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Apeer, a media collaboration tool, is not a WebEx killer as claimed or even much use as an instant-messaging client, but it is pretty nifty when it comes to sharing digital media.

Launched today by the San Francisco start-up of the same name, Apeer is more akin to Microsoft’s NetMeeting/Windows Meeting Space on performance-enhancing drugs.

The desktop application allows users to drag presentations, photos, video and music into a window they share with other online participants. Anyone can play around with the media - resizing, zooming, pausing, rewinding, annotating - while discussing it in a chat window.

What distinguishes Apeer is that there are few other effective options for collaborating with video and music and manipulation can take place without any noticeable lag. Apeer gets rid of such latency issues by distributing the files to each participant’s computer and then just sending small packets of instructions to move them around and change them.

Bob Goldstein, chief executive, told me this resolved a chief WebEx complaint:

“What people tell us all the time is ‘I tried to do a WebEx session the other day and I was on slide 4 and the other guy was on slide 7 and somebody else was on slide 10,’ with us, you’ll never have that.”

Of course, Apeer does not run Powerpoint, so presentations have to be contained in PDFs. It also takes place in a secure window, so other participants cannot see your desktop as can happen in WebEx.

Apeer lacks the live integrated voice-over-IP of WebEx and the webcam capabilities of instant-messaging clients. That could come in later versions, although Mr Goldstein says such features could slow performance and Apeer could run alongside instant-messaging web-conferencing anyway.

Apeer is aimed at businesses, with a monthly subscription model that can be adjusted on a per-seat basis. Mr Goldstein says it is being offered at a low price point that is “extremely disruptive” in terms of undercutting the competition. A consumer version could follow in the future.

Subscriptions from online games are now bringing in $1bn a year in the US, according to a report by the NPD research firm.

Its data cover massively-multiplayer PC games (MMOs) such as World of Warcraft, casual games and console services such as Microsoft’s Xbox Live.

NPD gave the top five MMO games as World of Warcraft, then Runescape, Lord of the Rings Online, Final Fantasy XI and City of Heroes.

Top online gaming sites were Pogo.com, followed by RealArcade.com, Bigfishgames.com, Gametap.com and Disney.com.

Video game publishers are increasingly looking to online and recurring subscriptions to give themselves extra, steadier revenue streams compared to the lumpy retail sales of games.

Activision will achieve that balance with the merger with Vivendi’s games division by mid-year, combining its powerful game franchises with World of Warcraft from Vivendi’s Blizzard studio.

In its fourth-quarter earnings report on Thursday, Activision followed in the footsteps of Electronic Arts and THQ in announcing it would begin recognising a substantial amount of net revenues and cost of sales from online-enabled games over a service period, expected to be six months beginning the month after shipment.

“I still think that the bulk of Activision revenues will come from the sales of retail products, Blizzard is a different situation,” Bobby Kotick, chief executive, told me.

Activision had a blow-out quarter and year. Revenues for the fiscal year to March 31 of $2.9bn were up 92 per cent, helped by the success of its Call of Duty 4 combat game and the Guitar Hero III rhythm game. Fourth-quarter revenues were up 93 per cent at $602.5m even though no new titles were released.

“The one thing I think we are starting to see is new users,” said Mr Kotick.

“You are seeing the older demographic and some younger consumers coming in. The type of content like Guitar Hero is more broadly appealing, production values are better - the developers of Grand Theft Auto did a brilliant job - and the physical interface is improving with products like Guitar Hero and the Nintendo Wii. All this is driving new consumers and I think that will continue.”

Advanced Micro Devices’s annual meeting today was a surprisingly placid affair, considering its share price has nearly halved in value over the past year.

Existing directors were re-elected without a murmur and there was only one question from the floor: a stockholder asking if AMD would consider sponsoring golf tournaments.

Hector Ruiz, chief executive, is under more pressure from analysts, questioning whether AMD can continue in its present form and whether it can return to profitability this year after six consecutive quarters of losses.

The stock is up 13 per cent in the past week on analyst speculation that AMD could be split into two - a manufacturing business and a chip design and development one.

Mr Ruiz said progress was being made towards an “an asset-smart strategy” and he would give an update on this “complex undertaking…in the very near future.”

He said AMD would spend only $900m in capital expenditure in 2008, it was cutting its workforce by 10 per cent and this reduction in expenses would bring down the break-even point by hundreds of millions of dollars, making him confident of a return to profitability in the second half.

AMD would do fewer things better, he said, and get out of non-core businesses that did not have “a clear path to profitability.”

Production problems with its quad-core “Barcelona” family of processors were now behind it, he added, and AMD was on course to begin quad-core production on chips with more economic 45-nanometre circuit widths in the second half - about a year behind Intel.

His most intriguing comment on the battle with Intel was: “We are re-architecting the business so that our financial success is not invariably dependent on continued component performance leadership over a rich and dominant competitor.”

That is as close as AMD is likely to come to admitting defeat, having gone toe-to-toe in recent years with Intel, exchanging processor-advance punches.

Intel now appears to have a decisive lead in the x86 processor market that the two dominate. Mr Ruiz is suggesting his company will focus on expanding in other areas such as graphics chips or targeting specific segments such as processors for small businesses,  in order to grow its own business in the future.

I know the web has advantages over print in terms of delivering news in a timely manner, but I never thought the colour of my shirt would determine the online headlines I receive.

MSNBC.com’s Spectra news visualisation tool links to a webcam to read the colour of your clothing and serve up headlines from matching news categories. It also delivers them as a 3-D customisable whirlwind of stories that can be clicked on.

The application is part of the service’s NewsWare platform of digital tools launched this week.

It also includes NewsBlaster, an online game where players can shoot and explode orbs that release headlines to be captured and read, and NewsScroller, a build-your-own news ticker.

Personally, I don’t have the patience nor the shirt wardrobe to consume news in this gimmicky way, although I have taken to the NewsSkimmer headlines screensaver, now that my Realtime.com one has closed down, without a word from its RealNetworks parent.

There is a race on to develop Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) for the desktop between Adobe, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Sun Microsystems.

Those five are trying to wow us with examples of RIAs as cool widgets running inside or outside the browser, with some working when your PC or other device is offline.

Adobe’s technology is called AIR, Google has Gears, Microsoft has launched Silverlight and Mozilla plans Prism for its Firefox browser.

At Sun’s JavaOne conference in San Francisco today, the company touted JavaFX with three cool demos.

Connected Life is a widget that can exist as a Facebook or blog application or be dragged outside the browser. It combines feeds such as Twitter messages and Flickr photos to show you what your friends are up to. Photo Flocker allows Flickr users to search for photos by tags and throws up results in a 3D interface. Movie Cloud is a 3D sphere spinning around with dozens of high-definition videos that can be clicked on and played.

JavaFX apps were also shown working just as well on a mobile phone. Developers will be able to get their hands on a tool kit to build applications from July.

JavaOne also featured the rock star Neil Young. There was no performance of Sun chief executive Jonathan Schwartz’s favourite song, Rockin’ In the Free World, but a demonstration was given instead of how Java was helping to build the artist’s archive of his work on Blu-ray discs.

Young seems to have come up with the most imaginative use to date of Blu-ray’s new BD-Live interactive features. He has chronicled his life as an artist and plans to release the first period, 1963-1972, in the autumn.

That will take up 10 discs and at 50 gigabytes per dual-layer disc that could be 500GB of material, enough to satisfy even the most ardent fan. By the time he is finished, the life story could be a 50-disc collection.

The Blu-ray technology allows high-def audio to be played while listeners sift through relevant archival material such as photos, notes, videos and memorabilia such as concert tickets. The biography and timeline can also be updated by downloads and contributions from fans.

“Previously, there was no way to browse archival material on a disc and listen to a song in high resolution at the same time,” said Young.

“Previous technology required unacceptable quality compromises. I am glad we waited and got it right.”

Silicon Valley’s growing alter ego as Smartphone Valley has been boosted by Ericsson’s announcement today that it is opening a research centre in San Jose.

Its chief technology strategist, the 30-year company veteran Jan Uddenfeldt, will also move from Sweden to the Valley.

The initiative follows Nokia’s December decision to name its first non-Finn chief technology officer - Bob Iannucci - and base him in Palo Alto. The American headed its Nokia Research Center there, opened in 2006.

Apple’s introduction of the iPhone, Palm’s presence, a host of emerging telecoms start-ups and the move of PC applications to mobile phones has made it essential for industry leaders to take a stake in Valley innovation.

Ericsson, whose focus is network infrastructure, acquired the Valley’s Redback Networks and its IP routing technology in 2006 for $1.9bn and paid $1.4bn a year ago for Norway’s Tandberg Television, which has IPTV assets. It also acquired Santa Clara-based broadband equipment maker Entrisphere last year.

Bert Nordberg, Ericsson’s most senior North American executive as chairman of Redback and Entrisphere, moved to San Jose three months ago.

He told me the plan was to open a campus there for all of its acquired companies as well as core Ericsson staff. Its 1,000 employees in the Valley will move in this autumn and the centre has been designed for 1,500.

“We think it’s going to be manned by experts on mobile coming from other companies and within Ericsson, then some acquisitions and new hires,” he said.

“With the [fourth-generation Long Term Evolution] LTE technology coming and speeds of up to 100 megabits a second over the network, anything is possible. The PC-centric world is in North America and that’s why we believe a lot of the future will start here. We will have a base here in the Valley for building an LTE ecosystem.”

Amidst all of the Microsoft-Yahoo hubbub, business carries on at the world’s biggest software company. Today, Microsoft is set to announce a series of updates to the Zune, its answer to Apple’s wildly popular iPod.

The biggest news for Zune fans - Microsoft claims 2m of them - is that they will now be able to buy some of their favourite television shows through Microsoft’s online Zune store.

The shows, priced at $1.99, come courtesy of new content deals with NBC and other popular studios. They will add 800 TV shows to the 3.5m songs, 4,800 music videos and 3,500 podcasts already available through Microsoft’s iTunes equivalent.

Microsoft had its work cut out when it launched the Zune in November of 2006 and is still playing catch-up to Apple, which launched TV shows on iTunes two years ago. But Jason Reindorp, Zune’s marketing director, says the Zune is beginning to carve out a niche for itself among consumers looking for an iPod alternative.

“We are rushing to get to parity with the iTunes offering,” Mr Reindorp says. “But at the same time sowing the seeds of our key differentiators.” For Microsoft, this means a focus on the social aspect of music. Tomorrow’s announcement will also include new social features designed to make it easier for users to share playlists.

Noticably absent from Microsoft’s announcement is any indication whether a content deal with film studios is in the works. Apple unveiled a push into film rentals in January after it admitted that its a-la-carte business model for film downloads had failed to perform as well as it had hoped.

Mr Reindorp says movie rentals are something that would be “very easy” for Microsoft to do eventually technologically but that the company was focused on download-to-own TV content for the time being.
Microsoft declined to specify the terms of its new content deals, but hinted that it was willing to accommodate studios in ways that Apple was not. “Increasingly we’re seeing that studios want flexibility, and iTunes has a one-size-fits all, give us your content and we’ll distribute it in this way [approach],” Mr Reindorp says. “I’m not sure that’s sustainable going forward.”

Jittr, the video delivery network, emerged from “stealth mode” today as Vusion, a name change that seems necessary given its claims of providing jitter-free high-definition pictures over the internet.

The Silicon Valley company also announced its first customer: Island Def Jam Music Group, which has a roster including Mariah Carey, Kanye West, Rihanna and The Killers. The Vusion platform will deliver an online video portal of DVD-quality versions of the artists’ music videos.

Jittr is entering a crowded space dominated by big names Akamai and Limelight. Other notable content delivery networks (CDNs) include Move Networks, which powers ABC television’s high-quality video, BitTorrent, Vuze, Edgecast, Grid, Level 3 and Panther Express.

The Streamingmedia.com blog tracks more than 40 CDNs. It says the market is too crowded and a shakeout is inevitable.

However, Grover Righter, Vusion’s marketing chief, insisted in an interview that the company was not a CDN.

CDNs focused on servers on the edge of networks, http downloading, caching and serving flash video and images, he told me.

Vusion was focused on longer format, high-quality video served over the regular internet but processed by its servers in data centres, using its proprietary Wide Area Rapid Propagation (Warp) protocol.

Warp essentially is the secret sauce that allows Vusion to serve video in a way that it claims eliminates buffering - so there is an instant-on for the video plus channel-changing without delays.

Mr Righter says media companies at last month’s NAB broadcasters convention in Las Vegas were so impressed with the technology that they were now planning to bring forward 2010 plans for high-definition video over the internet by 18 months.

“This is a rapidly growing market, there’s room for several players and I think ours is a better machine,” he said.

The San Jose start-up was founded two years ago and has under 50 employees. It has received an unspecified investment from BlueRun Ventures, the Nokia-backed VC fund.

It may or may not be a CDN, but it is chasing the same customers and a lighter less-expensive infrastructure than its rivals could allow it to undercut their prices.

One buck a share. That’s how close it may have been.

When I spoke on Sunday to Legg Mason’s Bill Miller (Yahoo’s second-biggest shareholder, with 6 per cent or so of the stock,) he wouldn’t be drawn on whether he personally would have taken the $33 a share on offer if Microsoft had taken its bid direct to shareholders. But he did say this:

“Something in the $34 or $35 range would have satisfied most shareholders.”

Yahoo’s board held out for $37, while Yang himself apparently told Steve Ballmer on Saturday that he and co-founder David Filo would be happier with $38.

Miller chose to blame the Microsoft side for letting the deal get away rather than paying the extra $5bn to come up to Yang’s price. But if he is right about how little extra it would have taken to get a deal done, that is as much an indictment of Yang’s negotiating stance as it is of Microsoft’s unwillingness to pay the extra buck. It only makes the failure of these negotiations seem even more bizarre.

Nile Guide, the latest online travel site to launch, lets trip planners print out their own guide books, although its destination list at this stage is far from comprehensive.

The site itself is also limited - it only works with the latest version of Internet Explorer and Firefox. I could not access it on Firefox when it first launched this week and extracting information from it was as painful as getting baggage out of Heathrow’s Terminal 5.

But response times now seem to have picked up and there are some nifty features to explore.

As a Bay Area company, San Francisco and its surrounds are understandably well covered. I was most impressed with the way searches for places to stay and see could be quickly narrowed down on the fly.

Select the lodging tab for San Francisco and more than 600 hotels come up. Check a box for hip hotels and for a Union Square neighbourhood and the list narrows itself down to 19. Move a slider to five-star-rated hotels and you are down to the Ritz Carlton and Campton Place.

The user can then drag the hotel across to a trip planner column and use it to continue the search by finding places in close proximity. The right kind of nightlife can be pinned down with an “energy” slider control and walks can be judged with a “strenuousness” slider.

All the information found can be dragged into a set itinerary and printed out with photos for a personalised guidebook.
Nile Guide is missing a few elements. It could use an up-to-date listings service so that shows and other events could be added to an itinerary. It also lacks integration for flights, car hire and hotel bookings made on other sites.

This is something that longer-established site Tripit does very well: automatically aggregating all of your bookings for a trip into a printable itinerary and also incorporating information about your destination. Travel plans can be published as well to alert friends and fellow travellers that you may be in their area.

While Tripit is more practical, Nile Guide is prettier, as is Dopplr, another service that helps you to hook up with friends and frequent travellers.

Josh Steinitz, chief executive and co-founder, says Nile Guide has been in development for two years and partnerships for events listings are in the works, as well as more destinations than the 80 currently available.

Data sources are sites such as CitySearch, Expedia, OpenTable and TripAdvisor, supplemented by guidebook content, user ratings and a number of local experts checking the quality of entries.

Mr Steinitz himself has written about and photographed his visits to more than 50 countries and helped to build Away.com, later sold to Orbitz. Draper Richards and KPG Ventures are investors in Nile Guide, which is still a few stops and features short of a full itinerary.