Boxee

New York-based consulting firm Herman Blackbook is offering seed funding for developers making applications for open-source platforms like Twitter, the iPhone, Boxee, AppNexus and more. With their "New Platforms Fund," the company will give up to 10 "cutting edge" ideas (they're not talking iFart here) $1,000-$3,000 each to develop into the alpha stage, and take minor equity stakes as they grow, too.

"The fund will focus on innovation that has low barriers for mainstream adoption as we find that all too often, innovation is too far ahead of the adoption curve," said Darren Herman, principal of Herman Blackbook, in a statement. "We know we cannot fund every idea through our door and our investment philosophy is not for everyone, but should that golden egg exist that falls beyond our investment scope, our Hb network of angel investors and venture capitalists will come in handy."  read more »

Boxee, the free open-source software that could change your living room experience forever, got busy during the Thanksgiving break and just released a new alpha version, adding Netflix, The WB (Buffy fans, rejoice!), MTVMusic and other features. Boxee users can now play, browse, and queue 'Instant Watch' movies through the application.

In a survey of their alpha users last month, Netflix topped the most-wanted list along with HBO, ABC and Discovery shows. Avner Ronen, Boxee's co-founder, said HBO won't be coming any time soon. "the BIG issue with HBO is that they don’t offer full episodes online… :(," he wrote in a blog post.  read more »

What should media organizations do to survive? "We should embrace change,” Jeff Jarvis tells John Koblin. “Instead, too often we fight change. That’s the nature of organizations and institutions that hold power. Change might mean losing power. The great and magnificent irony of online—this would really send [Ron] Rosenbaum’s spine up—is that in my blog, in what I call Jarvis’ Law, is that I say if you give people control, we will use it. If you don’t, you lose us. The counterintuitive way of the Internet age is when you give up control, you win. The old way was to maintain control to win."

Speaking of change, which current and former journalists want to become flacks for Dan Abrams' new venture? According to Felix Gillette, "Less than a week after he announced he was launching a 'global strategy firm' that would assemble a network of thousands of working journalists, bloggers, authors and ex-journalists, he was drowning in applications."

And yet more change. Leon Neyfakh writes, "Though prayers this week should undoubtedly be with the editors of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, who were told a few days ago by their CEO that they can no longer afford to acquire new books, it should not go unremarked that editors at other houses are being forced to give up something almost as essential: lunch!"

Plus: It's Living Room 2.0... Vegetables Are the New Meat... Mark Bittman

Fred Wilson watches television in a modern living room, but it probably isn’t quite like yours. Call it living room 2.0. As managing partner of Union Square Ventures—which invests in budding tech start-ups like Twitter, Tumblr and 10gen—he often brings the latest gadgets and social networking whats-its into his West Village home. He says his big “‘aha’ moment” came last year, when he plugged his Mac Mini, Apple’s tiny desktop computer drive that’s about half the size of a toaster, into his 60-inch television display. Suddenly the Internet, the whole World Wide Web, was in his living room.

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Apple:

Apple TV, Steve Jobs' digital media device, went on the market in March 2007. But sales have been lackluster and, in an Oct. 21 earnings call, Mr. Jobs said "the whole category is still a hobby right now. I don't think anybody has succeeded at it and actually the experimentation has slowed down. A lot of the early companies that were trying things have faded away, so I'd have to say that given the economic conditions, given the venture capital outlooks and stuff, I continue to believe it will be a hobby in 2009." But Mr. Jobs is a clever guy.  read more »

We were at the NY Tech Meetup last night, hosted by Meetup founder Scott Heiferman himself, at the ridiculously gorgeous/high-tech IAC building in Chelsea. In the huge lobby, budding start-ups have five minutes to present their new projects to investors, colleagues and developers. Here's one we were pretty excited about: Boxee. It's like TiVo, iTunes and Netflix... on steroids.

Boxee is what its New York creators call a "social media device." You download it onto your computer, it searches your hard drive and all of your devices (from your iPhone to your iPod) for videos, pictures and music and puts it all into one pretty interface. You can hook it up to your TV at home and get even better visuals.Check out how it looks in the video above, courtesy of Allen Stern at CenterNetworks.  read more »