Share This

Thursday, December 31, 2009

This Year in Web Videos, Four Different Ways

This Year in Web Videos, Four Different Ways
BY Kit EatonWed Dec 16, 2009 at 6:35 PM

year in web videos

Ah, digital photography and videos--my old, er, new friends. And powerful tools too: Good for capturing the passing moment. Or for documenting the passing year. Here are four videos that do just that, in very very different ways.

YouTube's Most Popular Clips of 2009

This was a big year for YouTube, with some innovations and a rising audience. But the most surprising thing about its most popular videos of 2009 was that the list was so music act-heavy that YouTube had to break it into two lists--one for music, one for everything else. As noted over at AllThingsD it's because otherwise "people like you and me, who have only a vague idea who Pitbull and Keri Hilson are, would have been totally baffled."

The music top ten crown went to Pitbull with I know you want me raking in over 88 million views, beating Miley Cyrus's The Climb into second place with just 64 million peeps. But the non-music list is topped by the winner of UK TV show "Britain's Got Talent" Susan Boyle...somewhat making a mockery of Google's list-splitting tactics. To that end, here's YouTube's third most popular non-music clip globally (which does have music in, but it's sweet and at least trying to raise money for charity.)

China's 2009 WebClips

Over at Shanghaiist, Elaine Chow has done a fab job of rounding up a slew of Internet videos and pics that you mightn't have seen. Unless you're a Chinese Netizen, that is. Among the gems are Obama Girl (an attractive student sitting behind President Obama at a speech, who paid to become a minor net celeb), Michael Jackson Face Boy (youngster doing amusing lip synchs to MJ songs) and Long Legs Girl (a volunteer at the Olympics opening ceremony, famous after people noticed her astonishingly long legs.)

Check out the list--it'll remind you that the Internet is not exclusively a U.S. phenomenon, or even one belonging to us here in what we deem the Western half of the globe. China too has its net crazies, and bad reality/talent TV shows: Here's a clip of Zeng Ki Ye. She was a contestant in the Happy Girls show, and though she didn't win, her mind-bogglingly bad singing somehow got her 15 minutes of fame.

Gawker's Top 100 Web Videos of 2009

The always lateral-thinking, nose-thumbing publication Gawker has crafted it's own slant on the webclips that helped defined this year online. And by webclips, I really do mean webclips: Funny dogs, cats, freakouts, fat kids, giant seagulls. Yes, it's what some might deem the dregs of this year's Internet video, while others (between snorts of laughter) will argue they're a perfect way to cheer up a boring day of work with some lunchtime *ahem* clip-viewing.

Gawker's list is topped by "The Amazing Beat Box Kid" and proceeds through "Kick to the Face #1," "Jesus Pwn3d U" and 96 others before arriving at "Keyboard cat." Check it out below. It's less than three minutes, and I guarantee you'll laugh, sob and snigger at least once each, before crashing into a blue funk and worrying about the state of the world you're living in.

Terrapin Gardens Farm

No idea what that sub-headline is going to lead to? Good. Watch this: It's long, at around 16 minutes, but it's the antidote to the clips above. And it's just calmly beautiful.

Something of a labor of love by editor/director Rick Scully, this is a time lapse masterpiece of snaps taken every two minutes for 365 days--ending on May 11th this year--of Terrapin Gardens Farm in Tunbridge, Vermont. Look closely and you'll see weather, the seasons, and the comings and goings of people, vehicles, animals and vegetation.

And aside from the fascination offered by that, the way Scully made the thing is novel all by itself: This was no super-expensive high tech deal. He hacked a very old JVC analog video camera together with a $75 video-capture card hooked up over USB 1.1 to an aging eMac that could only snag low-res (320 by 240 pixels) images, which he then compiled in iMove'09. This low-tech setup is a big part of the charm of the video. "A year goes by fast enough" as Scully notes, and technology presses ever forwards--in 2010 there will be a whole bunch more. And that makes it satisfying that there's still a place for low-fi solutions to artistic problems.

Read more Tech News on our Technology Channel

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Websites that died in 2009

Websites that died in 2009
11:41, December 30, 2009

While some websites have flourished in 2009, most notably Facebook and Twitter, others have fallen by the wayside. Many sites that died were relatively small enterprises. But even the big Internet giants, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo ditched once popular services and websites.

January saw Google''s changes to Jaiku and Dodgeball. Jaiku, a social networking, micro-blogging and lifestreaming service comparable to Twitter, was not shut but will be left to flounder. On January 14, 2009 it was announced that Google would be open-sourcing the product but would "no longer actively develop the Jaiku codebase" leaving development to a "passionate volunteer team of Googlers". Dodgeball was a location-based social networking software provider for mobile devices. Users would text their location to the service, which then notified them of crushes, friends, friends'' friends and interesting venues nearby. Dodgeball was shut down by Google in March 2009 and replaced with Google Latitude. Google Notebook was also shutdown for new users as cloud services like Google Docs increased in popularity. Another cloud service owned by Yahoo also announced its closure in January. Yahoo''s Briefcase had been deemed somewhat useless by many observers. The site offered 30MB of online storage, a number that was quite useful when it was launched in 1999. However this was quickly eclipsed by other Web storage providers and Web mail services. Users were given two months to download any files before it was shutdown.

February saw the demise of Jubii, an online communication utility. It included e-mail, text chat, VoIP, and file hosting--all in one tool. However it was seen as being incomplete with tools that did not tie into other existing services. The Jubii brand was actually an attempt to repackage the Lycos brand to U.S. users, however it, along with the European versions of Lycos Mail and Tripod Internet hosting, were shelved in mid-February. HP''s Upline was an online backup solution built off of Titanize, a product it had absorbed as a result of acquiring makers Opelin in 2007. Upline let users back up their home and work computers to the cloud for a yearly fee. Unlike some of the other storage providers, Upline''s paid plans offered unlimited storage. But in late February Upline announced it was to shutdown the service at the end of March, giving users a little more than a month to grab their files from HP''s servers.

Microsoft''s Encarta began as a software encyclopedia and later moved to the Web. Microsoft ran it as a subscription service, but in order to compete with free services like Wikipedia, the company provided portions of it that were supplemented with advertisements to non-subscribers. But in late March, the software giant announced that it would be discontinuing both the online and software-based versions of the site. The service was finally shelved in October though the company continues to use Encarta''s namesake for its free, online dictionary service. Japan''s Encarta site remains online but is due to close on December 31, 2009.

Wikia Search launched in January of 2008 with the idea that it let users control the rankings of search results. The hope was to let people constantly vote up more relevant pages, while letting the less-relevant pages move down. Wikia and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales hoped the system would spread across the Web, as it was made open-source, but it failed to do so. At its peak the site drew around 10,000 users a month. But with competition from Google''s own similar solution, called Search Wiki, Wales called it quits on Wikia Search in March.

SpiralFrog, a music download service based in New York, collapsed in late March under a mountain of debt. The site, launched in the United States and Canada in September 2007, offered free and legal music downloads, all supported by advertising. But on March 19, 2009, SpiralFrog terminated operations due to loan recalls. Unnamed sources say that the music provider supposedly tried to borrow at least 9 million U.S. dollars last year to stay in business. Its shut down came on the heels of another ad-supported music provider, Ruckus, which was geared toward college students. Users who had downloaded music from the site were also left with unplayable tracks due to strict DRM conditions (Digital Rights Management) that required logging into the site every 60 days.

Yahoo closed another of its services in June. Jumpcut.com was a website that provided free video editing and hosting services. Launched in January 2006, it was was purchased by Yahoo in October of the same year. But due to corporate prioritizing and the on-going financial problems at Yahoo, the upload service was terminated in December 2008 and the site was closed on June 15, 2009. Then came another Yahoo coffin. Geocites, one of the oldest web hosting services, shut down confining to history some of the earliest existing online content. Yahoo picked up personal Web site maker Geocities in January 1999 for a staggering 3.65 billion dollars in stock. Many of its most fervent users moved to other hosting providers partly due to poor, post-purchase choices from Yahoo that changed the site''s terms of service as well as core functionality. The rise of easy blogging tools and social networks, which for many was a simpler way to publish personal information, also helped bring the death-knell for Geocities. Yahoo announced its decision in April and finally shut the site down in late October.


It was not a good year for Yahoo users who then saw Yahoo! 360° consigned to the dustbin. Yahoo! 360° was a personal communication portal similar to other social networking sites. The site included social networking, blogging, and photo sharing services. Users could create personal web sites, share photos from Yahoo! Photos, maintain blogs, lists of local reviews, supply profile information, and see which friends are currently online. In May 2009 Yahoo! announced that the Yahoo! 360° service would close on July 13, 2009 as Yahoo! developers aimed to "focus their efforts on the new profile on Yahoo". The site wasn't killed off entirely though. Despite its lack of popularity at large, it was remains popular in Vietnam where it is still available.

As well as its Encarta service, Microsoft also shutdown Windows Live Events which had been an effort to replace services like Evite, Facebook events, MyPunchbowl, etc. It was launched as part of the Windows Live rebranding back in late 2007, and let users create events that could be shared publicly. More importantly, it was a smooth move to get users friendly with other Microsoft services like Live Spaces and Live Messenger. But in August, Microsoft announced that it would be closing up Windows Live Events in favor of building some of its functionality into Windows Live Calendar. In September, the company disabled the capability to create new events. Come April 2010 the site will be taken offline entirely.

Facial recognition was big in 2009, but not for face-finding tech Riya. It shuttered its doors in late August. It had come close to being snatched up by Google just four years prior, but the search giant instead went with competitor Neven Vision. Riya was simply overshadowed by tech giants who had time to catch up with their own facial recognition products. This included Google with its Picasa Web albums and photo library software, both of which were offered free of charge. Even Apple, has introduced its own facial recognition features as a part of its latest iLife release.

Google's telecommunications service GrandCentral will shut shop at the end of the year. The voice service was acquired in 2007 but has been left dormant for more than a year. However, it has effectively been reborn in the form of Google Voice and old GrandCentral users will be switched to the new service.

Source:Xinhua/Agencies

Using The Cloud Computing For Business

Using The Cloud For Business
Dan Woods, 12.29.09, 06:00 PM EST
Why the cloud is much more than a technology phenomenon.

Jan Baan, founder of Baan Corp., was present at the creation of enterprise resource planning. While leading the ERP software company from 1978–98, Baan observed what worked well and what failed as companies automated their business processes using a datacentric approach. For the past 10 years, Baan has spent his time and more than
250 million euros ($360 million) of his money on Cordys, a software company that creates what Baan calls a business operations platform. In this Q&A, Baan examines what the cloud means for business, what went wrong with ERP, and how a business operations platform delivers flexible automation of business processes that can be optimized through cloud computing.

Forbes: Why are companies getting the cloud wrong?

Baan: If you want to get the cloud right, put away the slide decks on virtualization and infrastructure and start thinking about who you should be working with and how to work with them, and then think about how you can support that better than ever before. Too many people look at the cloud as a technology phenomenon when they should look at it as a business opportunity and an accelerator for collaboration. The cloud is an environment for creating ways of doing business that are radically different from monolithic ERP-based processes. The age of command-and-control in business technology is over. You empower the knowledge worker through collaboration.

What does the cloud really mean for business?

Business processes should be the core element in the cloud, not Word documents or e-mail. Everything in the cloud should grow out of an inherently collaborative business process. You have to think beyond the business processes in your company to linking your customers' customers to your suppliers' suppliers, and draw them all together in a common end-to-end business process. You can create those relationships much faster now, but people aren't taking advantage of it. They are still very much in the ERP paradigm, which can be limiting. The cloud allows everyone to focus on their own processes, share them with others, and add some individual elements to their own processes and optimize them.

Some of these same promises about end-to-end business processes were made about ERP when it was new. What went wrong?

In the ERP world, everything is data-centric. Data is king, and business processes became embedded in data silos. Many big companies have created stovepipes that are isolated from each other, with business processes stored in the data. The vendor's best practices are then overlaid on the processes. Those stovepipes are still isolated, trapped on premise. That inhibits innovation.

What is your vision of making the cloud work for business?

I don't want to imply that everything has to be on the cloud. The optimal situation is a combination--a kind of composition between legacy systems and the optimized business process from the business and its partners, and it lives in the cloud.

I call it a business operations platform, a bridge between traditional service-oriented architecture and some of the heavy-duty infrastructure and standard components from ERP. Business components are decoupled from underlying technology. The concept of "programming," in which a businessperson conceives of an idea and technologists program something that achieves it, gives way to describing a business process, and the IT landscape responds in kind. There is much more of a "what you model is what you get" feeling to this new paradigm.

What is the role of ERP in this scenario?

Your ERP system, along with a product life-cycle management system, logistics systems and others, can be integrated and used as vanilla components, while being further enhanced by best practices or best processes, achieving a state of operational effectiveness. Take what you have learned through years of experience with ERP and apply it to the cloud.

What are the benefits of getting this right?

Dramatic improvements in business processes, reduction in IT costs, and a radical expansion of partners to help you run your business. Applications in the cloud cost less than 10% of an on-premises application. That means double-digit-percentage cost savings, and, more importantly, a boost to the value stream. Lead time for product creation can be reduced from 60 days to one or two hours. It's already happening. Instead of building a car in six weeks, we can do it in a day.

What stands in the way of this transformation?

First of all, the role of CIO sometimes seems afraid of its own shadow. The CIO should become more of a business leader. Maybe we should change the title Chief Information Officer to Chief Process Officer (CPO).

CIOs with guts are crucial to change. The CEO is too isolated and unaware of the development of these trends, but now the CIO, in the new role of a CPO, could be a tremendous asset to the CEO, providing leadership for changing the company and improving business processes. The value is in aligning IT and business, and the CPO is much more on the business side, not just on the IT side.

Too much attention is focused on technology innovation and not enough on business innovation. When that happens, we add functionality, but also complexity. The technology innovations with real impact are those that reduce complexity.

IT should be democratized in the same way Henry Ford democratized the car. Currently, fully functional IT is only for Fortune 1000 companies with a big budget. In the future, the benefits of IT will be available for everyone. Small and medium-size enterprises are, with the new technology wave of a business operations platform, able to connect their supply chain much faster than Fortune 1000 companies can. Agility is the mantra for today's smart companies.

Social media and cloud computing are exciting because they foreshadow this future.

Dan Woods is chief technology officer and editor of Evolved Technologist, a research firm focused on the needs of CTOs and CIOs. He consults for many of the other companies he writes about. For more information, go to evolvedtechnologist.com.