A New York City startup called Howcast is launching today that wants to be the YouTube of instructional videos. In fact, the three founders—Jason Liebman, Daniel Blackman and Sanjay Raman—are ex-Google employees who worked on Google Video and YouTube before they left eight months ago. They actually are going for a little more polish than YouTube, trying to bring some production values to the world of Web video.

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I read today that Co-founder of Topix, Rich Skrenta is looking at taking on Google with new search engine, Blekko. I discussed this with a few people at work today and the response seems to be very negative. The responses I got: “Sif!”…”As if anyone can compete with Google”. To be critical of yet another so-called competitor of Google, I believe, is rational. It’s been tried before and giants like Yahoo! and Live haven’t even managed it. So what is so good about Blekko?

Well, one of the problems I think Skrenta and his team are trying to fix is when you type in a word like “Kylie Minogue” you get many pages of results: images, news, scholar, books, et al. Not to mention the hundreds of pages of search results. I feel, Blekko is trying to achieve a more integrated Google. One page and summaries of what you actually need (want) to know. And apparently no PageRank algorithm.

I’m really excited to see what Blekko has in-store. I am, admittedly a Google-aholic but I am also open to better ways of doing things. For example, I am looking at making the move from iGoogle as my home page to PageFlakes as the latter looks and moves a lot better, whilst still being integrated with the likes of Gmail.

Apparently, Blekko will not be live until 2009. At the moment by going to the domain you get a picture of some cute, puppet-looking creature. I wonder how cute and fun Blekko is going to be…

Yaro yesterday posted a blog on his achievements for the year over at Entrepreneur’s Journey.

Some of the highlights:

- Attending the Strategic Profits event in Florida.

- Attending the World Internet Summit in Melbourne.

- Buying his first house and a new car.

- Selling BetterEdit.com for a low-six figure sum.

- Continuing to enlighten, inspire and teach me more about online business and the opportunities it provides.

If you would like to read the blog post, and I highly recommend you do, click here.

This post is the first of three posts Yaro intends to publish on this topic. So add his blog to your RSS reader so you don’t miss out on the others.

Over and out…

P

Doris Lessing, winner of 2007’s Nobel Prize in Literature on the Internet:

“We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers”.

Ok. Sure why not.

Source: TechCrunch

Boredom and lost productivity in the air will soon be a thing of the past with the introduction of Internet access on aircraft.

TechCrunch said on Thursday that American airline, JetBlue had announced that it would provide services restricted to Yahoo! Mail, Messenger and Wi-Fi enabled BlackBerries to access BB mail and messenger.

However, it has recently came out that American Airlines will start offering complete web-access onboard followed shortly by Virgin America. There is again likely to be a catch; this time not with what you can access but with the cost-of-use. Both airlines, American and Virgin are likely to charge $10 per flight for the privilege to access the Internet in-flight. Personally, I’d pay it, but…

TechCrunch says “…it could be worth a lot more to them to offer it for free, and use it to build brand loyalty”. I agree, especially for airlines trying to win business clientele.

I haven’t heard any news of the Australian airlines - Qantas, Virgin Blue and Qantas-owned JetStar - planning to offer onboard net access. I think it would be a great move for Virgin Blue, seeing they’re increasingly attacking the business segment, to offer it.

Back in “the day” (when ever that was) people met others and met potential partners in social, real life situations. Nowadays, the internet is playing a bigger part. This is especially the case with the introduction of “Web 2.0” -to use that term lightly. The Web 2.0 movement has produced such social-networking facilities as MySpace, Flickr and YouTube. Dating wise, a Google search reveals numerous sites of which you can sign-up to meet your potential life-partner.

To a point, I guess the web can be looked at as a 2nd world -hence Second Life. Thus, we intermingle online much as we do in the real world.

Take a look at Adrian Cooke’s article, A Lesson From the Online Dating Industry.

Pajago

It’s about time that people realised they must adhere to an acceptable use policy (AUP) with broadband access. I’d say the vast majority of home internet users use some form of file-sharing program to obtain music and movies for free. I agree that if people want this facility they should understand they will need to pay some sort of premium on their internet subscription fee.

Not necessarily a penalty but a higher fee than someone that is using their bandwidth conservatively -lawfully. Myself, I can’t be bothered with P2P in all honesty. As much as it’s illegal and immoral I don’t want to be downloading all sorts of crap to my computer. Personally, I am a fan of BigPond Music -which I can’t use unfortunately as I am an Apple Mac user- and Apple iTunes -which I love dearly.

What annoys me as a Cable user is that my bandwidth is often hogged by those P2P users in my street. I, however, am trying to download legally and pay a nominal fee for each song and I get the short straw. Check out what Internode is going to do:

ADELAIDE-BASED ISP Internode is considering using filtering systems to contain rampant growth in peer-to-peer internet traffic across its network.

Internode product manager Jim Kellett said the company was examining the technology after it announced that it had jacked up the price its high-end broadband internet services by up to 30 per cent. “It’s certainly an area of technology that we’re keeping a close eye on,” Mr Kellett said.

Read on…

Online search leader Google said on Friday it purchased FeedBurner, which helps bloggers and podcasters syndicate and make money from their online content, for an undisclosed sum.

Chicago-based FeedBurner “delivers feeds to millions of users around the world and offers unique and useful tools for publishers to analyze, optimize, and monetize their content,” wrote Susan Wojcicki, Google’s vice president of product management, in announcing the deal on Google’s official blog.

FeedBurner also offers a tool for pushing ads through feeds, generating advertising revenue.

According to some reports Google was to pay $US100 million for FeedBurner, which was launched in 2004.

Source: SMH

Ok, lets say I just told somebody at a party (what a geeky party) about this cool site called Wikipedia. They go home, and settle down at the PC and type in Wikipedia.com, right? Right. We have come to realise, how ever unconsciously that .com is a generic top-level domain. This testifies the value of using a .com rather than a .org, .info (etc) domain. For more information on this topic, see this website on .com domains.

Obvious other types of domains have their place. For instance, geographical domains play their part at both a functional and conscious level. Here in Australia, if I give out my BigPond email address which ends in .com most people are adamant that I mean .com.au. I am unsure how people react to .us, .co.uk and .ca.

I feel that geographical domains are more significant at an offline level. From what I observe, people that source a domain offline are likely to think of its geographical orientation. Whereas online, standard .com plays a greater role.

BigPond is Australia’s first major corporation to set-up shop on Second Life. Already, many major International companies are using it as a promotional tool so I am sure BigPond has the same objective in sight with it’s island, The Pond.

Although BigPond is the first major Australian company to launch a Second Life base, this is a growing trend globally, sparked by entrances from Dell, Toyota, Adidas, IBM, and Intel.

Second Life is a virtual world developed by Linden Lab in California. Initially, a client-program is downloaded to the users PC, then an “avatar” is created with a name, personality and other characteristics, to interact with others in the world. Your avatar can shop, spend Linden dollars, watch a movie, speak to others -all sorts of stuff.

BigPond didn’t make a terribly large investment to affiliate with Second Life but customers will see value in it, being part of their unmetred content network.

Some of BigPond’s support staff would help customers inside Second Life as part of their day-to-day roles, but BigPond had not yet committed staff to police it full-time.

Source: SMH

Pajago