IBM has released a survey of 2400 consumers, called the End of Advertising Survey, that found that %11 of respondents would pay a small fee to remove advertisements from their online video viewing experience. A YouTube Premium subscription option? It could make sense.The ContextIt's widely believed that the web 2.0 era marked the end of paid content and software - that advertising would now fund all future media if not online activity in general. As online advertising begins to take hold meaningfully, though, some number of people wish they could go back to the good old days of paying a small sum.This will likely be an even more pertinent question when the wall separating billions in TV advertisement comes down, flooding the world of online video. Online video is already a lot more mainstream than many web-heads admit, and the mainstream is more savvy than we might think. Tivo has been a paradigm changer and I have no doubt that a substantial percentage of people will pay to remove ads in a media future increasingly centered on online video. Give me access to my viewing history, preferences and recommendations and I'll happily pay too. Likewise, some users may be willing to pay for an ad-free publishing platform, increased length limits and higher quality playback. I've long been an advocate for paying for software, but now the 89% of the people who say I'm crazy can know that IBM says I am not alone!The MoneyE-Consultancy.comdid some math and argues that at $2 per month, or $24.95 per year, 10% of YouTube's 50m unique users per month would equal a $137 million annual revenue stream from subscriptions. We did a little more math over here and found that advertisements, on the other hand, at a very generous rate of $10cpm would equal $38m in annual revenue from those 11% of YouTube's viewers. In other words, if (and this is a big if) all these numbers were correct then YouTube could increase its proffits by $100m annually by offering a premium subscription.
Yahoo!, who has been a key contributor to open source distributed computing framework Hadoop, today announced an academic research partershipwith Carnegie Mellon University that will give students access to Hadoop and other open source tools running in a supercomputing-class data center. The data center, named M45 after the Pleiades star cluster, is a 4,000-processor cluster supercomputer with 3 terabytes of memory and 1.5 petabytes of diskspace. Yahoo! claims that the M45 cluster is one of the top 50 fastest supercomputers in the world, capable of performing at 27 teraflops.According to Yahoo!, universities have not had access to the type of hardware and software infrastructure necessary for web-scale distributed computing research. Yahoo! intends for Carnegie Mellon to be first school in a broader academic research partnership program. CMU and Yahoo! also plan to hold a Hadoop Summit in the first half of 2008, to which they say they would invite major Hadoop users such as Facebook and the University of California at Berkeley."Yahoo! is dedicated to working with leading universities to solve some of the most critical computing challenges facing our industry," said Ron Brachman, vice president and head of Yahoo! academic relations in a press release. "Launching this program and M45 is a significant milestone in creating a global, collaborative research community working to advance the new sciences of the Internet."The search and portal company is following in the footsteps of rival, Google, who along with IBM announced in Octoberthat it was building a 1,600 processor data center that would be used to help teach cloud computing concepts to students at six American universities.
Google today announced a $10 million challenge for developers to build mobile applications for its forthcoming Android mobile OS. Android was announced last Monday, instead of the widely expected GPhone handset. The SDK is here and information about the challenge are here.Earlier this fall, Google dedicated $30 million to the X Prize to get to the moon. Today's Android announcement may be more modest, but it's exciting none the less.Read on for details and a video with a demo of some in-house developed Android apps.The contest will run in two parts. In part 1, the 50 most promising applications submitted between January and the third of March 2008 will receive $25,000 to fund further development. Top applications from that list of winners will then receive 10 prizes of $100,000 and 10 prizes at $250,000. Those are not insignificant sums.The list of topics Google says it is interested in seeing apps developed for include:* Social networking* Media consumption, management, editing, or sharing, e.g., photos* Productivity and collaboration such as email, IM, calendar, etc.* Gaming* News and information* Rethinking of traditional user interfaces* Use of mash-up functionality* Use of location-based services* Humanitarian benefits* Applications in service of global economic development* Whatever you're excited about!Apparently "ad serving" is one part of Android that Google can take care of on its own.The company announced details of the contest on its new Android Developers blog(zero subscribers as of today, that's an unusual sight on a Google blog!).There's also an already active Google Groupdedicated to discussing the challenge.
Angel-funded ActiveSymbolsis a privately held company that was founded in 2003 to develop a visual search platform. Four years and six key patent filings later, the company is ready to release phase one of that platform, focusing on facial recognition.The Bellevue, Washington-based company, which enjoys a healthy research partnership with the University of Washington, is not aiming to create a destination site. Instead, ActiveSymbols aims to provide the technology for integrating facial recognition and image detection into image intensive web sites, or in the enterprise (for example, searching a large news photo database).The company has released a tech demo, however, called Eyealiketo show off their facial recognition platform. The site features two rather whimsical applications designed to put ActiveSymbols' technology to the test, Celeb Match and Dream Date.Both applications step actually on the other's toes -- they each do celebrity and personals search. In one, users can upload a photo of themselves and find celebrities who look like them according to the facial recognition and matching software. Or, they can upload a picture of someone they find attractive and search personals for people who look similar -- for that demo, ActiveSymbols has 250k-300k images from Match.com and American Singles. The other application lets users do more or less the same two things, but starting with celebrity photos.While these applications may seem frivolous, they're nonetheless a good technical demo of the facial recognition technology. Company President Greg Heuss told me that eventually, ActiveSymbols will expand the platform beyond the online dating and social networking verticals. The company is hard at work converting their image recognition algorithms to video, which will hopefully result in more accurate automatic copyright surveillance software. Security and military intelligence applications of their software are another route that the company is exploring.The technology works by breaking faces down into elements, identifying common features like eyes, nose, and mouth. The platform then attempts to extract data on the orientation and shape of the face, the skin tone, and the color and texture of the hair. Heuss told me that skin tone has generally proved to be the most difficult part of the facial recognition to master, an observation that bore out in my own testing of the platform. Using the "Celeb Match" application, I was oddly matched with a number of people whose skin tone was several shades darker than mine, likely due to the dark beard that obscures most of my face.Heuss said the company is constantly tweaking the algorithm, and with more data the matching will improve.The Eyealike demos probably make a lot of sense as a feature on dating sites, but they aren't very compelling. Of course, that doesn't mean there aren't any worthwhile uses for good facial recognition technology (and it's probably important to note that ActiveSymbols isn't actually showing off any perfect face matching, but rather showing the ability of the platform to compare similar faces).Imagine, for example, if instead of having to individually tag the face of each person in every single photo you upload to Facebook, the site used facial recognition software to learn what you friends look like via the photos of them it has already seen and tagged your new photos automatically. That would be pretty compelling.
The Under the Radar | Mobility eventis coming up this week. It's on November 15, 2007, at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View, California. Read/WriteWeb has a couple of giveaways for our readers:1) One free ticket to the event, valued at $695.00;2) And for those of you who won't be in California at the time, we're also giving away a free Microsoft software pack, featuring Microsoft Vista and Office 2007.So we'll select 2 winners - one for a local Silicon Valley resident or someone in the area on 15 Nov, and the Microsoft prize for someone who can't make the Mobility event.To enter, all you have to do is tell us - in the comments here - what is your current favorite Mobile Web app, and why. It's that easy. I'm really curious to know what peoples favorite Mobile Web apps are - e.g. what is your best iPhone app, or what you play with most on your Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, etc! Simply leave a comment here and you're in the running for the two prizes. Please also tell us if you can attend Under the Radar Mobility, so we know whether to consider you for that prize. The two winners will be randomly drawn.Thanks Dealmaker Media for the two prizes. We also have a $100 VIP discountfor the Mobility event - click hereto get that.
Read/WriteWeb has a couple of jobs open currently:Silicon Valley-based Writer: we're looking for a writer based in San Francisco or Silicon Valley, to cover news and events happening in the Valley. We need someone who can attend all the Web tech events and maybe even go schmoozing at the parties on our behalf. We also need someone with an 'ear to the ground' in the Valley, who can pick up news stories for Read/WriteWeb. So if you're an enthusiastic webhead who would like press passes to all the cool tech events and news announcements, then contact the Read/WriteWeb editor. This is a part-time writing position, but could easily turn into a full-time one for the right person. To reiterate, you mustbe located in SF or Silicon Valley to apply for this.Webmaster: we're also looking for a person to do web site management and design tasks, on an ongoing basis (part-time). This person needs Moveable Type and Wordpress skills, and must be familiar with HTML, Javascript. If you're interested in this position, please contact the Read/WriteWeb editor.
Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. For those of you reading this via our website, note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feedor by email.Note: If you would like to sponsor the Weekly Wrapup- which gives you a banner ad in our feeds as well as on site - please contact the editorfor pricing details.Web NewsOpenSocial, Facebook Ad Network, MySpace HyperTargetingLast weekwas all about Google's OpenSocial, a project that will tie together Google, MySpace and other social networking platforms in a common widget development environment. This week the discussion raged on. By the end of the week it had boiled down to two themes:1) OpenSocial isn't quite as "open" as it makes out to be - check out Marshall Kirkpatrick's postfor more. Also see Bernard Lunn's post on the privacy implicationsof OpenSocial. In summary, OpenSocial seems to be less about open standards, and more about Google setting the standards. Nevertheless, it also has a lot of things going for it - see Sean Ammirati's post Google's Kevin Marks Discusses OpenSocial at Defragto find out Google's plans for OpenSocial.2) Facebook isn't in a rush to join OpenSocial; indeed this week they focused primarily on pushing out their new advertising network. See Josh Catone's coverage of Facebook's ad plans. Also Josh wrote about why Facebook shouldn't fear OpenSocial.On the advertising front, there was action from MySpace this week too. The world's largest social networking site announced that it would be launching a new advertising program called "HyperTargeting,"which uses profile data to target ads to users.This week we ran a poll asking: Will Facebook Join OpenSocial?See a summary of the comments here. The results at press time:Yes 44%No 46%Open What? 10%No GPhone, but Google Announces AndroidThe other big Web news of the week: after months if not years of speculation, Google announcedthat they are not in fact developing a single phone, but rather an ostensibly open-source mobile operating system called Android.Other Web tech news this week:IAC to Split Up, Announces Major Ad Deal with GoogleMajor Newspapers Consider Ad AllianceMySpace Voted Most Likely to Be Blocked at WorkSumner Redstone: YouTube Won't Pay The RentYouTube Releases Multi-file Uploader, Raises File Limits to 1 GBWeb ProductsBlogcosm Challenges Technorati, Techmeme to Parse the BlogosphereBlogcosmis a new company aiming to build a directory of the blogosphere. From the mundane to the esoteric, the company wants to provide users with a rich data set about any particular blog of interest or the vertical market it is in.Marshall Kirkpatrick met founder Scott Lawton, an old time geek from Massachusetts, this week at the first annual Blog World Expoin Las Vegas. Blogcosm built a blog directory of all the speakers at Blog World Expoand the blogs they write for, as a case study. Check our post for more, but note that the current Blogcosm site is very basic and doesn't have any of the sophisticated features the founder talked up in the post.Where the Cool Photos Hang OutRemember when Flickrused to be the elite hang out of the visual digerati? By initially embracing talented photographers, Flickr developed a reputation as the place to go to check out amazing amateur and professional photography on the web. But then Yahoo! came along and encouraged users of its Photos service to migrate to Flickr, opening the site up to anyone and their vacation pictures. Has Flickr become boring and mundane? Where should we turn to now to find all the cool photos?Flickr is still a great photo hosting platform used by a large number of amazing photographers, but cutting through the increased noise can be a chore. The six sites in this postwill help you locate the more artistic photos out there on the web, without having to wade through any photos of Aunt Millie at the beach.TrueKnowledge Demos Its Semantic Search EngineVenture funded UK semantic search engine TrueKnowledgeunveiled a demo of its private beta this week - and Read/WriteWeb was one of the first to publish a review. TrueKnowledge looks like an interesting site to watch. One cannot help but think of the still-unlaunched Powerset, but it's also reminiscent of the very real Ask.com"smart answers".You can find many other startup profiles in our Startups category.AnalysisHow a Startup Inspired HP's Print 2.0 StrategyBig computing company HP was promoting a strange concept at the Web 2.0 Summit in October: Print 2.0. At first R/WW editor Richard MacManus couldn't figure out what this meant. Web-based printers? Some new form of inkless paper? Curious to know more, while he was at the Summit Richard met up with HP's Antonio Rodriguez- formerly of startup Tabblo, now Director of Research and Development for HP’s embedded web-to-print group.The Social Enterprise - What Works, and What Doesn'tAlex Iskold asks why should enterprises go social, and what are the compelling reasons for adoption?On the surface there are immediate benefits, but from experience we know thatconsumer technologies do not directly map into the enterprise. In this post, Alex exploredthe reasons for the social enterprise, looking at what social technologies fit and raisingvarious concerns related to adoption.E-Government Meets Web 2.0: Goodbye Portals, Hello Web ServicesGartnerrecently released a couple of reports on how web 2.0 technologies are being used in e-Government. The reports are entitled The E-Government Hype Cycle Meets Web 2.0and Government and Web 2.0: The Emerging Midoffice. Both are about how modern e-government efforts are moving away from the 'one stop shop' portal approach that characterized early efforts, and are turning more towards mashups and (to quote the first Gartner report) "a number of mostly adventurous initiatives with blogs, wikis or islands in Second Life." But it's the ecosystem of Web Services - and the reusability of content and services that Web Services enable - that really excites Gartner about web 2.0 in e-government.You can find more R/WW analysis posts here.EventsThis week the Defrag conference was held - and it got some rave reviews. For an overview of the conference, check out Sean Ammirati's post: Five Themes From the Defrag Conference. See also Charles Knight's live-blogging of the event on AltSearchEngines.R/WW Network Blogslast100Our Digital Lifestyle blog last100this week looked at the new NPR website. Daniel Langendorf wrote that "I’m in music heaven again. The new site uses a slick Flash pop-up player that’s super-easy to use and, as an added bonus, works across all NPR properties."Alt Search EnginesThis week AltSearchEngineswas busy live-blogging Defrag. But also there's a feature post about people search engine Wink, which this week released advanced profile controls, giving people complete control over the contents of the search result for their name.Read/WriteTalkSean Ammirati of Read/WriteTalkinterviewed Kaliya Hamlin- a.k.a. Identity Woman. She's recognized as one of the thought leaders in user centric identity, having helped organize Identity Commons and lead the Internet Identity Workshop.That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.
Voting is now closed for the Best Technology Blog, but there is a potential vote rigging controversy afoot. The site currently states:"RESULTS ARE NOT FINAL FOR THIS POLL! This poll is still being checked for excessive voting from individual machines. If excess voting is found it will be noted and the votes will be removed. The winner should be announced Monday."Top gadget blogs Engadget and Gizmodo dominated the voting - and both are neck and neck, with 44.7% and 44.2% of the votes respectively. [let's not mention where R/WW ended up!]. Both of the big gadget blogs heavily promoted the contest to their readers. During the week I noticed Engadget take an early lead - and up till a couple of days ago when I lastchecked, Engadget held a reasonable lead over Gizmodo. But both sites have gotten a lot of fast votes over the past few days. Perhaps taking their fierce rivalrya bit too far?Note that users were allowed to cast 1 vote every 24 hours, which was determined by IP address. But most web techies know how easy it is to manipulate ip address voting. So we'll see how the "excessive voting" investigation goes!p.s. I wonder if this will be covered by Valleywag? ;-)Top image courtesy of CNNMoney.com (linked above)
There are a lot of ways to send large files online. One my favorites is Senduitfrom Davidville (the Tumblr guys), which I wrote aboutin April. I like its simplicity and how easy it is to use. Unfortunately, Senduit, which is built on the back of Amazon's Simple Storage Service, has a 100mb file limit and though speedy on the download, requires that the file first be fully uploaded before downloading can begin.PipeBytesis a new service that cuts out the middle man. The service has no file size limits and lets recipients begin downloading before the file is finished uploading -- in fact, that file doesn't begin to upload until someone starts downloading on the other end. While files are being transferred, a YouTube video plays in the browser window to keep you occupied, and an animated status indicator shows you the progress of your transfer.I was able to successfully send an 80mb MP3 file to Marshall Kirkpatrick via the service. Though we were both shown different videos, they seems uncannily matched content-wise to the file I was sending -- which was a DJ mix, and I was shown a video of a turntable routine. I'm not sure if PipeBytes read the file note I left, which mentioned what type of music the MP3 was, and tried to match up a like video or if it was a coincidence (I think I'd lean toward the latter).It's not clear how PipeBytes works, but my guess is that the site is establishes a direct connection between the uploader and downloader. There are a few reasons I think this: 1. Your file doesn't start uploading until someone is downloading, 2. It can only send to one person at a time, 3. Their FAQ says files "are sent directly to your peer."If that's the case, PipeBytes should be spending virtually nothing on bandwidth. Though it does raise some questions about the usefulness of the service. If all it is doing is establishing a direct connection, what is the advantage over doing the same thing via instant messenger, Skype, or IRC (DCC Send)? The advantage of file sending sites like Senduit is that they allow the downloader to get quicker speeds on their end as a result of getting the files through a faster pipe. Also, they are asynchronous, so uploader and downloader don't have to be online at the same time. When both of those advantages are removed, why not just use IM?
The team over at Live.com Translationhave released a very simple toolthat allows anyone to put a drop-down translation menu on their website. Here's a live example, entered with one line of javascript. Give it a click and you can read Read/WriteWeb in a variety of other languages.When users click on the prompt to translate the page into their language of choice, they are taken to a Live.com page where the original and translated pages are displayed side by side.I think this is pretty awesome and I added it to my personal site right away. Thanks to LiveSidefor the link, it's always the best source for in-depth and breaking coverage of the Live.com world.
The much hyped web drama "Quarterlife," which is set to debut on MySpace on November 12, may be making the jump to television as a result of the Hollywood writers guild strike. According to a report from The Hollywood Reporter, the Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick-backed web show is rumored to be in talks with NBC to be used as strike-contingency programming.Zwick and Herskovitz, the creative team behind the cult hit TV show "My So-Called Life" and the Oscar-nominated film "Blood Diamond," make up one of the more high profile teams to try their hand at a web-only production. They would follow the successful runof Michael Eisner's "Prom Queen" earlier this year.According to The Hollywood Reporter, "Quaterlife" could appear on NBC as early as February. The show, which was initially developed for ABC three years ago, will go on with its Monday MySpace debut as planned, a spokesperson for Zwick and Herskovitz told the paper. However, Herskovitz has gone on record as saying that their MySpace contract only covers the first four hours of the show and the team would like to explore other distribution channels.This would, of course, not be the first time NBC has looked to the web for talent for its television network. The network's late-night staple Saturday Night Live famously hired Andy Sambergafter viewing some of his popular web video shorts.
digg_url = 'http://digg.com/offbeat_news/When_Patrick_Met_Camille_New_York_Romance_Unfolds_Online';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';Sunday night, Patrick Moberg, a 21-year-old web designer from Brooklyn, was riding the number 5 train from Union Square in Manhattan when he spotted the girl of his dreams. With rosy cheeks, a flower in her hair, and writing in a journal, it was love at first sight. And, in a stroke of good luck, the girl got off the train at his stop. But, sadly, Moberg lost her in the crowd.The determined web designer went home and immediately put up a web site dedicated to finding what he thought could be the love of his life: NYGirlOfMyDreams.com. The site included sketches of the girl and himself, and information about which train he saw her on. On the web site Moberg posted his cell phone number and email address and within hours he had an influx of messages.According to the New York Post, Moberg was even offered love by callers. "Some people said I'm not the girl but you're so adorable, pick me instead," he told the paper. By Tuesday night, he updated the web site to proclaim that he had made a positive match through a friend of the mystery girl's who had come across the site and to remove his contact information. The girl is Camille Hayton, from Melbourne, Australia who also lives in Brooklyn and interns at BlackBook magazine."This is crazy. I can't believe it's happening," the 22-year-old Hayton told the Post. So what happens next? You'll have to use your imagination. Moberg isn't planning to update the site anymore, and won't return any emails or phone calls requesting interviews."Unlike all the romantic comedies and bad pop songs, you'll have to make up your own ending for this," says a message on NYGirlOfMyDreams.com.
There's content news all around this morning. Microsoft just announced the launch of a new blog for its forthcoming Office Live Workspace Community, Glenn Close has launched a blog of her own to support the dog products ecommerce site her family has invested in and the classic tech podcast Gillmor Gang has been sighted on Facebook.Live Workspace BlogLast month we covered some early screenshotsof Microsoft's soon-to-launch online collaboration suite, Live Workspace. It's built on top of the desktop Office tools and in competition with Google Docs. It looks very nice and today the company launched a new blogto do all the things a company blog can do for a product. Two questions. Why is the video on the site posted in one of Google's YouTube video players? Second, where's the Google Docs community blog?Glenn Close is a...Actress Glenn Close is blogging at a new dog site called Fetchdog. It's a nicely designed site, aimed at a tiny part (high end, eco products) of a big niche market - dogs. Dogs are big, shopping is big and Glenn Close is big - sounds like a good combination. We'll see if the celebrity blog strategy can be sustained over time, I'd guess not. Speaking of things that aren't sustainable - for this ecologically attuned site to promote the sketchy world of dog breeders and purebreds is a real shame. There's a huge number of mixed-breed dogs left abandoned and bound for extermination in pounds around the country. The Mystery Podcast ReappearsSpeaking of celebrities who struggle to produce regular content, Steve Gillmor is back. A long time tech journalist and an esoteric visionary, Gillmor gets the all-star crew of the old Gillmor Gang podcast back togetherfor a conversation about OpenSocial and so much more. Nick Carr, Michael Arrington, Jason Calacanis and some enterprise guys who are fun too. Many people have missed the Gang a lot and hope that it resumes. Where can you find the show? On Facebook, oddly enough. The beleaguered Podtech, Gillmor's employer for at least much of this year, isn't part of the picture. One way or the other, bring on the 90 minute, rambling, high-level conversation from a handful of elite industry thinkers. It's always been a great education and I'm not alone in wanting much more.
