Charbax.com

Though they need to improve friendfeed quite a bit for it to really make absolute sense. Though the ex-Google people who previously created Gmail, Adsense, are now working on friendfeed, if they make it right, friendfeed could replace IRC, IM and twitter. I would like it if it will be possible to filter the friendfeed chat room by users, to filter up highly rated users by the amount of likes that their entries get, and filter up quality entries in real-time. Especially it will be good to thus automatically moderate real-time discussions on topics when a lot of people are chatting about them at the same time.

At the Copenhagen Film Festival CPH:PIX 16-26th of April 2009, I have filmed 64 interviews with the film directors and regular people when they exited the cinemas and asking them what they think about the movie premieres that they just saw. You can see all my videos on this Youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/filmviews

Copying is now free, uncontrollable and unlimited.

Copyright should be replaced by the author and artists basic right to get paid for their work.

The payment should happen through a collective licence fee that all households should pay. Approximately £5 per month will bring us a large way there.

The Government needs to then guarantee all authors and artists that the collected money is distributed fairly and directly to artists and authors. This will be based on very precise statistics on file sharing, on independent statistics made at file download and streaming portals (independent statistics at Youtube, Flickr, Google Books, Last.fm and at more such sites). Those statistics will also be made by hundreds of thousands of volunteer Internet users who will have installed Last.fm type of scrobling software which monitors the number of playbacks of music, video, even of text in the browser and reports that to the central statistics systems.

The Government will have responsabillity to make sure that all works of art, all articles, all texts, photos everything is catalogued and even backed up by the state as a means to safeguard a copy of everything as it being the national cultural heritage. Based on this database, digital and analog fingerprints are generated on all works. And thus every single use of these works of art can be identified and the artist or author can be compensated.

We need to admit that the issue here is to remove the established music labels, movie studios and publishor’s grip on the cultural industry revenues. We need to think about the artists and the authors and not about the intermediaries. We need to admit that these last 10 years have been a struggle by the old established majors to hold on to their multi billion pound yearly revenues. We need to recognize that the Internet is here to remove all intermediaries in the cultural industries. The faster we as a society admit it, the sooner cultural expansion will flourish on the Internet leading to much better arts and much better culture in general.

I have been saying this since 2006 and before: http://charbax.com/2007/12/19/studios-know-they-are-going-to-be-toast-on-the-internet/

I posted this as a comment at http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/311/CommentKey:287082

My full Youtube account has been restored, perhaps thanks to the help in pressure and attention from the blogs at newteevee.com, techdirt.com and the support on friendfeed and twitter:

Dear Nicolas,

Thank you for your counternotification. Fox has retracted its copyright
claim with respect to the following videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sb7iphIFyoY

This content has been restored and I have reactivated your accounts. For
technical reasons, it may take a day for the video to be available again.
Please let us know if you have any further issues.

Sincerely,

Harry
The YouTube Team

In a terrible mistake by self proclaimed Internet DMCA enforcer BayTSP, DMCA takedown notices were issued on thousands of Youtube videos that all were created by users legally for a video mashup competition on the Burger King sponsored Youtube channel, where users were invited to record their own voice-overs on Seth Macfarlane’s cavalcade of comedy cartoon series. I participated in that, and I recorded a kind of funny voice-over on the video with the two ducks watching TV.

from Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation about Duck TV Charbax 1 - Charbax
Video ID: Sb7iphIFyoY

Without warning, about 2 days ago, Youtube then suspended my account and have issued me with automated email replies when I tried to contact copyright@youtube.com and support@youtube.com with the following messages:

“Suspended accounts cannot be reinstated.”

“Your account has now been terminated”

“Note: In the event that your account is restored, your account information such as videos and comments will NOT be restored.”

This would be a totally catastrophic result for me if true. My Youtube account is a very important part of my online presence and a very important part of my freelance video-blogging business and of my prospects of making money doing freelance video-blogging. Youtube also says I may not setup any other Youtube account in the future. I cannot accept any of those scenarios, all resulting of a false copyright claim by BayTSP on behalf of Twentieth Century Fox.

“Federal law requires that we terminate accounts when there are repeated claims of copyright infringement.”

At the same time, Youtube also did surprise me with two other notices of supposed copyright violations that I would have committed on another Youtube account which I bought on Oct 15, 2008 from someone to then hand over to a french company named Archos who I thought needed a better presence on Youtube. I am very certain that Archos only uploaded totally legal videos about their products and also used the account to answer Youtube users comments on different Archos related videos:

from World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. about Edge’s WWF Debut - Archos
Video ID: Co1BuPIYrF4
from Viacom International, Inc. about Eight Man Tag: Steiner Brothers/Basham/Damaja Vs VKM/Team 3D - Archos
Video ID: 98WnaZ3od7I

I have though no idea what those videos are. I don’t know if those copyright infringements were takend down before the 15th of October 2008, the date when I took over that Archos youtube account from a user of which I only have his original paypal account on which I paid the $50 to get that account name.

Should Youtube penalize me for supposed copyright violations that a user did on a Youtube account more than 6 months ago, before I bought the account from him and handed it over to a french company?

Should Youtube suspend my Charbax Youtube account and the Archos one on the basis of that mistaken takedown notice sent by BayTSP on behalf of Twentieth Century Fox for a video that I created for fun using a flash based voice-over recording application hosted at http://youtube.com/bk and probably even developped by Youtube engineers as a promotional tool and which would upload the resulting video directly to my Youtube account for archival and for promotion of their voice-over cartoon promotion and competition?

Here I am hoping strongly that Youtube can promptly restore my full Youtube account, with all of my about 400 videos, all of their viewing histories, search rankings on Google and Youtube, all user comments on my videos, all my comments on other videos and all of my ratings.

All the while, my story is being covered at http://newteevee.com/2009/05/05/20th-century-fox-sics-takedown-notices-on-its-own-mashup-promotion/ and http://help.youtube.com/group/youtube-howto/browse_thread/thread/73da5e7e013ff2c7. I have sent the signed DMCA Counter notice as described in the Youtube DMCA Help page copyright@youtube.com, I have emailed copyright@youtube.com and support@youtube.com several times, I have left phone messages on the answering machines of BayTSP, Media Rights Capital and even at a Marketing representative of Burger King. So far, my Youtube account has been suspended for more than 2 days, and I still haven’t gotten any direct reply from any real person at Youtube, BayTSP, 20th Century Fox, MRC, Seth Macfarlane or anyone else about the resolution of this problem.

I understand that it must be hard for Youtube to handle the millions of Youtube accounts that upload thousands of videos everyday, the billions of video views and the thousands of copyright owners complaining about the insufficient monetization or just complaining about their content being copied without their rights. I though also think that Youtube should the responsibility to have implemented a global solution for copyrights, for the maximum monetization of independent and major studio contents and especially for the fair treatment of independent video-bloggers like me who are relying on Google to implement Adsense-like monetization on freelance and independent Youtube video projects.

DR should spend the normal TV show production budget on producing the worlds coolest Youtube videos on a new DR Denmark channel on youtube. For the whole world to see the potential of danish people in terms of comedy, funky moves and other awesome ideas. The concept is that every second of every episode needs to be so unbelievably awesome, that everyone in Denmark and everyone in the world will want to watch all of it on Youtube. Let Danish TV syndicate their TV concept to the rest of the worlds TV channels instead of it being Danish TV buying English and American TV concepts. This show needs to be inspired by Casper and Mandrilaftalen, the best TV show ever made, and mix that with the philosophy of Thomas Blachman on X Factor and with the awesome timing and cinematography of Ole Bornedahl or any other unknown and known danish talents that will contribute to this project. The goal being, to not suck, to be awesome, to hopefully attract millions of viewers on DR’s Youtube channel, and then sharing that Youtube overlay advertising revenue with the Danish artists who will be making all this innovative work. This should be one show that Danish people and a worldwide audience will be looking forward to each new episode, worldwide audiences will download this as podcasts, will stream it in HD quality over the Internet and it will bring many people from the whole world to Denmark to be a part of this project.

Here’s a follow-up to my previous post at Current global Youtube bandwidth might be 126 petabytes per month that I posted as a comment here:

Let me do a quick calculation on the actual expense for Google per 1000 views:

Standard Youtube quality is at 320×180 - 350kbit/s Sorenson - 25fps - 22hz mono audio thus consumes about 8 Megabytes of bandwidth for a 3 minute clip. Guessing that the average Youtube view measured (75 Billion views per year according to Credit Suisse) watches a 3 minute clip.

75 Billion times 8 Megabytes = approximately 590625000 Gigabytes of bandwidth consumed by Google for Youtube per year. = Approximately 590 thousand Terrabytes of bandwidth per year.

Let’s assume Google has brought the cost down per Gigabyte towards $0.05, assuming that since Google is the largest single user of bandwidth in the world with Youtube, that they do get discounts on bandwidth pricing by the content delivery networks and since Google owns and builds many of the fiber optic lines and nodes themselves to including builds the server parks as close to all viewers as possible.

590 Thousand Terrabytes per year times $0.05/GB only amounts to a cost for Google of $29.531.250 dollars to host Youtube each year at this point.

I surely think that below $30 Million for hosting Youtube each year, that is pretty manageable.

Surely my estimate of total cost at $0.05 might be low considering you add other Cloud Computing costs to just Bandwidth, such as storage, encoding capacity and processing power to process each request fast.

If you consider Google would pay $0.10 per GB delivered, and that the average Youtube view instead is 6 minutes in length (in my opinion very unlikely, a Youtube view average length probably is closer to 1 minute, since people skip stuff they don’t really like), then Google would still only have an expense per year for Youtube of below $120 Million per year for delivering those 75 Billion views per year.

Now consider a certain % of Youtube views now are in High Quality mode which uses 480×270 - 1mbit/s Sorenson - 25fps - 44hz stereo mp3 audio and even that more and more of the views are in the Youtube HD format 1280×720 - 2mbit/s H264 - full framerate - 44hz stereo 254kbit/s AAC audio, I still think those HQ and HD formats are only a small % of all Youtube views since most people don’t bother clicking to get HQ and HD quality when viewing and that HQ requires 1mbit/s+ download speed and HD required 2mbit/s+ download speed and a fast computer to decode 720p H264 Flash content.

So my guess is that Google definitely keeps Youtube expenses below $100 Million all included so far, and my estimate is that Google could quickly be making MANY Billions of dollars in revenue from Youtube as soon as Google decides to flip the monetization switch. Which basically means to allow all Youtube content providers to activate overlay advertising on all their videos, which will include referals for 1-click sales including digital content sales and shipped products (for example 1-click Amazon buy), including integrated sales of merchandizing and much much more. Youtube hasn’t even integrated very much full length full quality commercially produced contents such as being a Hulu and all-in-one VOD provider.

Anyways, in my points Youtube will quickly become Google’s biggest source of revenues and profits, and I think it probably is the biggest part of Google’s future and I actually think the growth of Youtube view-counts and bandwidth usage is only at the very early stages and that we are soon going to be talking about thousand and millions of times more views and bandwidth usage once all people transfer their 5-hour daily TV watching to be source from Youtube through set-top-boxes and other ways to watch Youtube on the TV and on mobile devices.

If Google had to get a CPM on ALL videos today to cover their bandwidth and service costs, in my estimation that CPM would be: $1.33 CPM. That would be a CPM very easy for Google to exceed even by only monetizing a fraction of all the views. A $15 CPM is very likely achievable by Google with good overlay advertising, thus Google would only have to monetize less than 10% of all the views with overlay advertising to make a profit.

That is based on my estimate that Google covers mosts bandwidth/storage/ cloud computing expenses at below $100 million per year for 75 Billion views.

I see no reason why Google would be paying more than $0.10 per Gigabyte transfered for normal Youtube views. And I think that most of those most popular Youtube views are for short standard quality video files.

The main goal of the OLPC, and thus, of the whole computer industry at this point, is to lower the cost of laptops by lowering the power consumption. The best way to achieve that, is to limit the way applications get full native access to the deep internals of the computer system. Intel’s X86 standard and Microsoft’s Windows OS were designed only for that multi-purpose backwards compatibility where the same unoptimized bloated software would work across thousands of hardware configurations with often full root access to the deepest internals of a computer system. For most of the applications that most people need, you do not need full native code support in third party applications. By limiting full native access for third party applications, you take care in one swoop of all the security problems that one has on Intel and Microsoft based PC and laptops. You basically make spyware, viruses, hacking and all of those problems impossible by design.

That is how Android is made. Android provides a totally sandboxed JAVA-based software layer, which only interacts with the hardware features through totally controllable software-to-hardware APIs. With Android on ARM, you have a complete shift in the way third party applications are run compared to X86 Windows XP/7, MacOSX and even most of those X86 Desktop Linux distributions that have been going around, including Ubuntu and Fedora.

The open source native Android Linux code hacking happens exclusively at the manufacturer stage. Which means, you want to have a manufacturer in control of everything, you want the manufacturer to customize Android for the very specific mass produced hardware in question, providing all the standard and non-standard software-to-hardware APIs for third party software developers to gain access to the all of the devices standard or special hardware features.

What you have backing Android is the worlds absolute best company in Google, comprised of the worlds largest concentration of PHDs and Engineers with the most experience in Web and computer technology. The role of Google with Android is to make sure that the native Android code works in the most optimal fashion with the most optimal hardware configurations that manufacturers are making for it. Google helps manufacturers prepare that Android native code customization for each different System On Chip, for each different variation on the ARM Cortex processor profiles by each of the industry leading ARM processor manufacturers among Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Freescale, Samsung, Nvidia, Marvell and others.

If you want to change the default Android user interface layer and make it look more like the Sugar User Interface layer (which for XO-1 was built on top of an optimized X86 Fedora Linux installation), you definitely can do those changes and customizations. Those would come from the manufacturers, thus in the case of OLPC from the whole OLPC organization, in cooperation with Google or anyone else helping to create a more education-laptop friendly user interface. But Android applications remain the same, and appart from slight porting that can be required, all Android applications are designed to work in full screen mode, and management of multi-tasking, notifications, memory and processing power consumption, all those are managed the same way accros all implementations of the Android OS.

HP has just announced that they are working to support Android in future HP Laptops. Asus has announced to be working on Android laptops. Look forward to Android ruling over all ARM Laptop implementations, at least for these where the lowest cost and the lowest power consumption levels have been achieved. Look forward to $100 Android ARM laptops. Look forward to the empire of Intel and Microsoft crumbling under the inevitable hardware and software revolution that comes with the XO-2 and with the whole industry’s shift to lower cost, lower power consumption using ARM and Android in all laptops.

The idea of a big calculator type of product using a cheap and simple embedded ARM processor, something like a 6″ 480×360 monochrome display (perhaps even smaller) and WiFi perhaps even some built-in way to use a SIM card slot for subsidized cellular data access, that type of super cheap Laptop project could be fine for reading ebooks, writing documents and searching for text based stuff on the Internet. That type of cheap monochrome screen and cheap embedded processor could display very basic HTML text-only pages from the Internet. And I could imagine that a whole mobile-web type of alternate Internet could be made that would suit to be viewed on this type of super cheap embedded laptop. Google or some other online service can even process the whole web other than AJAC and Flash content to reformat it to be displayed on such a supposed low resolution monochrome display.

Imagine basically a display that could be some type of mobile phone like monochrome LCD display but large enough to be usable in a Laptop form factor. And with enough resolution to be used for ebooks, writing documents and surfing a basic type of web.

Though, even though about 500 blogs around the Internet according to Google Blog Search had been announcing this as an OLPC alternative, I’d rather call it a complete redifinition of the PC/Laptop industry. They all talked about a February 3rd release event happening somewhere in India. Though that date has no passed and there are no pictures to be found on the Internet. No detailed specifications, no real concrete proof that this project exists. So far, this Indian project is vapourware.

Although I agree with the principal that we need to build it cheaper than the XO-1, it needs to be based on cheaper embedded processors, it needs to use the cheapest displays that we can get. Even if those displays are low resolution and monochrome. Color displays, the next PIxel Qi and all that is fascinating and we all cannot wait for the XO-2 touchscreens. Though until Pixel Qi launches their first commercial screens hopefully within a few months, until then, then why not use cheap monochrome ones if somehow they can be made to display the kind of text that is needed.

OLPC is probably looking for a non X86 architecture for XO-2, probably ARM, where several providers can provide the processor. Using ARM Cortex, OLPC can use any of Texas Instruments, Mavell, Freescale, Samsung, Qualcomm, Nvidia and others, all interchangeably, independently of the deals that will be put in place. The idea being that having all these ARM Cortex providers being more or less compatible with each other, enabling minimal changes in motherboard designs to have them all be compatible, this enables competition in the processor market. This will more quickly drive the prices down much further. This is the only way you can optimize the interpretation of Moore’s law which says that you can cut the price and power consumption of laptops by half every 18 months.

There is a basic reason AMD is not too enthusiastic about this whole new low cost laptop market. The reason is written on the wall, everyones can see it coming, cheaper laptops means it will be much harder to find profits in the industry. AMD isn’t exactly having an easy time already as things are today, Intel’s profit margins and overall income have shrinked 90% in 2008 compared to 2007.

I believe OLPC should use Google Android with Sugar on top, and they should increasingly rely on cloud computing such as the recently rumored Google Web Drive service to store and share all the data on. With XO-2, you should much further synchronize the way the school servers synch storage, processing power and contents to and from the cloud. Basically what you get is an overly simplified Internet access terminal, one with a small ARM Cortex processor behind the next generation of even lower power and lower cost Pixel Qi screens. One that just relies on basic Google Gears for local content caching, and let most of the rest happen using the much cheaper cloud.

$100 laptops using ARM are possible today already. Chinese GPS manufacturers are making them already using uber simple Linux and last generation MIPS or ARM processors:http://techvideoblog.com/category/laptops/

This makes it obvious that OLPC can achieve a $75 price point on XO-2, consider also the advantage of using a dual touch-screen, is that ou can even more easilly mass manufacture exactly the same model for the whole world. Since all the different keyboard layouts and all of the local interfaces are simply going to be a software function of the touchscreens. Mary-Lou Jepsen has done it once already. She can do it again.