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The search for a new CEO for also-ran online video site Dailymotion has ended, as Cédric Tournay (pictured) has agreed to take the reins of the Paris-based site, the company said in an e-mailed announcement. Tournay is the former CEO of European health portal Doctissimo. He replaces the company’s interim head, Ian Brotherston, who in turn stepped in for Mark Zaleski in April. Zaleski was moved over to the role of non-executive chairman and was charged with heading up international operations. With Tournay’s at the helm, Brotherston, a former BT (NYSE: BT) and AOL (NYSE: TWX) exec, will now manage Dailymotion’s EVP International Strategy. Dailymotion has raised a big $34 million round in late 2007, to expand into U.S., but things haven’t gone well for the site stateside, mirroring the woes of the online video industry. According to a French newsletter Stratégies, Dailymotion’s 2008 revenue at €12.5 million ($16.2 million)—that’s big in France, I hear—and reports have suggested it is looking to raise more money.

Evite, the invitation service owned by IAC (NSDQ: IACI), is doing a reorg and laid off 9 employees out of 38 total, we have learned and confirmed from the company. Among the execs who have been laid off include Rosanna McCollough, who was the GM of Evite since early last year, and Lariayn Payne, VP of Marketing for Evite.

This is part of the reorg of the service, as John Foley, who used to run Evite a while back (from 2002-2005) but now runs sister IAC-company Pronto, is taking Evite under his wings, though they will continue to be separate businesses. Hans Woolley, a co-founder of Pronto, has been named President of Evite and will report to Foley. An IAC PR rep told me they have some new ideas about Evite as a product and will be implementing those going ahead. This follows a similar reorg earlier this year where Gifts.com was brought under Pronto’s management, and Gifts.com CEO Jason Rapp left the company. .

IAC doesn’t break out Evite as separate category in its earnings—it is part of the Media & Advertising group—but Diller said in the Q109 earnings call that display advertising on Evite, its main source of revenue, has been hurt due to the downturn. A lot of more social-media friendly events sites have also come up in the last few years, including MyPunchbowl, Socializr, Zvents, Eventful, and a new contender Cocodot (which we wrote about here), and of course, biggies in social networking Facebook and MySpace.

After a few months of informal moves on it, the U.S. Justice Dept is now investigating an anti-trust inquiry into Google’s book settlement with the authors and publishers over its online book scanning and repository project. The agreement, which was reached last year, has been criticized by some authors and publishers as giving the search giant a stranglehold on the book publishing industry; the agreement is up for review by the federal court in New York in late October. In a letter to Federal District Court Judge Denny Chin of New York, William F. Cavanaugh, the Justice Department’s deputy assistant attorney general wrote that “The United States has reviewed public comments expressing concern that aspects of the settlement agreement may violate the Sherman Act.” But even though the dept has not reached any conclusions on it, this requires further investigation, the letter said.

According to a Google (NSDQ: GOOG) spokesperson, quoted by LAT, “The Department of Justice and several state attorneys general have contacted us to learn more about the impact of the settlement, and we are happy to answer their questions…It’s important to note that this agreement is non-exclusive and if approved by the court, stands to expand access to millions of books in the U.S.”

The Authors Guild, meanwhile, says this is just a procedural move by the Dept, and the agreement, while may need some tweaking, will withstand the inquiry.

In October last year, Google finally thought it had put the long-standing class action lawsuit with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers over its Google Book Search behind it. Under the terms of the settlement, Google has the right to display the books online and sell access to individual works. For example, Google could offer paid subscriptions to its entire collection to libraries and other institutions.

While Google agreed to share the revenues with the publishers and authors, libraries, some consumer rights groups and other parties are worried that Google would have solitary and overwhelming control over access to “orphan books”—titles whose authors and rights-holders have essentially abandoned. Since there’s no other online entity with access to these abandoned books, Google could effectively raise prices for access to the collection and libraries and other online repositories would have nowhere else to go for them.

Just last month, Amazon.com (NSDQ: AMZN) CEO Jeff Bezos expressed his concerns with the deal. He said at a conference that the agreement “needs to be revisited…It doesn’t seem right that you should do something—kind of get a prize for violating a large series of copyrights. You just can’t believe that’s the way it actually works.”

Google received some unfortunate news today, with the U.S. Department of Justice formally announcing the investigation of the $125 million settlement Google made with the Author’s Guild to pay authors a nominal fee for copyrighted works it has scanned and made available on the Web. The settlement has drawn its fair share of critics, including Jeff Bezos. But Google keeps on plugging away, making its book search better and better.

For instance, Google Books recently launched a plethora of new and innovative features to make the product easier for consumers to use, such as embeddable previews and better in-book search. Today, it added one more useful feature relating to search: a visual cue on the right margin showing the pages throughout a book where a search term appears.

When you search within a book, a page appears in a window, with a scrollbar on the right. Little rectangles will appear in the margin beside the scrollbar to show you where your results are located. When your mouse hovers over one of the rectangles indicating where a search term can be found in the book, you’ll get a preview of the search results and the option of jumping directly to that respective page by clicking on the rectangle.

With the previous search function, it wasn’t as easy to find the exact location of the results in a book. With this simple tweak, Google has improved the visual display of search functions, helping users navigate results in a more organized and efficient way. The DOJ will probably hold that against it.

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When I first signed up for GrandCentral a few years ago, I lived in a different city. As such, I had a different area code. And that was fine until I moved and Google, which bought GrandCentral in 2007 and subsequently put it on lockdown, prohibited me from changing it. I didn’t think much of it until my GrandCentral account magically transformed into a Google Voice account a few months ago, taking a good service and making it excellent. Unfortunately, I was still stuck with my old number. But now, there’s an option to change it.

The “Change your number” functionality, as spotted today by Boy Genius Report, is great news for users like me. Unfortunately, it will cost you to change it. There’s a one-time $10 fee, which in my mind is well worth it. Best of all, Google Voice will activate your new number right away and still keep your old one active and forwarding to the new one for three months.

What’s also nice is that in picking your new number, you can search by area code and by a word that you want your number to contain. So for example if I search for area code 408 and the word “tuna,” I can get a 408 number that ends in 8862 (”T-U-N-A” on a keypad).

Here are the details:

There is a $10 one-time fee to change your Google Voice number. Here is how it works:

• Pick a new number in the area codes we have.
• Pay $10 with Google Checkout, using your credit card.
• Your new number becomes active right away.
• Calls to your old number will keep coming to your Google Voice account for three months, so you have time to tell everyone about your new number.

We’re still waiting on number portability (the ability to use your existing numbers as Google Voice numbers), but this is a nice start.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Since the debut of the App Store last summer, my iPhone has become an indispensable part of my workout routine. The phone makes it easy to track your workout progress both in the gym and outdoors, where applications like RunKeeper allow you to use the phone’s integrated GPS to plot your bike or running course on a map. But there’s been one annoyance that’s aggravated me (and many others) to no end: the limited control you have over your music once you’ve launched one of these fitness apps. Fortunately the iPhone 3.0 software update finally fixes this, and a RunKeeper-like application called Fitnio(iTunes Link) has managed to beat some of its more well-known competitors to the punch.

Until the release of the iPhone 3.0 software update, developers were unable to access the phone’s music library. In order to play music as you ran, you’d have to first open up the phone’s iPod application, pick a playlist, then switch over to the excercise app. Once there, you could use your headphone’s multifunction button to execute some basic commands (next song, pause, and previous song), but if you wanted to switch playlists you were out of luck.

Fitnio breaks down this barrier, allowing you to browse through your iTunes playlists and queue one up for the next time you begin a jog. It may not sound like a big deal, but it’s certainly a very welcome change. Unfortunately there’s still no way to jump to a specific album or artist’s songs, but developer Robby Walker says that those will be coming in the future.

Fitnio is a pretty barebones app, without the nice visualizations you’ll see on RunKeeper (it also doesn’t have voice overs announcing your progress, which some people may miss). But it gets the job done, tracking your movements while biking or running using the phone’s integrated GPS, and it’s only a fifth of the price of RunKeeper’s Pro app, coming in at $1.99.

Of course, Fitnio’s musical advantage over the competition will likely be short-lived. Given that all developers have access to the new features in the iPhone 3.0 software update, you can expect similar apps to include this feature very soon. That said, if you’re looking for a fix right now, Fitnio is worth checking out.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Here’s video from the Aspen Ideas Festival responding to my question about what follows the industrial age. It’s much better than my limited report on it below:

More of Kai Ryssdal’s very good interview with Schmidt here.

»  Amazon taps its inner Apple, but Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) could be the one to stop Kindle’s march cold. Great read. [FastCompany]

»  Deconstructing Malcolm Gladwell: “We hate most in others that which we fail to see in ourselves.” Anil, I love you, man. [Anil Dash]

»  MySpace and other such web services not liable for assaults. Could help Craigslist as well. [Reuters]

»  Online video startups raised about $64 million in Q209. Better than most related categories. [Videonuze]

»  Access Intelligence, publisher of Min media industry newsletter, reorgs; lays off 20 people. [Folio]

»  Shock and horror in Twittersphere: followers can be bought. [BBC]

»  MJ’s funeral could be streamed live online. At least on Hulu. [NTV]

»  Facebook’s revenue breakdown: an informed guesstimate [SAI]

After months of dismal unemployment numbers, this morning’s continued growth in the unemployment rate from 9.4% in May to 9.5% for the month of June reinforces the fact that the U.S. is still very much in the midst of recession. Additionally, the U.S. Department of Labor reported today that employers cut 467,000 jobs in June, compared to 322,000 jobs in May. Unfortunately, the tech industry is still feeling the heat of the recession, with the rate of available jobs not improving much from the past few months, according to technology jobs site Dice.com.

Tom Silver, senior vice president of Dice.com, told us this morning that Dice.com is reporting a 44% year-over-year drop in job listings for the month of June. May’s year-over-year decline hovered around 45%. And Silver also points to a rise in the Department of Labor’s unemployment rate for the “Computer and Mathematics sector,” (the area best associated with the tech sector). June’s unemployment rate for the tech sector almost tripled year-over year, from 1.9% in June of 2008, to 5.4% in June of 2009. While Silver says that the tech job market is certainly better than during the fourth quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009, the number of job opportunities have remained stagnant over the course of the past few months.

According to the TechCrunch layoff tracker, layoffs in the tech sector may be slowing down, which we reported in May. Layoffs are still taking place—the tracker has increased by 10,000 lost jobs over the past two months to a total of 340,000 individual layoffs. But there is a marked difference in the pace of layoffs from late 2008 and the first quarter of 2009, when layoffs were increasing by 100,000 every few weeks For instance, it only took three weeks for cumulative tech layoffs to go from 200,000 to 300,000 in February and five weeks for layoffs to go from 100,000 to the 200,000 mark before that in January.

Though companies are cutting back and limiting hiring for the near future, Silver says that there are still certain jobs within the tech sector that are in demand. Developers who are skilled in the areas of virtualization and IT security are among those in high-demand. And Silver maintains that tech companies are always in need of talented and skilled programmers. But for all the marketing and business development folks out there, demand usually picks up in line with the economy.

You can check out CrunchBoard for tech job listings.

Photo Credit: Flickr/Lisa Brewster

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Online ads are often targeted, but that doesn’t mean that people necessarily pay attention. A survey by AdWeek and Harris Interactive (via SearchEngineLand) shows that people are much more likely to ignore internet ads (both banner ads and search ads) than TV ads, radio ads, or newspaper ads. Internet ads also don’t get high marks for helpfulness. So what’s the bottom line, according to the survey’s authors? “While advertisers scramble to create their ad campaigns, one thing they need to remember is that, even if viewership may be down and even with the increased use of digital video recorders so people can fast forward through commercials, television ads are the most helpful to consumers. Also, while an Internet strategy is essential for a comprehensive ad campaign, Internet banner ads are not considered helpful by few and are ignored the most.”

What Ads Do People Ignore?

—46% Internet banner ads
—17% Internet search engine ads
—13% Television ads
—9% Radio ads
—6% Newspaper Ads

What Ads Are Most Helpful?

—37% TV ads
—17% Newspaper ads
—14% Internet search ads
—3% Radio ads
—1% Internet banner ads

July 1, 2009 - the day the music wars started in earnest. Last night the guys from Dovecote Records, a small music label based in New York, were hanging out at their local bar. Employees from file sharing startup LimeWire showed up to have a party. There was confusion over the ownership of some pizza, and a riot almost ensued.

From the Dovecote Blog:

Woman: “Who the FUCK are you? And why are you eating our pizza?”

Kosuke and Paul look confused.

Kosuke: Are you joking? Is this a joke?

Woman: No this is definitely NOT a joke. I want to know who you are and why you’re eating our pizza.

Kosuke: Well our friend came in and told us there was free pizza at the bar. We are. So. Sorry. It was a misunderstanding.

Woman: (with unbridled entitlement) This is a company party our CEO is here and you STOLE our pizza. Are you from out of town? Because let me tell you, NOTHING is free in New York City. Nothing is free… well maybe except for the condoms in Times Square.

Paul and Kosuke continue apologizing. They offer to pay for the two slices.

Woman: (didactically snobbish) We don’t want your money. No. Enjoy the pizza, but you can’t steal other people’s things. You can’t take what’s not yours

Again the duo continues their apologies. Kosuke tries to turn the situation around and befriend them.

Kosuke: What company do you guys work for?

Woman: We work for Limewire.

Kosuke’s eyes go wide. Anger festers in his pupils.

Kosuke: Oh ok. Well I work at a record label so fuck you. You’ve stolen from us enough. (Bites pizza. Begins to walk away.)

Then things really got out of hand. One of the Dovecote guys grabbed a whole pizza and tried to run away with it. A Limewire engineer pursues and pours beer on him:

Paul’s anger builds. He stands up. Puts his bag on runs out the door, taking an entire pizza box with him. Matt T., a software developer at Limewire, tries to stop Paul by grabbing him and pouring beer all over his shirt, backpack, laptop, and pants.

We usually side against the labels on just about everything, but in this case we’re with Dovecote. Limewire is a mess and everyone knows it.

Whatever happens in the future with the battle between users and labels, we know one thing. July 1, 2009, the date of the Infamous 2009 LimeWire Pizza Fiasco, was when it wasn’t just about words and lawsuits any more. On that day, the music wars turned humorously physical.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

The Inside Word is a weekly feature that looks at compelling industry debates and discussions unfolding on the blogs of employees at digital-media companies.

Poster: Raj Kapoor

Blog name: the vc in me ...

Company: Mayfield Fund

Backstory: Kapoor, a managing director at Mayfield Fund and co-founder of online photo-sharing service Snapfish (sold to Hewlett-Packard) argues that non-profits are on the upswing online. He cites several non-profits that have disrupted for-profit businesses, including Wikipedia, Firefox and Openstreetmap, and says he expects non-profit sites to take over other areas on the web soon.

Blog post: Why do these entities take off? “The-not-for-profit structure innocently makes it VERY hard to compete with them,” Kapoor writes. “They have such a low cost infrastructure (most of these orgs have less than 40 employees at scale and many volunteers), and the marginal cost of delivery of their service is so low, that they can offer much of it for free or very low cost without worry of profit maximization. This brings in more users, which strengthens the content or application, which then provides even more value—a virtuous cycle hard to break (the ‘network effect’), even when the resources of large companies are turned on these areas.” He also notes that eventually many of these entities (notably Firefox developer Mozilla and Craigslist) do begin to make money.

Post-script: We asked Kapoor what online categories are ripe for the next non-profit takeover. He said maps/geodata: “It’s a universally used data type, has limitless layers since there are so many data types you could put on a map (peoples, places, reviews, stories, etc.), and will have explosive use given the mobile internet and app growth.”

Please e-mail suggestions for future editions of the Inside Word to joe@paidcontent.org.

Borrell Associates—which earlier this year provided a very bearish outlook for growth in the local online ad market—has changed its mind. The research firm now expects the market to grow by 11 percent, up from its initial projection of 8 percent in January. That means the market should reach $14.03 billion this year, up from $12.9 billion in 2008—but the jump is likely to be even bigger than that. Says CEO Gordon Borrell in a blog post: “We take a lot of pride in our projections, which have been on target year after year. But we may have been far too conservative earlier this year when we projected that local online advertising would grow 8% in 2009. At the end of the first quarter, the increase looked closer to 11%. When we finish collecting our second-quarter data in the next few weeks, I’m certain the number will be quite a bit higher.”

He says none of the factors that Borrell thought would cut into sales in 2009—including small businesses pulling all their online spending and high churn rates—have been as prevalent as the firm believed. “Phenomenal as it may seem, we’re getting data indicating triple-digit growth for some companies selling interactive advertising,” he says. In a comment on the Screenwerk blog, he adds that “wild enthusiasm over fantastic results” is not driving the new spending. Instead, he attributes it to “market pressure,” noting that small advertisers are receiving lots of sales pitches. Certainly, the growth rate will still be down, considering that the market jumped by 47 percent in 2008. Still, the continued relative strength in the local online ad market likely explains why major internet companies including AOL (NYSE: TWX) and MySpace are doubling down with new local efforts.

You may have noticed that Twitter has started hyperlinking hashtags. Those are words preceded by a “#” which denote what the Tweet is about and makes it easier to search for Tweets about specific topics and events. For instance, try searching for #realtimecrunchup. Now that they are hyperlinked, when you click on a hashtag, you are led to the search result page for the specific hashtag. Others have been implementing this; FriendFeed (big surprise) has been doing this for awhile. Some of the Twitter clients, including the desktop versions of Tweetie and Seesmic Desktop also provide hyperlinks to hashtags.

For Twitter, search is a navigation tool, and this functionality is yet one more way to allow people to easily discover new Tweets outside their group of followers. This trend started when they added the search box to everyone’s home page last April.

Real-time search is heating up. Just earlier today, FriendFeed launched its own real-time search. By linking to hashtags, Twitter is giving people another entry point into its existing search. Now, if you could only track mentions of specific hashtags over time.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

While the Jerry Seinfeld ads represented the nadir of Microsoft’s attempts to create a popular ad campaign, the software company seemed to hit its stride recently with the generally positive notices for its I’m A PC spots. But now the latest in a series of ads promoting Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 browser is so bad that it’s making some viewers want to puke—literally. The ad features a typical suburban couple at the breakfast table, and includes a laptop. (See the full ad, after the jump.) Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) told CNET that ad was intended to humorously highlight IE8’s InPrivate Browsing feature. But as complaints rose, Microsoft and its agency, Bradley and Montgomery, decided to remove the ad from their respective sites. The spot is still on YouTube for the time being.

Nothing innovative here really. Just some functional features which should have been added a long time to Google’s Blog Search. Then again, better late than never.  So, Google has just added RSS/ATOM subscription, list of  the most popular terms that users are using, and latest blog posts from, I guess “more prominent” blogs indexed by Google Blog Search?The RSS/ATOM subscription is nothing new really. It’s just a way for users  to subscribe to any topic or story using any feed reader. For those who don’t use feed readers, Google Blog Search front page can now also be added to iGoogle page as a gadget. This can be customized according to topics.

In addition, the main Google Blog Search site is now featuring to ways to get the latest blog stories - via Hot Queries and Latest posts. Hot Queries list down the most popular searches done on Google Blog Search while Latest Posts displays the latest post from popular blogs. Clicking on the

These two features will appear only on the Google Blog Search main site and will disappear on individual blog search results pages.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Google Blog Search Adds RSS, Hot Queries, Latest Blog Posts

Report: New launches can't keep up with folding titles.

Yesterday, we wrote about what Facebook was planning for the next major release of its iPhone app, version 3.0. The big update will contain 15 new features, probably none bigger than the addition of event management to the app, finally. But there was one thing Facebook developer Joe Hewitt didn’t mention yesterday, and it’s a big one: Video uploads from the iPhone 3GS.

Hewitt just started working on the feature yesterday, thinking it would be something that would come in the next release, after this one. But he was surprised at how quickly he was able to get it up and running and so he tweeted out today, “3GS video uploading for the Facebook iPhone app is a go — didn’t plan to include it in the 3.0 update, but it was really easy to code.”

This is excellent news as it gives iPhone 3GS owners another easy outlet to upload video to. We’ve already detailed how simple it is to upload to YouTube from the device, and how doing so from the new Kyte app gives you great video quality. The iPhone 3GS is simply awesome as a mobile video device, and Facebook is an excellent platform for sharing video amongst friends.

Additionally, we’ve heard talk the new iPhone 3.1 beta software which was just released to developers the other day, has some new functionality that should make video uploads even easier. Apparently, the device will be able to change the quality of the video getting uploaded based on your available bandwidth to optimize for the uploads.

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