Today’s keynote presentation by Phil Schiller has been widely regarded as a relatively lackluster affair. That isn’t to say it went badly - I’m genuinely excited about some of the new software updates. But the Macworld keynote in years past has been home to some very major product announcements, including the Macbook Air, the MacBook Pro, and perhaps most notably, the first iPhone. Investors have learned to expect big things from Apple every January, and for at least the last four years their reactions to the keynote have weighed heavily on Apple’s stock price.

Except for this year. And that’s no accident.

A site called the Keynote Index Fund has tabulated just how big these stock swings have been over the years. In 2006, Apple launched some of its first Intel-based computers, and was rewarded with gains of 10.3% over the two days following the announcement. The next year, the launch of the iPhone and the Apple TV was met with an increase of a whopping 13.5% over the same time period.

But the stock has taken a major hit whenever the keynote didn’t live up to expectations. Last year, Apple released products including the Time Capsule, Movie Rentals, AppleTV 2, and Macbook Air - an impressive lineup to be sure, but nothing that could live up to the iPhone release of the year before. The stock subsequently took a 10.7% loss over the next two days.

In the weeks leading up to Macworld 2009, it looked like this year’s show might be headed for a similar fate. Rumors of new products were few and far between, and it seemed like Apple simply didn’t have much to announce. And then Apple dropped the bomb: this would be the company’s last Macworld, and CEO Steve Jobs wasn’t going to be giving the keynote. This spawned countless distasteful rumors regarding Jobs’ health, but it also served to lower expectations. Leading analysts went on to report that “no significant new products [were] expected“. So when Phil didn’t whip out the third generation iPhone this morning, nobody was surprised. The stock dipped a bit, but little more than it would on a typical day.

So what was the damage? A loss of $1.56 (-1.65%). Nothing to cheer about, but looking at years past, it could have been much, much worse. Granted, the figures stated above were averaged over two days, so we won’t know until tomorrow just how big the swing was, but given today’s performance I won’t be surprised if any change is relatively modest.

It’s unlikely we’ll ever know if Steve Jobs pulled out from the show with the direct intention of lowering expectations. But can you picture him presenting a keynote whose major highlights were an 8-hour laptop battery and some software updates? I don’t think he could either.

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Pandora Radio, the personalized internet radio service that has remained among the most popular iPhone apps on the iTunes App Store since its inception in July (and that I’ve previously called the iPhone’s killer app), will be releasing its most significant update yet later today.

Dubbed Pandora 2.0, the application will now include artist biographies, streaming samples for songs you’ve bookmarked, and perhaps most notably, the ability to create a station using a single song (much as you would using the iTunes Genius features). Other features in the new release include a CoverFlow-like view for song history, the ability to share stations with friends using Email, and a song progress bar (which has long been annoyingly absent).

Pandora has been around for years, offering a very powerful music recommendation engine powered by The Music Genome, which employees professional musicians to describe each song using over 150 attribute (or “genes”). Its iPhone app closed out 2008 ranked as iTunes’ top free application overall, and it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.

Update: It looks like you can download the application now here. The application page still shows the older version, but you’ll download the 2.0 version of the app.

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In fact, the whole Netbook market may be making them nervous. Despite the fact that they power most of these devices with their new Atom chip that handles some PC chores well and uses a lot less power (so batteries are smaller and last longer). Intel sees Netbooks as devices for people who can’t afford normal laptops, or as second devices. But it’s clear that a lot of people are buying them instead of normal dual core machines, despite their very serious limitations.

That means that for the most part, every Netbook sold is one less Dual Core that Intel can sell at a higher price and higher margin. Which explains exactly why the company has been publicly criticizing the performance of the machines. “If you’ve ever used a Netbook and used a 10-inch screen size–it’s fine for an hour. It’s not something you’re going to use day in and day out,” said Intel VP Stu Pann at an event last year.

Intel also wants to keep Netbooks at 10 inches or less. Some PC companies we’ve spoken with say that Intel doesn’t want Atom chips in devices bigger than 10 inches, and puts incredible pressure on them to keep Netbooks at 10 inches or less. Dell’s Inspiron uses an Atom chip anyway, but Samsung is using Via’s competitive (and less expensive) chip, the Nano.

We asked Intel if they forbid manufacturers to build Netbooks with larger than 10 inch screens, which is what those manufacturers are telling us (Dell notwithstanding). Their answer: “Intel defines a netbook as a 10″ or smaller screen size. We recommend that OEMs and netbook manufacturers use that guideline as well in order to get the best user experience.”

That’s a nice statement but it’s complete rubbish. There is no performance loss with a 12 inch screen v. a smaller screen (other than power usage). A 12 inch Netbook is just as fast or as slow as a 10 inch one. The only difference is that the user is even less likely to buy a low end laptop with a dual core.

Netbooks are clearly here to stay, and the new models with larger screens and larger keyboards solve two of the three problems I have with them (the last issue is Vista and XP, which runs poorly on these devices, but people are fixing that problem, too).

We’ll soon see 13 inch and larger Netbooks, despite the pressure Intel is putting on manufacturers to keep them at 10 inches. Intel may not agree to have their chips in these devices, but Via, with their excellent Nano competitor, seems more than willing to fill the void.

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MixedInk, a document editing site that allows large groups to democratically create a single collaborative document, has launched its service to the public. The service fuses concepts from Digg and popular wiki sites to create a unique document creation tool that is ideal for groups far larger than you’d normally encounter in the workplace. In conjunction with today’s public launch, the site has also partnered with Slate to create a community-written inauguration speech for President Obama, which will be published on the site in two weeks.

While there are quite a few collaborative document services available (including Google Docs, Zoho, and the just-announced new version of iWork), most of these services focus on letting a small group of people interact. Unfortunately, these services are clumsy for large-scale collaboration with groups of more than a dozen or so people, as it becomes difficult to reach a consensus and certain sections are repeatedly overwritten.

MixedInk is taking a different approach to collaboration, allowing users to draft their documents using a Digg-like voting system. Instead of constantly editing the same document, users are invited to submit their own versions, which can then be voted on and rated by their peers. As they they read drafts submitted by others, users can mouse-over the passages they like most and incorporate them into their own submissions (the system will also suggest popular passages as you write using keyword detection). Over time, the most popular passages and versions float to the top until the entire group is satisfied and voting ends.

MixedInk probably won’t be useful for small groups (it would probably be easier to pick up a phone), but for larger scale initiatives it could become a great alternative to traditional Wiki systems, which often use confusing versioning systems. The system has already been put to the test on some very large-scale documents: over the summer the technology was used by the Netroots community to write its platform.

The service is available for free to users who create documents on MixedInk’s site, with a premium version available for branded enterprise solutions and possible integration into other sites.

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ResizeImage is the simplest and most usable tool I’ve seen to handle quick image resizing and cropping. It’s not as useful as Skitch, which a downloadable application for Macs only, but it works in a pinch.

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Nearly two years ago, Steve Jobs published an open letter to the music industry calling for the death of DRM (digital rights management). He convinced EMI to ditch DRM back in April, 2007, but the three other major music labels held out. Until today. Now all the songs on iTunes are DRM-free, or soon will be.

And, with that, the DRM era of digital music finally can be put to rest. (Amazon’s MP3 store has been selling DRM-free tracks from all the major labels for a year now already). The labels were likely holding out for other concessions from Apple, such as variable pricing (which they got), and the Apple also thankfully convinced them to sell songs over cellular data networks to iPhones for the same price as they could get them on their computers.

But it looks like the labels prevailed in sticking it to consumers on one last point. Anyone who wants to upgrade their entire existing iTunes Library to DRM-free versions of the same songs, can conveniently do so with one click. But it is going to cost you 30 cents a track to do so. That’s right, you have to pay again for songs you already bought. Let’s see, 6 billion songs X 30 cents = $1.8 billion in potential upgrade fees. That’s a music tax, plain and simple. No wonder the music companies finally relented.

It still won’t save them.

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This is very similar to what companies like Crunchies finalist BackType and also uberVU are all about, and I definitely see the need for this type of service: regardless of one’s interests or line of work, dedicated comment search engines make it easy for users to find out what the content and tone of conversations across social media really are. I like the fact that you no longer need to visit every web service that has comments separately in order to find out what’s being said, but that you can go to a single place, do a simple search and find out.

Artiklz also helps center discussion about your blog posts in one location, enabling you to get notifications by e-mail, SMS, IM or a web interface, whenever a new comment is made about your writings on any given service. You can also add a badge to your blog that gives your readers the option to be notified when you post a new article, or when somebody leaves a comment on a given post, and you can even track a specific individual’s comments.

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It’s an annual tradition. Every year at Macworld, Apple releases a smattering of stats that gives a peek at how its business is doing. At this year’s Philnote (Phil Schiller gave the speech instead of Steve Jobs), which was Apple’s last Macworld appearance, the stats were few and far between. A few morsels for the information-starved Apple faithful (and investors). But here they are:

• iTunes has now sold six billion songs (it crossed the 5 billion mark last June).
• Over 10 million different tracks are available on iTunes.
• Starting today, 8 million songs are DRM-free, and all 10 million will be DRM free by the end of March.
• There are now over 75 million accounts on iTunes linked to credit cards.
• In fiscal year 2008, Apple sold 9.7 million Macs
• Mac sales grew twice as fast as the overall PC market.

The last billion songs took about five and half months to sell, which was the same pace more or less that it took Apple to get to its fourth billion (January, 2008) and fifth billion songs (June, 2008). So iTunes sales are no longer accelerating, despite many more iPhones and iPods out there. It makes you wonder what the saturation point is for consumers buying songs from iTunes. One thing to cheer about, DRM is now officially dead (it looks like Apple traded variable pricing for getting rid of DRM), but I’m not sure that is going to spur sales much.

From my own experience, I buy a few albums when I get a new iPod, and then my purchases taper off. I’ve only purchased 139 songs from iTunes over the past five years. That comes to $28 a year. But then, I’m well past my music-buying prime. How much have you spent on iTunes?

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Google Trends, which shows hot queries on Google at any given time, is sporting a nasty item at no. 2 today: a plane flying into two towers.

In July a swastika appeared on Google Trends, leading to endless debate on whether it was an ugly symbol or not. Later that month the site was attacked again. 4Chan was the culprit last time, we’ll see if they’re again responsible.

Here’s the statement Google released last time this happened:

The Hot Trends list is automatically generated by machines and algorithms that detect hot or breaking queries. In this case, it appears that the html code for this query was posted on a popular internet bulletin board, which led to quite a few people searching to find out more about this symbol. The Hot Trends list reflected that surge due to people searching with this query.

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Apple’s Phil Schiller announced at the Steveless keynote at Macworld today (CrunchGear is liveblogging it) that a new version of iPhoto will include facial recognition software. The feature, called Faces, lets you put a name to face, then it tries to find other images with the same face and lets you confirm whether the software got it right. I really hopes this works, because I simply don’t have time to tag the 7,000 images in my iPhoto, 5,000 of which are probably one of my sons. iPhoto will also automatically generate albums that contain photos of the faces you select. Facial recognition is a hard problem to solve. I’ll believe it when I see it.

iPhoto is also adding a feature called Places, which lets you geotag photos or uses the GPS coordinates if they are available. There is a map view now that shows where you’ve taken all of your photos with pins on a map (powered by Google Maps). It is also finally supporting Flickr and Facebook uploading (hopefully, with automatic resizing). Yes, Apple, we want our photos on the Web, where more people can see them. But what’s nice is that the geotags sync with Flickr, and if someone adds a tag on Facebook to one of your photos it syncs back.

I like this direction because Apple is turning iPhoto into a true Webtop app. It should take a look at Fotonauts, which was founded by former Apple technologist Jean-Marie Huillot and is pushing the envelope in this area . Fotonauts lets you turn each album into a Webpage without an expensive Me.com account, and makes it easy to build a social community around each album.

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At 9:24 AM the stream issued an alarming announcement that “Steve Jobs just died”. Moments later this was corrected, with a statement that the MacRumors team didn’t know how it had gotten into the feed. There was quiet for a few minutes. And then things took a turn for the worst, as members of what appears to be the 4chan image-board began flooding the feed with bizarre comments.

Note: We don’t recommend that you visit the site at the moment, as the feed now includes some graphic and disgusting images.

For a working stream of the latest news, check out the CrunchGear Macworld Notes.

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Who needs cable TV? Move Networks, which powers the Web video streaming for ABC, Fox, the Discovery Channel, and Animal Planet, streamed 180 million hours of premium video last year, 100 million of which it claims was in high-definition (at a resolution of 720p). With YouTube turning on an HD viewing option in December, and adding an HD section (as did Hulu), you can expect that 100 million hours to be dwarfed this year across all the major Web video services.

Move also estimates that it reached 55 million unique viewers in 2008, up from 25 million in 2007. The doubling from the year before is in line with a Forrester Research study that shows 63 percent of people watched video on the Web last year, compared to only 32 percent on 2007. In a survey of Move Network viewers, the company itself found that college-age consumers watch a lot more video on the Web—70 percent, with 55 percent saying they watch “more than half of their television programming via the Internet.”

Younger viewers, the ones advertisers want to reach because they are more impressionable, are moving to the Web, and not just for video snacking. (Move’s specialty is streaming full-length episodes of TV shows).

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Macbook Wheel, including the Hummingbird battery which can power the computer for a full 19 minutes. So simple. So perfect. I love The Onion.

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Late in Q4 last year, we decided to reduce our workforce. Even though we had a great year with tremendous growth, the economic uncertainties caused us to lay off colleagues. I am sad to part with them

Worse, the company has to find a replacement for President and COO Jay Rappaport, who joined the company in April 2007 and brought a lot of experience in-house as the ex-President of Vonage and former COO of AOL. We’ve added Clearspring to our Layoff Tracker.

There’s no doubt that Clearspring is being hit hard by the financial crisis, and since its business model is based primarily on online advertising its prospects are probably going to get worse before they get better.

Don’t count out Clearspring just yet though. They might be trimming down for tough times ahead, but with total venture investment in the startup at $36 million, with $18 million raised in a series C last May, they may very well have enough cash to weather the storm and come out stronger on the other end.

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Video recommendation engine ffwd has just released its completed API to developers, allowing them to incorporate some of the service’s core functionality into their sites.

Using the API, developers will be able to make calls to ffwd for video content, and will also be able to incorporate ffwd user profiles and news feed items into their sites. In conjunction with the release, ffwd has also announced that Boxee, the widely acclaimed media hub that runs on devices like the Apple TV, will be incorporating its service in future releases using the API. Developers interested in using the API can apply here, and will be able to use it for free for now (though it will eventually have an as-of-yet undetermined licensing fee).

Besides the API, ffwd has also recently released a number of new social features, including the ability to post video suggestions directly to Twitter using a bookmarklet.

ffwd presents users with a “channel” of online video, and allows them to skip to the next clip by hitting the ffwd button whenever they’d like (it’s like channel surfing, but for the web). Based on which clips are skipped, the service uses an advanced algorithm to personalize the channel. For more on the service, check out our introduction article here.

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Sling Media, the company behind the popular (and very cool) settop boxes that allow you to stream cable from your house to your computer, looks like it has outdone itself. At this week’s Macworld the company will be showing off its upcoming iPhone application, which effectively gives iPhone owners instant access to their Cable TVs and Tivos from anywhere they have a network connection. Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait a little longer (the company says that the app will be submitted to Apple some time in Q1), but it looks like it will be well worth the wait.

From the announcement:

SlingPlayer Mobile gives consumers their entire home TV experience, including local channels, local sports teams, video on demand, pay per view, etc. Any program that you can watch on your sofa back home, you can now watch via your iPhone using a standard network connection. In addition, SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone users can also control their home digital video recorder (DVR) to watch recorded shows, pause, rewind, and fast forward live TV, or even queue new recordings while away from home.

The company will also be announcing SlingPlayer for Mac HD, which gives Mac users the ability to watch high definition content streaming from their HD SlingBoxes using a web-based player on the company’s recently launched video hub Sling.com.

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Fox News got “Breaking: Bill O Riley is gay,” and Rick Sanchez from CNN got “I am high on crack right now might not be coming into work today.” But other Twitter accounts had links to sites to generate affiliate revenue. Facebook’s Twitter account had a message pointing to getlaid.info (now shut down), which redirected to a porn site. President Elect Barack Obama’s account had a link to a site that offered a $500 gas card for taking a survey. Both had affiliate links associated with them.

Why were some sites simply defaced while others used to generate affiliate fees? It all seems to point back to one person that goes by “Gmz” on a hacker site called Digital Gangster (this site was also where Miley Cyrus photos were posted after they were taken from her hacked Gmail account). Gmz, says a source, obtained the account credentials for the Twitter accounts and then posted them on DigitalGanster. It was removed shortly afterward, but not before others grabbed the information and started to post on the various sites.

A later post on Digital Gangster asked “Who did it?” Gmz chimed into the thread, saying “That guy must have been a very generous individual. To hand out accounts rather than use that for profit. Could it be enough for respect or just enough for that user to be identified as an “idiot”?”

I’ve emailed Gmz from my new Digital Gangster account to confirm that he originally posted the credentials and I can’t wait to read his unlikely response. Twitter, of course, could follow up with Digital Gangster via their attorneys or the police and get access to that information. And it should be very easy to track the people who posted affiliate links on hacked Twitter accounts - just contact the affiliate companies and follow the money.

I wouldn’t be surprised if arrests were made in connection with all the Twitter drama this morning, once all this plays out.

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RipCode, a company that offers online video streaming and transcoding services, has closed a $12.5 million funding round led by Granite Ventures with participation from existing investors Hunt Ventures, El Dorado Ventures, Vesbridge Partners, and ATA Ventures. The company, which was founded in 2005, had previously raised $19.5 million in funding. As part of the deal, Granite’s Eric Zimits will join RipCode’s board.

One of the major issues with streaming video lies in offering content compatible with the wide array of devices that can access the web. Sites are oftentimes forced to store the same video multiple times in different file formats and sizes to accommodate as many devices as possible, but this can lead to unnecessary storage and processing costs.

RipCode allows content providers to negate this issue by transcoding their videos on the fly, without the need to process and store multiple copies. The company recently scored a major win with its partnership with MySpace, which now uses the company’s services to offer streaming video to mobile phones. And given the increasing diversity of devices that can access the high-speed web, we can probably expect to see similar partnerships between RipCode and other major video providers in the future.

RipCode plans to use the new funds to further expand its sales and marketing efforts, as well as continue development on its infrastructure and software offerings.

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For those Web companies that comply by it, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is turning out to be their best friend. Last week, Universal Music Group (UMG) was denied a summary judgment by a Los Angeles court in its copyright infringement case against Veoh. (Court order embedded below). UMG wanted a summary judgment against Veoh, arguing that it could not hide behind the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA, which state that Web services are not liable for the copyright infringement of its users if it takes certain steps to prevent it.

This is the second time a summary judgment has been denied to a company trying to sue Veoh for copyright infringement. (The last time it was a porn company). These orders are setting important legal precedents not just for Veoh, but for YouTube and others also facing DMCA lawsuits.

The safe harbor of the DMCA states that Web services are not liable for copyright infringement if the content is stored “at the direction of a user.” UMG tried to argue that Veoh should not be covered by the safe harbor because it did a bunch of things with the music and video content after it was stored on its servers, including converting it into Flash, breaking it up into chunks for peer-to-peer distribution, and allowing other users to stream it or download it.

The judge, A Howartd Matz, didn’t buy the argument. He found Veoh’s position to be “more persuasive,” noting that user’s must agree to Veoh’s Terms of Service before uploading a video, and that the terms of service clearly prohibit uploading copyrighted material. In other words, the initial act of uploading is considered to be user-directed storage under the DMCA, and whatever Veoh does to process the video after that cannot be used to get around the letter of the law.

If you live by the DMCA, be prepared to die by the DMCA.

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Picasa, the popular free photo management software made by Google, has finally made its way to the Mac. The application has long been noticeably absent on the Macintosh - especially given the fact that it has been available for Linux (which typically lags behind Macs and Windows) since 2006. It’s also a direct competitor to Apple’s long running iPhoto product, which has come with all new Macs for years. So how does it stack up?

In my brief testing the application seems to be very snappy (much faster than iPhoto), though it lacks the sleek look of Apple’s products. Photos import quickly, effects are easy to find and apply, and most things are intuitive, though the folder browsing can be a little confusing. It might not be as pretty as iPhoto, but I won’t be surprised if power-users make the switch (or at least consider it).

One of the biggest differences between Picasa and iPhoto is that Picasa doesn’t move or reorganize images, but instead keeps track of where your images are scattered across your hard drive and allows you to view them in one place. For users that manually manage their photos by sorting them into folders, this is a very welcome change. In contrast, iPhoto has long transfered your photos to its own library, and encouraged users to sort their photos through the app itself.

Given that iPhoto has come preinstalled on every Mac for years, Google is doing doing everything it can to make Picasa play nice with your existing library. While users can typically modify any image on their hard drive directly from Picasa, all images in iPhoto’s library are treated differently: the application will copy these images to a new location, and only then apply edits. The application also allows users to revert back to previous versions.

Picasa is a welcome alternative to iPhoto, but it’s still premature to drop iPhoto entirely. It’s highly likely that Apple will unveil a new version of iPhoto at tomorrow’s Macworld keynote, and you can be sure that it will include some significant enhancements.

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After picking the wrong horse in the Presidential Election (where she might have become Secretary of the Treasury if John McCain had won), former eBay CEO Meg Whitman now looks to be laying the groundwork for a run at the governorship in California in 2010. (The current Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, cannot run for another term under existing laws). Whitman today resigned from all the corporate boards she serves on—eBay, Procter & Gamble, and Dreamworks Animation. While she hasn’t formally declared that she is even exploring the possibility of becoming a candidate, that is the scuttlebutt.

If she wins the Republican nomination, candidates she could face on the Democratic side include former California Governor Jerry Brown (who is thinking of running again) and two popular mayors (Gavin Newsom of San Francisco and Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles). If she hopes to stand a chance, she needs to cultivate more of a populist streak. Expect to see her on a lot more talk shows.

Even though she left eBay a year ago, much of her appeal will be tied to the public’s perception of the company, which has seen better days. If eBay turns itself around and is once again seen as a success in two years, that will help her campaign. But if eBay sellers and buyers continue to flee from the service, that will hurt her. She cannot escape the eBay association.

Would you vote for her?

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