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As the Qplayer plays this Sigur Ros video from YouTube, I can conduct a search for a friend's band, and add songs from their MySpace to my playlist. The only drawback: search results appear in a separate window.

(Credit:
Screenshot)

A quick recap: the Qbox Web site lets you conduct searches for artists across MySpace, Bebo, and YouTube simultaneously. When results appear, you click a small play button on the Web page and the Qplayer launches and begins playing the song or video. You can conduct other searches and add them to your currently playing list, mixing audio and video in whatever order you like. The service is interesting because–like many younger music listeners–it makes no distinction between multiplatinum artists and your best friend’s garage band. As long as they’re on MySpace, Bebo, or YouTube, they’re easily available from Qbox.

A follow-up to my previous post on Qbox: they fixed whatever was preventing the player from playing songs embedded in MySpace pages, and I can now happily recommend it anybody who frequently listens to music on MySpace, Bebo, or YouTube.

Qbox has the concept right, but the overall experience is a little more awkward than it could be–you can conduct searches from the player, but the results appear in a separate Web browser window. Then, when you select an option like “play” or “add to player” from the Web page in the browser, it adds the song back to the Qplayer playlist. I’m not sure why this back-and-forth has to exist, given that Qplayer is basically a modified Web browser–why not just display the search results window in a separate tab within the player? It also has an annoying habit of asking you if you’re sure you want to close the player every time you try to shut it down–unnecessary dialog boxes are a pet peeve of mine. But I trust this is just a first iteration, and I’ll be keeping track as they improve the service and the software.

Earlier this week, Gwyneth Paltrow’s new start-up Goop.com went live. The site promises to have tips for food, shopping, and life in general from the actress.

Celebrity: Ashton Kutcher

Site:
Blahgirls.com

Kutcher, who is also the founder of VoIP start-up Ooma, launched Blahgirls earlier this month at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco. While mainly playing an animated video series, it’s also a celebrity gossip blog that plans to make money through advertising and branding that shows up inside the videos.

Status: Alive and kicking. According to Compete.com, it’s had a healthy zigzag of unique user growth leading into September, although it’s still got a way to go before it’s a household name.

Status: Alive and still very much around. Like Peter Gabriel’s investment in The Filter, this isn’t Smith’s idea as much as he’s just helping to fund it.

Celebrity: Will Ferrell

Site:
FunnyorDie.com

Ferrell is co-founder of FunnyOrDie.com, a comedy site that lets amateur comedians post their homemade creations alongside content from the pros. The site received a boom in traffic from several of its videos hitting the Web, including “The Landlord” which has netted close to 60 million views.

Celebrity: 50Cent

Site:
ThisIs50.com

ThisIs50.com is a cross between an online resume and a place for fans to gather. What makes it an interesting business venture is that it’s been created using the build-your-own social network service Ning. 50Cent, whose real name is Curtis Jackson has leveraged all sorts of brand integration like a Kyte.tv video player and links to various places to buy and stream his music, including imeem.

Celebrity: David Caruso
Site:
LexiconDigital.tv

Lexicon Digital Communications may be most famous for its CSI-star founder and CEO David Caruso, who announced the company at the Consumer Electronics Show back in January. What made the announcement noteworthy is that nine months later we still have no idea what exactly the company does.

Celebrity: Will Smith

Site:
PluggedIn.com

Back in mid-April Smith was one of the investors in a $2 million round of funding for music video site PluggedIn. The site serves up its videos in spiffy looking high resolution with the use of a special plug-in (which incidentally has nothing to do with the site’s name).

Status: Alive, although it’s too early to tell where it will end up. The site launched in late March and has since picked up just under $1 million in seed funding.

Status: Hoffspace is alive and well with over 16,000 members after launching in late August.

Status: It’s too early to tell but celebrity blogs can rise to prominence and then fall down with startling volatility. Much of Blahgirls’ longevity will come down to the content, which in the case of the SouthPark-esqe animated show makes it fairly watchable, even to newcomers.

Celebrity: Peter Gabriel

Site:
TheFilter.com

The Filter is a media recommendation engine that Gabriel has invested in. Users tell the service what kind of music and videos they like, and it spits out recommendations that get smarter as it accumulates ratings.

There’s no telling whether it’s going to be more of a blog or an actual business venture with branded products, an editorial staff, and a synergistic TV program. What we do know is that Paltrow is simply the latest in a long string of celebrities who have come off the big screen (or out of the recording studio) and onto the Web with products and services backed with their money and persona.

Status: Still alive, but again we have another case of a celebrity-backed venture that uses existing technology. In this case, it’s two-year-old Chesspark.

Any we missed? Drop us a line.

Status: Cafemom is doing very well. It picked up a $5 million round of funding less than a year after launching. According to the site, it’s getting more than 6 million unique visitors a month.

Celebrity: Andrew Shue

Site:
Cafemom.com

Shue, better known as “Billy Campbell” from the 1990s TV series Melrose Place is also the co-founder of Cafemom.com, a social networking site for moms. The site launched in 2006 and offers a place for mothers to share tips and stories and to come together with other nearby moms.

The Baron Davis-backed IBeatYou is a fun way to approach casual competition for all sorts of things. In this case it's a photo contest.

Celebrity: David Hasselhoff
Site:
Hoffspace

David Hasselhoff had a posse. So big in fact that he got tired of using other social networks to keep track of all his fans and thus created his own, which has aptly been dubbed “Hoffspace” Like 50Cent, the Hoff has chosen to use Ning. The difference: Hasselhoff has managed to make his site look pretty good.

(Credit:
IBeatYou)

Celebrity: Kanye West

Site: KanyeTravel.com

Kanye Travel is like any other travel site. You can buy plane tickets, book a rental
car, and pick out hotel rooms in the same place, with one bill to pay. Where the hip-hop artist is doing things a bit differently is using the same space to sell tickets to his shows and getting attractions on-board to give out special rates to KanyeTravel.com users.

Celebrity: The RZA

Site:
WuChess.com

The RZA may be best known for being part of rap group Wu-Tang Clan. WuChess is an extension of that brand and mixes social networking with online chess. Users can play against the computer or other people for prizes and stat points that are tracked on their profiles and determine their ranking for matchmaking and tournaments.

Celebrity: MC Hammer
Site:
DanceJam

DanceJam is a really interesting service that’s a bit like an encyclopedia for forms of dance that blends in competitions and instructional videos. We checked it out back before it launched last November.

Status: Alive and well. The site had been focused on the European market, but opened up to other parts of the globe after a redesign in May. The one thing that might hinder its mass adoption is competition: the inclusion of playlist recommendation in both Apple and Microsoft’s latest MP3 players.

Status: WayOutTV is effectively dead (for now that is). There’s still the WayOutTV channel on YouTube. However, there are no longer any videos. WayOutTV.com is also dead, although according to The Los Angeles Times
it will return at a later date.

Status: Doing real well. In June, HBO took an equity stake in the site, which plans to produce five hours of content that will appear on the paid TV network. We also heard that as of late July, more than 140 of its videos had hit the front page of social news site Digg.com since launch.

Status: Alive and kicking, although it’s a visual mess. There’s also a 50cent.com, which is far cleaner and powered by MTV-owned Flux.

Below are 14 recent ones, including updates on whether they’re still around.

Honorable mentions for tech/Web spokespeople: William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy (for Priceline.com), and Barry Bonds (for Bling Software).

Celebrities: Baron Davis and Cash Warren

Site:
IBeatYou.com

Davis, the pro basketball player, and Warren, a Hollywood producer, are co-founders of IBeatYou, which is a competition site. Users can create challenges and have others compete in order to earn points. Much like Worth1000, it’s become a repository for quirky user creations like photo contests and one-upmanship.

Status: Kind of launched. There’s no actual content yet.

Celebrity: Damon Wayans

Site: WayOutTV.com
WayOutTV was a video comedy site that was to be curated by Wayans. Originally slated to be its own site, it became a channel on YouTube shortly after launching.

Celebrity: Gwyneth Paltrow
Site:
Goop.com

As mentioned before, it’s hard to know what will become of Goop. If anything, Paltrow has enough star power to run a brand without having to do all of the dirty work as Martha Stewart and Oprah have done with some of their online efforts.

Status: Alive and kicking but slow. The site has also not yet taken on the challenge of mixing in the ticket sales and discounts.

Status: Still yet-to-be-launched. But if you want to see a really amazing three-minute-plus promotional video that doesn’t show you what a company does, you can find it here.

Dell began its dedicated cloud services business 18 months ago, and has acquired big-name customers like Salesforce.com, Facebook, Yahoo, and Microsoft. It’s an area Dell is growing quickly, but it’s also one that Stahlman believes is not well-understood by the financial analysts watching Dell.

“This is a very significant dynamic in the server market today that I don’t think Wall Street has caught up with,” he noted.

Revenue was $16.43 billion for the quarter, an 11-percent increase from a year ago. That was helped by a big boost in shipments of the company’s hardware–up 19 percent worldwide.

Regarding the company’s consumer business, it is still in the growing stages. Margins on consumer notebooks continue to decline, as do the average selling prices. But, demand for consumer notebooks are growing in many markets, including new ones like China and India. The key will be Dell’s ability to exploit that better than their rivals, HP, Lenovo, and Acer.

Dell’s strength has traditionally been in the enterprise market, and it says it will continue to grow its services business to take advantage of growing demand from its current roster of customers.

Despite lower-than-expected profits, Gladden called it “a great growth quarter” for Dell. The cost of growth in Europe in particular, he said was partly to blame for this quarter’s results. In other words, in an attempt to gain share in both consumer and enterprise markets, Dell spent more than it did last year.

This post was updated at 3:50 p.m. PDT with comments from Michael Dell and analysts.

Dell on Thursday reported its second-quarter results, and the company admitted it had more work to do to improve its performance.

The CEO’s repeated response was that the company is seeing gains in market share as a result, but still has some fine-tuning to do in regard to pricing.

“It’s correct that Dell has focused on enterprise and consumer will follow in their priorities. That’s the right thing for them to do,” he said.

But a bigger issue for the IT industry in general is the current conservative spending climate. Gladden said its business with large corporate customers and state and local governments has seen the most slowing.

But Wall Street didn’t like what it heard: Dell’s stock was down more than 10 percent to $22.50 in after-hours trading.

Gladden said repeatedly that there was “more work to be done,” to improve profitability and decrease costs. To that end, Dell still isn’t done with layoffs. The company said in early 2007 it had a goal of lowering headcount by 8,900. As of now, they’ve reduced staffing by 8,500. The last 400 will be gone by the third quarter, according to Gladden.

Its second quarter profits were down 17 percent to $616 million, from $746 million a year ago. Dell reported earnings of 31 cents per share, missing analysts’ expected 36 cents per share.

Dell’s CFO did say not to expect improvements in profitability in the consumer business for another four quarters. And that’s fine, according to Gartner’s Stahlman.

But Gladden did say that his company is beginning to see some of that slower spending spreading to Western Europe and Asia.

Dell does not provide guidance to Wall Street for the forthcoming quarter, which makes analysts more than a bit nervous. That was quite obvious on the earnings call Thursday, when analysts repeatedly asked Gladden and CEO Michael Dell about why the company was so aggressive in trying to gain market share in Europe, and didn’t have the profits to show for it.

New CFO Brian Gladden presided over his first earnings call for Dell.

With shipments up in all markets, they say it’s working. Specifically, Gladden pointed out servers and notebooks. Server shipments increased 19 percent, and notebooks 44 percent. The company has increased its global retail presence from basically nothing a year ago to having its products on shelves in major electronics chains in the U.S., Europe, China, India, and more.

Though Wall Street appeared fixated on costs of driving up the company’s notebook business in Europe, it’s missing the larger picture, according to Gartner analyst Mark Stahlman. Specifically, Dell’s growing cloud computing business.

“When you’re restarting growth, it’s an imprecise process,” Dell said. “We see some parts of our business where we were probably a bit too aggressive, (and) we’re modulating for that now.”

“But it’s conservatism that’s been relatively consistent for the last six months,” he said. It jibes with what rival Hewlett-Packard reported during its earnings call last week, when CEO Mark Hurd said he didn’t see much of a change between last quarter and the current quarter.

In sum, Dell is still trying to turn itself around. While the previous quarter’s earnings results may have been more reassuring to investors, the company is still undergoing change internally and they don’t have every wrinkle ironed out.

Click here for full coverage of the Google Chrome launch.

“By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the services and may be revoked for certain services as defined in the additional terms of those services.”

2. Although you retain any copyrights to content you own and use in the browser, Google says it has a right to display some of your content, in conjunction with promoting its services. Here’s their exact wording.

“Some of the services are supported by advertising revenue and may display advertisements and promotions. These advertisements may be targeted to the content of information stored on the services, queries made through the services or other information.

This is becoming standard fare with much software these days, but worth noting.

Also worth paying attention to are the settings when you install it. By default, Chrome will add all manner of shortcuts, so if you don’t want it to do that, be sure to click “customize these settings.” Of note, it does not make itself the default browser without a user agreeing to do so.

Traditionally, it is Web pages and not the browser itself that serves ads. Google isn’t saying it will change this paradigm, but its terms of service don’t rule that out either.

Moments ago, Google went live with its Chrome Web Browser. I immediately clicked download, but not before I saved a copy of its terms of service. I like to know what I am agreeing to.

“The software which you use may automatically download and install updates from time to time from Google. These updates are designed to improve, enhance and further develop the services and may take the form of bug fixes, enhanced functions, new software modules and completely new versions. You agree to receive such updates (and permit Google to deliver these to you) as part of your use of the services.”

View results

3. Don’t be surprised to see more ads.

The manner, mode and extent of advertising by Google on the services are subject to change without specific notice to you.”

Google Chrome
Internet Explorer
Firefox
Safari
Opera
Other

1. Google reserves the right to automatically update and install Chrome.

Here are a few things that stood out to me.

CNET News Poll Browser wars, redux
What browser is in your future?

Protesters turned out to riot and burn photos at a press conference in Seoul Wednesday held by former Samsung top lawyer, Kim Yong-Chul, and the Associated Press got a great photo of the civil disobediance in action.

Now this is a passionate user base.

The company’s former lawyer held the press conference to call for punishment of Samsung’s former chairman, Lee Kun-Hee, who stepped down Tuesday after being indicted on tax evasion charges.

Nine other Samsung executives were indicted on charges similar to Lee’s.

Lee was cleared on charges related to the slush fund, but was also indicted on breach of trust for helping to arrange the sale of company stock to his son and unfairly low prices.

We’re not allowed to run AP photos (we don’t pay for the service, but if anyone has their own photos, please send them my way at Erica dot Ogg at cnet.com), but Engadget has the image, so be sure to check it out.

The rioters are apparently angry with Kim, whose admission to prosecutors about the existence of a $215 million company slush fund used to bribe public officials touched off a high-profile investigation into South Korea’s largest company, which has long been a symbol of national pride.

(Credit:
Tom Krazit/CNET News)

Google’s Rich Miner had nothing new to share Thursday with Mobilize attendees regarding the company’s Android software for mobile phones, except that it will be really, really cool.

Click here for full coverage of Google Android

Google has spent almost a year finalizing its plans for Android, a Linux-based combination of nuts-and-bolts software with applications and a user interface designed to run mobile phones. The idea is to give the mobile industry an open operating system that they can use as they see fit without breaking application compatibility across a wide variety of handsets.

Miner returned often to the theme of openness during his 20-minute presentation on Android, noting that “once you start talking open, you don’t come back from that.” He also emphasized that no one party would control Android, in that Google plans to release the code for the operating system under an open-source license.

Google's Rich Miner had little new to say about Android, the company's almost-live mobile operating system, during a conference in San Francisco on Thursday.

But Google plans to make sure that the first Android customers know who designed their phone’s software. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the first Android phones will emphasize Google’s brand on the handset. Miner did not take questions from the audience following his keynote speech, and refused to answer questions regarding the report outside the auditorium following the conclusion of his talk.

Android is set to make its debut next week in the form of an HTC handset running on T-Mobile’s network, but Miner ran through Google’s standard pitch for Android in San Francisco for an audience of mobile industry insiders already very familiar with Android’s potential. He painted Android as the answer to the industry’s search for a truly open operating system that erases the headaches of the past.

Click here for full coverage of the D: All Things Digital conference.

OK, so the blog is up and running. If you need a break, I have another post based on some of Gates’ pre-keynote talk. (short version–no comment on Yahoo)

Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer share the stage at D6 on Tuesday in Carlsbad, Calif.

CARLSBAD, Calif.–So I’m here live at D6 and ready to live blog the Bill and Steve show, along with Webware’s Rafe Needleman. If this newfangled tech works, the live blog will be below.

I’m told the
Windows 7 preview will be just a tiny–if highly anticipated–part of the discussion. My source on that, by the way, is Bill Gates.

(Credit:
Dan Farber/CNET News.com)

In a separate mailing to Bugtraq, Juan Pablo Lopez Yacubian says he was also able to use a similar exploit to crash Mozilla
Firefox 3 beta 5.

Among the vulnerabilities cited are a denial-of-service (crash) vulnerability caused by a write-access violation, a denial-of-service (crash) vulnerability caused by a read-access violation, and a third vulnerability that allows attackers to spoof the content contained in the address bar. A full write up can be found here .

Researcher Juan Pablo Lopez Yacubian is credited with finding multiple vulnerabilities in Apple
Safari 3.1.1 for Windows. Other versions of Safari may also be affected.

Safari users may be subject to crashes or interactions with an attacker’s malicious site, according to a warning posted on Tuesday on BugTraq .

That said, the general workaround is not to use Safari 3.1.1 for Windows until Apple issues a fix. Versions of Firefox 2.x and Opera are recommended.

According to the settlement agreement, about 1,400 of RIM’s 3,200 stock option grants were backdated (dated prior to the date of actual granting) or re-priced (dated later than the actual granting), both of which are done to increase the value of the option.

RIM said in a statement that the company and the executives, have also made settlement offers to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to resolve that agency’s investigation into option granting practices at the company, which makes the BlackBerry handheld device. Those offers are subject to SEC approval. If they are approved RIM does not expect the settlements would have a material adverse effect on the company’s business, RIM said.

“RIM is pleased that the parties have resolved matters with the OSC and looks forward to resolving matters with the SEC,” John Richardson, RIM’s lead director, said in the statement.

Co-Chief Executives Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, Chief Financial Officer Dennis Kavelman, and Finance Director Angelo Loberto have agreed to contribute $31 million to RIM for the benefit they received from the incorrectly priced stock options granted to all employees from 1996 to 2006. They will also pay $36.4 million to defray costs incurred by the company in the investigation and $7.4 million to the Ontario Securities Commission as an administrative penalty, according to the settlement.

The company announced on Wednesday that the settlement had been reached.

The co-chief executives of Research in Motion and two other executives will pay more than $74.5 million ($92 million Canadian) to settle a stock options-backdating case, under an agreement approved on Thursday by Canada’s securities commission.

RIM employees made about $53.6 million as a result of the incorrect options dating practices, but only half of that has been repaid, the settlement agreement said.

While they have very early stage development in the works for some new and novel technology to reduce the manufacturing costs of solar cells, they are not sharing details. The Spectrawatt core business today will be about building a company to manufacture crystalline silicon based solar cells. In the near term the business will be buying wafers and manufacturing cells. According to Andrew, they have a significant supply of silicon secured, and while he cannot say who the vendors are, at least one of those vendors will likely be announcing soon, as the Spectrawatt contract is a material event for them.

Andrew and I are in agreement that 2004 was a kind of a magic year changing what the photovoltaic industry is. Andrew stated it was the first year where the average company in every segment of the value chain in solar became profitable. So given today’s environment Intel and Spectrawatt could have conceivably started at numerous places in the value chain. This is where the vertical integration may come in. His view on the silicon supply is that no glut is coming, or at least not a long lived one. The end demand market is growing at 30 to 40% per year, and the silicon supply that is coming on line is in large part subject to long term contracts with fixed prices. The silicon supply additions then are pretty much already spoken for. In Andrew’s mind while growth at the margin will definitely cause some level of boom bust cycles, those long term supply contracts may moderate it more than other people believe. If he is right, and he has secure supplies, a horizontal business like cell manufacturing is a great place to be. If he is wrong, he sees continued vertical integration to manage the growth issue as one of the major avenues industry participants will go done. In this he and I also agree, rapid movements in supply cycles tend to reward vertical integration. And if he gets big enough with Spectrawatt, vertical integration could be a move Spectrawatt makes, too.

Andrew did say that they may vertically integrate later. So I asked why did they start at cells? Andrew explained that since the business comes out of Intel, and Intel is accomplished at processing wafers into products, cells made sense to start with. And at the end of the day they hold the view that the biggest point of value in solar value chain is in creating the cell, moving from low value silicon to high value device. They consider it the largest single value add step.

So the first question is why x-Si and not thin film? Besides the obvious that it is far and away the biggest market today and a natural fit for Intel, Andrew added two more. Customers care about per kwh cost, and all things equal, how much energy they can get out of the real estate they have (read, efficiency matters). So they think x-Si makes a lot more sense than thin film, especially given the additional issues around stability, manufacturing complexity and materials resource constraints.

I had a chance to chat with Andrew Wilson, a longtime Intel guy who is the CEO of Spectrawatt, about what he is doing. The venture is the result of the last 3 years of extensive business planning, that Andrew said grew out of an off the cuff conversation he had internally four years ago.

It is great for the solar industry to see more technology giants like Intel joining the fray, and perhaps helping drive down crystalline product costs the same way Applied Materials and IBM are looking to drive down then film costs.

Following on the 2006 and 2007 announcements of technology giants Applied Materials and IBM moving into the solar sector, Intel has joined the fray in 2008 with the spinout of SpectraWatt, its newly created solar division.

Neal Dikeman is a founding partner at Jane Capital Partners LLC, a boutique merchant bank advising strategic investors and startups in cleantech. He is the founding CEO of Carbonflow, founding contributor of Cleantech Blog, Chairman of Cleantech.org, and a blogger for CNET’s
Green Tech blog.