I don’t think this is difficult for Google to figure out. They should just allow any Youtube publisher to activate overlay advertising on all of their videos.
Google has voice recognition, they have annotations, invideo comments are comming up. They have comments, they should have some more and better usergenerated tagging, ratings and personal recommendations.
From there, while they re-encode all the videos to more and better formats, they can stream out the advertising features as a stream parallel to the video streams, which devices can then overlay on the video in all kinds of different ways.
Really the only perhaps difficulty Google might have with overlay ads, is that it might not be compatible with the current Youtube Flash version standard which is Flash 7.
Once Google activated overlay advertising, video makers are going to be making a living doing this. If you have more then 100 thousand viewers per month on your Youtube videos, you could be making a living doing it. And Google is going to be making billions of dollars each quarter on this. I expect Youtube to become Google’s biggest revenue source pretty soon. There is nothing better on the Internet then video.
- WiFi and HSDPA built-in to upload my HD videos directly to an FTP server without needing to use a laptop. API to interact with online services to then publish that video to video-blogs and Youtube.
- Live streaming using WiFi or HSDPA of the camera feed in a low resolution and bitrate all the while the camcorder is recording the HD quality to the Internal storage.
- Built-in 2.5″ hard drive (up to 500GB) as well as SDHC storage.
- Built-in bluetooth or VHF to use for cheap but high quality wireless microphones. Multiple microphones should work with one camera.
- USB keyboard support to enter filenames, description, tags for when publishing the HD videos directly from the camera to the Internet.
- Voice recognition service (could be online), can automatically transcribe title, description and tags from voice recordings made to be linked up with the main HD video file recording.
- On screen live chat from live video viewers in the same way as the Qik live chat works on the Nokia N95.
- Live video feed should be able to go to services such as Qik.com, Mogulus.com, Ustream.tv, Kyte.tv as well as live p2p streaming systems using live Bittorrent protocols, pplive or sopcast.
I’d say this is probably better then the stuff Asus has (Similarly specced Asus Eee 901 is $589 in USA while Acer Aspire One is $379). MSI Wind might have a slightly larger screen and a hard drive, but it’s also 38% more expensive.
Dell is coming with perhaps even better value in September.
Of course, these Atom notebooks are over twice the price of the 7.5″ sunlight readable AMD Geode based OLPC at 120€ (you can buy two get one worldwide in September, the second laptop you buy goes to a child in a developing nation) and about 4 times the price of the ARM based laptops that are also coming up in the next few months.
But if you absolutely are considering getting an Atom based laptop, this Acer Aspire One does look like pretty good value to me. The slightly cheaper Asus Eee 700 has a much less usable smaller LCD screen and a much less usable smaller keyboard as well.
Here’s a nice french video review comparing this 8.9″ netbook with 12″ and a 15″ laptops, to have an idea of the size difference, Acer managed to make the keyboard about the same size as on the 12″ laptop that is shown, just so you aren’t too surprised of its small size when you receive it: http://dailymotion.com/video/x628dx_lesnumeriques-acer-aspire-one_tech
This is definitely much better value then any of the 2000€ Fujitsu, Sony or Flybook small laptops which were the only ones available at this size about a year ago.
It might be worth waiting a few weeks to see if Acer will release an Aspire One with built-in HSDPA.
This JL700 laptop is from some unknown Hong Kong company, but it does prove that $100 ARM based laptops are coming.
But this is certainly the type of laptop that is the laptop of the future.
Archos could make this using their nearly unaltered DaVinci platform and simply cramming it into a laptop form factor with a keyboard and trackpad mouse and a normal cheaer non-touch LCD. Archos could sell it below $200 and try to provide Google Android on it as an open platform, while they develop Google Android for the rest of the Archos line of products.
ARM based laptops cost less then half the cost of X86 based laptops, they consume less then half the power, take up less then half the size and weight.
I am sure we are going to see ARM based laptops very soon based on all kinds of ARM chips be it Texas Instruments DaVinci, Marvell Scale, Samsung, Qualcomm, Nvidia and others. Those are all going to be half or a third of the cost of any X86 based laptop, they are going to consume lower then half the battery power, they are going to fit in half the size and weight, they are going to be much faster at booting up and at doing basic tasks compared to X86.
Of course, this means the end for Intel, Microsoft and potentially the end of several large PC and laptop makers such as Dell, HP, Apple, Fujitsu, Asus, Acer, MSI, Foxconn and others, all of which see no profit in selling laptops at $99: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/21/technology/21pc.html
Google knows with 99.9999% certainty that there is a real person behind each Google Account. They simply have usage statistics and usage behaviour detectors that can verify that a Google Account user is a real user and not a bot. This makes it IMPOSSIBLE to game such a Google Reviews system.
There is nothing wrong with self promotion, and promoting your friends and family is just fine. Google knows when you are self promoting yourself and Google knows when you are promoting your friends. Google knows everything about you, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. This means Google can weight each Review differently and output the Reviews differently in a personalized way for each user.
Imagine what will filter up to the top for search queries such as “Who should be the president?”, “What should we do about Iraq?”, “Are Oil companies doing good?”, “What should my neighbour do with his garden?”
Google could in fact realise this idea that I’ve had for the last 4 years, Google could become the Truth Engine, making a system that uses the collective intelligence of all the people and outputs 100% the truth. This would force every politician to follow orders from the population, this would make direct democracy a reality.
Do you want to know the truth about anything in realtime? Simply look it up on Google. Do you know something, do you have some proof, do you have some evidence, do you have some ideas? Simply publish them on Google, based on your profile and usage behaviour, and other users appreciations of your submitions, your Truth can become the truth.
Chad Hurley says they have automatic DMCA systems, or user-generated automatic moderation. Does that mean they have analog and digital fingerprinting filters on uploaded content? Do they provide content owners to scan their content and submit those analog and digital fingerprints? Does Youtube let content owners automatically “take-over” the content onto their own Youtube account when someone else uploads it?
The worst thing I think with regards to content owners being still legitimally angry at Youtube, is that Youtube still doesn’t monetize the views as it should, so all these billions of views of copyrighted material isn’t directly monetized, basically it’s bad for content owners and bad for Youtube as well in terms of paying for bandwidth and infrastructure. Although some say content owners can monetize their content indirectly (stuff like when people watch your music video or your concert video on Youtube, more people buy your CD) and some people say it doesn’t matter that Google is loosing millions of dollars on paying for the bandwidth and infrastructure required to deliver 40 thousand terrabytes of bandwidth per month currently, including the infrastructure required to encoding of 1000 minutes of video every minute, host it and process it in different ways.
I didn’t like Flash based videos when Youtube started, I still don’t like it. But the popularity and ease of use of the Youtube experience is impressive. Still though, I think it’s much too hard to really get meaningful experiences on Youtube, the personalized video recommendations engine isn’t very good so far, the quality is still so low and the incentive from content producers is still very limited cause the monetization is not very effective.
Google is the coolest company out there, but I think they are still too slow at releasing new features. It’s been over a year and a half since Google aquired Youtube, and still nothing much seem to have happened other then perhaps that there is a better more reliable infrastructure behind it, view count and audience is growing, fancy statistics for the content providers, that’s still no difference from the users point of view and especially I would say it could be said to be disappointing from the content providers point of view.
Chad Hurley says he is proud that there are some college kids that are earning thousands of dollars each month posting videos to Youtube, that some people get record contracts or get hired on TV because of being discovered on Youtube. That’s all fine and well, I wouldn’t have the exact monetization statistics, but I don’t think there are more then a few tens perhaps a few hundreds of independent content providers that are able to make money on Youtube thus far. Monetization of Youtube with banner ads next to the video is not much better then traditional adsense, you need millions of hits to start making a few hundreds dollars a month. Once Youtube has activated automatic overlay advertising, the monetization rates should grow 10x or 100x in terms of monetization per 1000 views. This will lead to tens of thousands of college kids being able to make a living being creative with their video publishing on Youtube. So really, Youtube needs to increase the impact from monetization 1000 times.
If you want to give the country back to the people, why not use the Internet to change the way democracy works.
We need an online parliament where every person is a representative of the people, where good ideas and the truth automatically are highlighted using direct democracy and algorithms. Any leader should then promise to serve the will of the people by using this democratic system on the Internet.
Representative democracy was invented before the airplane, before the telephone and before the Internet. We need to upgrade democracy.
Today ICANN announced that they will open up for unlimited amount of top level domains and they will start to use all alphabets. I think this is fantastic news. This means the value of .com .tv .eu and all other current TLD domain sharks today all have gone bankrupt. This is the news they hoped would not happen.
I think that the new rules should be following:
- The Democracy involved at ICANN should rule on sharked, spammed or unused domains. As well as trademarks automatically are monitored using a database so suspicious attempts at registering trademarks will be identified.
- ICANN should control the whole system themselves using a central Google Apps like infrastructure that can scale to cover all TLD and all domains for the whole world.
- Domains should be free, no price, nada. Other then perhaps a very small fee to cover the costs of maintaining the whole DNS, database and ICANN controlling system. Thus price for a domain should be probably less than 1 dollar per domain per year. ICANN should remove all the domain registrar business, we don’t need it. The price of a domain should be public knowledge and nobody should pay more than that price.
- To register a domain you need to give your real identity to ICANN, you have to register your business and be able to submit tax papers and government controlled verification in case of a conflict.
This will be just like newsgroups, the value of .com and all current TLDs will decrease, and now the value instead is going to be the content and the relevancy. Today is a great day for democracy online, for relevancy of searches, for the quality of the content online, for the semantic web and for the freedom of speech.
Once they activate it, I think it can probably use voice recognition to synchronize overlay advertising with the words said in the video. “When somebody says Coca-Cola in the video, there might be a Coca-Cola ad popping up at the bottom of the ad”.
I think this could be so insanely huge it will revolutionize the whole entertainment industry. Finally it will be possible to make a living putting videos on the Internet. As much as $10 or $15 per 1000 views on the videos should be what Google would be paying any content creator who ties up their Youtube account with their Adsense account and who activates the Overlay advertising on all their videos. No Youtube content creator would be forced to activate the ads, but if the content creator wants to earn money they would be able to flip a switch and start displaying ads on all of their uploaded videos.
So I was saying, this will revolutionize the entertainment and blogging industry cause it would be relatively easy for video-bloggers to then improve the quality of their video productions to get higher audiences. When artists and citizen journalists finally get paid even just a little for their effort, they will be able to do this full time. Walk around with Youtube connected cell phones and still concentrate uploading a lot more quality content then they were uploading back when uploading videos on Youtube was something the independent content producers only did in their free time as a hobby.
I think Google are probably fine-tuning the overlay advertising feature to have it totally ready for when they launch it big time for any content provider on Youtube to be able to start making serious money. Income per 1000 views on Youtube overlay ads are perhaps as much as 100 times higher compared to textual ads using Adsense on for example blogs.
