News and Information

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.

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.

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.

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.

Global television network Current TV has teamed up with Twitter for “Hack the Debate,” a live broadcast of the debates this evening that will display real-time Twitter comments from its audience on the screen. The broadcast visualization and online streaming will be powered by Adobe Flash, and the list of cable and satellite channels that […]

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — As nearly a thousand technologists from around the world gathered this week on the MIT campus for Technology Review’s annual EmTech conference to learn about emerging technologies and to celebrate the young innovators, the mood was decidedly muted, with the precarious global financial situation clearly on the mind of many.

User-driven news site Digg announced a major expansion today that will include doubling its staff, growing internationally, improving infrastructure and developing new features. The company raised $28.7 million in a new round of funding led by Highland Capital Partners to finance its progress, according to Jay Adelson’s post on the Digg blog.

John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate last month may have helped him attract a wider female audience of online video viewers, according to numbers Nielsen released today. Fifty-eight percent of his website’s online video viewers last month were women, compared to 37 percent in June.

GigaOM, VentureBeat and ReadWriteWeb will be part of expanded technology coverage at the NYTimes.com, the paper announced today.  The announcement is part of a redesign of business pages along with a major increase in coverage in a number of sectors including "green" tech and economic issues. The redesigned page goes live today.

The Associated Press announced today that it has chosen the Seattle-based video management and publishing company thePlatform to bring broader coverage and higher-quality video to its Online Video Network. For the first time, the AP’s 2,100 affiliate sites will be able to post AP videos to their destination pages using an embeddable player.

Greed and the expectation of the level of high returns enjoyed during the stock market boom of the late nineties has powered the excess in the credit markets which have lead to the current financial crisis, says Alan Murray, Deputy Managing Editor of the Wall Street Journal.

The technology boom of the late nineties, and its subsequent bust in 2000, led institutions to create exotic financial instruments to duplicate the steep gains enjoyed during the boom, says professor John H. Vogel Jr, a real estate expert at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

  Not only was this past Saturday Night Live’s broadcast a big hit on television, with its biggest season premiere audience since 2001, it has created the most popular online video clip ever published by NBC, a network spokesperson has told Beet.TV.  The opening Sarah Palin/Hilary Clinton skit performed by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler […]

  The New York Times broke its record for daily visits to its Website with close to 9 million yesterday (9/16), a spokesperson has told Beet.TV, citing internal numbers.  The upheaval on Wall Street, coupled with the presidential campaign and hurricanes have added to to the record numbers, a spokesperson told me late this afternoon.

Like so many disasters which have driven news consumption, the earthquake that hit Wall Street on Monday has brought record traffic to the Wall Street Journal Online.  Monday set an all time record of two million visitors, a Journal spokeswoman told Beet.TV, citing internal numbers.  Traffic on Tuesday was nearly as high, we are told.  […]

The immense interest in Republican vice presidential nominee Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has driven 38 million video views over the past week, including YouTube videos, broadcast videos and spoofs, reports the Silicon Alley Insider’s Michael Learmonth.  Michael has created his report on numbers provided TubeMogul.

Purple States TV, an online political show reported through the eyes of five citizen journalists, will syndicate its videos to The Washington Post politics site beginning tomorrow, founder and executive producer Cynthia Farrar told me in an interview on the Beet.TV rooftop earlier today. The videos will be featured on the front page of the […]

Yammer, a Twitter-like microblogging tool for businesses, won the top TechCrunch50 prize of $50,000, TechCrunch announced yesterday. I spoke with CEO David Sacks about the company after he presented on Monday, and he told me that it was "really cool" that judge "Marc Benioff said he liked it the best." Benioff, the CEO of salesforce.com, […]

SAN DIEGO — Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, co-executive producers of All Things Digital, are at DEMO in San Diego.  I’ve posted a video of Kara’s first day at the conference including an interview with conference director Chris Shipley.

SAN FRANCISCO — Today at the TechCrunch50 conference, Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Product and User Experience at Google, announced Google’s plans to make scanned newspaper archives searchable through Google News. Over 100 newspapers are available at the product’s launch today, Marissa told me in an interview after her session.