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.

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.

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.”

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.

Flickr is the Apple of online photo-sharing with its high multimedia standards, cool interface, tools and fanatical following, but a failure to add video has been a major shortcoming of the service.

No longer. The Yahoo subsidiary finally introduced video today, but with some limitations.

Only Pro members, who pay an annual $24.95 subscription, can upload to the new service and clips are being kept to 90 seconds and 150mb in size.

Flickr says the 90-second limit is an artistic rather than a technical one.

It told its community:

“You know that Flickr is all about sharing photos that you yourself have taken. Video will be no different and so what quickly bubbled up was the idea of “long photos,” of capturing slices of life to share.”

So Flickr appears to want to remain distinctive by discouraging the kind of music video and TV-clip uploads seen on YouTube. Videos should be an extension of photos, perhaps recorded on the same camera, considering that so many digital cameras now have a movie feature.

The new service is completely integrated and looks as cool as the photo one - it has already attracted its first meme, Fridgets.

News that Apple is in talks with record labels about a possible ‘all-you-can-eat’ model for iTunes is making the rounds on the blogs this morning following last night’s story in the FT.

Over at TechCrunch, Erick Schonfeld asks whether music companies would be willing to go along with a subscription model. We think the answer is clearly yes.

Consider this: Steve Jobs himself pointed out last year that the average iPod contains just 20 iTunes songs. Our own back-of-the envelope analysis shows that the number at this point (4bn iTunes songs sold, divided by 140m iPods and 4m or so iPhones) could be closer to 28 songs per Apple device. Either way, given Apple’s 70-30 revenue split with record labels, that means the music companies are making a paltry $14-$20 per iPod, even though many iPods can hold thousands of songs. Meanwhile, Apple banks hundreds of dollars per iPod sold.

Compare that $14-$20 with what record labels could make on an all-you-can eat deal, and it’s easy to see why music companies would be interested.  Music labels are thought to be pushing for a $100 up-front payment over the two-year life of an iPod, with the markup to be split between the music companies and Apple. The lowball $20 per iPod figure being floated by Apple suggests that Steve Jobs is determined to drive a hard bargain, if he agrees to such an arrangement at all. But even if the record labels were only able to get Apple to come up to $40 per device, they would be almost doubling what they have been getting under the current a-la-carte model.

 Update: Peter Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider has a good analysis of the economics of an iTunes subscription service here.

 Steve Ballmer has a certain inimitable style (I use the term loosely.) This recapitulation of his famous “monkey dance”, delivered last week on a stage in Las Vegas, has Microsoft insiders squirming, but at least it makes a point. The software company now has its sights set on building a technology platform for Web developers, not just the software developers commemorated in Ballmer’s original 2001 outburst.

Google has a quieter way of doing these things, but make no mistake: there is a fight brewing here for hearts and minds. This battle will determine which vision wins out for the next stage in the internet’s evolution as a computing platform.

Google has just reserved San Francisco’s cavernous Moscone Center for a two-day event in May to draw Web developers into its own camp. This is a clear sign of how fast its aspirations have been taking shape. Its first pitch to developers came two years ago with a small conference aimed at people interested in building applications using the Google Maps API. Last year, that turned into a broader developer day that drew 5,000 to San Jose, before graduating this year to the main stage for technology industry convocations.

When I spoke to senior Google product manager Tom Stocky today, he was at pains to play down any suggestion that the internet company was about to go up against companies like Microsoft and Adobe.

“I’m not sure I see it as Google versus anyone else. What we’re really doing is promoting the Web as a platform. There’s no Google agenda.”

Well, up to a point.

Google’s “platform play” has two parts to it. One involves promoting open source tools for Web development - things like the Google Web Toolkit, for writing more effective AJAX applications, or Google Gears, for creating Web applications that can also run offline. Clearly, even if Google does not benefit directly from offering these tools, keeping developers out of the Microsoft and Adobe camps is important.

The other part of Google’s strategy for the May event will be to attract more developers to write applications that ride on top of the internet company’s own services. It has released 40-odd APIs so far, exposing services like YouTube and its Google Docs applications for independent programmers to draw on.

You can expect the blogosphere to be stuffed with laudatory coverage nearer the event about how Google is fostering a more open Web than the one some of its rivals seem to have in mind. Only, don’t expect Eric Schmidt to put on his monkey suit.

The investors in San Francisco start-up Zivity would prefer to think they are funding the next wave of social networking rather than an online peepshow.

Zivity, which serves up photo-shoots of scantily clad and tastefully nude women for subscribers paying $10 a month, is announcing its second-round funding today and has raised $7m from some prominent venture capitalists.

Founders Fund and BlueRun Ventures are providing the financing for the company founded by Scott Banister and his wife Cyan.

The connection is the online payment service, PayPal, bought by eBay for $1.5bn in 2002. Founders Fund founder Peter Thiel was chief executive, John Malloy sat on PayPal’s board before he co-founded BlueRun and Scott Banister was also a director. Mr Thiel was also an early investor in Facebook and both have invested in Slide, which provides popular social-networking widgets.

“The fundamental investment is in people who can make the seemingly impossible possible and the unlikely likely. We’ve worked together on other things and Scott is someone who has done great things a few times over and he is still a young guy,” says Mr Malloy.

The 32-year-old is a serial entrepreneur and co-founded IronPort, an email security company that Cisco bought for $830m last year.

Mr Banister draws parallels with Zivity – IronPort aimed to challenge the dominance of Sendmail in email, Zivity aims to challenge the dominant advertising model for social networking.

“The subscription model is coming and we are interested in having great content and paying the people that create that content,” he says.

Subscribers to Zivity, which is still in invite-only mode, get their own profile page where they can add their details, friends and status updates, but the focus is really on the models and photographers, with members allowed five votes a month to give to their favourites.

Mr Banister says it is giving an unprecedented 40 per cent of its subscription revenues to the content creators, divided according to how many votes they get. His own wife Cyan, as well as being Chief Strategy Officer, is also one of the topless models eligible for the profit sharing.

“You see stars like Lindsay Lohan appearing nude [as Marilyn Monroe] in New York magazine and getting paid for it, but in this era of self-publishing, women do it on MySpace and see their photos taken down by the MySpace abuse department,” he says.

“There’s a big gap we can bridge here, the models and photographers are really excited.”

Despite soft-porn photos being available in abundance on the internet for free, Mr Banister feels Zivity can still create sufficient interest to be a profitable business.

“We’ve close to 30,000 people on our waiting list to get in, the reaction has been incredible,” he says.

“We’re creating something here that is just not available on other social networking sites and we’re providing an outlet for models and photographers that they’ve never had before.”