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Vevo, the Recorded Music Industries answer to its business woes, launched last night with a star-studded party in Manhattan. Bono, John Mayer, WyClef Jean, Rihanna, and Queen Rania of Jordan joined Universal’s Doug Morris, Google’s Eric Schmidt and practically every major music industry executive for the event. What is Vevo? It’s a new business model powered by YouTube. Will you use it? It doesn’t look like you’re going to have a choice.
Boxee is the latest company hoping to bring web video to your television. The company is set to bring a set-top box that can collect videos from Netflix, MLB.TV and other streaming services like Pandora from the web and broadcast them through a connected television. Boxee hopes to have the box on the market early next year.
Google teamed with the New York Times and the Washington Post to develop the recently launched News-by-Topic. The goal is to create living stories, grouped together, which can report the news through written word, photographs, graphics and video. If users flock to the experiment in new media journalism, Google will make News-By-Topic available to many other publishers, in hopes of changing the way users gather information online.
Recently, Time unveiled what could be the digital future of Sports Illustrated, and today the company, along with News Corp., Hearst, Conde Nast and Meredith Corp have revealed that the group of publishers are developing a digital reading software to take the publishing business into the 21st century. The goal of the joint venture is to produce a technology that would work on a variety of platforms, from computers, to smart phones to tablets. The unnamed, unknown technology hopes to bring video and color photos to the device, which will rival Amazon Kindle’s e-ink.