Apple Gets Lennon
Apple said on Tuesday it would offer the entire solo catalog of John Lennon on iTunes in its second such deal with one of the Beatles, who have been among the highest-profile holdouts to put tunes online. The Lennon deal, a similar one with Paul McCartney, and a recent settlement to a lengthy trademark dispute between Apple and the Beatles' company of the same name, is finally clearing the way for the Fab Four catalog to be distributed online. Apple said 16 Lennon solo albums from EMI Group Plc were available for the first time on iTunes, with the "Lennon Legend" and "Acoustic" collections making digital debuts. Industry sources said Apple would soon announce similar deals for the solo works of Ringo Starr and the late George Harrison. All the band's members, except for Harrison, have in the past made some of their solo works available digitally, but not through iTunes until recently, according to EMI. Asked in a June interview if the Beatles catalog would be online by the end of 2008, Harrison's widow, Olivia Harrison said, "I don't know if it would be the end of this year, but it would be nice. Imminent, let's put it that way." Apple declined to say when it expects to release the Beatles catalog.

YouTube Wants to Talk to Jon Stewart
YouTube wants to question Comedy Central comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as part of its defense against claims that the online video-sharing site illegally shows snippets of sports and entertainment videos. The request came as part of lawsuits brought against YouTube by Viacom, which owns MTV, Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central; The Football Association Premier League, England's top soccer league; and indie music publisher Bourne. The lawsuits claim, in essence, that YouTube profits from massive copyright infringement of television programs and feature films. The documents seeking the depositions of Stewart and Colbert pertained only to the Viacom lawsuit. YouTube says it needs depositions from more than 30 people to fight legal challenges that "threaten to silence communications by hundreds of millions of people across the globe who exchange information, news and entertainment" through its Web site. YouTube, owned by Google, said it plans to show that it respects the importance of intellectual property rights by proving it goes well beyond what is required under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That law gives service providers protection from copyright lawsuits as long as they comply with requests to remove unauthorized material — something YouTube says it does. The company said it also intends to show that the plaintiffs themselves had put their own works on YouTube or permitted others to do the same. The company did not say exactly what it intended to gain from questioning Stewart and Colbert. Colbert hosts "The Colbert Report," a spin-off of "The Daily Show," which is hosted by Stewart. YouTube is also seeking to depose Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone, CEO Philippe Dauman, general counsel Michael Fricklas and various executives with MTV, Comedy Central and other Viacom's networks. Viacom spokesman Jeremy Zweig said the company had no comment on the court document. Viacom sought $1 billion in damages for what it said was unauthorized viewing of programs from its networks. In their lawsuit, the soccer league and indie music publisher sought unspecified damages and any profits YouTube made as a result of the sharing of copyrighted videos. The lawsuits were combined into a single trial.

Mobile social networking 'to ring up $6bn'
Social networking fans will drive mobile user-generated content revenues to nearly $6bn by 2012. User-generated revenues from social networking services, dating and content uploaded to third party sites will increase from $572m in 2007 to more than $5.7bn in 2012, analyst house Juniper Research predicts. Social networking is expected to bring in half of the $5.7bn total revenue by the end of the 2012 forecast period. There is an enormous advantage to either putting a version of those sites on the mobile or - through convergence - putting exactly those sites on the mobile. The number of mobile users accessing social networking sites via their phones is also forecast to rise - from 14 million in 2007 to nearly 600 million in 2012. Mobile dating and chatrooms currently account for 57% of user-generated revenues, with this proportion falling to 21% by 2012 as other services increase in popularity, Juniper predicts. Separate research by mobile media company M:Metrics found 12.3 million consumers in the US and Western Europe accessed a social networking site through their mobile in June 2007. The US has the largest number of on-the-go social networkers, with 7.5 million phone-toting social surfers during the month of June this year. Italy is next with 1.3 million and the UK is in third place with 1.1 million, the research found.

DirecTV to Offer High-Speed Internet
Satellite-television provider DirecTV Group Inc. announced a wholesale agreement today with Current Group to provide high-speed Internet service over electric-power lines. Under the agreement, DirecTV will market a bundled package of Current's broadband and voice over Internet protocol, or Voip, services under the DirecTV brand. The satellite-TV company also resells high-speed Internet services from AT&T, Verizon Communications and Qwest Communications under those phone companies' brands. Broadband over power line is a new technology that allows customers to plug a modem device the size of a cellphone into an electric outlet and connect a cable from their computer for Internet access that is capable of speeds that are faster than some popular Internet plans from cable and phone companies. Current is building out broadband networks in Cincinnati and Dallas-Fort Worth and is in talks with a number of utilities around the world about a commercial rollout. The new DirecTV broadband and Voip services will be available to residents in Dallas-Fort Worth area at the end of 2007 or beginning of 2008. DirecTV hasn't determined the pricing yet but says that the package of TV, Internet and phone services will be competitive, compared with those offered by phone companies.

The publishing world is hooking up to the iPhone
HarperCollins announced Wednesday that it had set up a special link, mobile.harpercollins.com, that will allow browsers to view excerpts from more than a dozen new releases, including Michael C. White's "Soul Catcher" and Michael Korda's "Ike," a biography of President Dwight Eisenhower. "Reaching consumers on mobile devices and the Internet is increasingly important for publishers," Brian Murray, president of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide, said in a statement that noted the publisher has some 10,000 titles already digitized. "Our digital warehouse gives us the unique opportunity to quickly offer access to our titles on the newest technology, and we encourage people to provide feedback about their experiences." Several publishers have been offering content for cell phone use and the iPhone, which already allows consumers to watch videos, take pictures, listen to music and surf the Web, is an obvious outlet for an industry anxious to boost sales and keep up with the latest technology. Other titles being excerpted on the iPhone include Faye Kellerman's "The Burnt House" and Ray Bradbury's "Now and Forever." Browsers can view up to 10 pages of a given book's first two chapters and can quickly shrink or enlarge the print size. The Harper Web site was adapted for the iPhone by LibreDigital, a division of NewsStand, Inc. that has been working with the publisher on digitizing its books and making them available worldwide.

Will Classmates Flunk IPO?
High school reunions are ugly reminders of just how old and flabby people can get. Classmates.com, which on Monday filed for an IPO, is like encountering the former schoolmate who’s spent 10 years studying the inside of a Doritos bag. Classmates.com might keep track of high school cheerleaders, but it probably won’t find many on Wall Street. That’s because its Ice Age online business model relies on costly advertising and spamlike e-mail marketing campaigns to drive its subscription-based service. And its profitability prospects are grim. “We have a history of losses and we may not achieve profitability in the future,” Classmates said in its U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Classmates reported a loss of $250,000 for the three-month period ended March 31, 2007. Worse, it reported a loss of $1.9 million and $8.2 million for the full years ended Dec. 31, 2006 and 2005, respectively. All told, the profitless company said it has an “accumulated deficit” of $12.1 million. Founded in 1995, the aging Classmates hopes to raise as much as $125 million in its initial public offering, according to the documents.

Big media hunts for Web cred, again
This summer has been an unusual hunting season for the start-up world, with nascent Internet companies firmly in the crosshairs of major media conglomerates. This month alone, Hearst Publications purchased social-shopping site Kaboodle, The New York Times "absorbed" the Freakonomics blog, and bookmarking start-up Clipmarks was rumored to be in the midst of a deal with Forbes. In July, cable conglomerate Discovery Communications snapped up eco-blog TreeHugger. And this spring, CBS Interactive acquired both music community Last.fm and finance video blog Wallstrip. "Surprisingly, we were in discussions with multiple media companies and not really that much with tech companies for some reason," said Manish Chandra, the founder of Kaboodle. Sometimes, the motives behind the purchases are ambiguous, but one thing's clear--media companies are forking over amounts of cash in the tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars for Web start-ups that would seem more appropriate targets for a Yahoo or Google. The big media rush to buy into the Web brings a remarkable sense of deja vu--and skepticism. The common wisdom (based on more than a little evidence, like Time Warner's hugely disappointing acquisition of AOL), ever since the first wave of tech acquisitions in the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, has been that big media doesn't know what to do with its pricey Web acquisitions. "They have the money available to them today to get deeply involved in the dynamics of this, but they don't for the most part natively understand. Conde Nast purchased Reddit last year, only to see the social news site increasingly eclipsed by competitor Digg, which remains independent.

Why Wi-Fi Networks Are Floundering
The static crackling around municipal wireless networks is getting worse. San Francisco Wi-Fi, perhaps the highest-profile project among the hundreds announced over the past few years, is in limbo. Milwaukee is delaying its plan to offer citywide wireless Internet access. The network build-out in Philadelphia, the trailblazer among major cities embracing wireless as a vital new form of municipal infrastructure, is progressing slower than expected. These potholes in the nation's wireless rollout of civic ambition—criticized by many as an improper use of tax dollars—are hardly the exception. For the road is getting bumpier for cities and the companies they have partnered with in a bid to blanket their streets with high-speed Internet access at little or no cost to users. While 415 U.S. cities and counties are now building or planning to build municipal Wi-Fi networks, deployments are slowing down slightly. Nearly 70% jump from mid-2006, when there were 247 muni Wi-Fi projects on tap, but that's down from the torrid pace of a year earlier, when deployment plans doubled. Perhaps the clearest hint of trouble ahead is that some of the companies partnering with cities on these projects, including EarthLink and AT&T, are having second thoughts about remaining in the municipal Wi-Fi business. In San Francisco, recent developments have left many observers scratching their heads over whether that city's Wi-Fi project, announced more than a year ago, will ever get off the ground. In July, the president of the city's Board of Supervisors revealed that he was seeking to change the terms of the preliminary contracts awarded to EarthLink and Google.

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