Alice Schroeder's biography "The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life," released September 29, became an immediate bestseller. PR firm CJP Communications recently launched the first two segments of an eight-part online documentary series it produced, "Shaping 'The Snowball': Alice Schroeder on the Oracle of Omaha", to give a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the book and put [...]

The comedy video website Funny or Die, humor site 23/6 and The Huffington Post have teamed up to create Huff or Die, accessible at funnyordie.com/huffordie, to showcase their best political humor videos and blog posts. Funny or Die made the announcement last week. At the Omma Global conference last month I spoke with CEO Dick Glover about the site's soaring traffic [...]

Craig Mundie, Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy Officer, says the industry is on the "cusp" of making computing more "humanistic."  To demonstrate where this may be going, he shares a video of a prototype robotic receptionist at work at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond.  Mundie showed this video during his keynote address at the Technology Review EmTech08 on the MIT campus last [...]

CAMBRIDGE, Mass -- In the midst of this extraordinary financial and political news cycle, online media consumption has been breaking traffic records.  As consumption is up, so is demand for bandwidth from big content delivery networks like Akamai.  Akamai, which carries Internet traffic for NBC, the BBC, Reuters and others, had a spike of 7 percent in normal traffic at [...]

People-powered news site Newsvine I interviewed CEO Mike Davidson at the Omma Global conference last month, where he spoke on a panel

San Mateo-based BlackArrow, a video-ad management system that can insert ads into broadband, video-on-demand and DVR playout, has announced $20 million in new funding, Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch reports. Andy interviewed BlackArrow Senior Vice President Chris Hock early this summer about how their system works. Investors include Cisco Systems, Polaris Venture Partners, Comcast Interactive Capital, Mayfield Fund and Intel Capital. [...]

Tina Brown, a titan of magazine publishing, has just launched her first online venture with the backing of Barry Diller's IAC.  The Daily Beast is a site and daily email about cultural/business/political movers and shakers, a world she knows very well as past editor of Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Talk. Here's the take on the new launch by Staci [...]

CAMBRIDGE, Mass -- Adobe AIR runtime environment has been installed on 35 million PCs and will reach 100 million by the end of the year, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch told Andy in this interview.  He caught up with Lynch at the EmTech08 conference last week. Developers can use Adobe AIR to build rich, cross-platform Internet applications that deploy to the [...]

Thomson Reuters announced commercial options for its sophisticated metadata generation service Open Calais at the EmTech08 conference last week. Andy interviewed Tom Tague, Vice President of Solutions for Thomson Reuters, about the service and its implications for the semantic web.  Both commercial and non-commercial publishers will be able to continue using the service for free up to 40,000 times a [...]

Scott Kirsner, Editor of CinemaTech and contributor to Variety, will be one of the hosts of a conference called "The Conversation" taking place October 17-18 in Berkeley. The focus will be on the interaction of cinema, online video, and games. Andy interviewed Kirsner last week at the EmTech08 conference at MIT. Liz Gannes writes today that NewTeeVee readers can get a [...]

The Washington Post, the newspaper publisher which has lead the industry in integrating online video, has registered a record 1.4 million video views in September, up some 162 percent over last year, according to internal numbers released this morning. The rise in consumption of video at the Post is part of surging traffic due in large part to the presidential campaign.  Overall, traffic [...]

LOS ANGELES, CA --- TMZ, Time Warner's hugely popular celebrity gossip site, is expanding its video syndication agreement with NewsCorp's MySpace. Today, MySpace is launching a new branded entertainment hub. TMZ has been been on a tear these days. According to comScore, the site had 10.5 million unique visitors and 375 million views in August. In June in Hollywood I [...]

Software billionaire Charles Simonyi, the former chief architect of Microsoft who helped develop Excel and Word, is headed back to space. Space Adventures, a space tourism company based in Virginia, says Simonyi will travel to space next year on a Russian rocket--making him the first private traveler to make two trips. Simonyi spent $25 million on a 13-day trip in [...]

Gigya, the largest widget network, has raised $11 million in Series C funding, bringing its fundraising total since its 2006 launch to $23.5 million, Mark Hendrickson at TechCrunch reports. The new funding will go toward widget distributor Wildfire, the only service which Gigya currently monetizes, and Socialize, a competitor with Google Friend Connect. Andy interviewed Ben Pashman, Vice President of [...]

Open-source social media center Boxee released a patch yesterday that essentially jailbreaks AppleTV, Brian Chen at Wired's Gadget Lab reports. The patch makes it possible for users to play any DRM-free multimedia file on AppleTV. The patch adds a Boxee button to the main AppleTV menu, and clicking it brings the user to Boxee's sleek interface, which CEO Avner Ronen showed [...]

The new interactive video platform Ved.io, which allows users to annotate video with links, pictures, and commentary, opened to the public yesterday. Ved.io's coverage of Friday's debate brings information from the web--like voting records, news, analysis, and quotes--to a screen adjacent to the streaming video. I interviewed Ved.io founder Craig Boyce at the TechCrunch50 conference last month, and he showed me [...]

StumbleUpon, the large referral system for discovering video and other online content, has moved to a Web-based platform, the company announced late yesterday.  Previously, it had only worked with a toolbar plug-in.    The new web strategy might work, posits Kara Swisher in her post. Here's the take on this by MG Siegler in VentureBeat. We've republished here a recent interview [...]

An Adobe official has confirmed that Adobe is working on Flash technology for the iPhone, and that the player will be available in a very short time if Apple gives it the OK, according to a report by iPhone Atlas. Adobe already has Flash running on an iPhone emulator. Andy interviewed Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch about the evolution of Flash [...]

Msnbc.com's interactive debate video player, launched on Friday at politics.msnbc.com in time for the first presidential contest, allows viewers to watch or re-watch the debate footage and jump ahead to specific topics by clicking on one of twenty keywords. The player has a timeline showing at what points each candidate discusses the keywords, so a viewer who wants to watch John [...]

RealDVD, a legal program that allows consumers to burn an unlimited number of DVDs on up to five PCs, will go on sale today at www.realdvd.com for $29.95. I interviewed RealNetworks VP of Video Product and Development Jeff Chasen in the Beet offices earlier this month, where he gave me a demonstration of the program. The uploaded files are encrypted to [...]