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.

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.

Building B, a Silicon Valley media start-up, has emerged from more than two years in stealth mode to announce a new “TV 2.0″ business model.

But for all its talk of innovation, its Sezmi service is most likely to win consumer support as a cheaper alternative to satellite and cable TV providers.

Sezmi aims to offer TV channels at low-cost by using existing infrastructure. Its set-top box will tap a broadband internet connection and the spare capacity of terrestrial broadcasters to download programming to its hard-drive, while a sophisticated indoor aerial will enable live over-the-air digital channels to be seen.

Sezmi will therefore partner with terrestrial broadcasters and internet service providers (for a graphic explanation of how it is supposed to work see this diagram from the local San Jose Mercury News).

The company seeks to make a virtue out of this hybrid model with the TV 2.0 label. This means presenting personalised programme lists for each member of a family , allowing them to choose to watch what they want, when they want, including internet-based video.

A commercial launch is touted in several major US markets later this year, but Sezmi has to convince consumers this is the future and faces an uphill battle against the incumbents.

Its biggest weapon will be price, but there is no word as yet on what it plans to charge.

Building B has attracted some big industry names. Phil Wiser, its president, is Sony’s former chief technology officer in the US, while Andy Lack, Sony BMG Music Entertainment chairman, is on the board

Morgenthaler Ventures, OmniCapital, Index Ventures and private investors took part in a $17.5m financing round last August.

Bob Pavey, a Morgenthaler partner, said breathlessly at the time: “I am as excited about Building B as I was about Apple when I first invested in them.”

Intel and Cray have been talking this week about building supercomputers with a million cores or brains, but how will all those processors-within-processors work together and communicate with one another and how difficult will it be to write applications that take advantage of all of them?

This is the question that Stanford University hopes to answer with its Pervasive Parallelism Lab, announced on Wednesday.

“Parallel programming is perhaps the largest problem in computer science today,” said Bill Dally, chair of the Computer Science Department.

“[It] is the major obstacle to the continued scaling of computing performance that has fuelled the computing industry, and several related industries, for the last 40 years.”

The problem has arisen because multi-core processors were too expensive until recently for all but high-performance computers, meaning few programmers have developed the expertise to take advantage of their new, affordable abundance.

Stanford says computer scientists fear the progress of computing could stall and that’s clearly a worry for the major microprocessor suppliers - Intel, AMD, IBM, Nvidia, HP and Sun are all supporting the new lab, which will pool the efforts of the university’s leading computer scientists.

It is also not the first initiative of its kind. Intel and Microsoft announced last month  they were investing $20m in research at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign  in the same area.

Stanford’s lab has a budget of $6m over three years. The aim is to develop a complete parallel computing system, covering everything from fundamental hardware to new user-friendly programming languages. This could lead to the system doing all the work for developers to optimise their code for parallel processing.

Tim Draper of famed Silicon Valley venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson has listened to hundreds of pitches from start-ups over the past few years, but only three put themselves forward as alternatives to the online marketplace eBay.

“I was surprised when he told me that,” says James Chong (pictured), founder and chief executive of Wigix, the fourth eBay challenger to cross DFJ’s path.

Wigix’s pitch was impressive enough for the VC firm to lead a recent $5.3m funding round for the Bay Area start-up and for Mr Draper to take a seat on the board.

“EBay has been sitting on its laurels, this area is in real need of innovation,” says Mr Chong.

He spent 11 years at Charles Schwab and the last five setting up its accounts site, before establishing Wigix a year ago.

That explains the financial bent to the marketplace that differentiates itself from eBay by treating items very like company stocks.

EBay started out by offering collectibles, unique items, which goes some way to explaining the site’s sometimes rambling search results.

Wigix argues that most items for auction are now distinct commodities, such as an 8Gb iPod Nano, and they can be found and their market prices tracked more easily by users and search engines when they have their own page and even their own stock-ticker symbol.

Wigix uses the bid/ask principles of buying and selling shares and makes it possible to show current market prices for these commodity items. It says this allows real-time trading and combats the problems on auction sites of shilling and sniping.

A My Wigix section allows users to keep lists of their own possessions, see the market value of them and even name a price at which they would be prepared to sell them.

This gives a notional boost to the liquidity of Wigix’s marketplace. In theory, items may also never leave the marketplace if someone buys something from another user and leaves it on their public list of available items.

Wigix employs around 30 people in offices in Oakland and Beijing, China, but it is encouraging users to help it by suggesting different SKUs and taking ownership of category and product pages. They can earn a cut from advertising on the page and even sell ownership of it to anyone bidding.

Extra features allow users to submit reviews and manuals and ask others about what they think of products they own.

Wigix’s organisation of its auction site makes a lot of sense, but it is likely to be under-represented in items that are hard to classify, such as collectibles and jewellery.

The real test will be whether those items trading as second-hand goods in various conditions can be turned into commodities and traded like stocks and shares.

At its public beta launch on Tuesday, the site was slow and seemed short of inventory, despite its claims of having 500,000 items available.

Nevertheless, it may benefit from dissatisfaction with eBay and its fees structure. Wigix has no listing fees, free trading below $25, a $1.50 fee for buyers above that and a 2 per cent fee for sellers up to $1,000, then 1 per cent above that.

That’s a lot easier to understand than eBay’s complicated explanation of its charges.

The queues for Grand Theft Auto IV, which went on sale at midnight, seem justified judging by the rave reviews for the latest game from developer Rockstar Games and its publisher Take-Two.

“Rockstar’s magnum opus is a modern-day masterpiece that could change the way the world views videogames,” said Gamespy.

Its New York-based location “Liberty City is nothing less than one of the greatest videogame worlds yet conceived,” said IGN.

“I now know how film critics felt after screening The Godfather …Grand Theft Auto IV doesn’t just raise the bar for the storied franchise; it completely changes the landscape of gaming,” said Game Informer.

Metacritic, which provides a weighted average score for games based on a wide range of reviews, has rated the PlayStation 3 version of the game as a perfect 100 and the Xbox 360 version as a 99.

The industry average for video games is around 68, with Nintendo games scoring highest at an average of 75, Sony following on 74, then Take-Two on 73 and Electronic Arts on 72.

Metacritic is widely quoted by the industry and the Mature-rated Grand Theft Auto franchise’s excellence has to be one big reason why EA has bid $2bn for Take-Two.

At its analyst day in February, John Riccitiello, EA chief executive, expressed his disappointment that EA’s Metacritic average had dropped 5 points in five years from 77 to 72.

He set a target for its fiscal 2011 year of reaching an average Metacritic score of 80.

EA is this year building better games than it has ever done, he believes, but just imagine the boost to those averages the addition of Rockstar would give.

Intel is taking the high road and its rival Advanced Micro Devices the low one in search of market share in different business segments, according to announcements on Monday.

Intel unveiled a partnership with the Cray supercomputing company. In an industry first, their engineers will work together on creating a new supercomputer for release around 2012.

They aim to reduce dramatically processing times for intensive applications such as medical imaging, cell modelling in genome research and hurricane forecasting. The high-performance computing market was worth $11.5bn last year, according to the IDC research firm.

Kirk Skaugen (pictured left), head of Intel’s Server Platforms group, and Peter Ungaro (right), Cray chief executive, told me that synergies between the two companies’ research teams would help them solve problems where components interconnected.  This was key to keeping processors fed with data and operating at maximum performance.

They would also work on how to take advantage of what is expected to be a grouping of as many as 1m processing cores in a single supercomputing system.

The two companies say they will work with academic institutions and government bodies to test their products.

Meanwhile, AMD introduced its AMD Business Class, aimed at small and medium-sized businesses. This is a new platform of chips designed to help PC makers target this segment with products. Both dual, triple and quad-core processors are featured combined with AMD and non-AMD graphics and chipsets.

Acer, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens and Lenovo all announced their support for the initiative.

Yahoo chose the Web 2.0 Expo conference in San Francisco today to announce its was rewiring its whole network.

Who knows what Microsoft will make of this, given its plans to acquire the company. Microsoft itself has launched its Mesh hybrid computing platform at the conference.

Yahoo’s new chief technology officer, Ari Balogh, told attendees its moves were not to build a new social network, but to “build social into everything we do.”

He showed off some smart retooling ideas such as a Yahoo Mail application that allows you to sort through your Inbox more efficiently - highlighting emails from people that are part of your closest social network. From today, the company is opening up its environment for developers to build applications that users can add to any Yahoo page.

Mitchell Baker, chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, used her keynote to talk about the Firefox browser being worked on for mobile phones. Fennec, named after the small version of a fox found in the Sahara Desert, is much faster than existing cell phone browsers, according to early reports.

Jonathan Zittrain, author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, spoke by video from London and answered questions in an online chatroom set up by the conference organisers. His argument seems to be that new smaller devices for accessing the internet, such as the iPhone, are more proprietary and closed than the internet accessed through a PC. Increasing use of them will stifle innovation, he says.

I’m not sure I agree, given how open the iPhone is becoming and the forthcoming virtualisation on mobile phones, which would allow them to run any kind of operating system or browsers like Fennec, which is open source and open to every kind of additional features.

You can read Richard Waters’ review of Jonathan’s book here.

Zap-pow! Web 2.0 and user-generated content have hit comic strips.

Bitstrips made waves at South by Southwest last month with its launch of a cartoon-building website that makes creating your own strip easy.

Now the internet-savvy Scott Adams has launched Dilbert 2.0, an online version of his strip that allows readers to change the punchline.

My Dilbert, where fans will be able to rewrite the whole strip, will follow in May, along with Group Mash, which allows users to collaborate and write different panels together.

The cartoonist already allows readers to search, rank, comment on and receive RSS feeds of his strips. He aims to work with his audience by authoring random frames and seeing if groups can successfully develop strips.

It sounds like the kind of spirit and teamwork that is singularly lacking in Dilbert’s fictional world and something that Catbert, Evil Director of Human Resources, would never allow.

We’re still a long way from Home.

Sony has just admitted that its virtual-world interface for the PlayStation 3 is going to arrive at least a year later than first expected.

Sony announced Home with an impressive demonstration at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in March last year.

With stunning graphics and simple controls, Sony showed how players could create avatars and experience games, movies and chats with fellow players through a far more sophisticated interface than Second Life or Microsoft’s Xbox Live.

However, a demo is easier than a full implementation and Sony appears to have underestimated the amount of development work needed.

Beta testing began last April, but a full launch planned for the autumn was then postponed to this month. Now Sony says an “open beta” service will launch this autumn.

“We have come to the conclusion that we need more time to refine the service to ensure a more focused gaming entertainment experience  than what it is today,” said Kaz Hirai, president of Sony Computer Entertainment.

The news is a disappointment after Sony appeared to be making a recovery with the PS3. Some big games are expected to boost console sales, starting with Gran Turismo 5 Prologue this month, exclusive to the PS3.

Home’s delay will not hit any financial projections though. Its revenue model was unclear and its only impact so far has been the wow-factor of Sony coming up with something genuinely innovative after being in the shadow of Nintendo and Microsoft.

Unfortunately, the continuing delays are turning wow into oh-oh.