Google is launching this new tool to measure the value of social media. Read more about it here: https://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/socialData/home.html
Category: Web
Live from Google Workshop: Google Analytics: Bringing accountability to Social Media
Posted by – December 7, 2011
Google is launching this new tool to measure the value of social media. This is a very interesting workshop. I am broadcasting it live now from a webcam on my head:
Find more clips at: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/leweb-2011
There is more information at: http://www.google.com/analytics/developers/socialhub.html
OLPC Summit: FLOSS Manuals
Posted by – October 24, 2011
Tuukka Hastrup from Finland consults for FLOSS Manuals, a collaborative manual and document writing software.
This video was filmed using the new JVC GC-PX10 camcorder at 36mbitps 1080p50 with the JVC MZ-V8/MZ-V10 external microphone, you can download the full sample file here on Google Docs
20 years ago today, the World Wide Web was released
Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web as a spare time project, the Google equivalent of a 20% project! He released the world wide web publicly on 6th August 1991 on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, archived by Google here: http://groups.google.com/group/alt.hypertext/msg/395f282a67a1916c?pli=1
Today, most devices that connect to the Internet are ARM Powered.
Here’s Robert Scoble’s video filmed about 3 years ago at CERN in Switzerland with Ben Segal, one of Tim Berners-Lee’s mentors at CERN talking about the birth of the World Wide Web:
Peter Sunde, co-founder of ThePirateBay.org and Flattr.com, at CeBIT 2011
Posted by – March 6, 2011
A few years ago, Peter Sunde together with a bunch of cool guys in Sweden started thepiratebay.org, which is kind of a fun site where people can find torrent files for all kinds of things. It has been in the media. There is a chance that you know about that site. Peter Sunde is very much involved in the politics around filesharing on the Internet, the politics of media and content, he has spoken at the european union and RIAA and MPAA have a bunch of lawsuits going after him and his team. He tried to buy a country once to implement freedom of filesharing rules there or to build a server farm there, but instead thepiratebay is hosted around the world and can never be shut down and nobody knows who controls it. Those guys are fun (read their Legal Threats page). What do you think about Copyrights, Piracy and those kinds of things? Write your opinions in the comments.
Related articles
- Flattr: Think Facebook “Likes” With Cash On Top (huffingtonpost.com)
- WikiLeaks Can Still Get Cash – Thanks To Pirate Bay’s Co-Founder (blogs.forbes.com)
- Why Tech Startup Flattr May Be The Key to WikiLeaks’ Future Funding (techcrunch.com)
- As Peter Sunde of Pirate Bay Speaks on Alternatives to ICANN and the DNS, Dashworlds.com Opens the First New Domain Name System via the DashCom Registry (pr.com)
- Pirate Bay Founder Says Apple “Becoming Microsoft” with Mac App Store (cultofmac.com)
Robert Scoble about Quora, Groupon, Android, Davos, Tablets and Apple at Lift11 Geneva
Posted by – February 7, 2011
Robert Scoble is one of the most influential bloggers on the web, he gives us an update and explanation on Quora, Android vs Apple, his Davos videos and more.
You can watch Robert Scoble’s pretty cool Lift presentation about the current status of Silicon Valley startups and tech companies in following video. Scroll forward to timecode: 1 hour 1 minute for Robert Scoble’s keynote (if anyone knows how to embed this video with deep link for starting at that time code, please post in the comments):
John Ham, Founder of Ustream.tv at LeWeb 2010
Posted by – December 26, 2010
John Ham discusses interactivity for live video streaming, infrastructure scaling for high quality video streaming and other upcoming features of http://ustream.tv such as pay-per-view.
Joe Green, Co-Founder and President of Causes.com at LeWeb 2010
Posted by – December 25, 2010
Joe Green co-founded Causes.com with Sean Parker who founded Napster, the guy played by Justin Timberlake in the recent Facebook movie “The Social Network”. Causes.com allows anyone to use their Facebook and Twitter friends and followers to raise funds for any kinds of organizations. You can also watch his presentation of causes.com on stage at LeWeb with Loic LeMeur.
Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer.com at LeWeb 2010
Posted by – December 15, 2010
If you have an idea to create a competitor to Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia or Google, but you lack the programming talent, you can still do like Kevin Rose did to start Digg.com, what Steve Jobs did to start Apple and what Bill Gates did to start Microsoft, you can just have someone else do all the programming work for you for cheap! Now that we have the Internet, why not hire someone to do it for those $500 or so that you have been saving up?
Digg.com was started for $200, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer bought DOS for $50’000 from some guy which basically founded Microsoft, Steve Jobs convinced his programming friend Steve Wozniak to code the Apple OS inspired by ideas they got from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center for “free”, some claim Mark Zuckerberg was hired as a freelance programmer for $1000 to program facebook (then possibly to have been called harvardconnection) before he decided it was too good and kept it for himself (something like that).
What do you think of the potential of outsourcing work using Freelancer.com or other such online freelancing sites? Can those sites also be used to connect freelancers in your local areas if you want to actually meet the freelancer face to face? What do you think is the potential to create a successful startup based on a small investment through freelancer.com or such site? What do you think is the value of an idea compared to the programming talent necessary to build it? What do you think is the risk of you potentially loosing your idea to a freelancer (like Mark Zuckerberg) if they find out that the idea is too good and they decide to keep it or duplicate it?
Super-Marmite.com is a Social Marketplace for homemade Meals
Posted by – December 13, 2010
What if you could buy a cheap meal from someone cooking extra portions of some healthy meal in your neighborhood instead of having to go to an unhealthy fast food restaurant? This startup won the “1st Prize for Originality” at LeWeb 2010 in Paris. The public also likes the idea a lot.
Pierre Chappaz on what is going on with Wikileaks
Posted by – December 13, 2010
At LeWeb 2010 there was an interesting Media Panel about the status of Wikileaks. This video features more from the point of view of French entrepreneur Pierre Chappaz who founded Kelkoo and Wikio.
Dassault Systems 3Dvia.com 3D tools for the web at LeWeb 2010
Posted by – December 11, 2010
This is 3D in the web browser using a plugin. Dassault Systems is providing tools for integrating 3D stuff on the web.
youfoot.com presented by Fabrice Lorenceau at LeWeb 2010
Posted by – December 11, 2010
youfoot lets users organize alternative Football tournaments and ligues, lets users comment and annotate all football matches in real-time. Will eventually integrate live video and audio commentary features. This type of web app has the potential to replace FIFA and UEFA for the organization and communities of Soccer competition.
Julio Alonso, Founder and CEO of Weblogs SL at LeWeb 2010
Posted by – December 11, 2010
A discussion about Spanish tech blogs and about the Wikileaks media panel at LeWeb 2010 conference in Paris.
How Danil Kozyatnikov of Siberia got invited at LeWeb 2010
Posted by – December 11, 2010
Tells his story about how he got to be one of the 4 invited to LeWeb through a facebook and twitter contest. Also presents his http://looking4.vc scavanger hunt prototype. Find him also at http://aksilon.com
appoke.com presented by Stéphane Guérin at LeWeb 2010
Posted by – December 11, 2010
Appoke is a startup that is showcased at the LeWeb 2010 conference in Paris.
mylifeshow.tv presented by Jerome Derozard at LeWeb 2010
Posted by – December 11, 2010
LifeShow player app on Android and mylifeshow.tv is a startup that is showcased at the LeWeb 2010 conference in Paris.
checkmymetro.com presented by Benjamin Suchar at LeWeb 2010
Posted by – December 11, 2010
CheckMyMetro is a startup that is showcased at the LeWeb 2010 conference in Paris.
Net Neutrality logic
Google owns the most servers of any one company out there. Literally, it is rumored to be in the millions. Youtube streams out more than 2 billion video views per day. If an average video view is 30 megabytes, that means Youtube uses at least 60’000 Terrabytes of bandwidth per day. As I am not sure where to find the current estimate of global bandwidth capacity to all home Internet lines, let us compare that with the current reported trans-atlantic bandwidth capacity at around 10 to 20 Terrabit/s, that means a maximum bandwidth between Europe and the USA of 108’000 Terrabytes per day. 2009 price per trans-atlantic 10Gbit/s was $14’000 per month. If Google had to transfer half of Youtube’s daily bandwidth over the atlantic, that would cost $11 Million per day in bandwidth costs. Obviously, that scenario would be totally impossible.
The only way Youtube can provide up to 1080p and even 4K video to everyone, for free, on demand, is by cleverly distributing all the most popular videos on many, hundreds, maybe thousands of sort of caching servers that deliver the Youtube videos to every ADSL, Cable, Fiber to the home users around the world. What Youtube does, is that it tries to deliver the video from a Youtube cache as close to the user as possible. Most likely, that for the past years already, Google has been negociating with all the worlds major ISPs to build those Youtube caching servers right onto the local fiber optic backbones and server centrals of every major ISP.
This means, Google already has had to pay ISPs and major backbone providers for preferential access to its contents. This is the only way Google can provide a service that is fast enough for everyone to experience full bandwidth and fast buffering on all these high quality videos and have it all work smoothly in prime time, and when everyone wants to watch the same popular videos.
I’d like bloggers who critisize Google for it’s stance on Net Neutrality to consider that Youtube may account for about half of current global web bandwidth consumption excluding peer-to-peer like BitTorrent. And that Youtube’s share of global bandwidth consumption can only increase fast as Google TV comes out. What I think is the core issue we have to consider, is that it would be the worst if ISPs somehow because they might be more interested in staying with the status quo, that they may prevent an expansion of web video distribution by limiting the way high quality videos can be distributed freely on-demand to everyone.
While I think it is important to make sure startups don’t have any barriers to present their new ideas and new technical solutions to the web, I also think it is kind of logical that a startup won’t be able to afford distributing HD quality video as smoothly as Youtube does it, a startup cannot afford to buy thousands or even millions of servers and install them on every ISP and backbone around the world. AS once the cache server is embedded directly onto the ISPs backbone, that bandwidth, no matter how much it is, costs very little for the ISP to provide, at least compared to a scenario where the ISP would have to fetch all that data from the other side of an ocean.
I want to see a scalable solution that basically allows Youtube to expand even much further and provide even higher quality. It would be great if 720p 2mbit/s HD, 1080p 4mbit/s HD and even 24mbit/s 4K was streamed at full speed to every user. And imagining a scenario where a larger and larger share of everyone’s 5 hour daily TV watching did stream on-demand from the web. This means that the current 60 Petabytes/day that Youtube consumes today could turn into 6000 Petabytes/day within months.
As for Net Neutrality on wireless networks. I have often tried to ask Telecom companies how much bandwidth there really is in those base stations. The answer I kind of got, was that the bandwidth is not much, maybe only in the tens of megabit/s per base station. So obviously, it may not really matter what generation is used, be it 3G, 3.5G, 3.5G+, 4G/LTC, WiMax, as soon as more than 2 or 3 people start to want to have several megabit/second in an area of a neighborhood or so, the technology just won’t be able to handle it all. So for sure, I think Wireless networks need to be regulated. Especially as there isn’t really enough bandwidth for everyone to stream video on 3G nor LTE networks. Most importantly, I want to see regulation enforce that bandwidth for VOIP usage may not be blocked or down-graded compared to the exact same quality of the bandwidth used for “normal” voice calls.
The only solution to the bandwidth limitations of wireless networks, is to install smaller base stations closer to every user, so called micro-cells, also called Fem2cells. I believe the best spectrum that we should all install those base stations for would be the 700mhz white spaces spectrum, that is why I would like to hear someone say that it would be possible to build a FON.com like network using unlicensed and free to use White Spaces 700mhz. Everyone would install a $20 White Spaces micro-cell routers onto their home wireline ADSL/Cable/Fiber connections, sharing the bandwidth into their neighborhoods, using one same browser based access authentication system worldwide, that will provide enough wireless bandwidth for everyone to do whatever they want.
Youtube 4K, for realz?!!!!!
Google announced this new resolution support on Youtube a bit weirdly: 4K is 4096×3072 thus 3072p. It is not “4096p” and not “1096 x 3072 pixels”. Or is 4K supposed to amount to 4 Million pixels? Here’s the text from Youtube’s announcement (as posted at this moment to http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/07/whats-bigger-than-1080p-4k-video-comes.html):
Today at the VidCon 2010 conference, we announced support for videos shot in 4K (a reference resolution of 4096 x 3072), meaning that now we support original video resolution from 360p all the way up to 4096p.
We always want videos on YouTube to be available in the highest quality possible, as creators intend. In December of last year, we announced support for 1080p, or full HD. At 1096 x 3072 pixels, 4K is nearly four times the size of 1080p. To view any video in a source resolution greater than 1080p, select “Original” in the video quality pulldown menu:
Here’s my reaction:
– WHOAAAWWW! Is this 1st of April or something? Is Google talking for real?
– What is the bitrate going to be for 4K? My guess, based on calculating the bitrate per pixel of 2mbit/s for Youtube 720p and 4mbit/s for Youtube 1080p is that for 4K it would be something like 24mbit/s. That’s within the same bitrate as our 15 year old DV format (like miniDV tapes). That’s like the top bitrate established for 1080p AVCHD format. This is totally manageable! We can get 50mbit/s and 100mbit/s “easilly” over here in Scandinavia. If Google would provide full bandwidth delivery of Youtube 4K worldwide, we could seriously enjoy this!
– I wish the LCD and Projector industry focus on making Quad HD or 4K screens (however they should be called) instead of that 3D fad thing. Logically, thanks to Youtube 4K, we could be getting 4K HDTVs and projectors for less than $1000 by this time next year. Because the processors are already ready, they just need to be put into mass manufactured screens and projectors.
Another point in Youtube’s announcement that I would like to learn something about and maybe start to counter:
To give some perspective on the size of 4K, the ideal screen size for a 4K video is 25 feet; IMAX movies are projected through two 2k resolution projectors.
I have seen Quad HD LCD screens at trade shows. Those were in the 50-82″ range I think. They are absolutely amazing (Sergey Brin has one), some of the most impressive demonstrations I have ever seen in going to most of the trade shows since 2005. See my video of the Samsung 3840x2160p 82″ LCD HDTV. See my video of the JVC 4K2K HDTV and Projector.
I believe that one can see higher than 1080p on HDTV starting below 50″ sizes. The iPhone 4 has a 326DPI 3.5″ screen. I don’t see why we can’t get higher DPI on our HDTVs than 52DPI on a 42″ HDTV? Why should the iPhone 4 have a 6x higher DPI than my 42″ 1080p Full HD HDTV? If they were to put 4K processor in my 42″ HDTV, it would still “only” have a 111DPI, still much less than what they have done on the iPhone 4. Sure my 42″ HDTV has 132 times larger surface area than an iPhone (a 42″ HDTV could fit 132 of iPhone’s screens), if you want to set a standard for what the DPI per field of vision should be based on the iPhone 4 held at half arms length (50cm) with 326DPI screen, then a 42″ HDTV with 4K screen of 111DPI would need to be seen within 1.5 meters of a distance to get the same effect. Usually a sofa is placed 4-6 meters away from the LCD HDTV. Perhaps people will want to sit closer to the screen to experience something closer to 4K quality. At the photo exhibitions and museums of paintings, it is common for people to approach the images at distances closer than 1 meter to appreciate the details in the image. Perhaps 4K would be more suitable sizes above 50″ and preferably perhaps even above 60″ in diagonal. 67″ 4K HDTV would have a 70DPI thus achieve same pixels per angle of view at 2.5 meters distance. 65″ 1080p HDTV is $2500 today at Best Buy, how much more would it cost to include the latest 4K processor in there to stream 4K contents from Youtube 4K? Perhaps 4K HDTVs in the living room can be displaying any of our existing 12megapixel images taken with any recent digital photo camera, slideshows on a 4K screen look awesome. Thus Picasa could be streaming out some amazing customized and personalized slideshows, to be marvelled at in the living room at closer distance than usual.
Another point in Youtube’s announcement that I would like to discuss:
Because 4K represents the highest quality of video available, there are a few limitations that you should be aware of. First off, video cameras that shoot in 4K aren’t cheap, and projectors that show videos in 4K are typically the size of a small refrigerator. And, as we mentioned, watching these videos on YouTube will require super-fast broadband.
Now, let’s discuss, when are cheap 4K encoders going to be available? What hardware is required in the camcorder to encode that resolution effectively (and not also use up too much bandwidth in its compression). How expensive are the 4K decoders really?
Is 4K support something that could come with the upcoming ARM Cortex A9 processors?
I would think that this could be a nice challenge for ARM processor providers to work towards. They have now reached 1080p playback for a while already, even though it only really comes with ARM Cortex A9 to small low power consumer devices. Media streamers though have done 1080p playback for a few years already. I filmed the first 1080p KiSS Technology players at CeBIT 2004:
With Moore’s law, doubling of playback processing every 18 months, 4K decoders should have been ready since the second half of 2008 already, and in Set-top-box devices that shouldn’t cost more than the KiSS Technology DP-600 shown in 2004, less than $300 today? Perhaps next year we will be able to see Google TV boxes with 4K and Youtube 4K streaming support on $2K 65″ 4K LCD HDTVs or $1K 4K projectors?
