The monologue is much, much older than the Internet, going all the way back to the Greeks. (If you couldn’t guess, the word “monologue” itself is Greek, meaning “speaking alone.”) Yet it’s little surprise that as online video has evolved, it’s made heavy use of monologues as a narrative device. A monologue done well is intimate, character-oriented, voice-driven and short — which is also a recipe for quality web content.

Today’s example: The independently produced Missed Connections Live, in many ways a mashup of Texts from Last Night and Project Rant. While many actors looking for material to perform might turn to the classics or write their own, Melissa Center, a New York-based actress with extensive theatrical credits and an As the World Turns appearance under her belt, mines Craigslist for inspiration, not just reading out loud postings from the Missed Connections section, but using them as a jumping-off point for character studies.

As an actress, Center demonstrates some real range, though she tends to lean toward stereotypes in her portrayals; her Lower East Side hipster chick, for example, is almost a parody of that particular subspecies, and Joe NY is a pretty broad interpretation of the kind of guy who says “broads.” More could be done with action, location and cinematography to draw out the characters — 50 in 50, Brent Rose’s similarly themed project, should offer Center and her team some inspiration. But the core concept has merit, and with a little additional burst of creativity it could become a quirky web favorite.

However, one key ingredient currently missing is the show’s web presence, which is so far pretty lackluster, and doesn’t include a link or screengrab of the original Missed Connections that inspired each episode, an element which seems like a necessary one to include. After all, the very nature of writing a note to someone on the off chance they might check Craigslist later and discover it has a note of futility to it that’s almost romantic. If Center is going to exploit these postings for her own gain, she might as well give those who posted them slightly more of a shot at connecting with the object of their affections.

I still can’t fathom why Sprint didn’t put Wi-Fi in its Pixi. The cost of a Wi-Fi radio in a phone these days is practically nothing, and it helps to offer customers a better smartphone experience. Sure, 3G is great when you have coverage, but what about the folks who bought a Pixi and then couldn’t update webOS because they live outside of a 3G coverage area? Yes, I too question why someone would buy a 3G device in a non-3G area, but that’s not the point. These folks had to update webOS using a computer and the webOS Doctor software offered by Palm — hardly a seamless experience.

Luckily, Verizon is doing the smart thing and providing a Wi-Fi radio in its Pixi. Not only does that help when there’s no 3G coverage, but it also supports apps that work only over Wi-Fi. What kinds of apps, you ask? There are several in-home remote control apps that depend on Wi-Fi for the iPhone, for example. And I’m using WiFiPhoto on a daily basis to wirelessly transfer pics from my iPhone to any computer via a web browser and Wi-Fi. There may not be any WiFi-specific apps for Palm’s webOS yet, but without Wi-Fi on a handset, developers can’t create such apps.

Christina Domecq, SpinVox CEO

After years of drama, more than $100 million in outside funding and a $500 million valuation, is London-based SpinVox about to bought for a mere $150 million by Nuance Communications? Nuance could announce a deal before Christmas, the Times Online is reporting, although Nuance declined to comment on “rumors and speculation.” The SpinVox blog hasn’t mentioned the story at all.  Such a deal at that price would be a huge comedown for SpinVox and its investors.

SpinVox was formed in 2003 with the idea of transcribing people’s voicemails to text — something that’s now offered by several services such as Got Voice, SimulScribe and YouMail. In March 2008 it raised $100 million at a $500 million valuation from investors that included Charles Dunstone of Carphone Warehouse; institutional investors such as GLG Partners; Goldman Sachs; BlueMountain; Toscafund Asset Management; ABN Amro, Gartmore and Allen & Co. The valuation was based in part on SpinVox’s customer base of large carriers, which paid to deliver the service for a fee to their end users. This year it accepted a $48.8 million loan that it’s currently struggling to repay, which may have put more pressure on the company to sell.

Also in 2009, rumors that it used people rather than algorithms to transcribe some voicemails came to light. The media focused on the privacy implications of sensitive voicemails being read by people, but the financial world was looking at the impossibility of scaling out such a service. But dealing with people and speech-to-text services is something Nuance knows a lot about.

Nuance, which has several transcription and speech-recognition businesses, hires people to transcribe high-value documents such as legal briefs and doctor’s notes for a professional transcription service. It also has been aggressively pursuing patents and startups in the speech-recognition space, as it battles both Google and Microsoft as voice recognition grows from a niche market thanks to mobile phones. So a deal wouldn’t be surprising, and it’s possible that SpinVox’s carrier customers, a few good algorithms, and language databases are worth $150 million to Nuance.

Thumbnail image courtesy of whatleydude via Flickr; Domecq photo via SpinVox

Image Credit: RadioShack

James pointed out a holiday price drop on the Nokia Booklet 3G this morning, so I’ll be fair to the other kids in netbook land — the LG X120 is down to $49 through Christmas Eve at RadioShack stores. Like the Booklet 3G, the X120 pricing requires a 2-year commitment to AT&T’s wireless broadband service at $60 a month. So regardless of the great deal up front, you’re looking at $1,440 over 24 months unless you decide to ante up an early termination fee of $175 along the way.

LG’s X120 netbook is your typical fare: a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom, 1 GB of memory, Microsoft Windows XP Home, 160 GB hard drive and 4400 mAh six-cell battery. The 10.1″ display is a little short in terms of resolution, however — 1024 x 576 is what you’re looking at, which is a far cry from the 1366 x 768 offered in the Booklet 3G. On the plus side for the X120 is SmartOn, the SplashTop-powered “instant on” Linux partition for fast booting and browsing.

Back in November we reported on the news that some of Apple’s new 27-inch iMacs were turning up with shattered screens and dodgy “flashing” displays. At the time, the most plausible explanation for the physical damage was that the packaging designed to protect the machines during transit was insufficient. The crazy flashing? Well, that’s anyone’s guess.

Add to the mix an already-lengthy waiting period for order fulfillment and you get a fair number of frustrated customers wondering what they paid $1,700 for.

Over on the Apple Support forums there’s a mammoth (80+ pages!) discussion raging about the very issue. As though that’s not enough, one disgruntled iMac owner created this web site for reporting and tracking other instances of damaged 27 inchers.

Yesterday Apple did what it so very rarely does — apologized. Really: “We apologize.” Wow. I almost fell off my chair.

The apology (I can’t stop shaking my head in wonder as I type that word) was delivered by an Apple spokesperson to CNET and reads, in all its succinct glory;

The new iMac has been a huge hit and we are working hard to fulfill orders as quickly as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience or delay this may cause our customers.

Of course, there was no mention of the shattered glass problem. Not a word about blinking displays. But c’mon, you didn’t expect a full and frank confession did you? This is Apple. Still, as Engadget’s Vladislav Savov put it, “Some contrition is better than none.”

According to information gathered from parts suppliers for Apple’s iPhone 3GS, the handset is headed for a record quarter. Apple’s Taiwanese suppliers for the iPhone’s components have reported a 31 percent increase in volume of orders placed for the parts, which should indicate a very healthy spike in sales of the smartphone.

The report comes via Taiwan’s online tech industry publication, the DigiTimes, which has provided ample fuel for the rumor fire regarding various Apple devices in the past, as well as reporting on Apple’s business outlook. In the second quarter, the iPhone sold 7.4 million worldwide, but if DigiTimes’ information is accurate, total sales for the third quarter, which end in December for the Mac maker, could reach the 10 million mark.

Numbers are up all across the smartphone component supply industry, but according to information gathered by the Taipei-based market Intelligence & Consulting Institute (MIC), much of that increase is due to Apple’s strong sales. Which isn’t to say that Apple’s competitors aren’t having any luck challenging its market dominance, according to MIC analyst Edward Lin:

Samsung is currently the largest supplier in the market, as it supplies for the Apple iPhone series models. However, TI, which has exited from the baseband business and now focuses on AP development, has rolled out the OMAP 3430 series, which adopts the Cortex A8 architecture and features a clock speed of 1GHz. This offers processor options other than Qualcomm, enabling terminal vendors to pair together different communications systems, and it has been well received by many brand-name vendors, such as HTC, Palm, etc. As a result, TI’s share in the Taiwanese smartphone AP market increased in the third quarter of 2009.

The ability to use different wireless communication standards is something that’s recently come up in rumors surrounding Apple’s next-generation device, and it looks like that rumor is well in keeping with the pulse of the industry at large. Perhaps it isn’t so far-fetched to imagine that the next iPhone could use both GSM- and CDMA-based networks, allowing it to be offered on Verizon in the U.S. Of course, then some of Apple’s commercials would become factually incorrect.

Regardless of what’s coming, third-quarter sales of 10 million is a huge win for Cupertino. Looking at recent developments, its easy to spot the source of this late-game success. Apple has opened up sales of its device to many more carriers at the international level, expanding into new territory in the UK, Canada and France, to name a few. It’s also finally gained official access to the massive Chinese market, which paves the way for a lot of potential success, despite early setbacks.

They might seem a little old-fashioned, but newsletters can be a great way to stay in touch with customers and prospects, and increase revenue to your business.

There have been times when I’ve pulled out all the marketing stops and still had my newsletter outperform every other medium. I think there are a few reasons for this.

1. The people who are receiving your newsletter really want to receive it. I follow a lot of people on Twitter, but I subscribe to very few newsletters. The ones I do subscribe to generally get read quite intensively. Why? Because I’m interested in the message of that particular person or company, and I probably enjoy the format of that particular newsletter (layout, content, regular sections, etc.). When I receive one of these few newsletters, it’s like receiving one of my favorite magazines, and I enjoy browsing it cover to cover in hopes of finding one new nugget of information that might help me in my life or business.
2. You get their undivided attention. When I read a newsletter, I generally have waited until I have time to focus on it, as I do with my favorite magazines. I don’t want to feel rushed or distracted, so I’ll save it in my email box until I have time to look over it. Even though I may not read every single article, the ones I do read get my undivided attention, which means I’m much more likely to take action on the article than when I’m browsing news and blog feeds.
3. It’s more personal. Getting a newsletter is a little like receiving a letter in the mail, and even though you know that a lot of other people receive it, there’s just something more personal and inviting about a newsletter over a blog entry, podcast, video or tweet. Maybe because it comes to your private email box, you can read it privately, and then send a somewhat private message back to the sender, should you decide to do so.
4. The pump has been primed. Anyone who subscribes to your newsletter is already interested in you, your company and its services. If they’ve been waiting on the fence for the right timing to act on your offer, you stand a good chance of capturing their business when they are ready to act.
5. It feels like an inside scoop. For whatever reason, newsletters seem a lot more exclusive than blogs and other media. Maybe it’s the personal and private thing again, but whatever it is, readers feel like they’re getting first-hand information directly from the horse’s mouth. That provides two opportunities. One, they’re likely to be watching for sweet deals and offers from you and your company. Two, if they do get “juicy inside information,” they’re way more likely to spread it around than if it were in a blog entry “for all the world to see.”
6. They can be forwarded (and perhaps are more likely to be). While a lot of people understand about sharing blog entries with others, forwarding an email is dead simple, so it’s much more likely that a newsletter will be forwarded onto someone if the reader thinks the recipient will benefit from it.

While I am a big advocate for blogging, I think newsletters are an equally powerful tool that can be used in a slightly different way to leverage your marketing efforts.

Do you have a newsletter? How has it helped you in promoting your business?

Image from Flickr by mpclemens

Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire

Brightcove, ever since it released the latest version of its white-label video management platform last month, has been busy signing up new customers and adding features to its product set. And one of those features — a software development kit (SDK) that will enable customers to build native apps for Apple’s iPhone — was released last week.

In an interview with NewTeeVee in New York last Thursday, Allaire spoke on a wide range of topics, including his expectations for TV Everywhere, growing industry support for HTTP streaming, and what he predicts will be huge growth of video viewing on mobile devices.

Such a prediction is the motivation behind the iPhone SDK, which was announced in November and rolled out to customers last week. “The year-over-year growth for video on smartphones is going to be significant in 2010,” Allaire said, adding that it will be further boosted by an increase in the monetization of mobile video. As a result, Brightcove is looking to increase its support for native apps on additional smartphone platforms, such as Google’s Adroid and RIM’s Blackberry. Brightcove already allows delivery to mobile web through its unified delivery technology, although Allaire admits that mobile web is still a very small portion of its overall business.

With the launch of Brightcove 4, the company introduced a new self-service, pay-as-you-go pricing model, called Brightcove Express, that enables customers to use its platform for as little as $99 a month with no annual commitment. Allaire said the entry into the lower end of the market is already starting to pay off, as Brightcove has seen more signups since launch than in any other three-week period. It is also seeing higher levels of engagement from customers using new features of Brightcove 4, indicating that the platform is becoming more “sticky” to its existing customer base.

In addition to talking about Brightcove’s business in particular, Allaire had some thoughts about some more general industry trends:

• TV Everywhere — While everyone is abuzz about services like Comcast’s On Demand Online, Allaire doesn’t think that TV Everywhere will be all it’s cracked up to be in 2010. Instead, he sees 2010 as a year in which service providers and content companies will be testing out dozens of different proofs of concept, with some set of standards becoming solidified by 2011.
• HTTP streaming — Allaire expects that the movement towards HTTP streaming will continue, particularly as Akamai and Adobe have both announced support for Flash streaming using HTTP rather than Flash’s proprietary streaming protocol, RTMP. One reason is that HTTP is easier and less costly for CDNs to scale in order to meet growing demand for streaming video.
• Silverlight — While impressed with the technology that Microsoft’s Silverlight team released at launch, Allaire thinks that uptake of the Silverlight platform has been disappointing. Unlike some others, Allaire doesn’t think the problem rests in the Silverlight plugin’s install base — which he believes to be about 50 percent of consumer PCs — but rather in the lack of support from the development community. “It’s a labor market problem,” Allaire said. “You’ve got millions of Flash developers with an entrenched skill set” that don’t want to start over and learn another rich Internet application framework.

This reduced price makes the Booklet 3G fairly competitive in the world of netbooks, and is pretty decent for one with integrated 3G. The special deal is available in any Best Buy store and through the Best Buy Mobile site. It runs from Dec. 13 through the holidays.

French web site NoWhereElse points to this video of what looks like a much-rumored Mac Tablet. This “device” isn’t the real thing, but it sure is pretty. Enjoy!

I know, guys, that for a while it seemed like adorable cat videos were dominating our society, no thanks to Surprised Kitty:

But here come some videos of children that will make your reproductive organs ache. Not because they’re doing kid things, though — but because they are doing their very best to seem like grown-ups. First, esteemed actor Brian Cox (lots of period pieces, X2) guides a budding actor through one of Shakespeare’s most famous monologues.

And then there’s the small son of YouTube user uke3452, covering Jason Mraz’s I’m Yours on the ukelele. Well, he plays the music, anyways.

Jason Mraz seems to be a deviation for him, as his other videos are more Beatle-centric: He’s so far covered While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.

New protip for creators hoping to go viral: have you considered procreation?

A handful of Android-based tablets will be released over the next few months, offering bigger screens and a more immersive experience than smartphones and eschewing bulky QWERTY keyboards in favor of touchscreen navigation. But is the Android operating system enough to entice users to pony up a few hundred dollars for the gadgets?

Dell is rumored to be the next player to join the space at CES in Las Vegas early next year, introducing a device with a 5-inch screen targeted at UK users. If that’s true, the handset would join a rapidly increasing number of Android tablets such as Fusion Garage’s JooJoo, the Archos 5, Camangi’s WebStation and IDC’s Vega. While price points have yet to be announced for some of the gadgets, the Android tablets generally fall in the $250-$500 range. They’ll compete against the Courier, which is being developed by Microsoft , and a rumored Apple tablet said to resemble a larger iPod touch and carry a $1,000 price tag.

Sizes can vary dramatically between some of the new tablets, but many are more closely related to mobile Internet devices (MIDs) like the iPod touch than to the larger tablets of a few years ago. With the exception of the touch, though, MIDs have largely failed to gain traction due largely to high price points, a lack of overall functionality and the apparent unwillingness of consumers to carry a connected device in addition to a phone.

That may change, though, as VoIP and other technologies bring voice support to non-cellular mobile devices. As Kevin over at jkOnTheRun noted yesterday, Google Talk can be an effective replacement for cellular connectivity, allowing users to easily “call” others with minimal losses in call quality. If Google or another player can bring easy-to-use voice offerings to the new wave of Android tablets — and if Google would add support for the Android Market without forcing users to jump through hoops to access the storefront — the tablet/MID space might finally produce more than just one winner.

There are very few laughs in LOL, an independently produced web series from Manchester, England. Instead, creator Ric Forster’s teen drama series (currently on episode 17 out of 20) invokes the web slang ironically, the way you might try to defuse a sarcastic comment or cutting insult. Of course, when you’re a teenager juggling school, family, partying and your best friend’s boyfriend, nothing is a joke — life is quite serious.

The strong northern English accents give the series a sense of place, but they don’t interfere with a pretty universal tale of teens behaving badly. While warnings persist for strong language and adult themes, the plot is fairly conventional. But the story of Keely (Nicola Mahoney), a good girl who’s essentially taunted into going bad, finds a dark edge in the narrative’s fractured timeline, which flashes forward six months into the future, where the consequences of Keely’s ongoing downward spiral are much more evident. The pacing could be a little tighter, especially as the flashforwards reveal just how screwed up life for Keely and her friends has gotten, and characters could be explored more deeply. But on an episode-by-episode level, the drama is believable, well-acted and compelling.

There isn’t any interactivity or social networking to LOL, but sites like Facebook and Bebo are as integrated into the show’s writing as they are integrated into the life of the average teenager (on either side of the pond). The best detail is the use of status updates as voiceover: “Keely isn’t going to school today, feels proper ill…” our protagonist says as she secretly seduces Jaz’s boyfriend Dawber, while Jaz (Bryony Seth) updates that “Jaz wishes she was still round at Dawber’s.” It’s a subtle touch that invokes the way adolescents communicate, while simultaneously adding a sense of emotional awareness to an otherwise silent scene of students sitting in class.

The level of production is surprisingly professional given that according to Forster, the series was pretty much entirely self-funded. While he was able to make the first three episodes as part of a trainee director program at Lime Pictures, where he works full-time, the following 17 episodes were shot on location rather than sets and paid for out of pocket.

And because the terms of use for the music he used in the show requires that the production be a not-for-profit one, he’s had to turn down offers of sponsorship and on-site ads. “A sponsorship deal would have to be big enough to go back and license all the music as the bands would want paying, which is fair enough!” he said via email.

Thus, Forster’s primary goal for LOL is that it helps his cast get spotted for other projects and helps him find representation as a writer/director, making this another interesting show in search of an opportunity, and definitely one to watch.

Last month saw the launch of CrowdFlower, an interesting venture that applies Dolores Labs’ Labor-as-a-Service platform to the non-profit “micro employment” foundation Samasource.

We’ve previously covered web-based labor and outsourcing services — notably Shorttask and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk — that match-make workers and tasks, and I’ve been critical of the unsustainable payment levels for most of the tasks on offer, often at compensation levels lower than minimum wage.

CrowdFlower puts a new spin on this concept, by assigning tasks to workers in the developing world and from communities that really need opportunity. Though the level of compensation for a typical task is still below normal levels in the developed world, the payment goes to communities where the money appears to be having a very positive impact.

Drawn from Samasource’s base of impoverished women, young people seeking opportunity and refugees, CrowdFlower’s workers are trained to undertake a wide range of computer-based tasks such as audio transcription, application testing, remote virtual assistance and data entry.

With workers drawn from Cameroon, Kenya, India, Pakistan, Ghana and Uganda, it’s likely that their English is of a good enough standard to mean that communication shouldn’t be a problem, and feedback mechanisms are available to rate the outcomes of worker’s tasks.

Mobile Altruism

CrowdFlower is accompanied by an iPhone app, Give Work, which adds another dimension to the service. With Give Work, iPhone owners tasks can also undertake tasks and donate a little of their spare time. Each task you complete via your iPhone is also assigned to a trained refugee in Africa, who is then paid for both their work and yours.

As I write, the task I elected to undertake was to compare images of sneakers an select the pairs that matched my tastes. This took me around 45 seconds, and I’m hoping my trivial efforts will go to help someone in the developing world.

It’s easy to see something like CrowdFlower as form of “digital colonialism,” but it appears to be having a very palpable impact in the communities and lives of the workers employed by Samasource. In essence, this venture is creating an entirely new culture of web workers with potentially promising careers, as well as re-balancing the inequalities between those with opportunity and those without, though it’s worth noting that it isn’t clear that all tasks are always allocated to workers in need.

CrowdFlower’s enabling a laudable mission, with tangible benefit to society. It’s a venture I’ll be keeping a close eye on as I publishing some work tasks of my own. Read more about Samasource in “Samasource: How African refugees are scoring Silicon Valley Internet jobs.”

Are you working with an innovative charitable crowdsourcing project like this? Tell us about it below.

Microsoft’s latest ad campaign focuses heavily on the end user, telling us that Windows 7.0 was “designed with you in mind.” But the company continues to lose the fight for consumers, and nowhere is that more evident than in its mobile business.

Windows Mobile has lost nearly a third of its market share over the last year, according to the most recent data from research firm Gartner, as more consumer-focused manufacturers such as Apple and Research In Motion continue to gain momentum in the white-hot smartphone space. WinMo users’ traffic on the wireless web has dropped off even more dramatically during that period, falling 70 percent, according to the latest figures from AdMob — a clear indication that the few consumers who have Windows Mobile aren’t doing much on their phones other than talking and messaging.

Version 6.5 of the mobile OS received scathing reviews following its October launch, with many alleging that the update was nothing more than a stopgap as Microsoft works on a complete overhaul. Inexplicably, though, version 7.0 isn’t likely to debut until the fourth quarter of 2010, giving its competitors ample time to build on their leads. Meanwhile, Android has picked up substantial steam recently and is sure to grow its market share as more handsets come to market through carriers around the world.

As the runaway success of the iPhone indicates, the smartphone space today is all about the consumer — not the enterprise. End users are increasingly buying their own handsets and forcing IT departments to support the gadgets. And that’s very bad news for Microsoft, which has consistently failed to grasp the needs and wants of consumers — especially when it comes to phones.

I’ve spent large portions of the last two weeks on a plane, which means that on more than one occasion I’ve found myself browsing through the Sky Mall catalog to see what kitschy, fun gadgets I could be spending my hard-earned cash on. And on my last flight, I found it: the underwater cell phone, for $1,790. The pitch for the phone system made by Ocean Reef begins with, “Have you ever wanted to make or receive a phone call underwater?” and grows more absurd from there.

I don’t scuba dive, yet this product piqued my curiosity to the point that I made numerous web searches trying to learn more. Namely, I wondered why one needs a cell phone underwater given that divers seem to have a wire line or radio connection back to their ship and to one another, at least judging by what I’ve seen on the Discovery Channel. And as the Ghostbusters so eloquently put it, “Who you gonna call?”

OK, let’s say you forgot to tell the office something important. Or rather than appreciating the rare view nature has afforded you at that moment, you feel like chatting. Is this thing gonna work? It appears that the phone floats on top of the water in a buoy, so at least we’re not looking for more bars under the sea. But given that most boat captains rely on satellite phones because there’s no cell coverage far from shore, I’m wondering how good the network is, and if your call will go through.

So this gadget, which is pretty much a Bluetooth headset in a mask attached by a 40-meter cable to a waterproof box containing your cell phone, joins others like the underwater cell phone and mobile TV released by NTT DoCoMo last year as something that would sink instead of swim. But divers, I’d love for you to weigh in.

I’m a little partial to digital tools that can be used to create diagrams and images that look hand drawn — Balsamiq Mockups is a wonderful example.

I’ve often thought it’d be great to have a font made from my own handwriting, enabling me to “hand annotate” digitally crafted images to add an informal, playful and personal touch. Of course, creating a typeface from scratch is an expensive, skillful, labor-intensive process, best left to professional typographers, not amateurs like myself.

So imagine my delight in discovering FontCapture, an entirely web-based application that enables you to create a font from your own handwriting within minutes — and what’s more, it’s free. All you need is a printer and a scanner.

“Fontifying” your handwriting is a simple, four-step process:

1. Print a specially formatted template.
2. Complete the template with your individual handwritten characters –  up to 128 glyphs. Be careful to align ascending and descending characters with the template’s baseline marks.
3. Scan your completed template back into your computer and upload it to the service.
4. Within a few seconds, you should see a preview of your font and a link to download it in OpenType format (see the screenshot above).

The service works very well. It’s simple, fast, free and accurate — though perhaps a little too accurate. FontCapture demonstrated  how appalling my handwriting really is! I didn’t do a perfect job of keeping my characters and glyphs aligned within the marks on the template, but the final result was a pretty good representation of my jittery scrawl.

I’d readily recommend the app to anyone who needs a digital representation of their handwriting, but sadly my own handwriting is too illegible to be charmingly applied to digital imagery.

What would you do with a font of your own handwriting?

Advertisers from Microsoft and Mediabrands recently decided to go all out to measure the effectiveness of Xbox Live advertising: They wired up 300 test subjects with a special headset that can read biometric signals like your heart rate, eye motion, body temperature and breathing patterns. Half of the test audience was then presented with advertising on the Xbox Live platform, while the other half got to see traditional TV ads. Turns out, people show much more active and lasting responses to interactive advertising than to your 60-second oldteevee clip.

These results may not be that surprising, but the set-up of the study is fascinating — and a little frightening at the same time. Will the future of video advertising be based on labs with subjects wired to all kinds of sensors? Or will advertisers even one day be able to gather this type of data in the field, with biometric sensors becoming more and more a part of the video game experience?

Maybe it’s worth it to first take a look at the results in a nutshell: Microsoft and Mediabrands tested two ad campaigns from Kia and Hyundai with both traditional TV advertising and Xbox Live ad content, and the respondents in both cases spent far more time interacting with the Xbox Live content than with the TV spot. In the case of the Hyundai campaign, people clicked for more than six minutes on average through the Xbox Live ad content. The Hyundai TV ad, on the other hand, was just 30 seconds long. The interactive ads also caused far higher emotional responses from participants than the traditional TV ad.

Figuring our how people react to ad content on different platforms has always been a little tricky, especially since different types of media offer various ways to measure responses. Web advertisers like to look at click-through rates. The effectiveness of video ads are measured by the number of people sticking around to watch the whole thing, and TV advertising has long been a bit of a black box, at least until TiVo came around to offer some hints about what kind of clips we skip and which ones we elect to watch. Try to compare all this data, and it quickly gets fuzzy.

Microsoft now believes it has found the holy grail of cross-platform ad response measurement. “This is a big step forward for publishers and advertisers alike,” Mark Kroese, Microsoft’s Advertising Business Group GM, wrote yesterday, explaining the results on the company’s advertising blog. Of course, Kroese is biased. Other advertisers may be scared by the prospects of not only having to show their work to focus groups, but actually read through their biometric signals to see how bored they were.

However, the kicker for me is that these types of measurements may not be confined to labs forever. Biometric sensor devices like the ones used by Microsoft and Mediabrands are rooted in neuroscience, but they’re quickly crossing over to the world of entertainment. The Star Wars Force Trainer, one of the hottest geek kids toys this holiday season, lets players move objects just by the power of their mind, and it uses sensors similar to the ones used in the Microsoft study. The Emotiv headset also measures pretty much the same data, and it can be used to control video games with your thoughts. Kinda makes you wonder when Microsoft will start to sell its own biometrics headset to control Xbox games and measure the response to its Xbox Live ads at the same time, doesn’t it?

Mobile WiMAX will claim almost 2 million subscribers by the end of the year, according to ABI Research, as the technology begins to get legs — wobbly little legs, but legs nonetheless — in the U.S. as well as a handful of other markets including Russia and Malaysia. Meanwhile, LTE is inching closer to reality, with Verizon Wireless this week revealing expected speeds for the 4G network it will begin building out in 2010. The window for WiMAX in the U.S., on the other hand, will remain open next year, with AT&T not due to launch commercial LTE services until 2011. So here’s a quick breakdown in advance of next year’s battle of 4G technologies in the U.S.: