angelsandeggs.com

On Monday, Obama signed an executive order allowing research on more stem cell lines than the Bush administration had permitted in its political compromise eight years ago.

President Obama’s decision to allow federal tax dollars to be used with embryonic stem cell research does more than reverse his predecessor’s policies and fulfill a long-standing campaign promise. It also reopens the debate about how well science and politics can, or should, mix.

The in vitro fertilization industry has thrived on private capital, Tanner said.

In addition, it’s difficult for companies to make long-term plans about funding because Obama’s successor could reverse this decision yet again, a situation that economist Robert Higgs has dubbed “regime uncertainty.” Or Congress could overrule him with yet another set of rules.

“You literally couldn’t do research in the same labs for approved lines and unapproved lines,” Garr said. “Lifting these restrictions will free up all of these resources in the scientific community.”

Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute who specializes in health care reform, said permitting more tax dollars to be spent on scientific research will only complicate the field.

The United States has the proper policies to bring research to the marketplace, such as protections for intellectual property, Werner said, but without a federal commitment to basic research in a scientific area, it will be harder to bring ideas to market. In the area of stem cell research, a lack of federal support may impact the development of regenerative medicine and therapies, which Werner called “the new paradigm of health care moving forward.”

There’s no evidence
to suggest you need
federal money to make
this research work.
–Michael Tanner,
senior fellow,
Cato Institute

For its part, the current administration has tried to distance itself from any appearance of impropriety. On Monday, Obama also signed a presidential memorandum saying: “Political officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and conclusions. If scientific and technological information is developed and used by the federal government, it should ordinarily be made available to the public.”

Still, Garr said, the research that will this executive order will facilitate includes basic research as well as work on products in the late stages of development. The federal funding will largely go to universities and public research institutions rather than the private sector, but companies like Garr’s invest in those projects. Garr’s Neuralstem, for instance, pays for research being conducted at the University of California at San Diego.

“When it gets down to approval from the FDA, they’ll be more likely to do that when there’s a body of research out there,” he said. “Anything that adds that knowledge to the public space will be a huge help to adding technologies to this industry. We know how to promote and support biomedical research–we just didn’t do it in this area.”‘

During the Bush administration, former Surgeon General Richard Carmona accused his bosses of political interference, and House Democrats released a report in 2003 accusing the administration of manipulating science related to wetlands, stem cells, missile defense, and sex education. (Bush aides say that, contrary to that claim about stem cell research, they acted after consulting scientists. Also, the previous policy merely restricted taxpayer funds being spent on this purpose; private companies could continue to pursue research without hindrance.)

“What’s interesting is that in the early part of this decade, when stem cell research was under scrutiny by folks in Washington, a lot of companies felt it impacted the private markets because there was a sort of cloud over it,” said Werner, the attorney representing stem cell companies. “The private markets kind of responded to the sense that maybe this is gong to be outlawed, maybe there is something wrong with this research. What will be interesting to see is whether the same would be true now that there will be such a shot in the arm from the administration for this research.”

“Scientists always want more money, but the evidence to suggest there’s a line of research not being done right now because of a lack of federal money–I’ve never had anybody able to show me that,” he said.

CNET’s Declan McCullagh contributed to this report

Richard Garr, president and CEO of Neuralstem, a company working to develop a stem cell therapy for Lou Gehrig’s disease, acknowledged there may or may not be new technologies that emerge from additional funding resources.

Research manipulation
In the case of global warming, both sides have accused the other of manipulating research findings to reach political ends. The late author Michael Crichton described this in his book State of Fear, concluding with an essay saying: “Groups with other agendas are hiding behind a movement that appears high-minded… (and) vague terms like sustainability and generational justice–terms that have no agreed definition–are employed in the service of a new crisis.”

But critics and skeptics of Obama’s decision say that injecting taxpayer dollars into a delicate and already controversial scientific process could backfire. Obama’s decision to make stem cell research scientifically worthy of federal tax dollars is as much of a politically subjective decision as Bush’s choice not to, they say.

Lifting these restrictions
will free up all of these
resources in the scientific
community.
–Richard Garr,
CEO, Neuralstem

While states like California stepped in to fund projects that the federal government would not, private sources did as well. Major companies like Aastrom, Geron Corp., and Stemcells, Inc. all increased their research and development expenditures on stem cell research from 2005 through 2007, according to a 2008 analysis (PDF) from the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Even if the economy continues to stall for months, private capital for worthy projects will be available in the long term, Tanner said.

“There’s no evidence to suggest you need federal money to make this research work,” he said.

“We’re talking about research that’s not going to see fruition for years,” he said. “Whether or not there’s a great deal of investment capital this year is not a great concern.”

Restricting federal funding to certain stem cell lines complicated the way universities had to conduct their research, he said, since federally funded projects would not be confused with other projects. The initial funds from California’s Proposition 71–which passed in 2004, allocating $3 billion for human embryonic stem-cell experiments–were spent on real estate.

“It is inevitable that when you get federal money involved, you politicize the issue,” Tanner said. “I worry that it comes at the expense of sound science. I don’t think you can say somehow the Obama administration is going to be a blank slate when it comes to science. Is the Obama administration really going to be open to a study that shows there is no global warming?”

Some representatives of the biotechnology industry praised Obama’s decision, saying it will do more than provide additional funding–it could also stimulate private investment by giving the market more confidence in the field.

The world of private financing has largely dried up, said Michael Werner, an attorney for Holland & Knight who represents stem cell companies and is a founding board member of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research. Obama’s decision may change that, he said.

“To the extent that the infrastructure is there and universities are staffed up, that affects private companies,” Garr said.

More money equals results?
Scientific arguments over the use of adult stem cells vs. embryonic stem cells, as well as claims of potential applications for the research, have been distorted in attempts to win the political debate, said the Cato Institute’s Tanner.

Moreover, it is questionable whether public funds will accomplish anything the private sector has not or cannot, Tanner said.

The executive order that Obama signed overturns restrictions President Bush instituted in 2001 that limited federal funding to 21 existing stem cell lines. The National Institutes of Health will have 120 days to develop guidelines for evaluating funding requests.

An extreme example was the Soviet Union, which suppressed genetic research in favor of the pseudoscience known as Lysenkoism.

“The thing about basic research is, it’s kind of like shooting an arrow and putting the target where it lands,” he said.

“Promoting science isn’t just about providing resources, it’s also about protecting free and open inquiry,” Obama said. He added that such research must be subject to strict guidelines, and “we will support it only when it is both scientifically worthy and responsibly conducted.”

Updated 2:43 p.m. PST with precise layoff total.

CNET News’ Stephen Shankland contributed to this report.

And with some economists expecting the recession to continue through 2009, it remains to be seen whether more layoffs will be seen at the Internet search pioneer.

This latest round of layoffs is part of Yahoo’s previously announced plan to reduce its annualized expenses by $400 million by the end of the year, which the company outlined in its third-quarter earnings announcement in October.

And while Yahoo is in the workforce reduction mode, one start-up sees it as an opportunity to snap up a few talented folks.

Yahoo is continuing to evaluate which of its operations are no longer a priority and can be shut down and which of its businesses should be placed in a maintenance mode with no further investments, Williams said.

Updated at 7:23 p.m. PST with comments from Yahoo employees.

For Yahoo, this marks the second time this year it’s initiated layoffs. In February, the company cut 1,000 jobs after its fourth-quarter profit took a hit.

SUNNYVALE, Calif.–Yahoo began issuing pink slips Wednesday to the majority of the employees affected by its previously announced 10 percent job cut, the company confirmed.

Williams, however, declined to elaborate which areas of Yahoo’s business took the greatest hits with the layoffs.

“There was an across-the-board review (for potential cuts) and no one area received a pass,” said Brad Williams, a Yahoo spokesman, who noted Yahoo engaged in a strategic review of where it would make most sense to cut the positions.

Yahoo, which has annualized expenses of $3.9 billion before the cuts, also plans to achieve its $400 million goal by consolidating facilities and moving some of its business to areas where it costs less to operate, as well as shutting down parts of its business and putting others in a maintenance-only mode.

Those decisions are anticipated to come in the following weeks and months, he added.

Another employee who was recently hired indicated he felt vulnerable to the layoffs, given he had little seniority.

TokBox, an online video calling company, is sending out a taco truck to Yahoo’s headquarters in the afternoon, in which it plans to hand out free tacos to the recently terminated employees, as well as conduct job interviews, a company spokeswoman said.

One four-year employee noted that the atmosphere this morning was extremely quiet, whereas on other days its common to find people milling about in the morning and chatting in groups. She noted her working group, or team, was intact as of noon but that layoffs would be occurring through the rest of the day.

Most of the 1,520 layoffs affect employees at Yahoo’s U.S.-based locations and come from a number of areas within the company, the company said.

Some employees could be seen leaving Yahoo’s Sunnyvale campus with duffel bags with their belongings, or large bags, others with backpacks stuffed tight with their items.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

Why would you want an Amazon Kindle, which is kind of bulky, not too attractive, and of limited scope when you could have a real digital document reader that is thin, easy to use, and very strong?

That’s the business case from Plastic Logic, one of the first companies to be on stage at DemoFall this morning.

It’s made with plastic, not glass, meaning that it is designed to be strong and to be able to stand up to being hit with objects or, presumably, even dropped.

The company’s plastic reader is designed to store dozens or hundreds of business documents on a very thin digital reader. It can store e-books, magazines, newspapers, PDFs and all kinds of information, the company said.

It looks pretty cool, and is said to weigh only ounces, “not pounds,” has a battery that lasts days and can be read in bright daylight.

The company hasn’t given this product a name yet, and it’s not clear when it will be available. But Plastic Logic said it is opening a Germany manufacturing plant later this month, so it shouldn’t be too long.

The Plastic Logic digital reader is a thin, light device that can store all kinds of digital documents.

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The Internet has proved to be a powerful and valuable force in our economy. Annual e-commerce retail sales in the United States reached $107 billion in 2006, a 22 percent jump over the previous year. Restrictive government mandates would only restrain such growth, not encourage it. Each new mandate also brings further government encroachment upon the rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. It is precisely because it developed relatively free from government oversight that the Internet has become such a dynamic part of our economy.

The Payments System Protection Act makes clear that the law can be enforced against sports betting, which the courts already have said is illegal. But it also requires regulators to define exactly what “unlawful Internet gambling” is prior to issuing broader regulations. This would substantially reduce the uncertainty and compliance costs for banks and payment centers. The Senate recently followed suit with its own attempt to clarify the ambiguities in the 2006 Act.

This can be seen in Congress’ attempt to eliminate unlawful Internet gambling. Not only does the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 raise serious questions about privacy, but its vague definitions and poorly defined goals force banks and payment centers into a tight position.

It’s an understatement to say the Internet has done more to shape society over the last 10 years than any other technological innovation, transforming communications, business, and entertainment. The benefits generated by the technological revolution easily parallel those of the earlier industrial revolution. What’s important is that this explosion in growth occurred in an era relatively free of government interference. Unfortunately, that may not remain the case.

Dick Armey, who says that the Treasury Department should be cautious in its Internet gambling rules

While most of us are distracted watching the presidential election, the U.S. Treasury Department is quietly pushing through new rules that potentially will have devastating consequences for privacy and e-commerce.

Dick Armey is the chairman of FreedomWorks, a national grassroots organization dedicated to lower taxes, less government, and more freedom.

Beyond correcting the economic burdens of the law, however, Americans ought to be concerned about the larger questions of the law’s impact on privacy and Internet freedom for the future. Once the federal government begins implementing guidelines for various types of online transactions, what is to prevent it from becoming more involved in every activity on the Internet? The Founding Fathers took great care constructing a government that would protect our endowed rights and liberties, not restrict and monitor them. Americans don’t want the government monitoring their private transactions, online or offline.

Regulatory incursions onto the Internet are becoming more frequent, threatening the open dynamic that has generated so much for consumers. Without vigilance, we face the prospect of turning the Internet into something akin to an electronic version of the Post Office rather than the engine of growth it has become.

They’re now required to serve as an arm of the government, monitoring private Internet transactions, and blocking those that are “illegal.” The problem is that the legislation never defined “unlawful Internet gambling,” leaving banks and payment centers to sort out that thorny issue for themselves. This generates a great deal of confusion, leaving consumers and Internet users facing the real prospect of perfectly legal activities being blocked simply due to uncertainty and caution on the part of banks and payment centers. For those processing these transactions, the ambiguity is compounded by compliance costs and the paperwork burden.

Occasionally we at CNET News will publish outside opinion articles, such as one on spam co-authored by Sen. Ron Wyden, and another on Net neutrality written by Diana DeGette. The background for this article is that the Treasury Department, in response to a 2006 law, is preparing a slew of anti-Internet gambling regulations that could be released at any time. Read below for a critique by Dick Armey, the economist and onetime House Majority Leader who’s now heading the FreedomWorks advocacy group. –Declan McCullagh

The Midnight Regulation Rush is On!

By Dick Armey

Despite the confusion surrounding the legislation, the Treasury Department is drafting a final rule it hopes to release in November to put the program in motion. But some in Congress are well aware of the burdens and complexities associated with this vague rule. Just last month, the House Financial Services Committee passed legislation introduced by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) that offers a simple solution.

Congress has acknowledged the potential downside of its foray onto the Internet with the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, and is working to correct its overreach. The Treasury Department should follow this lead, and not rush forward with sweeping government mandates that threaten the future growth and innovation on the Internet.

(Credit:
FreedomWorks)

And as with his past declarations of interest, Yahoo’s stock responded. Yahoo climbed 4.84 percent to $14.07 a share in early morning trading.

AllThingsD points out as well that Bartz is also in New York this week.

…Whether a deal gets done or not, who knows.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer once again publicly declared his interest in a Yahoo search deal, during a keynote speech at the 2009 Media Summit in New York.

…There are a lot of things that are fairly compelling economically in trying to put our two search efforts together in a partnership.

Ballmer, according to a post in AllThingsD, had this to say about Yahoo and new CEO Carol Bartz:

I’m sure when it’s appropriate, we’ll have a chance to sit down and talk.

How many of your Facebook friends like this band;
The band’s music via Pandora;
The band’s Wikipedia info;
Band pictures on Flickr;
The best tickets for the band’s next concert in your city via Zvents;
How many of your Twitter or FriendFeed contacts have discussed the band;
And geographically useful info about where the band is performing, using Yahoo’s Fire Eagle technology, such as what restaurants near the concert hall are top-rated by Yelp. Headup isn’t a search engine; it’s more an inference engine that looks for meaningful connections, spurred by what the people in your personal social network have talked about. As an example, I posted at my non-CNET blog yesterday about what Joe the Programmer could learn from Joe the Plumber: Headup found a similar post that was along the same lines; one that Google did not, at least not in the first 100 items found.

For example, if you go to Amazon to check out a band you’ve just heard about, with Headup you could see:

Headup gives you what could be called the “back story” on people, places, and things you see in your browser, unobtrusively and quickly. For example, let’s say you’re looking at your page in FriendFeed and see an item by someone who is LouisGray? Click the small yellow plus sign Headup adds to the page when it recognizes a term and you get:

If you’ve been looking for a tool to connect what you see in your Web browser at any given time with other stuff on the Web and in your social networks, Headup, a new
Firefox extension announced Thursday, is something you’ll want to spend some time with.

Headup uses Microsoft’s Silverlight 2 technology–and I had no problems with it whatsoever on my MacBook Pro. Headup provides you with two kinds of information: what’s out there on some of the major social sites like Flickr, Pandora, and Twitter about that person, place or thing, and what the people who make up your personal amalgamated social network think of it.

While Headup is still in private beta, if you want to give it a try, the first 400 people using the invite code of CNETINV will get in.

(Credit:
Bob Walsh) Headup is the creation of Tel Aviv-based start-up SemantiNet, and the brainchild of CEO Tal Keinan who in September nailed down $3.4 million in Series A funding.

“We (Tal and his partner, Tal Muskal) were early adopters of a lot of services,” Keinan said. “And we felt there was just too much of going to the content instead of the content coming to us going on.”

Waz made the comments Tuesday while part of a panel at the Leadership Music Digital Summit in Nashville. This was the same event where an AT&T executive told the gathering that it was cooperating with the Recording Industry Association of America by sending notices to customers accused of illegal filing sharing. The letters are part of a trial program, the executive told the audience. That exec, Jim Cicconi, later clarified that there will never be disruptions of service as a result.

EA Mobile’s Travis Boatman–who’s appeared onstage at Apple’s last two iPhone software events–announced this news during a keynote address at GDC. At some point this year, EA Mobile will release versions of franchises like Madden NFL, Wolfenstein, Command and Conquer, and NBA Live, according to PocketGamer.

These days, everyone’s a gamer. If not a traditionalist firing away at bad guys through a high-end video game console and large TV, he or she might just be in an ongoing Scrabble duel with a Facebook friend or hooked on an addictive
iPhone game like ReMovem.

And on the security front, Facebook has changed the way its password reset tool works so that it does not easily verify e-mail addresses to potential spammers, after CNET News contacted it with concerns from an Israeli security expert.

Among other assertions, Segerstrale argued that while the nature of the social games business differs significantly from that followed for many years by the more traditional, retail-oriented publishers, times are changing, customers’ behaviors and expectations are shifting rapidly, and the winning model may well be the new one.

Speaking of which, Twitter and online advertising company Federated Media earlier this week rolled out ExecTweets, a Microsoft-sponsored site featuring Twitter feeds from “top business execs.”

These titles, which are popping up by the bushelful on platforms like Facebook and MySpace, as well as on Apple’s iPhone, are garnering user numbers that would previously have been thought impossible.

Getting social
Social networks, for their part, also managed to grab quite a few of the week’s headlines. Facebook, for example, after being deluged with mostly negative feedback about its new layout, announced it’s making a handful of changes to appease the outraged masses.

But CNET’s Rafe Needleman quickly pointed out that this is not the mythical revenue model we’re waiting to see from Twitter. It can’t be. It’s just one of those oddball content partnership sites that will look interesting for a while but probably fade away as the Microsoft contract to sponsor it runs down.

The games included Rhythm Heaven, an American version of a rhythm game for the Nintendo DS that Iwata said had already sold 1.7 million copies in Japan; a new Wii Ware game called Rock ‘n Roll Climber that lets players use their Wii controllers and a Wii Balance Board to simulate the motions of climbing a rock wall; and a new Zelda title for the DS called The Legend of Zelda: Spirit.

Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, announced the new set of themes at a GDC event, then hosted a panel of gaming personalities, including Capcom producer Yoshinori Ono, and Charles Huang, co-founder of RedOctane, which makes Guitar Hero.

Scenes from GDC 2009

Joe Waz, a senior vice president at Comcast, the nation’s second largest ISP, told a gathering of music industry executives that the company has issued 2 million notices on behalf of copyright owners, according to multiple people who were in attendance.

And finally, at GDC Friday, engineers spelled out the inner workings and target markets for Larrabee, Intel’s first graphics chip in over a decade.

The big advantage IPv6 has over IPv4 is the number of unique addresses it can accommodate–4.3 billion for IPv4 compared to about 34,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 for IPv6. Although 4.3 billion may sound like a lot, addresses are often allocated in large blocks that mean many aren’t generally available, and expert estimates forecast an end to new IPv4 addresses in 2011.

The search giant has partnered with nine publishers to come up with about two dozen themes from recent games such as Electronic Arts’ Spore to arcade classics such as Galaga.

“Over time, we’ll continue to give you more control over what’s in your main stream and how you consume it, wrote Product Director Christopher Cox in a blog post Tuesday. “We have the eventual goal of building filters that summarize this activity so you can see a more condensed view of what’s been going on. We’re also thinking about ways of filtering out some of the Wall posts and content directed to specific people to focus more on posts shared with everyone.”

“Comcast, like other major ISPs, forwards notices of alleged infringement that we receive from music, movie, videogame, and other content owners to our customers,” Comcast said in a statement. “This is the same process we’ve had in place for years–nothing has changed. While we have always supported copyright holders in their efforts to reduce piracy under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and continue to do so, we have no plans to test a so-called ‘three-strikes-and-you’re-out’ policy.”

Gaming continues to be one of the most active areas of Apple’s App Store, and game developers at GDC flocked to sessions regarding the iPhone–conference organizers were forced to turn away late-arriving attendees to some sessions.

Google also got in on the GDC action by unveiling the latest addition to its iGoogle start page service: a collection of themes designed by video game publishers.

Tesla S electric sedan unveiled–photos

In other Internet-related news, Google now believes there’s a financial incentive for companies to support the next-gen Internet standard, IPv6. And Google itself could profit.

In addition, sources confirmed that Cox Communications is also assisting the RIAA in the group’s new campaign to use ISPs to help discourage consumers from pirating songs.

Huang also noted that user-generated content created inside of games has been on a sharp rise, as witnessed by the number of user-designed tracks that have been created and downloaded in the latest Guitar Hero title; the figure now tops 10 million.

The monetization comes when a social game publisher figures out how to attract a sizable audience and convince many of those people to engage in relatively cheap microtransactions for any number of things: level-ups, game gear, music, or whatever is on offer. Advertising is also a possible revenue producer.

Among the topics discussed was how the Web had changed gaming development. The general answer was that game developers and publishers alike are getting much more feedback during the development process, in part from increasingly simpler ways to aggregate information from blogs and message boards, as well as public beta programs.

Nowhere was this notion of the mainstreaming of gaming more pronounced than at this week’s Game Developers Conference, the massive gathering of which some consider all the more critical to the industry this year, given market forces. Sure, the video game industry is growing and some say it’s even recession-resistant, but it hasn’t escaped the wrath of the downturn entirely, with a series of recent studio closings, and layoffs and killed projects at even the strongest console manufacturers and biggest game publishers.

While Nintendo’s
Wii continues to outpace expectations, and certain games are making fortunes for their publishers, a strong argument can be made that the hottest segment of the video games industry is one that is still in its infancy: social games.

Twitter still has not announced a business model, Needleman later continued. There are no Pro Twitter accounts. There is no TwitterWords advertising program. You still can’t buy plush toy Fail Whales from Twitter. But that’s OK, he says. “There is rich value inside Twitter, and I do believe the company can afford to take its time to find the good ways to extract it.”

Net news
Internet service providers this week started coming forward about agreeing to work with the recording industry to battle illegal file sharing.

Among the changes already in the works is live updating, which gives users the ability to turn on auto-updating so they don’t have to refresh the page to see what’s new.

The system will also stream games directly to a TV via a small plug-in device, and players can use a custom wireless controller as well as VoIP headsets in conjunction with it.

Later in the week, during a Q&A session at the Global Technology Symposium held Thursday at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said the company’s still not sure why the recent redesign process irked so many of the Web site’s users.

Also at GDC, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata revved up a packed house at his opening keynote address, but his revelations were limited to three new games and a new storage infrastructure for the Wii virtual console.

Also of note
Rhomobile says it’s got a way for software developers to write apps once and have them run on five different modern smartphone operating systems…Obama commits $1.2. billion in energy R&D, holds an online town hall meeting, and his staff meets with tech execs…In job news, Amazon is reporting closing three facilities, Google is cutting nearly 200 sales and marketing jobs, and IBM job cuts hit its applications services unit…Tesla takes the covers off the Model S, an electric sedan priced at $56,400 but which qualifies for a $7,500 federal tax credit, and the company’s CEO makes an economic argument for buying it…and Ubuntu’s “Jaunty Jackalope” Ubuntu springs into beta.

“In terms of what went wrong with the redesign, we don’t know yet.” But she added that the percentage of users giving the redesign a thumbs-down was smaller than previous changes to the site.

OnLive, which was started by WebTV founder Steve Perlman and former Eidos CEO Mike McGarvey, is aiming to launch a system–seven years in the works–that will digitally distribute first-run, AAA games from publishers like Electronic Arts, Take-Two, Ubisoft, Atari, and others at the same time that those titles are released into retail channels. The system is designed to allow players to stream on-demand games at the highest quality onto any Intel-based Mac or PC running XP or Vista, regardless of how powerful the computer is.

“As a percentage of our users, this one is much less than before,” she said.
She also offered a backhanded compliment to Twitter, the microblogging site that Facebook considered buying last year.

In another threat to the likes of the Xbox,
PS3, and Wii, a start-up called OnLive announced a brand-new game distribution system Monday night that, if it works as planned, could change the games industry forever.

“What’s interesting about Twitter is that they are a very good company doing one thing very well, which is real-time update,” she said. “We are, by far, the largest photo-sharing site on the Web…Similarly, we are larger at doing what Twitter does. We think what they’re doing is good. Our redesign is not in reference to them–nor was our redesign in reference to Flickr.”

Comcast said Wednesday afternoon that the notices Waz referred to were part of the company’s standard practice and not a new policy.

A company representative also says that Facebook has been “looking at” the possibility of building in a virtual currency, but his language was about as ambiguous as it gets.

At GDC on Thursday, Kristian Segerstrale, the CEO and co-founder of PlayFish, one of the most successful publishers of social games stated his case for how the mainstream video games industry can learn from his side of the business.

Meanwhile, EA Mobile is making a big bet on the iPhone and iPod Touch, announcing plans this week to port more than a dozen of its most popular games to Apple’s gadgets.

Update at 7:59 a.m. PST: A RealNetworks representative quashes a rumor about a RealNetworks-MTV joint venture.

According to an internal memo (first leaked to gossip blog Gawker), 850 positions have been cut. That amounts to 7 percent of the company’s workforce.

A press release Thursday from Viacom gave a more detailed explanation: “The restructuring and write-down together will result in a pre-tax charge of $400 million to $450 million, or $0.42 to $0.48 per diluted share, in the fourth quarter of 2008. These staffing and compensation actions and write-downs are expected to result in pre-tax savings of $200 million to $250 million in 2009.”

“Our advantages and best efforts can’t completely protect Viacom from the very serious and broad-based challenges of this economic recession,” CEO Philippe Dauman wrote in the e-mail. “Viacom’s long-term health will depend on our shared commitment to adapt, to innovate and to make difficult choices. To compete and thrive, we need to create an organization and a cost structure that are in step with the evolving economic environment.”

It’s been common knowledge that Viacom layoffs were on the way, and the company had already canceled its big holiday parties this year, giving employees two extra vacation days in exchange.

The long-expected layoffs at Viacom, parent company of MTV Networks, have finally taken place.

According to a separate post on Gawker, the New York office for MTV-RealNetworks joint venture Rhapsody America is rumored to have closed, leaving 25 people jobless. RealNetworks spokesman Ryan Luckin said in an e-mail to me on Thursday that the rumor is false.

In addition to MTV, Viacom owns BET Networks and Paramount Pictures. Its cable channels include Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, VH1, and Noggin.