By Levi Shapiro

One way to antagonize Mark Selby, Nokia's VP of Industry Collaborations, is to use the term "UGC." At the conference, he told the audience "never use the term User Generated Content? it's disgusting." Selby, who came from a television background at IMG, encouraged the media industry to "look beyond just the consumption aspect on mobile. It is critical that we also deliver the ability to create, connect and interact." Nokia (NYSE: NOK) is in the process of transforming Symbian into an open platform.

In a separate panel, Jordan Berman, Executive Director of Media Innovation at AT&T (NYSE: T) Advertising Solutions, talked about mobile advertising, which is new for AT&T with the launch this month of banner ads on MediaNet. Jordan said he encourages brands to employ the handset as a response mechanism for non-mobile media like print, outdoor, in store, and TV. In Jordan's Valentines Day case study with 1800-Flowers.com, called 'Cupid Goes Wireless,' he said "AT&T drove flower buyers to the brand's WAP store where customers could order bouquets and send virtual flower bouquet greetings." Jordan called this a "whole new wireless way to stay out of the doghouse." Levi Shapiro, a wireless specialist and founder of three mobile media companies, sent in a dispatch from the conference this week, which he helped organize.

Recently I spoke with Imad Mouline, CTO of Gomez, Inc. Gomez is involved in the software as a service testing space for Internet traffic and more recently streaming media. Imad outlined the company's products and testing capabilities for the iTV on-demand space using their Active Streaming XF product. In a follow up article I will flesh out our results and experiences using Active Streaming XF.

Listen to Interview with Imad Mouline

Brightcove, the Cambridge, MA. based video tools company has launched their 3.0 platform to publishers, this after several months of testing by beta users. The system which is totally different in look and system flow from the prior version uses tabs and overlays to navigate between some key functions and while somewhat eaiser to move between uploading, managing and other aspects of the process, the platform is a visual mess.

Uploading video content was easier and seemed faster then with version 2. As with players, version 3 has fewer default players available however, there is support for user created players via XML which you can then add to your list within the application.

Interestingly, I.E. which had been the only browser that supported uploading of video content is now considered the slowest by the company. "Brightcove Studio loads more slowly in Internet Explorer than it does in some other browsers, If you are using Internet Explorer and find the Brightcove Studio load time annoying try Firefox, Google Chrome, or another browser"

I did notice some performance improvement specific to load times using Firefox when moving between sections however, it was not huge.

Users can take advantage of batch uploading of video content and playlists however, this can not be done via the UI but rather a user created XML file which according to their documentation "requires a high degree of precision" Certainly for companies with this in-house scripting capability and a need for batching of media it should not be a significant hurdle.

Automation will become a key element for larger companies and features like media API's which will allow for hooking out to external applications for file ingestion and server-side transcoding are important and I'd be interested to hear from people who've adapted these features specific to how well they integrate into their work flow.

One of the issues with version 2 which is a concern with the new version is will it take the same amount of time to produce one video clip through the entire process verses five or six clips? With version 2, it was frustrating when you had one video you wanted to post rapidly, say in a few minutes but had to step through the entire process. I'll do some time based testing and report back on this question.

As noted in slide six, I was not able to load any analytics on streams viewed and gave up after three minutes of waiting, no doubt a short term bug however, I'd like to see how analytics are graphically presented, say verses Google or other tools.

Also of note the uploader does not currently support .Mov HD files from the DVCPro format.

Brightcove has changed its buisness model several time and recently closed its consumer portal dumping thousands of producers using their free service. Now having moved upstream the company is currently focused on large media outlets.

For Indie filmmakers and other small producers, Brightcove is too expensive a platform for distribution especially with low cost or no cost solutions from companies such as Veotag among others

As reported today by NPR, the President-elect plans to appoint a technology Czar to coordinate the different silos of government, this in addition to fulfilling his pledge to provide broadband access to all American's. If I were to suggest a person for this post it would be Phil McKinney who not only understands technology innovation but has managed large teams and infrastructure at HP.

November 14th, 2007 Googleplex Campus, CA. Then candidate Barack Obama outlined his vision and goals for technology innovation with the Internet as a centerpiece.

There are many challenges facing the U.S. at home over the next four-years. The economy, healthcare and education to name a few. President Elect Obama's understanding of how Internet technology can provide equal access for all American's, bring healthcare into the electronic age and address a myriad of other challenges is a bright prospect that goes well beyond the technology itself.

AT&T announced that they are testing a plan to limit the amount of downstream data that new customers in the Reno, NV. market will be able to use in a calendar month, this for both DSL and users at the 10 Mbps level. According to the company, existing customers will be capped at 150 GB per month, this regardless of their connection speed.

According to company spokesman Michael Coe, five percent of AT&T's subscribers take up 50 percent of the capacity.

Starting in November, the company will limit downstream usage to 20 GB per month for DSL users. this at, at 768 Kbps. The limit increases with the speed of the plan, up to 150 GB per month at the 10 Mbps level. Users will be able to track their usage on the companies website, much like your monthly cell phone usage.

At the 3 Mbps tier this would amount to a monthly cap of 60 GB, or about the download of about 30 DVD-quality movies. Companies such as Roku which have announced HD streaming by the end of 2008 have indicated bandwidth caps will not affect their business model as they will employ new compression models to reduce bitrates. The net effect of the AT&T bandwidth caps is unclear at this point since there is no data to determine if this will be detrimental to residential customers.