Charbax.com

Where can I post comments to Hillary Clinton’s remarks on Internet Freedom?

These issues are very fascinating. And I would like to thank Google for providing a platform such as Sidewiki where I am posting this comment, where anyone can comment on any website even if the webmaster has disabled user comments.

I have not yet seen Hillary Clinton’s remarks and Q&A but I would like to comment on the issues just briefly:

- US Technology companies control a very large share of the worldwide technology industry. Could anyone provide % of actual capital in tech industry controlled by few US corporations?

- Sure I don’t like it at all that the Chinese government imprisons that many people and has probably one of the worse death penalty policies in the world. But do consider that for example the USA also does have huge amounts of prisoners, does also have the death penalty and does also listen in on all Internet conversations, even it is pretty well known that the US government has backdoors everywhere on the web. Does anyone know how much information Google provides to the US government and to other European governments about Google users?

- I would very much like that China improve their policies sooner rather than later. It would be very impressive if Google can the Obama administration can convince the Chinese Government that they all jointly sign a new Internet Freedom treaty that would:

1. Stop the useless Chinese firewall, filtering search results on tiananmen/falung gong just does not make any sense. Comon, be a bit progressive on this guys. It is actually ridiculous to block that.

2. Filtering adult material to hide it from Children is absolutely a good and worthy project which I think all countries should collaborate on. And Google DNS and Safe search type technologies should be used by all ISPs by default. Though very important fact should be it should be easy for any registered adult to unlock their connection and get unfiltered access. The filter should only be a default on all main DNS to protect children from adult contents. Very important not to confuse adult filtering with censorship.

3. Piracy should be legalized globally. Sure artists and content creators must be compensated appropriately. There should be new international author rights regulation that should compensate content creators directly without anymore of the same intermediaries of old media. For example, musicians, film makers, journalists, writers, photographers should get paid and find funds directly from a central global license for all contents that everyone should pay towards. This can be done using clever online statistics of popularity of all contents, by creating a registry of content creators and their works, and by letting users opt-in to provide accurate statistics on their content consumption and use ratings to provide better recommendations and filters to find the best contents. Leaving copyright laws of the past dictate this future of Internet content distribution would just be wrong. China and the USA must agree on a solution that improves content, finances much better creation and gives all users free access to all of it.

4. Sure the US technology companies are doing a pretty good job building the Internet and making all kinds of technologies. But they may also be slowing progress in terms of not yet making technology available to the 5 billion poorest people in the world. A new agreement on Technology goals such as power consumption of devices, price of devices, free access to spectrum and broadband, those things need to be taken care of globally. For example, 700mhz TV spectrum needs to be used globally for free unlimited wireless broadband for all. $100 Laptops with 200 hour battery life need to be manufactured as soon as possible and to be made available everywhere in the world. Honestly, capitalistic corporations might not be able to profit when laptops are sold below $100 and when wireless broadband is free for all. But those are very important decisions that politicians need to agree upon.

If Google can reach all this I would thank them so much.

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Wow, I beat my record for the amount of videos that I filmed and have posted from a 4-day consumer electronics conference. I uploaded 72 videos to Youtube from CES 2010 in HD 1280×720 9mbit/s quality. And I still have at least 2 more videos that I can think of that I forgot to upload yet which I will get to upload during the next couple of days. 22 of those videos have so far reached audiences of more than 1000 viewers, which I think is lower than I would have hoped for. I did not have any time during my trip in the USA to try to promote my best videos for trying to get them embedded on the big technology news blogs. And also, the big technology news blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo had their own armies of 20+ bloggers each doing all the coverage that they needed. Engadget for example brags about having published 700 posts during CES (I didn’t count them), that wouldn’t leave much space for them to think about embedding any other small video-bloggers videos even if those might be better than their own ones. My new site http://ARMdevices.net is also only just launched right now before CES, I need to work on optimizing the features, especially the comments and social networking aspects of it.

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I just launched a new site at http://armdevices.net the design and features will be improved during the next few days.

I video-blogged from Netbook World Summit and LeWeb conferences in Paris during the past 3 days, I will publish all the videos to my http://techvideoblog.com over the next few days.

I posted a couple of articles about OLPC at:
http://www.olpcnews.com/commentary/impact/olpc_netbook_impact_on_laptop.html
http://www.olpcnews.com/commentary/impact/olpc_needs_to_make_xo_laptop_b.html

Chrome OS Laptops will cost 50 dollars and run 20 hours on a battery, and come with free unlimited 3G internet data connectivity.

Chrome OS is not going to be companion to Windows/Mac, Chrome OS is destroying Microsoft/Apple and even Intel.

You will be able to run powerful and free image and video editing software using Native code and hardware accelerations functions of Chrome OS and HTML5.

Chrome OS works offline just as well as any other laptop. Want to write emails while offline and auto-send them when you find a web connection? That is possible. Want to write documents offline and sync them when you find a WiFi? That is possible. Want to watch video while offline? Just connect USB storage and that is possible. I am sure Chrome OS laptops will even come with extra storage and hard drive compartments built-in if you really want to carry a lot of stored data to do a lot of things offline. Otherwise, by that time, there will be Google Drive to store a TB of your personal files for less than 50 dollars per year, thus only slightly more expensive than buying a TB hard drive. And if you will want to store divx or mp3 files on your Google Drive that other users have stored on Google Drive already, you won’t have to actually upload it, a quick scan and a copy is on your Google Drive and storage costs will be shared by all the users who will have access to a copy of the file.

Chrome OS works on touch screens, uses whatever hardware you want. Most importantly, with a 50 dollar ARM laptop the experience will be just as good as on a 400 dollar Intel laptop.

It is simply ridiculous that it has had to be delayed so many years just because the system caters to an outdated system where publishers and distributors make the largest amount of profits from sales of books, newspapers, magazines. Those intermediaries need to go away and authors, artists, journalists need to get 100% of the cut. We need a full subscription plan at $5 per month or less that gives full unlimited access to all works. The EU better vote for this as soon as possible, or it will be crappy piracy vs crappy publishers for yet another bunch of years with crappy output by creators of content.

Google announced Terrabyte storage for 256 dollars per year for Picasa web photo storage. I still think Google has a long way to go. $256 per TB per year is 8x more than the current price of buing a TB hard drive on the open market and using it for 2 years. 16x more expensive if you consider that a hard drive should work fine for 4 years at least.

Google needs to implement fully cold cloud storage. If I want to upload a TB of my personal stuff to Google cloud storage, and that I very rarely need to access that data, Google should store 2 copies at 2 separate locations (if one hard disk fails), but then Google should also be able to turn off the power to the hard drives to 0 power consumption, and the only charge for power usage to resume turning on the hard drives on demand and charge for that power consumption as part of the bandwidth costs, cheaper than $0.01 per GB transfered from and to the cloud storage.

Then for the hosting of popular files, Google would automatically host those on more expensive always on hard drive storage, though the extra bandwidth usage should pay for most of that.

For (mostly pirated) popular video and audio files, Google should do like Streamload once did, only host one copy for all the users who “beamed” it instantly to their accounts. Thus if you want cloud storage for movie and music files that in average more than 1000 other Google cloud storage users are using, th cost for that TB of cloud storage should be less than 1/1000th the TB storage cost per year, thus $0.25 per TB per year, thus free unlimited cloud storage for popular files, financed by advertising. But Google probably needs to figure out some copyright issues before this happens.

For example, if I want 1TB on Google cloud storage today, Google should let me buy about 2x 1TB drives on the open market, at about $80 per hard drive at current hard drive pricing, and have them instantly connected to the Google cloud storage. Thus the pricing should be $80 per TB per hosted unique files per year. And $0.01 or less per GB transfered which includes power consumption costs (could depend also on the bitrate and the sustained transfer rates, bandwith to transfer many small files slowly would cost more than transfering the files quickly).

I have been posting this as a feature request on Google feedback groups since May 2007, today Google is launching real feed item recommendations, which they call Magic.

My request from May 20th 2007: Backup up somewhere cause I cannot find it in the archives of the official Google Group

Subject: Personalized News Items Suggestions Actions…
From: Charbax ()
Date: May 20, 2007 7:14:39 pm
List: com.googlegroups.google-reader-past
We can star items, now all Google Reader needs to provide is a
“Recommendations” button, which would display a list of recommended
news items, based on comparing this user with the activity of all the
other Google Reader users.

There should be some settings for different kinds of Recommended news
items:

x Generate Recommendations Based on read news items

x Generate Recommendations Based on starre news items only

<------------> A slider to choose level of obscurity that news items
may be, thus only fetching the most popular other news items, or also
recommending some more obscure stories that only a few other Google
Reader users have read or have starred.

Some other algorithms and functionalities might be chosen in the
settings of this feature by the users.

And as there is a Star function now, it is important to also have a
“Discard” item button, which basically tells the Google Reader
Recommendations engine that it should please try to avoid recommending
this type of news item in the future.

A history of chronologically starred and discared news items should
also be consultable so as to maybe later make some changes in those
ratings.

Also this could be used to Suggest similar news item that is better
suited than the one that is being read. Basically, Google knows all
the related news items that talk about the same things, so using the
stats of starring, it could display a “Hey, try reading this version
of the news item on this other blog, it should be a better one and one
Google Reader thinks is of your personal taste”.

Google should contact me if they are going to steal my idea, or I have
lots of other similar visions, I’m sure they are in the works and
studied, but maybe they are not..

In December 2007: http://groups.google.com/group/google-reader-feedback/browse_thread/thread/655e44352560e9ab/

And a couple of months ago: http://www.getsfn.com/google_reader/topics/feed_item_recommendations_based_on_likes

I like to speculate on Youtube’s potential for profits and revenues on my blog in those previous posts: http://charbax.com/2009/04/09/what-google-pays-for-youtube/ , http://charbax.com/2008/08/14/current-global-youtube-bandwidth-might-be-126-petabytes-per-month/ , http://charbax.com/2008/08/07/google-should-activate-overlay-youtube-ads-now/ , http://charbax.com/2008/06/28/youtube-needs-to-change/ , http://charbax.com/2008/04/30/when-google-starts-to-revolutionize-youtube-using-overlay-advertising/ and http://charbax.com/2008/01/09/i-just-interviewed-the-youtube-founders/

Today Youtube announces officially that they are serving more than 1 Billion video views per day. So here are my latest calculations posted to: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/09/youtubes-new-logo-shouts-from-the-rooftops-1-billion-views-per-day/#comment-3027990

Let’s calculate:

1 Billion views per day, if average 30 seconds per view, if average is 300kbit/s video bitrate = That’s “only” 1125 Terrabytes of video streaming bandwidth per day.

Let’s guess Google pays $0.01 per GB of bandwidth (because they own most of their bandwidth infrastructure caching all videos as close to viewers as possible). That would mean that Google would be paying only $11250 in bandwidth per day.

If average Youtube video view is 1 minute, that would still only cost $22500 per day at $0.01 per GB.

If Google pays as much as $0.05 per GB, and average video length is 1min and average bitrate is 300kbit/s, that’s still “only” $112500 per day to host the worlds biggest video site reaching hundreds of millions of viewers all over the world.

Now let’s consider Google may be “only” monetizing 20% of those views at a rate of “only” $10 per 1000 views with overlay advertising in partner/copyrighted/claimed videos:

If 20% of Youtube videos are monetized at $10CPM, that’s $2 Million in revenues for Google per day, for 200 million overlay and other ad impressions per day.

Overall, according to my calculations, Google may be spending between $8.2 Million and $41 Million per year on bandwidth to deliver all those video views.

And according to my calculation and speculation, if 20% of video views are monetized by overlay and other ads, Google could be making upwards $730 Million in revenues per year.

$730 Million -  $41 Million = $689 Million in profits for Google on Youtube each year. Of which they split about half to the content providers.

Youtube could still be a very huge source of profits and revenues for Google, and my calculations are probably much lower than Google’s really potential for monetization with this.

I believe even user generated content can be monetized, more and more advertisers only care if they can sell stuff to the viewers through those overlay ads.

I also posted this comment on the official Youtube blog: http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/10/y000000000utube.html?showComment=1255103825750#c9092045352321286663

3 years, why can I still not even apply to become a Youtube partner just because I am not a resident of USA, UK, Germany, France, Japan, Spain, Canada, Australia? How about the hobbyists of the 200 other countries of the world, are they not allowed to turn their hobbies into a real business?

All this time, still no real way to sell things with Google Checkout or whatever directly from within the videos. Still no automatic subtitles generation and automatically translated subtitles in all languages. Still no regular video-downloading support! No Micro-payments for monetization of really high quality streaming and downloading!

The video recommendations algorithms still suck. No really good platforms to watch Youtube on a set-top-box. No desktop uploader with resume and maximum upload bandwidth features, no way to access ones originally uploaded videos!

3 years, still no way to re-upload better quality of videos, still no easy way for regular people to claim ownership of video and audio content when other users pirate your content. Still no way to edit out the music of a video with your own alternative legal music.

3 years, still no alternative to the crappy Flash format!

OK, I appreciate that the bandwidth that Youtube provides for 1 billion daily views is absolutely amazing work in terms of bandwidth management and hosting. Though seriously, you got 1.65 Billion dollars for it, Google has the best PHD engineers in the world, you are a lot of developpers who should be able to improve things even faster at Youtube. Seriously, get to work now and release these features! You actually have the responsability to make these features work now.

1. They are much cheaper. Cheapest unlocked 3G-enabled ARM based laptops will be sold at $100 without any carrier contracts needed.

2. ARM Laptops have no screen size limits. Get a 15″ ARM powered laptop for $200 soon.

3. ARM Laptops run 15-20 hours on a small 3-cell battery at the minimum.

4. ARM Laptops are lighter, they don’t get hot like Intel based laptops.

5. Chrome OS (= Android 2.0) runs on ARM Laptops better than on Intel.

6. ARM Laptops can come with 500GB hard drives for just a $80 extra fee to pay for the hard drive. They can even all come with an empty 2.5″ sata hard drive slot to add any hard drive available on the market to add storage to it.

7. ARM Laptops have instant on ability, applications run faster and all load instantly.

8. Full HTML5 enabled browser runs on ARM Laptops with an unlimited amount of tabs with as little as only 256mb RAM required thus lowering the price.

The EU should force all Laptop and Desktop OEMs to provide the consumer the option to save instantly the cost of the OS at the counter and not have it pre-installed on their machine.

And any consumer purchasing a laptop or desktop with an OS pre-installed should be able to get an INSTANT rebate at the counter equivalent to the cost of the OS even if the OS is pre-installed on the computer. The reseller must provide a special software on a USB key that uninstalls automatically that OS on first bootup.

Then all Resellers must provide free or paid alternative OS choices. Chrome, Ubuntu or Linpus Linux could be available right there on a USB key available for free with any new computer purchase.

What this proposition means, is that if you enter a store and it only has Windows computer for sale, you must be able to demand Windows removed and they should give you an instant rebate between $40 and $100 depending on the actual price that they are paying to Microsoft. Many consumers will prefer to buy the computer without the Windows option either without it even being pre-installed or with a USB key function that erases Windows on first bootup. Erasing Windows can be done in the store while you wait, or if they don’t have time, you can get the “Delete Windows” USB key and delete it yourself at home the first time you boot it up.