When I met legendary rocker Neil Young recently, he was pretty disparaging about iTunes. It’s like all new digital media technologies, he said: great for convenience, but the sound quality sucks (since I have a tin ear when it comes to music, I’ll leave others to judge the validity of that comment. But Peter Gabriel, another musician who’s been working on new ideas for distributing digital music, certainly agrees.)

Young let slip that he is now talking to record companies about licensing an alternative digital platform that he has been working on - something , he claimed, of far higher quality that could provide an alternative to the privacy-prone download world, and perhaps even a new business model for music.

The technology behind this was first shown off last month at Sun’s JavaOne conference (we blogged about it here.) Young, who is something of a techie, has spent 15 years experimenting with different technologies to assemble a complete archive of his career. He is now finally ready to release the first multi-media instalment. It will come out on Blu-ray discs, with the capability of adding extra content in future through downloads.

Bemoaning the fact that he can never keep a secret, Young told me he was now trying to promote this as a broader media platform:

We’re in discussions right now about developing our own media platform based on that. Something record companies can sell their artists’ works on. Something that can’t be downloaded, something that’s got much more depth.

It has every media component you could want, and they’re all married together in a platform. That means other artists could use it, other record companies could use it and gain the knowledge of our 15-year development curve.

This needn’t be limited to music, according to Young.

How about the history of the Civil War? How about the British Empire? If you have a career spanning 40 years, maybe it’s George Washington’s life. It could be a lot of things.

There’s so much to this that we can’t tell, that you can’t see in one sitting. Maybe there’s a structure there that could save the music business - a new thing, where it is creating new products.

When it comes to convenience, speed and low cost, though, iTunes (and piracy) take a lot of beating.

I like the extra desktop space of having two monitors on my desk, but I am suffering screen-envy at what Nasa scientists can now feast their eyes on at Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley.

The 128-screen hyperwall-2, unveiled on Wednesday, is capable of rendering 250m-pixel graphics and is “the world’s highest resolution scientific visualisation and data exploration environment.”

The liquid crystal display wall is 23 feet wide and 10 feet tall. It allows high-resolution examination of simulations such as global weather and black-hole collisions.

The set up is 100 times more powerful than the first version of the hyperwall installed in 2002, with 49 screens. Nasa says it has “128 graphics processing units and 1,024 processor cores, with 74 teraflops (one teraflop equals one trillion floating point operations per second) of peak processing power and a data storage capacity of 475 terabytes (one terabyte equals one trillion bytes).”

That equates to the graphics power of 600 video game consoles.

Presumably, Advanced Micro Devices had a hand in this as a partner of Colfax International, the installer. I find this much more impressive than its Cinema 2.0 demonstration last week, where AMD dubiously claimed a new milestone in cinema with its latest graphics cards.

The Nasa hyperwall seems a supernova in comparison.

The most financially successful virtual worlds are not 3D and sophisticated, but flat and appealing to younger audiences.

Think Neopets, Webkinz, Club Penguin and Runescape, not Second Life.

Habbo, whose graphics are reminiscent of the Code Monkeys cartoon and 8-bit 80s video games, announced today that its 100-millionth avatar had been created.

That does not translate as 100m active members - the service had 10.3m unique visitors in May, according to comScore - but it is still an impressive indication of the growth of the service since its launch in Finland eight years ago.

Financial comparisons are difficult. Electronic Arts announced in April that it had sold 100m units of the The Sims, the video-game precursor to online virtual worlds. Blizzard Entertainment said in January it had passed 10m paying monthly subscribers for its World of Warcraft online game.

The companies do not break out the hard cash they make from these properties and neither does Sulake, the privately held Finnish company that owns Habbo and dropped the “Hotel” from Habbo Hotel in 2006.

However, it did reveal today it was “on track to reach our projected revenue goal of $85m, which indicates a healthy profit for the company” in 2008.

Teemu Huuhtanen, executive vice president of marketing, ad sales and business development, told me he thought Habbo was the largest independent virtual world, following Disney’s acquisition of Club Penguin for $700m last year, with its more than 20m users.

Monthly visitors are up 51 per cent on a year ago in Habbo’s 32 communities worldwide.

” I think the biggest reason for the growth is the redesign we did in October/November focusing on easy access and play, making sure that anyone without previous knowledge of virtual worlds could come to the web site and create their own character and start exploring,” he said.

Habbo has also partnered with movie studios and brands to help make the site more relevant to its teen target audience.

Around 85 per cent of revenues come from users paying for virtual items in the world, but advertising and sponsorship is expected to take a bigger share this year as the medium matures.

The maturity of its users does create a churn problem for Habbo. While Second Life may lose users because of the level of difficulty they face, Habbo members simply grow up and move on to more adult virtual worlds.

“Every year we need to reach the users in each market that turn 13, so it’s like a constant flow of new customers for us,” said Mr Huuhtanen.

It’s going to be a couple more weeks before the 3G iPhone makes its way to the shelves of Apple stores, but thanks to analysts at iSuppli, we now have a decent idea of how much it costs Apple to make each new handset.

ISuppli’s “virtual teardown”* of the latest iPhone, which landed in my inbox today, puts the cost of an assembled 3G iPhone at $173. That’s 23 per cent lower than the best estimate of what it costs to make the existing 8GB iPhone.

For Apple, a 23 per cent drop in cost could lead to fatter margins, in spite of its decision to abandon the iPhone’s earlier unsubsidised $499 price tag in favour of a subsidised price of $199. As iSuppli writes:

“The size of the subsidy paid by the wireless carriers to Apple will be about $300 per iPhone, iSuppli estimates. That means that with subsidies from carriers, Apple will be selling the 8MB version of the second-generation iPhone to carriers at an effective price of about $499 per unit, the same as the original product.”

Some of Apple’s extra margin will be pared by loss of a share of operators’ subscription revenues, an early concession that Apple has agreed to drop with the 3G iPhone. Some estimates had put Apple’s share of subscription fees at 10 per cent for the first-generation version.

In choosing to revert to a traditional subsidy-based model for the new iPhone, operators seem to be willing to take a short term hit in hopes that service and data fees for the 3G iPhone will be higher than those for iPhone 1.0.  If iSuppli’s analysis is right, Apple stands to make out well regardless.

*ISuppli analysts arrived at their $173 figure by getting on the phone with suppliers and supply chain analysts to develop an educated guess about what was likely to go into the new iPhone, and how much it was likely to cost. The final estimate did not include other costs, like the cost of software development, shipping, and packaging, iSuppli said.

Moo, the maker of cool calling-cards for the Web 2.0 generation, has had to turn a little square for its move into the business market.

Its new business cards, announced today, are more conventionally sized than the MiniCards it pioneered with up to 100 different photos on the reverse, selected by users from online photo galleries such as Flickr.

“It’s the most requested product we’ve had. People say ‘What I really want is a square one,’” says Richard Moross, Moo’s founder.
“It’s a larger more sympathetic canvas for pictures and designs and it’s much more accepted as a standard.”

Mr Moross can also square this change to addressing the much larger business market with the evolution of the use of Moo cards, from featuring Second Life avatars to advertising small businesses.

“We started as a business thinking how people were going to convey their virtual identity offline, but I think people’s virtual and real selves are much closer than we thought and to that end the professional use of the cards has really driven the demand.”

Mr Moross says Moo’s Printfinity™ variable print technology is still unique in the industry and lends itself to business applications where companies can show a range of products or brand statements on the back of the cards.

Moo ships from the UK and  is based in London. It has  printed around 10m MiniCards in the past year and has shipped  to 181 countries since it’s launch in September 2006. Around 55 per cent of its sales come from North America and French Italian, German and Spanish versions have just been launched.

The privately-held company has yet to reveal any financial numbers but has set its sights on challenging  VistaPrint, the Nasdaq-listed online printing company.

Twitter, the service that wisely restricts blog posts to 140 characters or less, has completed its much-anticipated third-round VC funding.

That’s 139 characters, so I should stop right there. Except to tell you that Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder, is now an investor, as is Spark Capital, the Boston VC firm, whose Bijan Sabet will take a perch on Twitter’s board.

Existing investors – New York’s Union Square Ventures and Tokyo-based Digital Garage – also took part in the round, but no figures or valuation for the company were revealed.

Twitter has suffered significant downtime of late as its popularity has grown. Biz Stone, co-founder, said in a blog note that the funding would help the company focus on its infrastructure to make Twitter “reliable and robust”.

Revenues and profitability would have to wait until Twitter had achieved its vision of becoming a “global communication utility,” he said.

It looks as though Google is about to hand more ammunition to the critics who claim that it is fast gaining excessive power in the digital advertising industry.

A spokesperson for the company says that on Tuesday it will announce a new Web measurement tool to give advertisers a better idea of the true size of online audiences. This sort of information is badly needed - as we reported before, there are big disagreements over the way companies like comScore and Nielsen assess the size of a particular Website’s audience, and the row that has been raging over this issue has damaged what little credibility they had left.

Google should be in a better position than most to provide an accurate picture. While no details are available yet, one person close to the initiative says the analysis will come from data pulled directly from servers - both Google’s and those of third parties.

The new measurement tool will not be offered separately, our source says, but will be built into Google’s own media planning service. That suggests that only advertisers who run their campaigns on Google will get the extra insight. If so, this is a textbook example of how Google’s superior access to data could help it tighten its grip on digital advertising.

Windows XP is not dead yet. With a week to go, the vibes are getting stronger that the unpopularity of Vista (deserved or not) will force Microsoft to back off from its plan to kill XP entirely.

There was a notable pause a few days ago when I asked Kevin Johnson, who runs the Windows division, whether XP would get a stay of execution (as anyone who knows the self-assured Johnson will attest, this in itself is out of character.) This is what he finally had to say, after careful consideration:

We’ll announce what we’re doing whenever we’re ready to announce. The number one priority is we want to take great care of our customers. The fact is today that any customer that buys the business version of Vista has downgrade rights to XP anyway. So, XP is available to them. The fact is we’re going to support XP for many, many years to come, we’re going to support Windows Vista for many, many years to come. The priority is taking care of our customers.

Forcing companies to buy “pre-downgraded” PCs is a nonsense. And it doesn’t take account of consumers, particularly those who buy low-priced machines that aren’t capable of running Vista with the new aero interface (which has, all along, been one of the main hooks for consumers to switch to the software.)

Another source hints that there may well be a stay of execution for XP before the month is out, though one that is very limited in nature.

Either way, there are still a few more days when you can be assured of ordering a machine with XP. As this Dell page today blares, sales of XP on the company’s website have been “Extended by popular demand.” The clear message to Microsoft, in case they haven’t heard it already: at least some companies are listening to what their customers are saying.

It’s almost too Web 2.0 to be true.

Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, has invested in the video comment service Seesmic, announcing the news in what else but a video comment on Seesmic.

Mr Omidyar also made his original offer to the company over the Twitter messaging service.

“He sent a tweet where he said ‘Can I invest in Seesmic?’”, says Loic Le Meur, Seesmic’s founder.

His new investor has become something of a Seesmic addict judging by his page on the site. He made his first of around two dozen comments from Bangladesh more than three months ago and now gives his location as Honolulu.

He has also been contributing ideas for Seesmic’s development. Mr Le Meur says it was his suggestion that a threaded video player, introduced today, should be developed for blogs.

Omidyar Networks, the philanthropic venture capital firm, has co-led a $6m second-round financing for Seesmic with Wellington Partners, bringing the total raised to $12m to date.

Mr Omidyar will take a seat on the Seesmic board.

“Through video conversation, Seesmic enables people to connect and engage with one another across the boundaries of geography and time, opening up entirely new possibilities for social connection,” is his quote in the press release.

But when you watch his 4am video from Bangladesh and today’s Honolulu effort, you know he means what he says.

Mr Le Meur said the new funds would help with internationalisation efforts and extending the platform on social networks and mobile devices.

The exodus of early Facebook executives continues. Six weeks after Facebook announced the departure of co-founder and technology guru Adam D’Angelo, the social network said on Thursday that Matt Cohler, one of Mark Zuckerberg’s first hires, is on his way out.

Well, not exactly. Cohler is leaving his position as VP of product development to become a general partner at Benchmark Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. But he will stay on at Facebook in an “advisory” capacity, whatever that means. 

Cohler’s not-quite departure is the latest evidence of the changes underway at a company that is trying to mature beyond its scrappy startup beginnings. Of the original, core team of executives that led Facebook up from obscurity to take on MySpace for the title of world’s biggest social network, only Mr Zuckerberg and his former Harvard roomate, Dustin Moskovitz, remain.

It’s not hard to understand why. It has been ten months since Facebook garnered its eye-popping $15bn valuation in an investment round with Microsoft, and the pressure to drum up the sales and profits necessary to justify such a high price tag remains intense.

Yet for all the work Facebook has been doing to develop its business model, it has little to show for it publicly. Over the past few months, the company’s PR operation has fallen largely silent, while the focus of internet buzz has shifted to other services like Twitter and Friendfeed (a Benchmark company).

There is little doubt that Zuckerberg and his new number two, Sheryl Sandberg, are hard at work on the business model needed to carry Facebook through the next stage of its development, perhaps paving the way for an eventual IPO. But there is also little doubt that Facebook isn’t quite the free-wheeling startup it used to be.