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The company increased its 2008 forecasts for subscribers, expecting up to 9.7 million subscribers by year’s end, compared with a previous forecast of up to 9.5 million. Netflix also slightly raised its revenue forecast to up to $1.39 billion, compared with the previous expectation of up to $1.385 billion. However, the company lowered its forecast for GAAP earnings per share. It now expects $1.16 to $1.29 per diluted share, compared with its previous forecast of $1.18 to $1.30 per diluted share.

According to MarketWatch, Netflix Chief Financial Officer Barry McCarthy told analysts that drop is due to higher-than-expected costs of building out its growing movie-download service. That service came online last summer, allowing customers to watch a few movies and TV shows online each month. But Netflix continues to add more movies to its Watch Instantly service and has shifted to an unlimited model in January to better compete with other video-on-demand services.

Online DVD rental service Netflix announced Monday that net income for the first quarter was up 36 percent year over year, due in part to an increase in its subscriber base.

Netflix reported it had 8,243,000 total subscribers at the end of the quarter, which closed March 31. That’s a 21 percent increase over the same period last year. First-quarter revenue was $326.2 million, up from $305.3 million for the same period last year. GAAP net income was $13.4 million, compared with $9.9 million in the first quarter last year–a 36 percent rise.

The free new perks were announced Tuesday by CEO Ivan Seidenberg during a lunch at WiredSafety’s Stop Cyberbullying Conference at Pace University in New York. Seidenberg spoke in front of an audience filled with young people, parents, educators, and government officials, who all gathered for the daylong conference on cyberbullying.

Parry Aftab, founder of WiredSafety.org, praised Verizon and Seidenberg, in particular, for his work in protecting children online. The organization even honored him with a special Internet Superhero award.

“We think of it as part of our corporate responsibility,” he said in a conversation after the lunch. “And we feel that it’s important for Verizon to be part of the dialog.”

Seidenberg said the company has gone to great lengths to ensure that sensitive location information isn’t abused. In addition to giving subscribers the ability to turn on and off the tracking services, he said that Verizon has also developed a multitiered security and authentication system to make sure that subscribers are sharing location information only with people they trust and know.

“We know that people will only fully utilize broadband networks if they trust that their personal information will remain private, and that parents will not feel comfortable with their children’s embrace of technology unless they know their children are safe,” Seidenberg said. “Verizon has tried to stay ahead of the curve on both fronts, and that’s why we’ve decided to make even more tools available to our customers for free.”

NEW YORK–Verizon Communications plans soon to offer online parental controls for free to all its broadband customers in an ongoing effort to keep kids safe on the Net.

Verizon offers a service that allows parents to keep track of their kids. It also recently started offering a service through a company called Loopt that provides a friend-tracking application that alerts people when their buddies are nearby.

“Verizon has a long history of getting behind the issues,” she said. “Not just the issues that are good for the bottom line, but issues that are good for consumers generally.”

Seidenberg said that all companies involved in the Internet have some responsibility to ensure that people using their services are safe.

“Privacy is a priority for Verizon,” he said. “And we work really hard to maintain customer trust.”

Seidenberg also touched on efforts the company is making to ensure privacy and safety for subscribers of its Verizon Wireless service. He acknowledged concerns surrounding the use of location-based services, which use satellite GPS chipsets embedded in phones to track subscribers.

(Credit:
Verizon Communications)

Specifically, Verizon plans to offer parents the ability to block their children from viewing selected content. The company is also offering application filters so parents can limit access to certain applications. And Verizon is giving parents the ability to designate specific time periods when the Internet or certain functions can and cannot be used.

There’s something to be said about a product still going strong after 23 years in this evolving industry.

Amazon.com User Reviews (4.5 stars out of 237 reviews)

Koss has a bad reputation for manufacturing terrible audio products, but it struck gold back in 1984 with one set of headphones, the PORTAPROS. They’re still being produced with continued success after 23 years and are, in my opinion, the most underrated headphones on the market, and here’s why:

Design: Love them or hate them, you have to admit that they look insane. Koss hasn’t changed the design since 1984, and personally I love the retro Tron look. People stop me all the time asking about them, and I always give them this exact same speech about how much I love them.
Super comfortable: I’ve worn them for the last two years for at least a couple of hours everyday, if not a full eight hours and never felt any irritation, mostly because of the side padding and the adjustments you can make to width of the band. Other headphones I’ve owned (Grado SR-80, Sennheiser PX-100, Sony MDR-V700DJ, Shure E3c) start to irritate my ears after prolonged usage, but the PortaPros are so comfy that I sometimes forget that I have them on.

(Credit: Koss)

Price: $35 with free shipping on Amazon. Maybe less on eBay.
Sound quality: Best sound I’ve heard out of sub-$200 cans. Instead of telling you how awesome these are, I’ll let these 249 people do the work for me:

(Credit: Koss) Versatile: I’ve used these during all day cycling trips, at the desk, at home, and a during a million other activities and they’ve withstood the worst: liquid and food spills, long drops, heat, snow, and rainstorms. Warranty: Koss offers a lifetime warranty on them. No questions asked. The appeal here is that you can drop $35 once and never buy another set again. (Credit: Koss) Longevity: These phones have become something of a cult favorite among audiophiles. They aren’t sold in stores so they’re kept in production by word of mouth purchases such as these, and I’m more than happy to pass on the good word. Having used the PortaPros for years in a million different applications and environments, I can say without exaggeration that these are my favorite headphones I’ve ever heard or purchased. This isn’t a “best headphone for your buck” talk, the low price is just icing on the cake. If they were $100 I’d definitely still throw down for them.

CNET Review (Review on its way, but check out the user section, 8.8 average rating from 12 users.)

Most folks recall the story about the Tacoma, Wash., house that was trashed after a woman posted an ad on Craigslist telling people to “please help yourself to anything on the property.”

Well, some mischief maker in Jacksonville, Ore., apparently decided to re-enact the Tacoma house-trashing scheme. According to this Associated Press story, Robert Salisbury came home to nearly 30 people rummaging through his barn and front porch. Not only that, when he told the trespassers to give him back his belongings, he was rebuffed.

“I informed them I was the owner, but they refused to give the stuff back,” Salisbury told the AP. “They showed me the Craigslist printout and told me they had the right to do what they did.”

The Craigslist post advertised all of Salisbury’s stuff–even his horse–as free for the taking. The woman who showed up to take his horse finally started to feel uneasy about the whole deal when she realized that the horse looked perfectly healthy, and well, seemed to actually belong to someone. She left a note on the door and then decided to call Salisbury to make sure that the ad was legit.

What’s shocking is that of the dozens of people who pilfered his property, she was the only one to catch wind of the scheme. Come on, people.

By the time the police showed up, the plunderers had already crammed their
cars full of Salisbury’s stuff and taken off.

Investigators are still trying to track down the person who posted the ad–and it could likely be someone Salisbury knows. The Tacoma incident, after all, was fueled by a family feud.

Microsoft hasn’t committed to any iPhone apps. However, if I was a betting woman, I would put my money on something coming from Microsoft’s Tellme unit.

Tellme is the speech recognition company that Microsoft bought last year. Among its many products is one that lets you speak a search term into a phone and get back a screen with information–say the location of the nearest gas station or pizza parlor.

Tellme CEO-turned-Microsoft executive Mike McCue has been spending a lot of time these days integrating his voice search technology with Windows Mobile. However, Tellme has also continued to work with Microsoft’s rivals in the cell phone business. In fact, Tellme’s latest software was released first for the BlackBerry.

McCue, who sports a 20th anniversary
Mac on his desk and praises Apple for its design, has made it clear he wants to be wherever the mobile customers are.

“We want to be on every phone possible,” he said in an interview earlier this year.

He also noted that while the
iPhone is seen as the be-all and end-all of mobile gadgets, it is actually fairly cumbersome and a two-handed job to search for local listings. No matter how great a touch screen is, he says, saying what you are looking for, if done right, can be much faster.

To switch a song on the iPhone, he noted, takes six clicks on the iPhone.

“Changing tunes on your iPhone is a dangerous experience,” he said.

As elegant as the iPhone is–and McCue gives it lots of credit–what’s really needed, McCue said, is a new interface. Not surprisingly, he sees voice as a big part of the solution.

It’s not surprising, as Microsoft works to catch up to Apple, that McCue’s team has been spending a lot more time lately on mobile applications, working closely with the group developing Windows Mobile 7–the next version of Microsoft’s cell phone operating system.

“We want to make Windows Mobile better,” McCue said, but added quickly, “Tellme will be available on all mobile operating systems.”

commentary

TechCrunch’s Dan Kimerling suggests that Microsoft’s stodgy enterprise software focus is largely irrelevant to a Generation Y reared on Facebook and Google. He may be right.

As Microsoft continues to bloat its products in an attempt to entice upgrades, the rising generation is looking for Web-based applications that are “simultaneously powerful and simple to use.”

This, however, is just one aspect of the youthquake. The other is that tomorrow’s programmers don’t grow up with Microsoft tools or ambitions to code the next great .Net application (perhaps because they can’t remember the last one).

Instead, they’re using open-source software before, throughout, and/or instead of college, writing the Web and its future in PHP and Ruby. They aren’t waiting for CEO Steve Ballmer to bombard them with his “Developers!” song. They already know it. They wrote it themselves in a text editor.

The ground is shifting beneath the feet of Microsoft, as well as other corporate behemoths. It may well be that tomorrow’s programmers will eventually settle into a catatonic existence of manipulating Microsoft developer tools. I doubt it.

Kimerling sums it up:

Until Microsoft starts listening to young people and creating products and services that simply work, and that means no crashes, no blue screens, and a dead simple user interface, it will not surprise me that a melancholy mood will hang over Microsoft, and its share price.

All true, except that instead of “Until” Kimerling should have prefaced this sentence with “Even if…”

commentary

After three straight days of traveling to close my quarter, I needed to unwind tonight. Given that I don’t drink or smoke crack, I chose to create a video: “The Challengers of Open Source.” Cheesy title, but I had The New Pornographers’ song (”Challengers”) running through my head and
car stereo on the drive home from the airport. So be it.

What is the video “about”? Well, about some of trends guiding open source into more enterprises, but mostly about the great people I know in the open-source (mostly business) community. The best thing about open source is the exceptional crowd with which I get to run.

I know I missed some in this video - I simply couldn’t find good photos or, if I did, they inexplicably didn’t work in the video when converted (such was the case with Nat Friedman’s that I pulled from Facebook).

Challengers of Open Source: Music video

You know you love it: The CW Television Network has decided to start streaming its teen show Gossip Girl online again.

According to The New York Times, free ad-supported episodes of the program will soon reappear on The CW’s Web site. They’d been taken down in April as an “experiment” to see how it affected viewership ratings.

(Credit:
The CW)

Here’s what happened: The melodrama about upper-crust high schoolers in Manhattan, based on a best-selling young-adult book series, had been blessed with the greatest of hype–the star power of creator Josh Schwartz, better known as the guy who brought us The O.C.; regular mentions in Gawker and New York magazine; scandalous sightings of its young cast partying all over the city; and racy ad campaigns featuring taglines like “OMFG” and “Every Parent’s Nightmare.”

But its ratings had been downright subpar, even as the show’s subject matter grew more and more guilty-pleasure-fantastic with sex, drugs, gambling, murder, and the exploits of rakish antihero Chuck Bass.

The CW had said all along that because of Gossip Girl’s young, tech-savvy audience–the title character is an anonymous blogger, after all–that traditional television ratings simply didn’t apply. Nielsen ratings, the longstanding measure of broadcast popularity, don’t measure episodes recorded on DVRs or watched on the Web, after all. But under pressure, the network pulled the show from its Web site to see if TV ratings would improve.

Any gain in ratings was negligible, the Times report said. That said, Gossip Girl episodes had been available for purchase in the iTunes Store throughout the “streaming ban,” and it was certainly still possible to record them on set-top boxes.

But with the second season of Gossip Girl premiering September 1, this means that you’ll once again be able to get your Upper East Side baby billionaire fix from the comfort of your procrastination-friendly office cubicle.

Chuck Bass would so approve.

Disclosure: The CW is a joint venture between Warner Bros. and CBS, parent company of CNET News.

A screenshot from Dances With Google of the possibly coming dictionary

(Credit: 与G共舞)

Google is slated to release a robust Chinese-English dictionary featuring 13 dictionaries in collaboration with Kingsoft, a producer of PC-based dictionaries, according to a Chinese blog that I will inadequately translate as “Dances With Google.”

The new product will drop Thursday at 2:30 a.m. China time, according to the blog. It will include such things as menu items, which are often perilously mistranslated into English.

h/t Google Blogoscoped.

Geek culture is once again showing its influence over the mainstream lexicon in the latest version of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, which includes word additions such as webinar, malware, netroots, pretexting (thank you Hewlett-Packard), and fanboy (thank you Apple).

Webinar is “one more example of the significant ongoing trend for electronic technologies to add words to the language,” Merriam-Webster publisher John Morse said in a Monday press release about the 100 or so new words in the 2008 edition of the influential reference guide.

That’s in line with Merriam-Webster’s choice of the term “wOOt”–with its roots in video game culture–as the word of the year for 2007.

The 100 or so new words in M-W’s latest dictionary reflect societal trends beyond technology. For example, some stem from culinary arts, such as prosecco (a sparkling Italian wine), soju (a Korean vodka distilled from rice), edamame (immature green soybeans), and pescatarian (a vegetarian whose diet includes fish).

But my favorite new entry, by far, is mondegreen, defined as “a word or phrase that results from a mishearing of something said or sung.” According to M-W, the term was first coined by author Sylvia Wright in 1954, when Wright wrote an article for The Atlantic magazine confessing to a childhood misinterpretation of the Scottish ballad “The Bonny Earl of Moray.” “When she first heard the lyric, ‘they had slain the Earl of Moray and had laid him on the green,’ she felt terribly sorry for the ‘poor Lady Mondegreen,’” according to the press release.

A more contemporary example is the bungling of the Jimi Hendrix “Purple Haze” line, “Scuse me, while I kiss the sky” as “Scuse me, while I kiss this guy.” My personal mondegreen example is the line from the Clash song “Rock the Casbah,” “The shareef don’t like it,” which I always thought was, “Shareeve don’t like it.” Who was this Shareeve character anyway, I wondered. You got one? M-W is asking the public to submit their own mondegreens by July 25, with favorites to be revealed and featured online beginning July 28.

M-W says it picks the new dictionary entries only after it starts to see the words used over time without explanation or translation. Here’s an Associated Press story with more details.