Indeed, the brand that has made itself into something of a white-label-esque marvel through XMPP-enabled services such as Google Talk and Facebook Chat, is being purchased by Cisco for an undisclosed sum, and will provide its buyer “rich aggregation capabilities to users through both on-premise and on-demand solutions.” Distilled into more commonly acceptable speak, this essentially means an infusion into Cisco’s WebEx Internet conferencing solution, among other facets within its portfolio.

WebEx as many have understood for some time, is also a Cisco acquisition. It purchased the Web software specialist in 2007. With Jabber the company offers a sizable, if not precisely calculable hint at what it wants to accomplish insofar as growth in its enterprise-based collaboration services.

As a good number of us on the end-user front have learned, a construction such as Jabber allows for a very user-friendly, very adaptable experience. A trial of the abovementioned free instant messaging clients will show this. The Jabber, Inc property in particular, however, which which functions the open instant messaging technology, has shown itself to be well enmeshed in business and large-scale operations, serving bigwigs like Sun, Adobe, Akamai, Bank of Ireland, BT, and several US government entities, including the Department of Homeland Security. If ample money is to be made in the land of XMPP, it is in this sector specifically.

Again, it is unclear what Cisco’s investment-to-gain ratio is at present concerning the Jabber purchase, but it is presumably the case that the engagements it will rank as a long-term boon to its general strategy to serve the widest swath of clients possible.

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The web video play is also intriguing on a number of levels, as it’s clear a whole lot of thought and savvy has been put into the release of the series, and that NBC is out to make a statement with it: we don’t need a community distribution portal, we’ll bring the viewers in to us.

Sure, they’re putting the series out on Xbox Live and “a few other various platforms” they don’t care to mention in the press materials, but it’s very clear that they intend for the show to be viewed primarily on NBC’s video portal, and it’s a tool to get visitors used to the idea of watching web video at NBC.com, as opposed to places they may be currently used to like YouTube.

Intentionally Low-Budget Look
While the series had a $2 million production budget, the eagle eye of the internet video audience will catch obvious production quirks meant to trigger the low-budget, indie producer spark in their mind. The entire series was filmed on a green screen set with professional grade lighting and high definition cameras.  It’s clear, though, that in certain spots low-resolution backgrounds were used, which stand out against some very sharp anti-aliasing between the subject and the background.

Similarly, in the scenes that break away from the second-person perspective of Rosario speaking to her PDA, two camera coverage is used; these scenes are brief, and only those with a savvy eye will notice it. For the most part, the show has the feel and vibe of a LonelyGirl15.

The low-budget feel is a bit of a farce, though, since the acting, directing, scripting and post-production is otherwise top-notch. Rosario completely drew me into the character and the story immediately after I hit play and the video properly buffered. The product placement and futuristic gadgetry is incredibly obvious but somehow unobtrusive. In short, this show is a professional piece of work and by and large isn’t in your face with the monetization.

I’m guessing once this series takes off, we’ll end up seeing this model used to finance future productions on a much wider scale.

A Unique and Sensible Way to Finance Production
I actually first learned about it when I was on the plane from Houston to Austin for the SummerMash event earlier this month. For years, I’ve had the habit of always picking up a copy of Wired Magazine any time I travel by plane, and Gemini Division recieved a feature length writeup in the hard copy of the magazine. Wired’s Frank Rose covered a wide array of details in the piece, but what interested me the most was the way the show was financed. In the beginning of the piece, he said:

Sure, the YouTube explosion was fueled by amateurs, but it will be showbiz professionals who cash in on Web video. That’s because most big corporate advertisers want a safe, predictable environment — not the latest YouTube one-off, no matter how viral.

And later, when he talked about the financing of Division, he explained that the production company Electric Farm at the time hadn’t decided on NBC as the distribution outfit yet, but had moved towards other financing options:

Meanwhile, [Electric Farm CEO Stan] Rogow has been talking with Cisco and a handful of other companies about another way to make money: product placement. As a Buck Rogers-style serial set “five minutes in the future,” the show presents many possibilities for tech companies. Dawson’s smartphone, for instance, is the aperture through which we see the entire series. She talks urgently into the device throughout each episode, sending the feed to someone — we don’t know whom — and occasionally holding it up to capture what’s going on around her. It’s a prominent branding opportunity for any handset maker willing to plunk down the money.

Of course, at the time of Wired’s press, Electric Farm wasn’t disclosing who those advertisers were, but on the first two episodes, the product placement advertisers appear to be Microsoft and Cisco. The story is told with the vehicle being video emails sent from a mobile device.

Remember those Cisco ads we ran on Mashable Conversations (”Pete Cashmore here. What’s your biggest pet peeve about online video…”)? Cisco’s placement in Gemini is a perfect fit for the campaign they ran with us and other videobloggers, as they’re focusing on the future of online and personal digital video. When the device ‘boots up’ for a new missive from Rosario, it shows a Cisco logo in the bottom right for a few seconds.

Similarly, the Microsoft involvement is both seamless and appropriate. At the beginning of the second episode, a combination of some sort of futuristic Windows mobile operating system that segues into a drill down approach of Paris, France (using the Microsoft Live maps protocol) showcases many existing and future possibile features of mobile mapping services. The only thing missing from the placement is the little icon that we used to run on our mobile posts saying “this sponsored post powered by Windows Mobile.”

This Isn’t Just for the Hollywood Pros…
The fact that I recognize all the placement sponsors so far and add to that have been sponsored by them here at Mashable under these very same campaigns tells me that these advertisers are accessible. If they’re accessible to the likes of me, that means this style of sponsored production is easily attainable soon for the common indie producer, contrary to what Frank Rose summized that this is going to be a boom only cashed in on by the Hollywood veterans.

Certainly, it didn’t hurt that there was a laundry list of Hollywood success stories signed on for this project, but this whole operation took place outside of the entrenched Hollywood studio system. NBC ended up distributing this piece, but it could have easily been any number of other highly trafficked portals.

For the work that’s been put into what looks like a very interesting storyline (not to mention a companion alternative reality game), I’d hate to see NBC’s gambit harm the viewership numbers for this series. They are doing a few things that us old New Media hands would consider very wrong in the distribution of this series: it isn’t being released in video podcast form, only the first four videos will be available for remote embed, and the distribution platform looks to be exclusively NBC’s web video portal.

This could end up being the rare case where a solid production ends up carrying the numbers through to respectable levels for NBC, but they could have done so much more in terms of return on investment and increased visibility had they chosen a more portable and open distribution strategy for this series.

Check it out, you’ll be glad you did.
Aside from all the industry analysis, it’s a great show, and I’ve embedded the first two episodes here at the bottom of this post. Take about six minutes and watch them both, and I’m sure you’ll be hooked as quick as I was.

Episode One

Episode Two

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Increased use of video and social networking has created what Cisco calls ‘visual networking’, which is raising traffic volumes at a compound annual growth rate of 46 per cent.

Cisco’s Visual Networking Index (PDF) predicts that visual networking will account for 90 per cent of the traffic coursing through the world’s IP networks by 2012.

The upward trend is not only driven by consumer demand for YouTube clips and IPTV, according to the report, as business use of video conferencing will grow at 35 per cent CAGR over the same period.

Cisco reckons that traffic volumes will be measured in exabytes (one billion gigabytes) by 2012 and will reach 552 exabytes by that time.

Soon after 2012 we will have to adopt zettabytes (one thousand billion gigabytes) to express traffic volumes.

The report is based on Cisco’s own predictions and aggregates analysis from several market research firms.

Source: Vnunet

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Perhaps the highest profile rootkit incident in recent years occurred in 2005, when security researcher Mark Russinovich found that Sony BMG had been distributing a rootkit with some of its music CDs as a means of copyright protection.

While rootkits for common operating systems, like Windows, are well known, they haven’t been an issue for Cisco’s IOS until now.

In a post to the Full Disclosure mailing list, security researcher Nicolas Fischbach wrote, “At the end of the day this is nothing new from a rootkit technology point of view, but it’s in the IOS/router world.”

The reason a potential vulnerability like this is noteworthy is because so many routers run Cisco’s IOS. Cisco routers accounted for 65% of router revenue worldwide in 2007, according to Dell’Oro Group, a telecommunications analysis firm.

Fischbach’s view is that the sky isn’t falling, at least not yet. There is a tool available to detect whether IOS has been altered: CIR, which stands for “Cisco Information Retrieval.” Furthermore, there are still hurdles to installing a rootkit in a Cisco router.

Fischbach characterized the installation process as “noisy” and as something that administrators should notice, unless they acquired the router through questionable or illegal channels.

As it happens, counterfeit routers have been keeping the FBI busy. In late February, the FBI said that various law enforcement agencies had seized over $76 million in counterfeit Cisco hardware and labels over the past two years.

Cisco recommends that customers follow industry best-practices to keep their networks secure and advises customers to read its publicly posted response to Muniz’s work.

“We thank Mr. Sebastian Muniz and Core Security Technologies for working with us towards the goal of keeping the Internet and Cisco networks, as a whole, secure,” Cisco said in an e-mailed statement. “We are currently in the process of analyzing the information that Mr. Muniz and Core Security Technologies presented at the conference.”

Source: Information Week

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Sebastian Muniz, a researcher with Core Security Technologies, developed the software, which he will unveil on May 22 at the EuSecWest conference in London.

Rootkits are stealthy programs that cover up their tracks on a computer, making them extremely hard to detect. To date, the vast majority of rootkits have been written for the Windows operating system, but this will mark the first time that someone has discussed a rootkit written for IOS, the Internetwork Operating System used by Cisco’s routers. “An IOS rootkit is able to perform the tasks that any other rootkit would do on desktop computer operating systems,” Muniz said in an e-mail interview.

Rootkits are typically used to install keylogging software as well as programs that allow attackers to remotely connect with the infected system. However, the most notorious rootkit of all, distributed by Sony BMG Music, stopped unauthorized CD copying.

A Cisco rootkit is particularly worrisome because, like Microsoft’s Windows, Cisco’s routers are very widely used. Cisco owned nearly two-thirds of the router market in the fourth quarter of 2007, according to IDC.

Read the rest of the story…

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Upon opening a Jiffle calendar, users are presented with a schedule of their associate’s availability. With a few clicks, a new appointment can be created in a manner that will come naturally to anyone who’s used a standard calendar application.

Jiffle believes that its application could be a boon to participants in Google’s Adwords program. After clicking on an appealing ad, consumers will no longer have to call customer support or sales representatives to schedule appointments - they can simply add themselves into an available time slot. Jiffle also thinks that Cisco’s WebEx could be used in conjunction with the service to further expedite meetings.

There are some strong competitors to Jiffle, including TimeBridge, which already supports Google Calendar. TimeBridge also helps facilitate group meetings through use of a point system, which allows users to vote on their preferred times. We expect to see other major developments in this space very soon.

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