LetsBuyIt Blog

According to the German Newspaper Sueddeutsche.de, Swiss scientists Riley Crane and Didier Sornette from the Technical University “Eidgenössischen Technischen Hochschule” (ETH) they are about to finalise a mathematical formula that can predict the success of an online video. Apparently there are comparative viewing habits and viral effects of videos that can be measured and expressed similar to earthquakes. It would be quite phenomenal if that was the case because then it would it be possible to improve videos making!

A quick note on the side: apparently HULU, the free video portal specialised on featured movies and series, is catching up with YouTube on the advertising revenue and might overtake YouTube in 2009. This would be quite outstanding because YouTube has almost “83m unique viewers in the US in September, compared to Hulu’s 6m, according to market researcher Nielsen,” as stated in the Financial Times. At the same time, Hulu is online available in the USA and YouTube internationally.

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The technology to present products is advancing at lightning speed. Online retailer such as Shopflick have developed successfully by relying on the use of videos to sell their products in short video clips. Ikea has implemented interactive clips with annotations in their different rooms. These videos require a lot of equipment to make the video powerful.

At the OMD 2008 we were fortunate enough to see a display of how MyClip360 uses their technology to develop those 3D images of products that almost resemble interactive videos. First the product is being photographed from every possible angle and rendered 3D on the computer and then you get product demo like this:

CNN has taken it even a step further now by demonstrating their new hologram technology during the US election day. They have recorded the journalist Jessica Yellin in a small tent in Chicago with 35 High-Definition cameras from all angels, remodelled here in 3D and project her as hologram to hold a conversation Wolf Blitzer in the CNN headquarter in New York in real-time. Impressive work!

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After having met Addy Feuerstein at the DLD 08 Conference by Burda in Munich last January 2008, Allofme has now opened their ports to the beta users. Being a fan of timelines, we just had to try out this interesting media-aggregator for ourselves.

The BillyTimeline has been enriched with some few videos, photos and entries and it already looks interesting. Not all the uploading features are active yet however you can upload all some offline files or your data from Picasa, Flickr, YouTube & Twitter already. Check it out because it is an interesting way to demonstrate information on a horizontal chronological timeline in comparison to the top-to-bottom textual way. We are trying to visualise our developments a little and this timeline is an entertaining piece of work.

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Almost everybody has watched some YouTube Videos and several videos tend to pop-up again from left, right and center. The list of the 10 most viewed YouTube Videos of all times (as of September 2008) therefore is particularly interesting. As Richard MacManus pointed it out in his article on ReadWriteWeb, the fact that hardly any of these successful videos is User Generated Content (UGC) but rather professionally produced videos gives a clear sign for the future of online content.

Does that mean that content production companies like Blinkenlichten, the German startup that produces professional, journalistic video content, is the way for the future instead of UGC?

Our favourite video:

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On the Googlewatchblog, we discovered that the Software company Hexolabs has come up with the first YouTube-embedded, interactive game with the help of the recently added YouTube functionality YouTube Annotations, called “A car’s life”.

These short, animated videos show a car driving along a road until an obstacle appears, that will get the car to crash. However just before the potential crash the YouTube Annotation shows a little button in the video. By clicking on this button the car crash can be avoided and the player will be led to the next level. With each level increase this button appears for a shorter period of time, which makes it more and more difficult.

The game might not be ingenious however this might the beginning of an entirely new wave of other YouTube embedded videogames! There is a high potential for a viral effect! Let me know if you of any other games!

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After many rumors and a long time of waiting (since July 22nd, 2007) it has been made public by Ryan Hayward on AdSense Blogspot now that Google launched its AdSense for Feeds in beta. With your Google AdSense account, it is now possible to push for Google advertising in your feeds in order to earn money with your blogs and feeds now. It is similary customizable as the other AdSense applications however this is only the beginning. The efficiency is questionnable as we are using feeds in order to minimizing the time spent for reading news and blogs hence we doubt that that Click-Through-Rate will be very high.

To find out more on how to integrated AdSense in your Feeds (interesting for publishers) click here for more info.

We found plenty of articles on the Google Blog but has this been existing in the other countries since 2005 as stated here on the Google Blog dated May 7, 2005 or is the date of the blog post just wrong?

It comes as no surprise that Google is trying to monetize its Readers now as well because Google is struggling to monetize their other projects such as YouTube, which just recently had to stop its project of live-streaming (article here) because investors are having a hard-time accepting those massive investments with no nice returns.

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There are uncountable videos on YouTube and its impact cannot be measured, which makes it definitely one of the most mysterious and influential mediums on the web. After having watching countless hours of videos on YouTube we found this very interesting video, which gives a little background information about the Anthropology of YouTube. It is a must-see!!!

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Youtube has come up with a white label YouTube called Startyourtube. Now you can just create your own YouTube with the look, feel, name, URL, content, etc. that you want such as Snowboarderstube as you can see below. To increase the capacities, number of possible views, blogs, etc. one needs to pay but it still means that you have your own Videoportal!

Some other names of similar sites are Ning, Magnify, Reality Digital, KickApps, and VSocial. Let us know if you know any other sites.

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We have previously already written about APIs in our Mashup Article and the Opensocial Project but this one is of particular interest for media and content websites. Google has just published that it has set up a YouTube API along with developer docs on how to adapt and use the API. Now developers can customise and develop their own YouTube which many developers and bloggers have been waiting for I think! These are the features as shown on the page of the YouTube APIs and Tools:

(Source: Google)

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