uvLayer redefines online video; with uvLayer users can easily manipulate their media, collect and publish to the web and share videos with friends across their social networks, all via an intuitive drag and drop interface.

uvLayer has been created by Unknown Vector Inc, located in San Francisco USA.

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Customize, share, upload, download videos from anywhere at this and that website has become quite common. And Kazivu offers you the same with a bit of a tune up, which is it; gives you a bookmarklet that lets you start posting videos with a single click.

Now there is no point in explaining what the service offers when it has already been mentioned that has been designed to let you put all your favorite videos in one place and create your own personalized channel. Therefore I will jump over to the bookmarklet, you can simply click and drag it over into your toolbar and when ever you find a video at any website (YouTube etc) you can simply click the ‘Post to Kazivu’ button and the screen on which the video is being displayed. If you click on the screen then, you are asked to login to your Kazivu account.

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Short clips with a man thudding into a tree trunk or a woman slipping down a tread mill have been around on YouTube for so long that the company itself outlined a new policy in a memo emailed to its content partners a few days back. The decision is set to enable longer videos to be uploaded in your account, videos that exceed the usual 10 minutes length:

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Tags:Broadcast Clips Movies youtube

comScore, in its press release today, has released the data from its Video Metrix service video revealing stats of US market for the month of April 2008. According to the release 11 billion videos were watched during the month of April which is 0.5 billion less than March’s statistics.

Google Sites topped the US market with around 4.1 billion (38% of overall)videos viewed at its site followed by Fox Interactive Media and Yahoo with 557.5 million (5.1%) and 352.3 million (3.2%) respectively.

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According to stats from Nielsen Mobile, search giant Google has managed to dominate the online mobile search market in the first quarter of 2008. Google succeeded in topping the list by capturing 61% of the Mobile Search Market followed by Yahoo and Microsoft with 18% and 5% respectively. However, the desktop results are slightly different as they are visible below.

Earlier this year, Google reported that the increase in number of mobile searches coming from iPhone increased 50 times than any other handset. Google is set as a default search engine on all iPhones whereas  Yahoo is presented as a secondary option. iPhone doesn’t allow any of Microsoft’s search product to be set as its default (though users can navigate manually). Services provided by Google Mobile includes Search, Maps, Gmail, SMS, YouTube and GOOG-411. Read the rest of this entry »

My first reaction when I came across this websites was that maybe I’m staring at a screenshot of Apple’s Keynote application from iWork. But 280 Slides apart from an inspiration in design doesn’t take much else from Keynote.

280 Slides is a startup by 280 North consisting of 3 graduates from the University of Southern California. It  allows you to create presentations and take them anywhere without any need of physical storage media, so it’s a web based presentation application plus storage. It provides support for Microsoft Powerpoint 2007, so you don’t have to worry about compatibility issues, plus the Open XML format ensures that your slides will have a very small size making it faster to download the presentation. Although this wont be necessary as 280 Slides provides basic presentation functionality built right into the application so you can just load up the website and start presenting in a pretty interface. Another feature, which I found very interesting is the integeration of media search, so that you can add photos and movies to your presentations directly from popular web services such as Youtube and Flickr. This can turn out to be a pretty handy feature which isn’t available in desktop presentation software yet.

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Reuters is reporting that NBC Universal and Viacom have filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of Robert Tur, who sued Youtube in July for hosting and actively propagating his famous footage of trucker Reginald Denny being beaten during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. NBC Universal and Viacom are claiming that:

Many of NBCU’s most valuable copyrighted works have been copied, performed, and disseminated without authorization by YouTube and other similarly operated Websites. NBCU has a strong interest in preserving the strength and viability of all of its legal rights and remedies in response to such conduct.

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Google’s lawyers filed the response to Viacom’s $1 billion lawsuit earlier this week, but now they face yet another court battle. BBC is reporting that the English Premier League is to sue Youtube for alleged copyright infringement. According to BBC

The football organisation said YouTube had “knowingly misappropriated” its intellectual property by encouraging footage to be viewed on its site.

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Om Malik is reporting that Youtube will start sharing revenue with its popular users like LisaNova, renetto, HappySlip, smosh and valsartdiary from today. Previously YouTube only shared revenues with large Media corps. The news is now live on YouTube blog as well.

According to the Youtube Blog: Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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Tags:google Law Suit viacom youtube

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.

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Sony Corp has announced that they will be launching a video sharing service called eyeVio in Japan on Friday. This would be the first step by the Asian Electronics and Entertainment giant towards challenging Youtube.

The service will be initially introduced in Japan, but Sony plans to offer it globally after gauging its uptake at home. According to CEO Howard Stringer: Read the rest of this entry »

Scribd a YCombinator funded company is making big splash recently. GigaOm is reporting that investors are jumping each other’s shoulders in order to put their money into this startup. According to Om a VC wanted to invest $5 million in the company at a valuation of $10 million, an offer the company passed. Redpoint Ventures however is rumored to have put in a substantial amount in the startup at a valuation of $20 million.

I wrote about Scribd previously in a post titled “Scribd is Youtube for Documents, Literally“, detailing how Scribd is a youtube for documents when it comes to community features, ease of use, sharing and embedding support and the ability for users to upload and enjoy copyrighted content.

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A short while back Viacom slapped Youtube with a massive DMCA notice asking them to take down 100,000 copyrighted videos from the site. Youtube acted swiftly and took down all those videos mentioned in the notice. However the move resulted in a removal of a video called “Stop the Falsiness”, that was a parody of “The Colbert Report”, which according to Fair Use Doctrine does not fall under the copyright act. The video was created by MoveOn.org. Electronics Frontier Foundation and Stanford Law School’s Fair Use Project decided to take the legal battle to Viacom suing them for infringing fair use act.

Viacom initially denied sending the takedown notice for this particular video, but later admitted that it had sent the notice and that it had been a mistake. Not only this Viacom has agreed to take the necessary steps to protect fair use:

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Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google-the world’s most popular and widely used advertising system, has announced that a new system called Claim Your Content is “very close to be turned on“. Schmidt made these comments in a one on one interview with John Seigenthaler, a former reporter with NBC’s Nightly News, at the National Association of Broadcasters Conference last night.

Google previously promised such a technology by the start of 2007, but later reports surfaced that it has decided to discard in-house development and will instead by using the content filtering technology provided by Audible Magic, which currently has MySpace as its major client.

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Thailand has blocked Youtube, because of a video clip on the site that mocks the Thai King. According to Reuters, Mr Sitthichai Pookaiyaudom the Thai Communication Minister ordered the blockade after requesting Google in vain to take down the clip. The Thai people love their monarch and have a very sentimental feeling to it. According to Thai law criticism directed towards the royal family is a crime punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Youtube also recently got blocked in Turkey after a video belittling the Turk revolution leader Ataturk were hosted on the site. The ban however got removed within two days after Youtube took the clips offline.

So from experience we could predict two things: Read the rest of this entry »

Vidmeter, a video tracking site has released some interesting statistics, which shows that the famous videos like the little guy, and the lonely girl that were removed from Youtube on the request of copyright owners just accounted for 5.93% of the sites most popular videos. Keep in mind that since its not possible to crawl and get statistics of the entire Youtube repository Vidmeter crawled a sample of 6,725 of Youtube`s most popular videos over the last three months for the purpose of this report.

Vidmeter checks Youtube four times a day for the 100 most popular videos of all time, the current month, the week and the day. The service gathered a list of videos which have been replaced with a takedown notice alert. The videos that were took down accounted for 9.23% of top videos and 5.93% of views, that is not even a half half proposition. The study clearly proves that the popularity of Youtube is not based on copyrighted content, another study showed that the Youtube traffic actually increased after the takedown of 100,000 videos on the cease and desist notice of Viacom.

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CenterNetworks, a really nice startup focused blog asked startups to send in video reviews of their service, the best of which will be hosted on CenterNetworks and the company will get a 2 months free ad space on CenterNetworks alongwith a detailed review, free crazy egg subscription and more to come. Allen was really working hard promoting his offer sending mails here and there, making press releases (pdf file) and God knows what else.

His efforts are finally paying off and YouTube amongst others have decided to participate in the competition. After all the possibility of a review at CenterNetworks is not something that they could have ignored. Man this is turning out to be hell of a competition.

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When Techcrunch first reviewd Scribd, they called the service a “Youtube for Documents” and indeed Scribd is turning out to be a Youtube for documents in more ways than one.

Just as on Youtube, Scribd for the first time has made it dead simple to share documents with people at large. The User Interface, comments, tagging and ratings are similar to Youtube if not a blatant copy. Just as Youtube, Scribd´s internal dynamics encourages copy right violations and they are adopting similar tactics to cope with it “We will take it down, if and when you will ask us to do so”, but till than it won’t hurt us to ride on the traffic generated by such documents. And last but not least posting and viewing could be done anonymously, so no one can catch you for any violations what so ever.

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Vibe Solutions, has launched a video aggregator, Pyro.tv. Pyro.tv enables users to create personalized channels, search for popular channels, subscribe to these channels and others users etc. It is in essence a video feedreader, something that Youtube´s channel subscription feature has almost accomplished. Users can also embed their clips in MySpace, Friendster and other social networks.

The real value of creating channels for videos will come with the videos itself and unless and until pyro.tv gets a huge collection of that i dont see it to be of great use. When it comes to building a repository of videos even the great google couldnt beat youtube at its game. For now i guess users would be happy with making channels and subscribing to videos on youtube.