The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘youtube’

From an audience perspective, the ability to embed videos on other sites is what expands their viewership and makes them go viral. But from an advertising perspective, most of that video is the Web equivalent of dead air. “Nobody sells embedded video because nobody knows where it is going,” says Magnify.net CEO Steve Rosenbaum. He has a partial fix for that, a new video advertising product he calls Elastic Inventory (more on that below).

Magnify offers a video aggregation platform that powers the video sections of mid-sized Web publishers such as New York Magazine, Bicycling, and The Week. Magnify lets these publishers upload their own video and mix that with video from more than 20 video sites across the Web such as YouTube, Metacafe, and Dailymotion.

The problem is that those publishers can’t run any pre-roll ads against those “curated” videos. But Magnify is starting to broker deals with the large video-sharing sites, starting with Metacafe, to allow publishers who use Magnify to insert their own pre-roll ads in the embedded videos. Magnify negotiates for the ad inventory on a wholesale basis across its network, allowing a publisher to buy video ads at a $5 CPM, for instance, and sell it at the $15 or $20 CPMs their own video ad inventory goes for. They pocket the spread in between (Magnify does not take a cut, it charges for its white-label video platform instead). The product is called Elastic Inventory because publishers don’t have to commit to buying any of the video ad space until they’ve already sold it. If they don’t sell it, they can continue to run the videos without ads.

The thinking is that advertisers are willing to pay higher CPMs for safe video inventory on what they deem to be high-quality sites. They don’t care if it is user-generated video as long as they’ve been vetted, which is what the editors on these Magnify-powered sites do. They are buying the known audience which visits these publishers and the controlled context in which these videos are shown.

Rosenbaum wants to cut deals for Elastic Inventory across all the major video-sharing sites. Dailymotion is probably next, but I doubt YouTube would ever agree to an arrangement where they lose control of the market for their video ads. And YouTube represents the lion’s share of embedded videos across Magnify-powered sites and elsewhere. Now, Magnify publishers will have an economic incentive to choose videos from other video-sharing sites instead.

When Opera Software last week released the final version of its Opera browser (version 10.60), it titled its press release ‘What is faster than the fastest?’.

The company touts other features, like built-in geolocation and webM support, as well but not nearly as much as it boasts about its browser’s speed. By doing so, the software maker aims to challenge claims that Google’s Chrome browser is, in fact, speedier than Opera and other popular browsers such as Firefox, Safari and IE.

In the midst of the browser wars, an Opera-employed copywriter has now turned to one of the most over-used but still amusing Internet memes, and has come up with some custom subtitles for the famous Hitler outburst scene from the film ‘Der Untergang’ (via Download Squad).

Some choice – fake – quotes:

“You idiot! Nobody uses developer builds!”

“You call yourself developers because you spent years in university, where you only learned to make Youtube (sic) videos and Pac Man (sic) games!”

“We have 20,000 employees and run half the Internet and we’ve made a browser that looks like a Fisher-Price toy!”

For the record, Lifehacker ran some speed tests on both the Windows and Mac platforms, and concluded that Chrome and Safari still beat Opera’s latest on the latter OS, while the latest stable version of Chrome also beat Opera 10.60 on Windows.

Furthermore, DailyTech tested Opera 10.6 against the upcoming Internet Explorer 9, and while they concluded that the browser outranked it in all 3 benchmarks, the Opera browser only came out on top in one of them, with Chrome beating them in the two other ones.

Ah well, as long as they all keep getting faster and we get to have some laughs from time to time, all is well in the world despite all this virtual warfare.

As we noted a few days ago, the latest stable builds of Google Chrome now come with native Flash support built-in by default. The hope behind this is to get better performance and better security out of Adobe’s plug-in. To showcase how well it works, Google has created a Flash-based game on top of YouTube, Chrome Fastball. It’s pretty nifty.

If you go to this page you YouTube, you’ll find the game. Basically, it’s a combination of a YouTube video and a task-based game that you try to complete as quickly as possible. A video starts playing showing a Rube Goldberg-like contraption. As a ball travels through it, at certain points, challenges pop up that you must complete before the video continues. One challenge is to find the best route in Google Maps, one is to tweet something (from a generic Twitter account tied to the game), one is to look up artists on Last.fm, etc.

Says Google:

In testing Flash Player integration into Chrome, the Chrome team admittedly spent many, many fun hours with a few of our favorite Flash-based indie games. So as a side project, we teamed up with a few creative folks to build

Between the iPad’s blocking of Flash earlier this year and the huge wave of ad campaigns, open letters, and debates that followed, it seems that everyone has an opinion on the merits (or lack thereof) of Flash on the modern web. Today, YouTube software engineer John Harding took to the site’s official blog to weigh on the current status of HTML5 video support. The gist of it: while HTML5 is great, it can’t do everything YouTube (or most mainstream video sites) need.

Harding explains his thesis point by point, beginning with the need for a standard video format for HTML5. Politics, codec quality, and patent disputes have kept HTML5 from adopting a single standard for video content (H.264, the industry standard, has licensing issues). Google hopes to remedy this with the WebM project and VP8, which were unveiled last month. But VP8 is still a long way from becoming the industry standard.

Next, Harding spells out issues with video streaming — namely, the fact that HTML5 doesn’t really have anything that matches Flash when it comes to dynamically adjusting quality control and buffering. There’s also the fact that HTML5 can’t offer protect copyrighted content from being copied (Flash can through RTMPE). And there isn’t a way to take an HTML5 video and embed it on another site, at least not the way YouTube does with annotations and other associated data. Other issues include the inability to play HTML5 full-screen, and no standard for Camera and Microphone access from the browser.

Of course, this doesn’t come as a big surprise. YouTube started offering an HTML5 video player earlier this year, but the default player is still in Flash. And Google has made it quite clear that despite its general advocacy of open standards, it believes there’s still quite a bit of life left in Flash. In fact, it’s even baking it into its Chrome browser.

Startup Bling Nation has landed a pretty major deal with PayPal, we’ve learned. Bling Nation’s payment systems addresses physical goods in merchant stores and will now allow consumers to use their payment chips to deduct funds from a PayPal account.

Here’s how Bling Nation works. The startup partners with banks, who then offer the consumers who use their services a Bling Nation and “Bank” branded chip that can be stuck onto any cell phone device. The chip will allow any user to make a payment directly out of their checking account similar to a debit payment. Bling Nation also partners with all of the local merchants in given town, to give them special “Bling Nation” credit card machines that will scan the chips.

The payment device will calculate the number of times a payee has made a transaction and as an added bonus, will automatically award the user with coupons, points or discounts, which the merchant determines. The device will read the chip and deduct the money for a purchase out of the payee’s bank account. Bling Nation even allows merchants to implement a security feature, in which upon purchase, the customer will have to enter a PIN code for larger transactions.

With the deal with PayPal, anyone will be use Bling Nation to link a PayPal account and receive tags that they can then stick to their cell phones. You may also be able to enroll during the checkout process as well. And Bling Nation in turn will equip merchants in given areas with payment devices that work with the chip.

This is a big win for Bling Nation’s system, which originally had ambitions of solely focusing on hyperlocal banks in small communities. The PayPal integration is currently being tested in Palo Alto and is steadily being rolled out nationally. Most of the work involves distributing the payments devices to local merchants.

Enrollment is limited for now, says co-founder Meyer Malka. Consumers can sign up for the service at participating merchants and eventually through the web. The deal also represents a way for consumers to start paying for physical goods, not just online purchases, with their PayPal accounts.

Bling Nation recently raised a whopping $20 million in funding to scale its system. Armed with a deal with PayPal, the startup is well on its way to making it into stores nationwide.

And PayPal is one step closer to fulfilling its futuristic vision for the payments platform, as shown in this video.

Energy efficiency tracking company OPOWER added Hadi Partovi to its Technology Advisory Board and will open new offices in San Francisco next month. The Arlington, VA based company’s 10,000 square foot office in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood will have room for between 75 and 100 employees, a large part of which will be engineers. “We signed a two-year sublease because we hope to grow out of that space,” says CEO Daniel Yates.

In Partovi, OPOWER is getting an experienced advisor who will help build the company in its plans to grow from 95 to 150 employees total in the coming year. Partovi co-founded online music service iLike with his brother Ali, which they sold to MySpace, before leaving in April. Previously, Partovi founded Tellme Networks, which was acquired by Microsoft for a reported $800 million. Partovi also worked on IE5.

OPOWER provides utility companies with a way to engage customers with easy-to-understand home energy reports designed to inspire them to reduce consumption. OPOWER uses behavioral economics to provide each customer with a personalized analysis of their usage, taking into account their circumstances and lifestyle.

“Instead of saying ‘you used this many kilowatts’, we say ‘you use 5% less or 20% more than your neighbors,’” says Senior Director of Marketing and Strategy Ogi Kavazovic.

The company has signed on 35 utility companies in 15 states across the country, including seven of the 10 biggest players. Yates says that by the end of this year, OPOWER will be saving more energy than the entire U.S. solar power industry is producing. The company is targeting north of $30 million in annual recurring revenue.

Music licensing company Rumblefish last week announced a new music program for YouTube users, enabling them to buy a lifetime, worldwide music license on a selected music track at $1.99 a pop and fully edit the music into their videos.

The online store, dubbed Friendly Music, has just been pushed live.

YouTube users can use the website to access Rumblefish’s catalog of copyright-cleared songs (about 35,000 tracks strong), which they can use to create soundtracks for their videos.

As I mentioned, songs can be purchased from the Friendly Music site at $1.99 per video, and users can edit them using which video-editing application they prefer. Buyers receive an official license for every song they use, so when they upload their finished video to YouTube they can be confident it will not be blocked or deprived of its audio.

FriendlyMusic offers royalty-free songs by artists in styles ranging from rap, reggae and R&B to country, pop and techno, as well as full orchestral recordings of classical compositions.

New music is said to be added to the catalog on a daily basis, and in the coming months the company says the Friendly Music catalog will expand to include “handpicked collections of name artists”.

Ladies and gents, this is a 3TB hard drive. Let that sink in. Three effin terabytes. That’s a whole lot of data on one hard drive. Seagate previously stated that the drive would be out by year’s end, but here it is and it’s barely summer.

The FreeAgent GoFlex family is Seagate’s first product line to sport the gigantic hard drive. USB 3.0, USB 2.0 and Firewire 800 via Seagate’s GoFlex adapters are tasked with the job of transferring the data to and fro the connected computer. The USB 2.0 flavor is available right now with the MSRP $249.

The real story, however, isn’t that Seagate managed to stuff 3TB into one 3.5-inch hard drive. It’s that Seagate is actually bringing it to market amid so many potential problems.

Small companies clone big companies all the time. And by clone I don’t just mean steal a basic idea. I mean clone almost literally – they just plain rip off every single feature and hope for the best. It certainly saves time on user testing.

Big companies, particularly big tech companies, don’t do this as much. Pride and ethics come into play at an individual and team level. Pure copying just isn’t how things are done.

Instead they tweak a little here, add a little there, and launch it as a variation of the original. That’s evolution, not stealing.

And most of the time it doesn’t work very well. Facebook’s users just don’t seem to want to behave like Twitter users, for example, no matter how hard Facebook tried to get them to change. And Google Buzz, besides the privacy snafus in the beginning, is just a little too complicated to get people using it wildly. Plus, I’m not convinced that people want all that junk in their email inbox.

But pure clones work well. Microsoft crushed Netscape in the 90s by simply building their own web browser and giving it away for free. Webmail and instant messaging services across Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and AOL are all largely the same, and that market is fragmented among all of those companies. If there’s a better way to do mail and messaging, no one has figured it out yet and gotten all the users to switch to them.

And that’s why it’s time for Google to just plane clone Facebook. Enough with the fancy pants Google Buzz Twitter-Facebook-Yelp killer. They need to raise the white flag and just copy Facebook right down to the details. Otherwise the war is over before Google even got to the battlefield.

So I’m not surprised to see that Google appears to be working on exactly that – a new social network that isn’t Orkut and isn’t Buzz but that will be 100% focused on being as good as or better than Facebook.

Why do they need to do this? Google is, after all, firing on all cylinders. Google continues to grow fast and has $24 billion a year in revenue. They dominate search marketing, possibly the most profitable business in the history of our species if you don’t include taxes, drugs or prostitution. Facebook has a long way to go to catch up.

Or do they? Facebook’s self serve ad business is exploding, say our sources, and may be significantly more robust than even the most favorable third party forecasts predict. Google let’s self serve users target ads based on search queries, and that works extremely well. But Facebook knows much, much more about its users than Google does, and allows self serve ads targeted to extremely relevant and timely user information. And with Facebook’s strategy of organizing the Internet through Facebook Platform has created a big open door for them to later insert ads on those sites, too. Facebook could be challenging Google’s revenue lead much sooner than people think. It’s not outrageous to think that the two companies could be in a dead heat by 2015, for example. See The Age Of Facebook for more of my thoughts on the rise of Facebook and why I think they’ll dominate the next decade.

Facebook is already bigger than Google in many ways. Not in total unique visitors per month – Facebook’s 550 million is still a lot less than Google’s 900 million. But Facebook has more page views: 250 billion v. 165 billion per month. And total minutes spent on Facebook is more than 2x Google: 150 billion v. 73 billion. (All stats are Comscore worldwide, May 2010).

Google needs a horse in the social networking race to be able to defend itself against Facebook over the long run. And the only way they’re going to be able to compete effectively is to just clone the darn thing. Original? No. Honorable? nope. But people have very short memories, sadly, and it’ll all blow over shortly.

There is one area where Google can gain a quick advantage – in truly open data with simple export tools and easy to understand privacy settings. I’d recommend going with the Twitter model on privacy – it’s all public or it’s all private (for approved friends only). It’s not hard to understand, and very few people actually choose the private option.

What Google shouldn’t do – must not do – is try to tie the service to other Google products for the wrong reasons. Microsoft’s web properties are constantly hobbled by the strategic decisions of a parent company that must protect an aging Windows and Office revenue stream, for example. Google must avoid that pitfall. And Facebook’s Twitter experiments, as well as Google bolting Buzz onto Gmail, show that users don’t like having the fundamental way they use products change very much. They need to flock to Google Me, or whatever it’s called, simply because they like the service.

This will be the great battle in consumer Internet over the next few years if Google does it right. And while I don’t like seeing clones, there’s really no other choice for Google. And at least the users will win – one thing Facebook needs right now is a little competition.

ps – Next up would be the Google Twitter clone. An exact copy, except with an open protocol that would let anyone run the service on their own server. They should call it Glitter.

YouTube always has had a way with pranks. Some time in the last hour, the world’s largest video portal activated a new button on some videos that looks like a tiny soccer ball. Clicking it will activate an endless, incredibly annoying sound that sounds vaguely like a swarm of insects. Or, for anyone who has been watching the World Cup, like the dreaded Vuvuzela — an instrument commonly played in South Africa at football (soccer) games. South Africa is, of course, the host country for this year’s World Cup, and fans watching the games have been subjected to the vuvuzela’s mindless drone for hours on end.

The noise is so annoying that television networks have taken measures to filter it out, and guides have popped up showing viewers how to block it from their TV sets and computers. But despite complaints, FIFA has decided not to ban the vuvuzela because of its traditional significance. Fun fact: one report says that the guy who brought the plastic vuvuzela to the market in South Africa is also in the business of selling ear plugs. Smart guy.

I’m not seeing the button show up on all videos, but it is definitely appearing on some clips that aren’t soccer related. Here’s one that has it.

Thanks to Ambuj Saxena for the tip.