Sirius XM Radio to offer the best of both services (sort of); Karmazin predicts success

UPDATED: Mel Karmazin, the former Sirius chief executive who now heads the merged company, was a busy man today, appearing not only with Opie & Anthony but with Howard Stern and on CNBC. He told the business news channel that "the prospects for the combined company are extraordinary," and predicted $400 million in cost savings and positive cash flow by 2009. According to Stern's website (look under "Wednesday's show"), Karmazin said the question now was not if satellite radio will make money, but how much. He also said the government approval process was "dreadful." Given that Stern's show, like the rest of satellite radio, is not subject to federal indecency standards, Karmazin could have used a lot of other words.

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There's been so much attention focused over the past 17 months about whether Sirius and XM satellite radio would be allowed to merge, that what exactly would happen once the companies merged got lost in the shuffle. (Not an iPod shuffle, but the general bureaucratic shuffle in Washington, although Sirius and XM helped secure their merger by successfully arguing that they competed with iPods and other devices.)

Now that the nation's only two satellite radio companies have completed their merger, people are wondering what exactly the newly christened Sirius XM Radio will sound like -- and who'll be making those sounds. Crunchgear, for example, asks if the company will renew the contract of XM shock jocks Opie & Anthony now that they're colleagues of Sirius' multi-million-dollar mouth, Howard Stern (pictured to the left). On that point, Mel Karmazin, the chief executive of Sirius XM Radio, had little to say when he went on the Opie & Anthony show today, according to Crunchgear, which nevertheless viewed the appearance as a move to reassure the duo's fans.

On the broader question of what the future holds for the new Sirius XM, the short answer is: It's complicated.

The new company was vague about its future programming lineups in the announcement yesterday of the deal's closure. It said:

As a result of the merger, SIRIUS XM Radio will also be able to offer consumers new packages in audio entertainment, including the first-ever a la carte programming option in subscription media. In addition to two a la carte options, the new packages will include: “Best of Both,” giving subscribers the option to access certain programming from the other network; discounted Family Friendly packages; and tailored packages including “Mostly Music” and “News, Talk and Sports.” The first of the new packages will be available in the early Fall.

But there's a lot more detail in documents filed at the Federal Communications Commission, which removed the last regulatory hurdle when it voted 3-2 to approve the deal last week.

One of the major concessions the FCC got from the companies was that they would not increase their existing $12.95 monthly subscription prices for at least three years, nor reduce the number of channels in those packages.

But Sirius and XM customers, who have gotten used to simplicity (both companies offered only one package at the identical $12.95 price) now will have a somewhat confusing array of other choices.

With three months, Sirius XM must ....

Around the Web 7.30.08: Wii big in U.S., YouTube maybe too big in Italy

-- Viacom has an overseas ally: media giant Mediaset, controlled by Italy's prime minister, sues Google's YouTube for $800 million in Rome. Reuters

-- Nintendo profits jump by a third as Wii console sales soar 74% in the U.S. Wheee! indeed. WSJ

-- Dell mulls sub-$100 digital-music player, again. CNet

-- How scary is the recently discovered DNS Internet vulnerability? One of the first experts to disclose how it works just had his own company compromised. Network World via Slashdot

-- Speaking of which: 41% of the Web remains at risk. Did we mention that exploit code has already been published? NYT

-- A U.K. hacker has lost his appeal to avoid extradition to the U.S. to face charges that he broke into Defense Department and NASA computers. Looks like he will get to explain his alleged quest for information on UFO sightings to judges here. AP via CNN

-- You know how you should keep a land line phone for emergencies, when cellphone networks get overloaded? Actually, land lines got creamed by yesterday's L.A. earthquake, too. LAT

-- MySpace appoints new executives, asserts everything is grand. TechCrunch

-- More women than men are on social networks, at least until men figure this out. ReadWriteWeb

-- Joseph Menn

Photo: Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who controls Mediaset. Credit: Plinio Lepri / Associated Press

Debix identity-theft protection service is newly cheap, might work

Years of identity-theft horror stories show that the world has no shortage of entrepreneurs and quick-buck artists angling to sell you some peace of mind.

Probably none has made quite so big a belly-flop splash as LifeLock, the service that slaps fraud alerts on your files at the three major credit bureaus, and perhaps commits fraud in order to do so.

LifeLock has advertised heavily and claims to be doing great, despite the little flap over the fact the company's co-founder was jailed on fraud charges earlier in his career and barred from the credit-repair business. Oh, and then there's the attention-grabbing bit by the company CEO, who fearlessly published his own Social Security number only to see it promptly stolen and used for fraud.

Other, quieter companies have the same basic approach, assisting clients by putting fraud alerts on files and then renewing them as they expire every 90 days. The alerts tell businesses they had better get in touch with you before issuing any new credit to someone using your name. LifeLock, Trusted ID and the rest typically charge about $100 a year, although you could do the same thing yourself for free.

Debix, however, does more, and does it for less. The company just dropped its price to $24 a year, and it puts a different phone number on the fraud alerts, so that potential creditors call Debix, and Debix tracks you down. Voice samples and secret codes round out the set-up; early reviews are enthusiastic.

While we're on the subject though, please know two things. First, you can do a whole lot for $0, including getting your own credit reports and putting a freeze on them so no new creditors can peek, making them highly unlikely to issue credit in your name.

Second, none of these systems prevents all types of identity fraud. A truly helpful rundown of how all this stuff works, and what questions to ask those peddling anti-ID theft services, has just been released by the nonprofit Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

-- Joseph Menn

Photo: LifeLock co-founder Robert Maynard Jr. Credit: Courtesy of Wired

Online viewing gains ground among TV watchers

Americans may love their TV sets. But more and more, they are also flipping open their laptops to watch TV shows.

According to a new study, the computer monitor, derided as a pixelated and cramped approximation of the TV set, is gaining ground on the boob tube. More than 20% of Americans watched some prime-time TV on a computer monitor during the spring TV season, up from 6% in the fall of 2007, according to the report (PDF download) from Integrated Media Measurement, a research firm in San Mateo, Calif.

"We are absolutely astounded at how fast this is happening," said Tom Zito, the firm's chief executive.

For the first time, the report's authors say, a "significant portion" of the online audience for a prime-time TV show is not also watching the show on TV. For example, last season, during a given week of the NBC show "Heroes" (pictured above), about 10% of people watched the episode for the first and only time on a computer monitor, Zito said.

Among people who turned to the Internet as a TV substitute, 50% viewed TV shows online as they became available. The other half powered up their computers to watch shows they had missed or to re-watch episodes. The study looked at the TV, Internet and cellphone media consumption of 3,000 people in six cities (Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Miami, Houston and Denver) over a month during the spring TV season.

The shift to watching TV on the computer is particularly true among women, perhaps ...

Why cellphones didn't work during the quake

The walls started shaking, the earth was quaking and all you wanted to do was call your relatives and reassure them that no, a brick did not fall on your head during the quake. But of course, in the hour or so following the 5.4 temblor that rocked Southern California, it wasn’t easy to make a call. Perhaps you got a busy signal, or it went straight to voice mail or it started to ring and then just dropped the call.

What gives? Why are cellphones most useless when you need them the most?

Mobile carriers project how many people will be using their phones during a crisis and try to ensure that their networks can handle that call volume, Verizon Wireless spokesman Ken Muche said. Today’s call volume was 40% higher than what Verizon had projected for a crisis. During last year’s wildfires, call volume was 600% higher, he said. Because of high call volume, Verizon had to start blocking some calls so that others could get through.

“No network has an infinite amount of capacity,” he said.

Every time you place a call, the call reaches out to the nearest cell tower and tries to connect, according to Sprint Nextel spokeswoman Kathleen Dunleavy. If it doesn’t find an open space on that site, it reaches out to the next one and pings around to different towers. In times when lots of people are using their phones, towers are all at capacity.

It doesn’t help that people keep trying and trying to make a call after their first attempt fails. So rather than handling 3 million calls, for instance, the towers have to handle 3 million people each trying five times to make a call, Dunleavy said.

There are things carriers can do in an extended emergency ...

Malicious attack takes down Scrabble on Facebook

UPDATED: Thanks to readers who raised good questions Hasbro's legal claim (see below), we decided to ask Ian Ballon, a noted intellectual property and Internet attorney, for a lesson in copyright law. You can read his take here. In addition, Scrabble is now back up, but so is a new version of Scrabulous, called Wordscraper.

After their word game was shut down this morning, many of the Scrabulous faithful on Facebook turned to the official Scrabble game for some action. But they found no relief. It didn't work.

Electronic Arts, which created online Scrabble on behalf of Hasbro, said there was a good reason for that: Hackers had taken down the game. It was rendered unplayable for most of the day and still didn't work just before 4 p.m. In a statement, the Redwood City, Calif., game company said:

EA’s Scrabble Facebook game experienced a malicious attack this morning, resulting in the disabling of Scrabble on Facebook. We’re working with our partners to resolve this issue and have Scrabble back online and ready to play as soon as possible.

There was no word on whether the attack was orchestrated by fans of Scrabulous. But it dealt another public relations blow to Hasbro, which owns the North American rights to Scrabble. On the day that its legal tactics resulted in the shutdown of a game that the toy company said infringed upon its copyrights, it missed a prime opportunity to transition Scrabulous players to its own version of the game.

Hasbro, which last week filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in New York against the makers of Scrabulous, suffered a deluge of criticism on its Scrabble page on Facebook. Incensed at losing access to Scrabulous, users blamed Hasbro. One commenter, Lesley Marton, summed up the views of several players when she wrote on Scrabble's feedback board, "At least get things ironed out here before taking away Scrabulous!"

Analysts say the blow-back from Scrabulous fans, although painful now, will probably be temporary. "There are a lot of people who are just disappointed and angry at losing Scrabulous," said Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at Forrester Research. "But people are going to get over it over time. Many of them will adopt Scrabble."

-- Alex Pham

Photo: Scrabble for Facebook. Credit: Electronic Arts

SoCal earthquake has everyone a-Twitter

UPDATED: On its blog, Twitter posted a chart showing how quickly information spread after the earthquake. And it gives credit to a user named Caroline (Vixy) as the first to Twitter the quake. Her post was short and to the point: "Earthquake." Here's a roundup of early tweets that broke the news.

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Twitter was first on the scene again when an estimated 5.4-magnitude earthquake struck near Los Angeles today.

Tweets started rumbling nearly as soon as the ground stopped shaking. That's a lot of Twittering on the Richter scale.

"So, now people tweet first and then run for safety?" one amused onlooker commented on Feedalizr.

To be fair, regular-people-turned-citizen-journalists used all kinds of social messaging services to get the word out about the latest natural disaster. The quake quickly became a popular topic on FriendFeed and elsewhere.

Twitter is just one of the fastest ways ...

Kids get a taste of food-related advertising online

A new report out today revealed some unsurprising information: Marketers spend a lot of money trying to get kids hooked on foods such as Shrek cereal and Pirates of the Caribbean waffles. What's a little more surprising is that they don't spend much money marketing food to kids where so many of them hang out -- on the Internet. In 2006, the time period that the online-spending portion of the report covered, food companies only allocated 5% of their youth marketing dollars online. (Of course, the online advertising market is growing by double digits every year, much faster than overall ad spending, so the percentage has probably increased since 2006.)

The marketing-to-kids report (PDF download) released this morning by the Federal Trade Commission, with the pithy title "Marketing Food to Children and Adolescents: A Review of Industry Expenditures, Activities and Self Regulation," says that the relatively low price tag for marketing to kids on the Web doesn't mean that companies aren't reaching kids there, however.

"A focus on expenditure data may underestimate the degree to which food and beverage marketers have relied on the Internet to advertise to children and teens," the report says. Translation: Internet advertising is cheaper than TV advertising, so companies can still have a big presence there without shelling out the big bucks.

In fact, the report says, kids are spending a lot of time on websites such as Wrigley's Candystand.com ("the hottest online games"), Postopia.com ("a fun site for kids") and Millsberry.com, a General Mills-sponsored site with games encouraging kids to watch Lucky Charms webisodes and play games hunting for Reese's Puffs online. They spend more time than they would with a TV commercial, in fact; between March 2007 and March 2008, kids spent as many as ...

Around the Web 7.29.08: Rough start for Cuil, just the beginning for XM-Sirius

-- "The Dark Knight" was cool, but the White Knight Two sounds more fun: Richard Branson showed off a spacecraft to help launch thrill-seekers into the outer atmosphere. LAT

-- T. Boone Pickens, the billionaire investor, says he's dumped his 10 million Yahoo shares out of frustration with the company's management, which he called "pathetic." SF Chronicle

-- BT, the British telecom, snapped up Ribbit, a Silicon Valley company that provides online calling services and voice-enabled applications, for $105 million. VentureBeat

-- Sirius and XM finally complete their merger, forming an even bigger struggling satellite radio company. Wired

-- Yahoo Music is offering refunds to people who bought digital downloads. On Sept. 30 Yahoo is going to stop supporting downloads it sold. CNet

-- Intel, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard team up with research institutes to work on cloud computing. GigaOm

-- Chip makers' interest in the solar power business is heating up. USA Today

-- All hat, no cattle? The launch of the Cuil search engine fizzled. Silicon Alley Insider

-- Farhad Manjoo says Google's virtual world, Lively, is like an amusement park with no rides, games, entertainers or junk food. Slate

-- Analysts say NBC's Olympics coverage is too Web 1.0. ClickZ

-- Chris Gaither

Photo: Billionaire Richard Branson, left, and aircraft designer Burt Rutan unveil the White Knight Two spacecraft. Credit: Al Seib / Los Angeles Times

Game over: Scrabulous exits Facebook in North America

UPDATED: Electronic Arts says the official version of Scrabble isn't working because it's fallen victim to a "malicious attack." Read this post about the Scrabble attack for more information.

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A minimum 13-point word that might signal game over for Scrabulous: N-I-X-E-D.

Hasbro scored big in its legal match against the popular but unauthorized version of Scrabble that's played online by millions of Facebook members. The creators of Scrabulous today shut down the game to players in the United States and Canada, where Hasbro owns the rights to Scrabble.

Mattel, which owns the rights to Scrabble elsewhere, has filed suit in India, where the two brothers behind Scrabulous, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, reside.

The shutdown came a week after Hasbro sued the Agarwallas and their company, RJ Softwares, for copyright infringement in New York federal court.

In a statement issued this morning, the Agarwallas said:

In deference to Facebook’s concerns and without prejudice to our legal rights, we have had to restrict our fans in USA and Canada from accessing the Scrabulous application on Facebook until further notice. This is an unfortunate event and not something that we are very pleased about, especially as Mattel has been pursuing the matter in Indian courts for the past few months. We will sincerely hope to bring to our fans brighter news in the days to come.

Scrabulous had half-a-million active players daily on Facebook, making it one of the most popular applications on the social networking site. Hasbro last month introduced a beta version of its official Scrabble game for Facebook. Initially scheduled for release to all users in July, Hasbro's version, developed by Electronic Arts, has been pushed out to mid-August, presumably to iron out issues spotted by players, including an inability to log on and delays in loading the game.

Hasbro, in a statement issued this morning, said it was aware of the problems and cited concern for players in its decision to wait several months before filing a lawsuit to shut down Scrabulous:

In deference to the fans, we waited in pursuing legal action until Electronic Arts had a legitimate alternative available.  We invite SCRABBLE fans in the U.S. and Canada to log onto Facebook and try out the authentic SCRABBLE application, now in open beta.  Both EA and Hasbro are monitoring feedback from fans, and we are already in the process of making changes that will result in a variety of improvements, including faster game play, leading up to the official launch scheduled for the first half of August.

That didn't go over well with Amber Loranger, a 24-year-old Scrabulous player in Portland, Ore. who woke up this morning to find that her games had been yanked. "I definitely think Hasbro lost some goodwill with people," said Loranger, who typically had 8 Scrabulous matches going at any one time, including a couple with her parents. "I'm trying to be an adult about it, but it's still sad. I wish they hadn't done that." 

-- Alex Pham

Photo: Screen shot of the Scrabulous game on Scrabulous.com