Only models look this good in Glass. (Photo: Google)

Speaking at TED, Sergey Brin called the smartphone user experience "emasculating," on the basis that "You're standing around and just rubbing this featureless piece of glass." Maybe Google that word when you get home, Sergey. [CNET]

Could perennial concerns about cancer keep Google Glass from realizing its full potential as a wearable communication device? [Quartz]

Groupon didn't do so hot in Q4, causing a big drop in the company's stock in after-hours trading. "The forecast is underwhelming," said one analyst. No kidding. [Reuters]

Time Warner Cable is pretty sure you don't even want gigabit Internet. Because when you think "attentive to customer desires," you think Time Warner Cable.  [Verge]

I.B.M. is still figuring out money-making uses for the supercomputer Watson. Besides all the big data applications, he apparently makes a mean croissant. [New York Times]

Customers that buy the company's most popular Internet package can now download content at 15 Mbps, up from 10 Mbps, Time Warner said. The upgrade will take affect automatically later this month, but you can can tap into the faster service now by resetting their modems and rebooting your computers.

Meanwhile, PC World reports today that Time Warner subscribers are beginning to see a new $3.95 charge on their bills, a new rental fee for cable modems. That charge, which apparently can't be avoided even by buying a modem, only went into effect in November in some locales, meaning the fee is just showing up now.

Well, with faster download speeds arriving—New Yorkers are getting the upgrade now, the rest of TWC's customers are also slated to receive the faster service this month—the secret surcharge may be easier to swallow.

Now if they could only get the service van to our apartment 50 percent faster.

Mr. Dickerson (Photo: Twitter.com)

Lots Of Tiny Wicker Puppets Sold Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson took to the company's blog to address his craft-obsessed minons and report big new numbers. Etsy recently hit 20 million members across over 200 countries. In the first week of November, they passed the $700 million sales mark and their direct checkout system has now processed over $100 million in transactions. By the end of the year, Etsy projects that it will have sold over 100 million items in the company's history.

The company is also going all out for the holiday season and expects to have its best month yet. It's running a multi-million-dollar online advertising campaign and opening a Etsy Holiday Shop in SoHo from November 29th through December 8th. SoHo though? Isn't Greenpoint or Williamsburg more on target with the Etsy brand?

Chu Bets Against Zynga Betable has already announced partnerships with big game companies and is right on the path to become the Spotify of online gambling and pass its closest rival, Zynga. Ya-Bing Chu, a former VP and GM of Zynga's mobile division, has now joined Betable as the company's new Chief Product Officer. At Zynga, he was responsible for operating Words with Friends and Scramble with Friends. Mr. Chu explains the move in an essay on Betable's blog, where he says, "I realized that Betable was the only frictionless way to enter the real money market, which is revolutionary."

Make It, Don't Break It Mayor Bloomberg and NYCEDC have opened submissions for their New York's Next Top Makers challenge. Competitors will have to create a product with commercial potential which includes consumer products, equipment, furniture and lighting, soft goods, packaging, interaction, transportation, DIY (kits) or something else. There are six $5,950 prizes and an $11,000 grand prize up for grabs. The deadline is in three months, so get to brainstorming right away.

Tumblr Goes Native Tumblr just released an update to its iOS app with a completely redesigned dashboard. The app has gone fully native and now finally runs a lot smoother: it runs faster than before, photos are a lot bigger, and GIFs play automatically when swiped. Better GIF's on your phone people, this is the stuff of the future.

Where's Our Food? There aren't many differences between the major players of the online food ordering game. But GrubHub has just changed the game a little bit with the beta release of its Track Your Grub feature. Similar to Domino's Pizza Tracker, Track Your Grub lets you know what the status of your order is during every step of the way. You'll get texts when your food is expected to arrive and when it leaves the restaurant. In certain areas, you can even watch your food make the trip to your apartment in real time on the maps feature. Seamless just got a little nervous.

Shop Like No One's Watching Sole Society, the West Coast based site that lets you order shoes direct from the manufacturer, has announced its first celebrity collection with two-time Dancing With The Stars champion Julianne Hough. On the site, Hough says, "Every girl needs a sexy leather jacket and a cutout heel." Noted.

Big Data Gets Big Money The social data platform, Datasift, has just secured $15 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Scale Venture Partners and Northgate Capital and Daher Capital also contributed. Rory O’Driscoll, the managing director of Scale Venture Partners, said in a press release sent to Betabeat, “Great companies make hard problems simple for the end user, and DataSift has done that with its game-changing visual interface."

Sad Turkey Daily deals site are a dime a dozen and so 8Coupons, a site that thinks of itself as "Kayak for deals," lets you see all daily deals across the web at one glance. The site's efficiency was proved this week when David Burke at Bloomingdales tried to pawn off its special turkey dinners on nine different deal sites at the same time. Seems a little desperate to go for nine sites at once.

Poke Your Way To Africa Plyfe, the game that rewards you for using social media with real prizes like Lady Gaga tickets, is about to go mobile. The site, which raised one million dollars in funding last March, has also announced an unexpected new partner--the United Nations. Users can now win opportunities to do development work in Africa. That should lead to some great new submissions for Gurl Goes To Africa.

Bad Guys Still Temporarily Nice Time Warner Cable, the unexpected nice guys of Hurricane Sandy, has announced that it will automatically credit many local residential and business customers whose services were impacted. The company says that it will also waive any fees or penalties for equipment, such as set-top boxes and cable modems, which were lost, damaged or destroyed as a result of the storm. In a press release sent to Betabeat, John Quigley, regional VP of operations for Time Warner Cable’s New York City market, said, “By posting credits automatically to customers’ accounts in the hardest-hit parts of our service area, we hope these affected residents and businesses will have one less call to make as they recover from the storm.”

(Photo: Maximum PC)

When last we heard from Time Warner Cable, a corporation so reviled that even Starfleet captains can't help but voice their discontent, it was devising its latest scheme to become the most hated company ever by charging a modem rental fee. Now, the New York Daily News reports that not one but two class action suits have been lodged against Time Warner, alleging that the $3.95/month modem leasing fee is essentially a money-making racket.

Writes the Daily News:

"In papers filed in New York and New Jersey courts, customers contend that the fee is illegal because it’s not included in existing customer agreements, the company did not give mandatory 30-day notice and it notified customers with a 'paltry postcard.'"

Though Time Warner initially said that customers could simply buy their own modems instead of paying the monthly fee, it turns out that only the expensive Motorola modems work with the Triple Play Plan. Plus, the modems you can rent are supposedly old, those that the company "wrote off as worthless years ago."

Both lawsuits are asking the court to pose an injunction against the company, effectively stifling the new fee, which went into effect on October 15th. No word yet on Captain Picard's reaction to the suits, though we can only guess as to his advice for the customers behind them: Sticking it to TWC? Make it so.

The photo on the left was taken this afternoon in Chinatown and you can see how many people really need a charge from the trucks by the mess of wires around the outlets.

The truck has also made it to 7th Ave South and Greenwich Ave in the Village. Here's what that looks like:

(Photo: Wikimedia)

Today Time Warner Cable announced that the company expects to invest $25 million to expand its fiber optic network in both "established and emerging" business sectors around New York City. Many of the areas highlighted in today's announcement happen to coincide with burgeoning tech hubs.

In a press release to Betabeat, Time Warner said it would extend its broadband capabilities in "the World Trade Center, the Flatiron District, all areas of Midtown and throughout the Financial District," in Manhattan. In addition to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Time Warner is also upgrading fiber in the "Brooklyn Tech Triangle, the Brooklyn Army Terminal and Industry City." Long Island City in Queens, the future home to Shapeways 3D-printing factory, will also benefit from the effort.

The investment is part of a deal with the city that was still being hammered out in June when Mayor Bloomberg announced his big plan to improve broadband. At the time, Time Warner was named in the ConnectNYC facet of the mayor's plan, which focused on wiring previously underserved areas and improving connectivity in commercial and industrial buildings.

Today's announcement, for example, was made at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, home to Carnegie Mellon's tech campus initiative, where Time Warner is finishing up "a multi-million dollar investment to provide fiber-based solutions to tenants of the 300-acre business complex."

But Time Warner isn't the only company the city has partnered with, as the Wall Street Journal reports, especially when it comes to residential initiatives.

The city also has tech agreements with Verizon Communications Inc., Cablevision Systems Corp. and AT&T Inc. Companies are laying fiber, providing wireless hot spots in parks and opening learning labs that give residents access to computers.

Time Warner itself is opening a "state-of-the-art" Learning Lab in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, "located inside the massive complex and accessible to the public." Good news for the long-neglected residents of the three neighboring housing projects, we hope.

The all-seeing eye must know all. (Photo: Link text)

Are you a Kansas City employee of Time Warner Cable? Are you also, perchance, an amateur sleuth? Well, get out your magnifying glass and your deerstalker cap, because your corporate overlord wants something investigated.

Let's back up. Kansas City is a pilot location for Google Fiber, an experiment in ultra high-speed Internet access. It's not clear entirely what Google plans to do with this fat pipe, but it seems to be making ISPs and cable providers very nervous. This is not surprising, considering that the collective rage routinely inspired by Time Warner alone could probably reignite a dying star.

But it appears that rather than sit idly by while Google wires their business model out of existence, Time Warner Cable is taking steps. For example, there is this poster, apparently from HQ, requesting any and all gossip Kansas City employees might have, published earlier today by GigaOm.

The poster cheerily encourages employees to "Share tips, rumors and rumblings about Google construction or launch activity for a chance to win $50!" It promises to hand out three gift cards a week, and adds that multiple tips are encouraged.

Those odds aren't bad, but it's probably going to take more than "a chance" to attract the real dyed-in-the-wool Sam Spade types.

Poor Parker Posey (Photo: The Cinema Source)

Stars, they're just like us: Unable to remember the plethora of gibberish passwords dictated by our countless web accounts. Of course, this is an entirely common problem, one experienced by the famous and non-famous alike. But this is also the New York Times Styles section, and talking to rich people is much more fun.

The actress Parker Posey writes her passwords on scraps of paper before promptly forgetting what website they're for. The musician Courtney Love uses mnemonics that correlate to her favorite songs. Lawyer Olivia Kraus is outraged that security questions play favorites, like "What's your favorite food?"

"The whole favorite thing is so juvenile,” she told the paper of record.

Betabeat couldn't help but wonder: don't the beautiful people flitting about the upper echelons of society have someone to remember their passwords for them? Perhaps a dedicated assistant who is paid explicitly to remember a star's first teacher, or pet's name, or tangle of birthdays and letters that make up a password?

Clearly, they are behind the times.

We have to give it to Sandra Burnhard though, who speaks the truth when it comes to her relationship with Time Warner cable, which she likens to “an S&M experience without the pleasure.” Plus, with Time Warner, there's no safe word.

Mr. Diller

The sun was still setting when The Observer rounded the corner under The High Line for IAC's Internet Week closing party, co-hosted by Aereo, a provocative new startup that will allow users to view broadcast content on their computers, smartphones and tablets. Off the drab West Side Highway, the Frank Gehry-designed building shimmered like a landing dock for a space ship--as if the top could twist off and whir its way into the atmosphere. Will Arnett and Wilmer Valderrama walked the red carpet. Dolled-up in pale pink, Allison Williams (the Miranda to Lena Dunham's Carrie) took Barry Diller's elbow as she navigated the crowd.

As the origin myth has it, Mr. Diller’s transformation from a Hollywood mogul to Internet soothsayer for this new digital era started with an Apple PowerBook. “No question that his relationship with his little screen, which is irritating to everybody in the room, has altered his life,” his closest confidante and now wife Diane von Furstenberg told The New Yorker some years back.

It was the early ’90s—right around the time Rupert Murdoch refused to make Mr. Diller a principal at Fox, the fabled fourth network Mr. Diller pioneered when competitors insisted that three would do just fine.

In search of an empire of his own, Mr. Diller embarked on a self-directed innovation tour—PowerBook in hand—visiting MIT’s Media Lab, and meeting with Steve Jobs (biding his time at NeXT Computers between gigs at Apple) and Bill Gates. Looking at the future through his PowerBook–shaped crystal ball, Mr. Diller concluded that a “new video democracy” was on the horizon. As The New Yorker put it, Mr. Diller saw how “the computer screen might become a TV set, and the keyboard would be a mechanism for summoning anything. The speed would be astonishing. A billion bits of information per second would travel over a wire.”

“My god. I’m impressed,” Mr. Diller told The Observer earlier this week, chuckling at his own prescience. “I mean that’s really shocking, at least to me, since I can’t imagine my thinking in ’92 had evolved that far. ’94, yes. But not ’92.”

Over the phone, Mr. Diller sounds not unlike a debonair Darth Vader. There’s a lot of impeccable elocution and heavy breathing. “I haven’t read that story since it was published. I don’t even know if I ever actually read the whole thing,” he offered with the kind of offhand braggadocio one might expect from the man credited with inventing the TV miniseries and the movie of the week at ABC, and greenlighting The Simpsons.

Two decades later, IAC, the corporate salmagundi of Internet companies where Mr. Diller now serves as chairman, recently led a $20.5 million investment round in Aereo.

Using remarkably tiny, thumbnail-size antennas stored in a warehouse in Brooklyn, Aereo is able to live-stream broadcast TV—the adorkable New Girl on Fox, say, or the upcoming London Olympics, which cost NBC $4.4 billion—to any mobile device for just $12 a month. Users can watch the programming as it airs, or record up to 40 hours of content. Aereo won’t say so, but coupled with a Netflix subscription, the new service will enable many users to cut the cord of their cable subscriptions.

“I thought it was fascinating,” Mr. Diller said. “And because I thought it would further develop ‘television’ over the Internet, I was intrigued.” According to Aereo’s CEO Chet Kanojia, Shana Fisher, one of the start-up’s seed investors, first introduced Aereo to IAC, which is a limited partner in her fund, High Line Venture Partners. “Barry immediately gravitated towards it because of his history,” said Mr. Kanojia, who divides his time between Aereo’s headquarters in Long Island City and its engineering base in Boston. “He said, ‘I want to meet this guy.’” He had to be sure, said Mr. Kanojia, that the technology was not “a fantasy.”

Skepticism allayed, Mr. Diller has been helping shine the spotlight on Aereo through everything from his recent congressional testimony on Net neutrality to that celebrity-studded Internet Week party.

Naturally, Mr. Diller’s former colleagues from the broadcast world would like to litigate Aereo out of existence. Less than two weeks after IAC announced its investment in Aereo, 15 plaintiffs, including ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox and even PBS, filed a lawsuit seeking damages for copyright violation and an injunction to stop Aereo from operating, just as they did a similar startup called Ivi.tv last year. Rumor had it Aereo raised $20.5 million expecting a fight, a claim Mr. Kanojia denied. The core dustup involves retransmission fees, a backdoor money stream networks came to depend on after the 1992 Cable Act, which required broadcasters to either declare their channels a “must carry” for distributors like Time Warner and DirectTV or opt for retransmission consent in the form of cash or other considerations. (Aereo argues that its minuscule antennas enable a “private performance” for individuals, absolving it from paying licensing fees.)

New Yorkers were forced to familiarize themselves with “retrans” fees after a dispute between MSG Network and Time Warner Cable resulted in a blackout of Knicks and Rangers games smack in the middle of Linsanity. On an earnings call last month, Time Warner CEO Glenn Britt told analysts he found the Aereo lawsuit “very interesting” and would be watching it closely.

“[Aereo] is the most direct attack on retransmission consent that we’ve seen,” Richard Greenfield, a media analyst for the broker-dealer BTIG, told The Observer. “I think the multichannel distribution world, which would benefit from an end of retrans, is foaming at the mouth for a legal ruling in favor.”

Television incumbents have fought every major technological advancement, from cable TV to the Betamax. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that Mr. Diller’s involvement in Aereo is particularly nettlesome. After all, who would be better poised to introduce broadcast TV on the Internet to the masses than a storied executive who spent the last few years nurturing online video start-ups like CollegeHumor and Vimeo.

Of course, betting that Mr. Diller can replicate the audacity of his network days hasn’t always panned out for prognosticators. He may have seen the future of TV on the Internet, but post-Fox, Mr. Diller landed in the woods of West Chester, Pa., as “king of cubic zirconium” at QVC. Then there was the $1.85 billion bid to one-up Google with Ask Jeeves. One would be more likely to ask Google than Jeeves how that venture fared. But IAC’s stock is on an upswing since Mr. Diller successfully fended off a suit from cowboy billionaire John Malone in 2008 for spinning off properties like Ticketmaster and the Home Shopping Network into their own public companies.

Hearings in the copyright lawsuit, which begin at the end of this month, will determine whether Aereo will add to Mr. Diller’s legacy as an upstart, or end up the next Napster.

“Whatever,” was Mr. Diller’s response to the notion that Aereo’s future might rank on par with his past successes. “I don’t relate things one to the other.”

Mr. Kanojia at the Internet Week party (via Wire Image)

For a product that’s attracted so much legal heat, it’s perhaps fitting that Mr. Kanojia’s inspiration started with a lawsuit, he told The Observer early this month in the Park Avenue outpost of his PR company (Aereo’s Long Island City office is under construction).

Mr. Kanojia, who speaks with a polyglot post-colonial accent shared by many an Indian expat, sat cross-legged in an armchair. His Gérald Genta watch was a jump-hour, a wonkish call-back to his training as an engineer. But like his benefactor, Mr. Kanojia also has ties to the television world he is upending. His former company Navic Networks, which was purchased by Microsoft in 2008, produced a piece of software embedded in cable boxes.

“We would monitor viewers across millions and millions of homes,” he recalled. “What I really saw was a third of the households, give or take, watched broadcast only,” he said. Despite access to 500 channels and DVRs, “80 percent of the households only watched seven or eight channels.”

Then, Mr. Kanojia saw a way to provide those “pulse-of-life” broadcast channels from the cloud in a manner that followed the letter of the law. In 2009, the Supreme Court ruled that Cablevision was within its rights to move its DVR systems to remote servers, rather than have consumers store the programs they chose to record in their individual boxes. “A simple logical extension to me was: this content is broadcast for the consumer, ends up in the public airwaves, is part of the broadcast legacy. So if network DVR is legal why can’t we build a remote network antenna?”

When Aereo launched publicly in March in the New York market, the service billed itself as merely an upgrade on rabbit ears for the Internet era. Because users only access one antenna per viewing session, the company argues it’s a “private performance,” allotted to every citizen in exchange for the broadcaster’s access to the public airwaves.

Network sources view it differently. “They’re stealing the content!” one executive told The Observer. “It’s baloney, it’s a rationalization of pure theft.”

The plaintiffs argue that Aereo is more of a cynical legal ploy than a technological innovation—and that Aereo puts the networks’ very existence in jeopardy by cutting into advertising dollars, retransmission fees and their own ability to monetize the Internet. The case has echoes of a similar argument Jack Valenti, former head of the Motion Picture Association, leveled against the VCR, comparing it to the Boston Strangler. In that landmark Supreme Court trial, referred to as “the Betamax case,” Fred Rogers, he of the cabled cardigans and neighborly wisdom, testified in favor of innovation. “Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others,” he said. “I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important.”

But in Aereo’s case, even Mr. Rogers’s own network is siding with the plaintiffs. In filings for the lawsuit, declaration after declaration from studio execs insinuates that Aereo could mean the end of beloved content and the networks’ ability to offer it for free over the airwaves. NBC’s declaration made threatening remarks about Sunday Night Football; PBS, a nonprofit, bemoaned the future of Great Performances.

“I don’t believe that for a second. I’ve heard that literally going back 40 years,” Mr. Diller said. “It used to be argued, by networks—I was at one when I started in the ’70s—that cable was the biggest threat to networks survival. So I don’t think the argument is valid."

Not that it surprised him. “Any incumbent in any area,” he added, will wield “pitchforks to protect their incumbency.” Asked how he would have responded, were he still head of a network, he said, “Exactly as they are. I understand why they would make arguments about diminished programming, because it’s such a populist concept. I just don’t think it’s got any basis in reality.”

Network sources intimate that Mr. Diller, who made his name in programming, should know better. But it’s a sensitive topic. Asked about Aereo at a recent executive breakfast at the Pierre Hotel hosted by The Wall Street Journal, Disney/ABC Television Group president Anne Sweeney curtly declined to comment.

But Mr. Greenfield, the BTIG analyst, sides with Mr. Diller. “This should lead to people watching more television, not less. Advertising should benefit. It does attack retrans, but retrans didn’t even exist in terms of dollars until a few years ago, so I find it hard to believe it would destroy them,” he said. The reason networks cling so desperately to retrans fees is because they represent a growing source of revenue with “no cost attached to it,” Mr. Greenfield added.

Mr. Diller also downplays the effect to networks’ bottom line. “Well, first of all, I don’t think Aereo presages the end of retransmission fees,” he said. “It may affect the absolute amount, but the amount is going to be large regardless of Aereo.”

The real impact, he noted, will be in increased video consumption online. “It will lead to more à la carte viewing, not packaged viewing. And I think that is an alternative many people would like.”

Still, it’s not as though Mr. Diller is entirely devoid of concern for his former colleagues in the broadcast world. “If I felt that they would lose revenue, in a material way, of course I would be sympathetic,” he said, surprising us with a benevolent tone. “I want them to get as much revenue as possible.” After all, he pointed out, IAC is also in the business of content creation. “We make programs we want them to pay for.”

-ntiku@observer.com

A version of this story appeared in the May 23, 2012 issue of The New York Observer. 

Slingbox or Death Star?

To both cable TV distributors and cable TV programmers, the possibility that consumers will finally cut that cord probably sounds like a slashing sound somewhere near their their bottom line.  But at least one big distributor is choosing to adapt.

The New York Times reports that Time Warner Cable, one of the top cable and internet providers in the country, announced yesterday that it would soon be subsidizing the cost of Slingbox, a set-top device that untethers viewers from their home television screen and lets them watch programming from anywhere, including computers, mobile phones, or second homes.

Based on Time Warner's recent legal battles with Viacom, which owns channels such as MTV and Nickelodeon, Viacom isn't going to be very happy about getting shot in the foot. Although it's in television distributors best interest to keep up with consumer demand to watch TV in different locations and on different devices, television programmers think said distributors should shell out extra for the privilege of showing their content on different screens. (In other words, if there's a revenue opportunity there, the programmers don't want the distributors to be the only ones cashing in.) Case in point, Viacom was engaged in two lawsuits this year, one with Time Warner Cable and one with Cablevision, over showing their content on iPad apps.

The Time Warner Cable deal allows a rebate for the full $300 cost of the Slingbox device, but only for subscribers that pay for its costlier $99-per-month Wideband Internet service. Too bad the cable companies can't figure out a way to work out a similar quid pro quo deal with hometown favorite Boxee. But we guess the words "cable bypass" are pretty much a deal-breaker.