Facebook and Social Startups Meme.

Forbes is reporting that Google has finally filed a response to Viacom’s copyright infringement lawsuit against Youtube. Google is obviously arguing that they are operating within legal limits:

Google said that YouTube respects the importance of copyrights and goes above and beyond what is required under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which gives Web hosts protection from copyright lawsuits so long as they comply with requests to remove unauthorized material.

YouTube says its cooperates with holders of copyrights and immediately complies with requests to have unauthorized material removed from the site.

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Ray Ozzie, the Chief Software Architect at Microsoft, today unveiled a new service from Microsoft called Silverlight Streaming that will provide free hosting to developers for upto 4GB. The offering is free for developers who want to create rich media service with Microsoft Expression Studio tools. Microsoft is also providing Silverlight Streaming SDK.

Microsoft launched Silverlight which was previously called Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere earlier this month. Silverlight is a competitor to Adobe’s Flash, which has almost become a de-facto standard for online video with the rise of online video sharing services like Youtube, Revver, iFilm and others. Microsoft has also made available a new Dynamic Language Runtime that will provide support for compiling and running Javascript, Visual Basic, C#, Python and Ruby in .Net. The DLR is open sourced under Microsoft Public License.

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Appirio, a company that provides custom application development and integration related services leveraging the Salesforce CRM and Apex on demand platform, has released Google Gadgets for Salesforce that allow users to view and access their Salesforce information directly on their Google Personalized Homepage. The company has developed widgets to display Accounts, Opportunities, Contacts, Cases and Tasks.

Opportunity Knocks shows the most recently updated opportunities in the business in an always-on view to Sales executives. Users can filter the view by amount, go to details and from their onwards jump directly into salesforce.com for more detailed information.

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SplashCast Media has announced a new feature today which they are calling “MyPodcastNetwork”. The feature allows users to easily collect and make a list of their favorite audio and video podcasts into a channel. The channel widget could then be displayed anywhere on the world and Splashcast will refresh it with the latest content from all those feeds.

Prior to this release Splashcast Media player allowed RSS feeds from Youtube and Flickr alone. Splashcast has also made available a directory containing around 200 podcasts from sites like NPR, MTV and so on. You can start right away, just go to catalog section on the site, create an account and choose “Podcasts and RSS” when you create a new show for your channel. Splashcast is claiming it to be the first ever such offering and thanks to Marshall’s relationship with fellow bloggers almost everyone that I know have already reviewed it, I being the last on the list.

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The New York Times has break the news about TargetSpot, a startup aiming to become an advertisement platform for Internet Radio, which by the end of 2006 had 72 million listeners according to Bridge Ratings, a market research firm. The service will officially launch on June 28, 2007.

TargetSpot has found its first client in the form of CBS radio, which also happens to be an investor in the startup. TargetSpot could be thought of as an adsense for online radio, as it enables advertisers large and small to create both localized or nation wide ads. Advertisers could target their ads on the basis of demographics, service area such as zipcode, region, or state, programming preferences like sports,talks etc, specific times of day and other such criteria. The company is claiming on their website that their Advanced Targeting System supports over one billion possibilities!

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Yahoo has announced the acquisition of the remaining 80% shares of RightMedia that they did not already owned. The announcement was officially made by Terry Semel, Chairman and CEO of Yahoo on the Yahoo blog and was soon confirmed by Michael Walrath, CEO of Right Media on the official Right Media Blog.

RightMedia is an online ad exchange platform similar to DoubleClick which was acquired by Google recently. Currently more than 20,000 buyers and sellers are trading over four billion impressions a day on the RightMedia ad exchange platform. The company was founded in 2003 and raised $7.5 million in series A round from Redpoint Ventures. The company later raised $45 million in Oct 2006 in Series B from Yahoo with Redpoint Ventures also participating in the round.

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ABC News is celebrating their 10 year anniversary by becoming a lot more social. According to Michael Clemente, Senior Executive Producer at ABC News:

The new site is designed to harness the power of community. And by community we mean “citizen reporters,” our viewers and readers who help us report the news by contributing, commenting and telling us what they know. The redesigned ABCNEWS.com makes it much easier for our Internet users to add to the facts, ask questions of newsmakers and make their voices heard.

ABC News have added a new sidebar to the right of each story, enabling viewers to comment on the stories, contribute more facts about the story by telling the editorial team what they know, and discuss and debate the story on the message boards.

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Every startup founder dreams about having explosive growth and every marketing and PR firm uses the “Viral, Buzz, Word of Mouth…” words to attract new clients. Many smart people out there have devised several techniques to do the trick, i.e to generate explosive growth.

There are many things like simplicity and ease of use, humane user treatment, free service and so on, that could force users to opt for your service instead of other such offerings. But amongst all these I have found “Free” to be the most powerful driving force behind a user’s decision. To understand this better lets dive into some viral growth case studies.

Hotmail:
Hotmail, which launched as a free web based email service in 1996, followed the advise of their investor Tim Draper (DFJ) and appended an advertising message to every outbound email: “Get your free email at Hotmail“. This turned every existing Hotmail user into a marketer and every email that he sent became a powerful marketing message as it was coming from a closed affiliate or friend. Who so ever read the message signed up for their own free email service and propelled the message even further. As a result Hotmail hit the 12 million user mark in just 1.5 years, signing 150,000 subscribers every day. Microsoft acquired Hotmail for $400 million in 1998.

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When Kiko decided to close doors and auction the service on eBay, Paul Graham wrote a run up of affairs to explain what went wrong and how the little startup died. According to Paul Graham:

The killer, unforseen by the Kikos and by us, was Google Calendar’s integration with Gmail. The Kikos can’t very well write their own Gmail to compete.

It seems that Google is up at it again. Martin Porcheron, who translates Google applications to his native language “l33t” in his spare time has hinted at some upcoming Gmail features, and two of the three upcoming features are integration related.

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