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While there are plenty of iPhone line-standers poking at a variety of digital devices to pass the hours, a number of iWaiters are working on their summer reading lists with some books. You remember books, right? Square-ish things made of dead trees with words (often written by dead people) in them?

Steve Jobs doesn’t seem to have much faith in books. He told the NYTimes earlier this year: “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Looking at the lines forming in front of Apple stores everywhere, it seems many of Jobs’s own customers are still bibliophiles. A quick poll of the Monday lunch-hour line at Apple’s flagship San Francisco store yielded a diversity of titles:

“The Pillars of the Earth” - Ken Follet
“You Can’t Win” - Jack Black
“Ulysses” - James Joyce
“The Conquest of Bread” - Peter Kropotkin
“Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich” - Robert Frank
“Snow Blind” - Robert Sabbag
“Dérive à Partir de Marx et Freud” - J. F. Lyotard

One booking-toting iPhone customer told me: “Books might be dead, but reading isn’t.”

What do you think? What reading material did you bring to the iPhone line?

Iran’s missile project may need more rocket scientists to help gets its projectiles off the ground, but its marketing team desperately needs some talented photo retouchers to better cover up its ballistic shortcomings. The duping of numerous newspapers by a digitally altered picture of Iran’s missile test is just the latest case of a Photoshopped picture being taken at face value. But while the sophistication of forgery detection software is way behind that of photo manipulation, with the help of government funding, it’s starting to catch up.

Hany Farid, a computer science professor at Dartmouth College, has developed software for faux photo detection, also known as digital forensics. His lab is funded by the Department of Justice and the FBI, which has already made use of it.

Indeed, with digital evidence being used more and more in the courtroom, both the prosecution and the defense want to be sure that exhibit A is really what it seems. “Any time you have digital evidence, either side can raise the specter of digital manipulation,” Farid said in a phone interview.

Farid’s detection software works by analyzing the patterns in photos. Unaltered photos have natural patterns in terms of lighting, contrast and scale. Altered photos will show unnatural patterns. “There’s no single technique,” Farid explained. “There’s a suite of tools, over a dozen. It’s not ‘Push a button and wait for something to happen.’ It’s very much an investigation looking for specific things.”

And Farid is now starting to see more interest from media circles about his software. He said he’s talked with the Associated Press, which deals with thousands of pictures of day, about using his software to check photos. Today’s Iranian missile photo gives the issue much more urgency. “It’s no longer just Star Magazine and the National Enquirer. Suddenly there are serious geopolitical issues involved.”

There was a time not too long ago when the business implications of social media were unclear; resistance to it on the part of corporations, therefore, was somewhat understandable. Web 2.0 seemed like just the next Internet fad in a series of many, and while it was viewed as having value for individuals and enthusiasts, it didn’t seem viable for corporate use. But corporations need to realize that social media is here to stay — and that in it lies the future of marketing.

According to a recent BusinessWeek article, 11.2 percent of online adults in the U.S. publish content on a blog at least once a month, 24.8 percent read blog content and 13.7 percent comment on it. And the younger the demographic, the higher the number. The days of mainstream media monopolizing information is long gone, with certain blogs attracting millions of visitors each month as people seek out a more personal spin on information. And as the web becomes more social, people are beginning to value relationships and conversations more than the passive consumption of information. BusinessWeek’s concluding advice: “Catch up…or catch you later.”

Social media is a lot more than just blogs, however, and a combination of blogs, social news and networking sites, along with new ways of consuming media online (YouTube, Flickr, Last.fm) have changed the world of marketing and advertising. No longer is it just about broadcasting your pitch and plastering your message all over the place; instead people expect corporations to engage with them through social platforms in a person-to-person fashion. As Bob Metcalfe notes:

People listen better and longer when you just talk to them and listen back. All too often professional marketers lose their credibility by hyperbole, hubris and amplification. It seems to me self evident that just talking with people is more effective than shouting and repeating yourself as if your audience was comprised of deaf idiots.

One term used to describe this evolution is Social Media Marketing; another is Conversational Marketing — a practice that involves engagement and interaction, a two-way communication rather than a one-way flow of information. While some companies continue to struggle with this new form of marketing, others have embraced it wholeheartedly. One such company is Samsung, as is evident in the marketing strategy for their latest phone.

Rather than relying on traditional forms of marketing, Samsung has created brand and product pages on the leading social networking platforms such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo and has launched a campaign that places the role of marketing the product squarely in the hands of their current (and potential) customers. The company is asking them to record songs and upload them to a community that Samsung has created where others vote for the ones they like best; the four winning songs will be featured in a national radio and online ad campaign.

This is a great example of embracing not only social networks as marketing platforms but also user-generated content as conversational marketing. If it works, it will get Samsung’s new phone marketed through word of mouth, with advertisement campaigns generated by actual people who would use their products.

With clear evidence that brute-force marketing is no longer as effective as it once was, what I find surprising is that more companies aren’t working with their communities this way. They must not understand the value of conversational marketing, in particular of social shopping, whereby people make online shopping decisions based on what their network of friends has previously bought and the recommendations they make. According to an AMA survey from 2006 (the most current I could find), the social shopping industry is already on track to be a multibillion-dollar industry. In the survey, 47 percent of consumers said that they would be open to using social networks to find and discuss holiday gift ideas, 51 percent said that, given the option, they would look for discounts on social networking sites. When it comes to downloading coupons from social networking sites, 51 percent said that they would do that, and another 18 percent said that they would participate on such sites by (reading or) writing product reviews. Most importantly, 29 percent said that they would actually make purchases through these sites.

In other words, if corporations want to make their advertising truly effective, they need to get social.

Muhammad Saleem is a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites.

Virgin Media and BPI (the UK equivalent of RIAA) plan to start sending out warning letters to the ISP’s errant subscribers illegally sharing music over Virgin’s broadband. BPI will identify illegal file sharers and send that information to Virgin Media. The ISP will then send the subscriber two “informative letters,” one from Virgin and one from BPI. Thus begins a plan of action the ISP and music association started back in March. We weren’t impressed with it then, and we aren’t impressed with it now.

Enlisting ISPs to help enforce civil laws on their networks is a slippery slope that could lead to privacy violations, conflicts of interest and lawsuits against the ISPs. Plus, warning people who illegally share music files that what they’re doing is wrong isn’t going to save music sales.

So what that Virgin isn’t disconnecting users who receive warning letters? It’s still a private company working to enforce public laws. There’s a word for that. Vigilante.

Although we at GigaOM are well aware that we’re part of the next generation of media, much of what we do and how we do it is governed by some of the most basic rules of traditional journalism, a profession whose ethics and mission we hold very dear to our hearts. So we were especially honored to learn that when presented with 10 of the top technology blogs on the web, tech reporters ranked GigaOM as the most credible one.

PR firm Brodeur, a division of Ominicom, teamed up with Marketwire to find out how beat reporters viewed the influence of social media on traditional news delivery; the survey also asked the reporters to rank blogs and other social media sites. From the survey:

Tech reporters ranked Engadget, Gizmodo, and Boing Boing as by far the most popular among the top 10 tested. But when it comes to credibility of content, journalists rated Arstechnica and GigaOm, along with Engadget, the top three sites. GigaOm scored the highest with 45% saying its content was “very credible.”

We have you to thank for this. Our community hold us to an incredibly high standard; if we’re doing something wrong, you are the first ones to tell us. And it is this evolution of media to which we are most dedicated — the ability to continue the conversation with those whose opinions matter to us the most: our readers.

Of course, we are always looking for good writers. If you’re interested in contributing to the site, drop me a line at carolyn at gigaom dot com.

Updated: We all know there’s no love lost between Hulu, the Hollywood-backed online video service, and Google-owned YouTube. The two companies have taken snipes at each other. For instance, at the NAB trade show, Hulu was trash-talking YouTube. Jason Kilar, the CEO of Hulu, said that you can’t make money by posting unauthorized and copyrighted videos — with a YouTube page behind him.

Hating your rival is part of the game, which is why it’s hard to ignore the irony of a Hulu Channel on YouTube. YES! What you just read is right. The LA Times discovered the channel and posted about it on their blog. Seems a little disingenuous! The reason for the Hulu-on-YouTube channel is pretty basic — YouTube has what Hulu hopes for: traffic and an audience. Hulu has content from its backers. It makes perfect sense for the two of them to start working together. Kilar should remember that you can’t make money by posting to a site that doesn’t have a lot of traffic.

NewTeeVee talked to Hulu and got a confirmation from them that indeed they are the ones who set up the channel for promotional purposes.

YouTube head of premium content partnerships Jordan Hoffner says: “It’s fantastic that Hulu is providing content to our global community and using our platform to grow and drive traffic to their business. Media companies large and small can set up channels or even partner with us to interact with the world’s largest and most active community. “

UBS’s John Hodulik, one of the best telecom analysts, has pegged AT&T as his top pick for this earnings seasons and is expecting some good tidings from Ma Bell. What caught my eye in his note this morning was the progress made by AT&T’s IPTV effort, U-Verse. Hodulik says AT&T has added about 135,000 subscribers in the first quarter of 2008, up from 105,000 new subs in the fourth quarter of 2007. (It could have had one more subscriber in Stacey, who is waiting for U-Verse to show up in Austin.)

This means the company could add as many as 975,000 more U-Verse subscribers by the end of 2008. If that is the case, then U-Verse will have done much better than company expected for 2008. At present, U-Verse is available to about 5.5 million homes, but by end of 2008 that number will increase, helping U-Verse penetration.AT&T has forecasted 1 million new U-Verse subscribers for 2008. AT&T had 231,000 U-Verse subscribers at the end of 2007.

EMI, one of the global music majors, is shutting down some of their offices in Asia. Music 2.0 Blog reports that offices in Thailand and Singapore have been shuttered. Regional headquarters in Hong King are ready for the grim reaper, Music 2.0 reports. All this is part of the right-sizing moves EMI has been making. It had earlier announced plans to cut thousands of jobs world wide. The big cuts in the region are going to come in June, Music 2.0 Blog asserts, and offers up an in depth analysis of how global music companies blew the big Asian opportunity: ringtones.

It is thus frustrating to note the column inches devoted to so-called innovative concepts in the US and Europe like Spiral Frog, Q-trax, Imeem and last.fm and their courting of major labels when Asian label executives themselves had been rebuffed for years by their head offices to approve similar deals in their home countries.

EMI’s move makes me wonder how long before other three music labels - Warner, Universal, and Sony-BMG follow suit. EMI over past few years has become the canary in coal mine: they aren’t the biggest of the music majors and as a result have been open to take more draconian measures to survive the music industry meltdown. Whether it was signing up for DRM free music, or ruthlessly cutting its payroll, EMI has been ahead of the curve, only to see its bigger brethren follow suit.

Mike Volpi, CEO of Joost, spent his first weekend in California in many months dealing with the blowback from a story in The Sunday Times (of UK) that has the company scaling back its global ambitions in favor of a US-only focus. We talked earlier this evening, and Volpi said none of those things are actually true. (PaidContent had talked to Joost spokesperson earlier today.)

“We are focusing on US, Western Europe, China and a few other Asian markets,” he told me. “Taking a more measured approach to our expansion, and keeping it in sync with markets where online advertising is mature enough.” Volpi pointed out that Joost launched in China two weeks ago, and has recently signed content partnerships in Scandinavia. When you add to the mix UK, France and a couple of other Western European countries, Volpi said it is pretty obvious that the company is not scaling back from its global ambitions.

“What we are not doing is chasing every market, because as a start-up we need to be focused,” Volpi added. Due to its heritage - it was started by Skype co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis - Joost had received a lot of press coverage. God knows, I wrote about them a few times. The fact that it is run by Volpi, a highly regarded former Cisco executive and funded by the likes of uber VC funds Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures, it is hardly a surprise that Joost is being closely scrutinized. The company raised about $45 million in May 2007.

Joost was supposed to be the delivery vehicle for Hollywood content in the US. Instead, Hulu, a web-based video company backed by major networks chose its thunder and market, leaving Joost scrambling to play catch up. It has Viacom and CBS as its primary US partners, and it clearly needs to sign-up more A-list type content providers. Furthermore, the BBC’s iPlayer (where the former Joost CTO currently works), Kangaroo and other players are beginning to challenge Joost on its turf in Europe as well.

That said, the company doesn’t have much room for error. It needs to quickly improve its client and platform. Joost client has been subject of much criticism. Volpi knows that. He said that Joost is going to announce a new web-based platform in a few months. (We offered them 5 ways they can get out of trouble. Anil Gupte had listed 7 reasons they could be in trouble.)

When I asked Volpi about layoffs, he said that company realigned its work force. A few people were let go recently, as I first reported for NewTeeVee. Many contractors were cut as well.

As a result Joost of today is a trimmer version of its former self, thanks to pruning by Volpi, who became Joost CEO in May 2007. Some of these details were outlined in a Portfolio article. I tried to pin down Volpi on the total number of employees the company currently has, but he would not comment.

Rafat in his report says that Joost has about 100 employees. By that yardstick and my own not-quite-confirmed-data, that’s a head count reduction of around 35 to 40. Volpi said that the company is adding more “engineering” folks in their New York office and contrary to published reports has no plans to shut down the Netherlands operation.

Photo by Joey Wan.

In a few weeks, online bookmaking site Blurb will launch a new community called BlurbNation, a section of the Blurb site where people can connect with a professional designer that will take their photos, stories, recipes or any other images and pull them together into a book. Such a move is aimed at expanding Blurb’s business beyond the 90,000 books it printed in 2007 — and to take it out of the red.

Blurb, which was founded in 2004, launched its site in April of 2006 and is on track to turn in breakeven results this year, is both a digital bookmaker and an example of yesteryear’s big Internet trend: The Long Tail (It seems so long ago, but it was only three-and-half years ago that Anderson wrote about the idea in Wired). Since we move at digital speed, we’ve already discarded that trend (and possibly refuted it) for social everything. But true business growth doesn’t take place at that harried clip, it typically requires the five to seven years allotted by VCs for their investment time frames.

00 Those time frames are there for a reason. Blurb CEO Eileen Gittins Blurb says the company exceeded its revenue expectations by 40 percent last year. (In 2007 she told Time she anticipated sales between $5 million and $10 million for the year.) And in the quarter following its launch late last year in Europe, sales from the continent have climbed to account for 17 percent of total overall revenues from a mere 2.5 percent.

To me this is a nice reminder to avoid focusing solely on the trend du jour, but also to keep in mind that much of the world runs at business speed, and that it’s the people out in the rest of the world that break a technology site into the mainstream.

Blurb makes books, nothing terribly technical about it, until you think about how impossible it would be, before the Internet existed, to source, edit, design and print 90,000 different titles in a single year. Its biggest customers are corporations trying to create memorable advertorials, though artists and average Americans also pull together their own works of art. Blurb competes with other online publishers LuLu and Xlibris, but has the lead in high-end photobooks.

The cool thing about marrying the digital medium with one that began in 1040 with the first Chinese printing presses (sorry Gutenberg), is that when it comes to user-generated content, Blurb may end up making UGC profitable before YouTube does. Profitability isn’t everything and I’m not sure how Blurb could ever reach more people than YouTube, but it’s nice to talk to an online service that can make money in the here and now.

The 700 MHz auctions are finally coming to a close, meeting most if not all expectations. And soon this will set off a network buildout frenzy, especially among the upstarts who end up winning this precious spectrum. Ericsson, the mobile equipment maker, is betting that they will call them for their network gear needs. It will support HSPA for now and in 2009 Ericsson will bring to market products based on 4G technology called LTE. If your technology choice is WiMAX, which is another technology that might be in the running for the 4G sweepstakes, call someone else.

The web-to-mobile calling efforts are starting to get interesting. Last week Jaxtr talked about how it planned to make money by selling ads, and today Jangl launches its own ad efforts tied to a partnership with Pudding Media. The plan is to target pre-roll ads on Jangl’s existing voice calls and SMS messages by using location and demographic information provided in the profiles on various social media sites.

Jangl has already made money by selling the ability to receive calls without giving out a phone number on dating web sites, but the ad efforts are targeting bigger money. Jangl’s CEO Michael Cerda estimates the CPMs are around $30 to $60 for SMS messages ads, and around $10 for voice. Now that revenue is entering the equation, we should soon have less subjective ways to judge who is successful in this crowded market. Sales are a better metric than user numbers when it comes to figuring out which services will succeed.