For every Google or Yahoo, the short history of the Web is positively littered with "next big thing" startups that got their 15 minutes but couldn't sustain the success in the end. YouTube, started by a pair of twenty-something friends last year, is in that boat now, except its 15 minutes isn't over yet--and may never be if it can figure a few things out. The first thing the company needs is advertising revenue. To that end, YouTube's first significant move is this new partnership with NBC, which will pay the home video site to distribute promotional video clips of …

Michael Copps, a Democratic commissioner at the Republican-controlled Federal Communications Commission, told an audience of technology executives to get more involved in Net neutrality, an issue that could have big implications for their industry. He says that letting operators control the Internet would irrevocably change it forever, and further telecom consolidation would exacerbate the issue. It's the same thing as media consolidation, he says, which has lead to controlling media messages and content from the top down. That, partly, is what led people away from mass media to the Web in the first place. "We need to figure out," Copps …

Search Engine Watch reviews Farecast and FareCompare, two new travel search engines. Farecast actually tries to predict airline prices by looking at 115 indicators including pricing, scheduling, and availability to give travelers an idea of when to book to get the best price. For each flight search, Farecast tells you if it thinks prices will rise or fall over the next seven days, and by how much. Next to this indicator is a fare history chart that shows consumers fluctuations in pricing over the last 45-90 days and the average lowest price ticket during that period. Farecast makes over 90 …

When interviewing major media executives, New York Times reporter Richard Siklos says they often turn the tables on him, asking: 'So who do you think has got this Internet thing figured out?' His answer: no one, but each of the biggies get a certain number of brownie points here and there. Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation deserve big points for getting MySpace and its 80 million users, but now they need to figure out what to do with it, because MySpace still makes a pithy contribution to the conglomerates' bottom line. Bob Iger and the Walt Disney Company get points …

Metropolitan-area Wi-Fi: the next big thing or the next colossal waste of tax dollars? In Taipei, an experiment by the city government to outfit the city with wireless Internet access has been a big disappointment; just 40,000 of its 2.6 million residents have signed up to use the service, called WiFly, in the six months it has been operational. WiFly was part of Taipei's plan to position itself as a world leader in technology. It only charges $12.50 a month too, so why isn't anyone biting? As one man hunched over his laptop in a coffee shop told The New …

Real Networks will start selling streaming-video ads on its popular online gaming platform RealArcade, the company said Tuesday. The site gets about 750,000 downloads a day; users will soon have to sit through 10- to 15-second ads while games download or between levels. According to The Washington Post, RealNetworks is the first major online game service to feature streaming video ads. That's a little hard to believe, actually. I thought WildTangent and Atom Shockwave already sold streaming video ads. In any event, Real's first advertisers will be Honda Motor Corp. and Hasbro. RealArcade is one of dozens of so-called casual …

Why? For possibly helping pedophiles, identity thieves, and other sickos find the private information of 619 students at public schools in Catawba County, North Carolina. The search engine made the social security numbers and test scores of 619 students available on its site until Friday, when the company complied with a local court order to delete all information about that county's board of education from its servers. Forbes spoke with search indexing experts who said Google's Web robots couldn't have successfully hacked into the school's site without knowing the password. Instead, something else must have happened--like someone making the student …

GBuy, Google's PayPal killer, is going live--possibly this week, writes The Wall Street Journal. The service, which would allow consumers to enter a password at a secure site instead of throwing their credit card information around everywhere, is expected to be available as early as this week, "people briefed on the situation" said. To attract initial customers, Google plans to offer an unspecified rebate to people who complete their online purchases using GBuy. So what's so great about this service? Google will add little GBuy icons to the items searched for on Google.com that use the service. The little GBuy …

U.S. telecom giants Cisco Systems and AT&T Corp. are putting 15.5 million behind Internet video company Akimbo, the Financial Times said Monday. The investment underscores the big shift among big media firms toward online services, and video in particular. Blueprint Ventures, a VC group that was involved in the deal, said Akimbo offers "an excellent" video channel--one that is "way out in front in terms of technology." Having a solid technology is definitely one thing, but distribution--especially since media firms still dominate mass media consumption and are looking for distribution online--is the other great piece of the puzzle for many …

MySpace may have taken the world by storm with its 80 million registered users, but it's still a blip on the News Corp. balance sheet, says Henry Blodget. Sure, the social network's growth is amazing--but so was the growth of sites like GeoCities and Tripod, neither of which evolved into much (what exactly has Yahoo done with GeoCities?) "[MySpace's] success has also restored Rupert's status as a brilliant visionary," Blodget says, but it's still "so irrelevant to the financial performance of the larger entity that it doesn't even merit describing." On News Corp.'s earnings reports, Fox Interactive Entertainment (where MySpace …