Livestation is a downloadable application that tidily bundles global television news channels, and is one of a number startup services offering live video streaming of news content. Others include Veetle, another website and application that was created by Stanford Uni graduates and facilitates high quality user-generated video feeds, and a wide range of illegal TV streaming services that are knocking around. Livestation’s primary content consists of excellent quality feeds from 23 partner news channels, who include Al Jazeera, BBC World News, and Bloomberg.

In exchange for streaming their news channel, each of Livestation’s partners receives a revenue share of their premium subscription revenues and website advertising profits; the streams aren’t edited, so ads on the channels are streamed to Livestation viewers too, and thus their reach will also increase.

While Livestation can either be accessed online or through the desktop application, the latter offers superior navigation: the experience is akin to iTunes, where you can scroll through channels as if they were album covers, tile as many video streams as you want (I stopped at 20), and skip between audio.

The desktop app also offers more than 4000 user-generated streams. These vastly outnumber the official partner channels, but Livestation CEO Matteo Berlucchi tells me they are “just to complement the desktop player”.

“We’ve built a video player that works on every platform,” he says on the phone, “so we let people use it to watch other streams. In a sense it’s like Del.icio.us for live streaming. We don’t look at it, it’s just there if people want to use it, as the crowdsourced element of Livestation.”

Berlucchi says that the agreements with partner channels will change if Livestation reaches “critical mass” and the number of users spirals upwards. At this point, stations will be charged to be included on the service.

The worry is that the majority of users will blinker their news intake though, and only follow sources that appeal to their political prejudices. Berlucchi however, doesn’t think this will happen:

“News-hungry people will, and already do, look for alternative news sources. Livestation can be used a source for more perspectives and views on news stories.” 

And herein lies the limiting factor. This is a service primarily for desktop news junkies. Where’s the wider appeal? Berlucchi think it lies in mobile and multi-platform services, and claims his company was the first to stream video live on via an iPhone app.

“Within three to five years mobile will overtake desktop,” he says. “There will be a big shift of all these services, so anything that is successful online will have to build a mobile presence on a scale never seen before, when previously, mobile before was an afterthought.

“Mobile is smaller and has different characteristics, there are similarities but also profound differences. If you’re trying to build an app for a smartphone and is meant to be consumed on the go, it will be very different to the desktop version.”

It seems that mobile is where the mass appeal of Livestation lies – junkies and industry bods can consume at their desks, but the mass consumption of news will be on the go.

When you open Wave for the first time, even the most hardened don’t-read-the-instructions tech head will be running for the safety of the introduction video; this is a complex interface that requires the same amount of neural dot-joining that the iPhone’s touchscreen does when you use it for the first time. And Google doesn’t make it easy on you – while their low key video tutors organise decidedly un-rock’n'roll barbecues and chuck U-rated Sudoku banter around, they still expect you to know what a UI is. The message from Wave is clear – this is for the big boys of 21st-century online interaction, and if you don’t like it, you can go play on Twitter with the other babies.                                

As most of your pals are likely not on Wave yet, or have been scared away by its learning curve, the simple things – interacting on a private wave with a handful of acquaintances – aren’t being done on a broad scale. Instead, for most people it’s straight into the deep end, interacting with anyone who happens to be knocking around on a “public wave” (one that anyone can contribute to). The charming tone you get when you enter a public wave is of excited, chattering children, rather than wary and polite adults.

So what are they talking about? As noted by Bad Idea contributor Chris Baraniuk on his Stuff Happening Now blog, text-based role-playing games are an inevitable early presence when you consider the average profile of those desperate for a Google Wave invite; but there’s everything here, from dubstep mixtapes to cigar appreciation to “beautiful men” (read: disturbing pics of Arnie with his shirt off).

Despite – or perhaps because of – the sophisticated and intricate interface, people are coming up with decidedly primitive games that involve simple clickers and counters; meanwhile my favourite wave is ‘CRAZY PARTY WAVE Y’ALL’, which is a giant gangshow of nonsense performed by people becoming aware of the awesome (but as yet only somewhat fathomable) power of Wave. It’s a joyful, timesucking mess of rainbow fonts, Daft Punk videos and stoned slang that gives a glimpse of what Wave will probably descend into on a massive scale.

You can bet that Google has many serious developers beavering away at expanding the functionality of Wave, which is currently only in ‘preview’. But for the moment, basement-bound nerds are filling the gaps, making ‘bots’ that do certain things as you work within a wave. These range from the useful to the purely LOL-worthy – a Swedish Chef that writes ‘bork’ everywhere, or the Kanye West bot that interrupts each new post with an “Imma let you finish”, or a reminder of how George Bush doesn’t like black people. Again: where Google imagined barbecue organisation, the world responded with an endlessly self-publishing Rick Astley video.

But while the amateurs are honing the details, there are wider functionalities that one would hope are going to crop up in the final version, but which haven’t been announced yet. URLs for public waves to help the sharing of discussions? One-click tweeting? Plus or minus recommendations on individual posts?

And yet: isn’t there enough to take in already? Twitter’s beauty lies in its brevity feeding back into its search function, providing brief results; search the Wave for a single term and it’s lost in the haystack of everyone’s untethered ranting.

Indeed, on first glance Wave is the sort of technological tipping point that could feasibly send a whole generation into asceticism or monastic purity – a nightmare of cacophonous, meaningless chatter, rendered with Byzantine intricacy, and topped off with a nauseating Silicon Valley cuteness. If Twitter turned the dial of informational white noise up a notch, Wave whacks it to 11; similarly, if any technology was guaranteed to shock the elderly with their apparent redundancy, this is it.

Wave may yet change the way we interact, and seems especially ready for the next generation of touchscreens, but Google clearly has an optimistic view of people’s ability to adapt to new technology. It took a lot people years to get their heads round email; expect many, many more for Wave to truly make a difference to our daily lives.

For those who missed episode three, BAD IDEA editors Jack and Daniel pitched a website business idea to the managers of Trustedplaces.com, but were told they’d have better chances approaching a sacked banker than a venture capital firm. They also met book publisher Malcolm Croft, who told them there was next to no money available – even for the authors he was commissioning (“I’m not going to use the word cheap but… inexpensive“). It left Daniel wondering if they weren’t headed for “some kind of cataclysmic career suicide.”

In episode four, Jack sets up a meeting with entrepreneur Ben Caulfield, and the duo decide to pitch him a business proposal for creating an “open university” styled online creative-writing community. It’s a big opportunity – but can they make it pay?

To catch up on all the other episodes, visit www.badidea.co.uk/printomortis.

It’s 10 years ago last week. There, on the cover of Time magazine, looking more self-satisfied than ever, stood the three men who would ostensibly save the world economy from the Asian Crisis: Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and his deputy Larry Summers. The committee to save the world.

Where are the superheroes now? Alan Greenspan is now widely derided for having created the bubble that has since burst. Robert Rubin – after helping Greenspan to weaken the nation’s regulatory structure – left the Clinton administration and went to Citibank, where he pushed speculative plays; they backfired, and 95% of the worth of the company’s stock disappeared in the current market meltdown (Mr. Rubin was forced to leave).

Some committee. After the Asian Crisis, the Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz wrote a blistering critique, which argued that what the men really did during was to take advantage of the temporary weakness of the world’s governments to advance the interests of Wall Street banks. It was all going to come crashing down one day, he warned.

Rubbish, was the reply. Weren’t we living in the new paradigm? We’d invented the Goldilocks economy, the Dow was headed to 33,000, and – oh, this is my favourite – Bill Clinton was telling us we could save the planet from environmental catastrophe by buying more stuff (on the discredited logic that growing companies would invest more to improve their efficiency). Mr. Greenspan was the Maestro. Mr. Rubin could do no wrong.

What a difference a decade makes. But just as it seems we can never get enough Leatherface or Jason movies, when you think the carnage is done, back they come. And they’re doing it again. Except this time they can’t pretend they’re out to save the world. They’re in a last desperate effort to save Wall Street, making the American taxpayer foot the bill for the huge errors the banks made.

After being kicked out of Harvard for hinting that women might be a tad thicker than men, Larry Summers has been resurrected as US President Barack Obama’s chief economic advisor. Mr. Obama’s Treasury Secretary is former Fed governor Tim Geithner. Mr. Geithner, in turn, comes from the New York Fed. If two men were tighter with Wall Street than these two, well, they’ve probably already jumped off skyscrapers.

Their first job is to stop the implosion of the American financial system. The diagnosis is straightforward. The US is deep in the throes of a financial crisis. The US financial crisis, as we also know, is dragging the world economy down with it. And financial crises, as all economists know, are fairly straightforward affairs. A massive loss of trust leads to a situation in which the government needs to step in to restore confidence to markets.

This isn’t rocket science. The textbook on banking crises has been written, and both Geithner and Summers have studied it at length. When banks have lost the trust of the public, the government must step in and take over those on the verge of bankruptcy, wipe out their shareholders, fire their boards, and clean up their balance sheets. They then sell them back to the public.

But they won’t do it. They’re postponing nationalisation, and instead concocting opaque bailout schemes. And they’re doing it, reportedly, because Larry and Tim’s friends on Wall Street are urging them to let them keep their jobs.

Investors have registered their disdain. Stock markets are plunging further than ever. It may be the best thing to happen. Until the government does the right thing, investors will treat the banks like toxic assets. To forestall complete collapse, the Obama administration will have no choice but to step in and take the bitter medicine.

The much-vaunted pay caps are apparently unenforceable. Anyhow, they’re just shreds of clothing thrown to slow down a charging bear. If a bank is well-run, let it pay its people what it wants. But for the rest, let the buffoons who created this mess join bread lines, I say.

We’ve also invited news editors Alyssa McDonald (New Statesman), and Jean Hannah Edelstein (BAD IDEA) to pore over one lucky story and investigate what makes recession rage translate into good feature journalism!

Special guests from CompletelyNovel.com will also be in attendance to lead a debate about HOW TO SAVE PUBLISHING FROM ABSOLUTE ANNIHILATION BY THE 21ST CENTURY’S DIGITAL TSUNAMI!!

Apart from that, BAD IDEA’s editors Jack and Daniel will be doing their usual “Gunther von Hagens for the literary elite” (KultureFlash) thing, and editing your work in a lively environment where “… you can expect the shouty Victorian atmosphere to increase towards grammatical brawling as the night goes on” (Guardian). To buy tickets click here.

Sponsored by Hendrick’s Gin, who will provide complimentary cocktails throughout the evening, The Butcher’s Shop is held in the atmospheric environs of the Old Operating Theatre (behind London Bridge station). 

For more info on the event, check out www.badidea.co.uk/thebutchersshop. And for a sample from one of our recent events, take a look at the clip  below, which features the live drawing skills of illustrator James Nash.

Apple launched the App Store on iTunes last summer as a virtual store where developers can sell their software applications, with Apple keeping 30 per cent of the profits; hundreds of apps that turn your iPhone into a lightsabre later, it’s not done badly. Apple said last month that there are a total of 15,000 applications available and they have generated more than 500 million hits from users in six months. 

So Windows predictably wants some of the action. Although Windows Marketplace will not be ready for the public until later this year, the company is currently in talks with the mobile phone networks about how revenue made through the applications will be shared.

Microsoft is the last to catch up with Apple, after other manufacturers have been hurriedly getting their act together. In October, Google announced that it was creating a virtual app store for its Android phones and BlackBerry maker, Research In Motion, followed with a similar announcement.

Yesterday Nokia unveiled its Ovi Store, which works out your location and stores your “past consumer behavior” to offer a therefore rather sinister set of personally tailored apps and services. Microsoft is in major competition with these other companies, but Apple is less threatened, because they control their hardware, the operating system that runs on it and many of the applications. Microsoft does not make hardware and mostly sells applications that other companies use.

As competitive brothers tend to do, Mac and Microsoft are constantly trying to outdo one another, but instead of attempting to do something new, the older sibling is going to copy what the other has already done. As well as its acme App Store, Microsoft announced plans to launch its latest smartphone operating system, the Windows Mobile 6.5, which includes quick access to updates such as emails and calendar appointments in a very similar manner to the iPhone. Yesterday they took the copycatting further and decided to start a retail chain sector. The number of stores that will be opened and the product range is yet to be decided.

“The purpose of opening these stores is to create deeper engagement with consumers and continue to learn first-hand about what they want and how they buy,” Microsoft said. But analysts are very doubtful that the shop will have anything like the universal appeal of Apple’s stylish shops.

Microsoft has hired David Porter as the corporate vice president of future retail stores, who has 25 years experience at Walmart. If that’s a preview to the future stores of Microsoft we can presumably expect fluorescent lighting, massive aisles, and overweight middle-Americans, while the hipsters carry on drinking in the clean lines and bright colours at Apple…

Google launched Audio Ads and Google Radio Automation back in 2006 in an attempt to create a new revenue stream for broadcast radio. It bought dMarc Broadcasting (a digital solutions provider for radio) for $102 million cash with a view to eventually paying $1.136m if the service took off. The dMarc founders, Chad and Ryan Steelberg, left Google a year after the purchase offer was made due to differences.

After the hefty cash sum was paid, and struggling for three years trying to make things work, Goggle accepted that the end was inevitable. “We haven’t had the impact we hoped for, so we have decided to exit the broadcast radio business and focus our efforts in online streaming audio,” as stated on their corporate blog.

Disabling the radio plan means layoffs in the Google complex. Susan Wojcicki, a Google vice president for product management said, Google would try to find jobs for most of the people involved in the radio ads program but that up to 40 people might be laid off.

“It’s just not making them enough money for the cost,” said Greg Sterling, an analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. “It speaks to the weakness of the medium itself.”

So even a company as large and ridiculously successful as Google is not immune to this recession. Its first wave of layoffs were last month, with approximately 100 employees let go from the firm’s recruitment department. The company is also possibly weeding out a few applications to save cash such as, Google Catalog Search, Mashup Editor, Google Notebook, Jaiku and Dodgeball.

He also said that the recent cutbacks suggest Google’s efforts to become a multiplatform media company are dormant, considering the end of print ads as well as uploads to Google Video and the closing of its mobile social-networking service, Dodgeball.

Now with the print and radio advertising projects down the tubes it makes you wonder if Google’s television venture will crumble as well. Wojcicki (Google V.P. for product management) said that Google would continue with it’s TV advertising business where they can measure audience response. Google is selling only a limited number of ads on the Dish Network, a few cable networks owned by NBC Universal and a small cable provider in Northern California. But currently they have not reached deals with any major cable companies.

With a company as massive as Google failing in these avenues, the outcome for the future of advertising looks grim. Is this failure due to Google leaving their comfort zone or just the traditional advertising model that refuses to work anymore?

I’ll bet it was lots of fun at first. The Obamas look so sweet in that photo of them walking down Pennsylvania Avenue, and it had to feel pretty neat to take a girl from Chicago’s south side in your own helicopter around Maryland. But whatever warm glow enveloped Barack Obama seems to have been now blown away by Washington’s cold winds.

His stated intention to do things differently got torn to shreds by the appointment of some cabinet members with ethical lapses that looked kind of District-textbook. His bipartisanship ran into the Republicans (oh yeah, those guys are still here). And his much-awaited rescue plan for the financial system, announced by his treasury secretary on Tuesday, sent the markets into free fall. We thought Obama was so cool, he could do anything; but Tim Geithner looked like something off stuffwhitepeoplelike.com.

Critics have been queuing up. On the editorial pages, even some of the president’s friends have grown lukewarm. So has Barack Obama’s day in the sun turned into the shortest political honeymoon in memory?

Things might not be so bad. My guess is that the person least perturbed by the quick resumption of panic and anger is Mr. Obama himself; not because he will have retreated into a “don’t-worry-be-happy” shell of denial, but because, from election night, he has always signalled that the start of his ride was going to be a bumpy one.

Second, if support for his stimulus package is tepid, his own approval ratings remain sky-high. His principal mistake in that respect appeared to be to let House Democrats set too much of the stimulus agenda. Message to Democrats: find that abandoned mineshaft in which you’ve hidden Bill Clinton, and have him invite Nancy Pelosi for a barbecue.

On the bailout, my guess is that Wall Street optimists had been hoping for some kind of magic wand to whisk away their woes, restore their profits, and take toxic assets off their balance sheets. Yeah, right. There’s about as much chance of that happening in the near future as of the Italians playing exciting football.

The problems confronted by the Obama administration are enormously complex. As the Economist put it, Tim Geithner wasn’t ready for prime time. But as the details are fleshed out, it may take shape as the most reasonable solution. And while the stimulus package is not perfect, anything which gets money into the hands of US consumers will be better than something which does not.

However, the ride will continue to be bumpy. Having a rough start is not a problem. The literature on the political business cycle in the US suggests that the president does well to do unpopular things early in his presidency, in the hopes they begin to pay dividends at the next elections. 

Things may really start to get rough for Mr. Obama after the 2010 mid-term elections, though. There’s a good chance that a real turnaround will not have yet begun, while national debt will soar. If his party suffer setbacks next year, the period which follows may prove particularly difficult.

In the meantime, though, when one compares Mr. Obama’s start with that of his immediate predecessors, it hasn’t been all that bad – at least, not yet. At this stage in his presidency Dubya was still wondering how they managed to make his office that shape; Bill Clinton was chairing night-long committee meetings deciding what committees he should chair.

Nonetheless, this is a nail-biting time. We’re only just now learning how very close the world financial system came to outright collapse last autumn. If the world economy is being besieged by the barbarians of bad credit and mistrust, Washington may be the last bastion from which a rearguard will be mounted. If the US stumbles its way into a Depression – and it still can – the rest of us will go down. If Washington manages to restore confidence, the world economy still faces a difficult couple of years. But it will not collapse, and can then start groping towards recovery.

So these are tense days and weeks, and all eyes are on the White House, and on the US Treasury. Nobody cheered encore at Tim Geithner’s debut; they were all trying to figure out why the curtain had closed. But everyone’s faith in Barack Obama may buy him a bit more time. Now more than ever, we’re hoping Michelle is pestering him not to screw up, buddy.

The rumour has been spiked on the Twitter corporate blog, where Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, wrote, ‘It’s important to note that whatever we come up with, Twitter will remain free to use by everyone—individuals, companies, celebrities, etc. We are still very early in the idea stage and we don’t have anything to share just yet despite a recent surge in speculation.’

It would be an awful hassle to actually deal with money that didn’t arrive in a big sack from whichever VC source you’ve managed to hustle, wouldn’t it Biz?

It leaves us to wonder, what will Twitter’s revenue plan be? The Internet community seems to have lots of ideas about exactly what the micro-blogging site should do to monetise on the site, which has been without a plan since its conception three years ago. Especially as Biz Stone doesn’t seem that bothered about the problem.

The finalists of a Silicon Alley Insider  competition to come up with a Twitter business plan were listed on January 11. The winner was a a social media marketing group called Denuology, who proposed that Twitter could charge for market research information and the ability to question Twitter users who choose to opt in to the programme. The Silicon Alley Insider then e-mailed the plan to the head honchos at Twitter, which kicked off the frenzy of blog rumours about Twitter ’selling out’. 

Some of the other ideas in the Insider’s top 11 were: a Gumtree-like marketplace for buying and selling in Twitter; charging for access to better Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and software development tools; and suggesting ads that users could ‘re-tweet’ to followers to earn ‘Twitter Bucks’ that could be redeemed for cash.

No doubt the blog realm will continue to speculate and whisper (and how we love to do that) until an announcement is finally made, if ever.