www.dpingram.com

YouTube founder Chad Hurley is making waves for hinting that YouTube plans to share revenue with users - he made the statements at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Friday. Jeff Jarvis grabbed a video of Hurley’s comments and posted it, fittingly, to YouTube (also embedded below).

Hurley didn’t go into much detail, but he said that the system would be rolled out in a “couple of months”. YouTube Mobile and other features are often rolled out way ahead of schedule, but the copyright system is late to arrive - so it’s hard to say whether that timescale will be met. Worryingly, the BBC says the system could include pre-roll ads (video ads before the clip). That would be supremely annoying, and completely undermine Google’s philosophy of relevant, unintrusive ads. That said, Hurley doesn’t make any mention of pre-roll ads in the clip. Until we get further information, I’m going to assume that they’ll simply pay a share of the AdSense revenue to the user, perhaps adding AdSense for Video later on. This would be good for Google, because it would get a large number of young users familiar with the AdSense system.

Hurley said that they didn’t want to base YouTube around a payment system from the start, and that makes sense - you wouldn’t want a community of users who are solely motivated by money. At launch time, they also lacked the soon-to-launch audio fingerprinting (aka copyright protection) technology that allows YouTube to assign ownership to a clip.

But the real significance of this is that rival sites have tried to differentiate themselves by paying users. We covered how lonelygirl15 had started posting clips to Revver to monetize them, while Metacafe is paying users through a system called Producer Rewards and Break.com, Efoof, Flixya and Guba all have various revenue sharing schemes in place. What’s more, these services are already struggling against the might of YouTube - Revver lost two founders, and Guba lost its CEO and two executives. If YouTube can deliver a bigger audience, a better sense of community and a good revenue sharing platform, then many of these sites will be left for dead. First to go, in my estimation, would be Revver, which relies entirely on this revenue sharing. Revver could stay afloat if YouTube doesn’t immediately deploy ads in embedded players, but eventually this is bound to happen - perhaps Revver will sell before then.

OA by Pete Cashmore is here on Mashable

Professional social network LinkedIn announced a $12.8 million round of financing led by Bessemer and the European Founders Fund. The company has raised $13.4 million in two previous rounds of financing, bringing the total to more than $26 million.

The company had something north of $10 million in revenue in 2006, and says they’ll do substantially more than that in 2007. LinkedIn has 70 employees, up from 45 a year ago. They claim 9 million worldwide users, and are adding 100,000 or so new users per week.

The valuation of the financing round is not being disclosed by the company, but it is rumored to be around $250 million. LinkedIn’s European competitor, Xing, is currently generating about €2.8 million in revenue per fiscal quarter, or $3.6 million. The company was valued at about $200 million when it went public in December 2006.

OA by Michael Arrington is here on Techcrunch

Shiny Media, the UK blogging company, has raised around $4.5 million from Dan Wagner’s new fund. Wagners owns Brightstaion Ventures, and was previously (may still be) involved with Venda the ecommerce company.

Shiny runs a range of blogs which take in the fashion, technology, sports, and lifestyle markets.

www.shiny.com

Wow, Izimi is getting near to launch and we’re getting all excited. One challenge we’ve had is how to express the significance of Izimi without just getting compared with the various SN and UGC websites out there. Afterall, the real fundamental core capability of Izimi is not related to its SN fucntionality (although its extremely rich in that way), but the fact that with Izimi you ‘Self-Publish’ direct from your own machine to anyone on the web. You don’t need to upload your stuff anywhere, its served direct from your PC (sort fo like a personal web server), there are no restrictions on file size or file type, and your stuff doesnt get compromised on quality.

Here is how we’re currently expressing it:

Izimi is the future of internet publishing. Izimi allows users to serve files, photos, music and videos straight from your own PC to anyone with a web browser. You control your own media. No uploads. No hosting. All yours.

Izimi - Control your own media.

Here are some distinctions between Izimi and some of the existing ways you might share or publish content

I’ve started to see and hear of a number of widgets that help you share your media across a number of different websites. This sort of things can be useful if you have content that you want to share in, say, your MySpace world as well as your blog, and perhaps on another website also. Instead of having to upload the same stuff many times over you just upload it once and then use the widget in each of those properties.

One example is Boxnet (Boxnet LITE), another is Myfabrik Lite.
Of course you could make life easier still and just get Izimi and then you dont even have to upload your stuff to one site, it just stays on your own PC and get served direct from there to anywhere.

Plus, with Izimi, because the files stay on your machine there are no limitations on file type, file size, storage, quality of videos.

Our PR guru James Warren pointed me to this bunch www.qnext.com who are doing some P2P stuff which at first glance looks a little like Izimi.

Its a bit like Izimi in some ways, which is a good endorsement of what Izimi is doing (like I said before, I always expected someone somewhere to pop out of a garage with a similar idea), but they talk about webcasts which sounds a little odd - I want ANYONE to be able to see my stuff, anywhere on the Internet with just a web browser. Sometimes those people may be known to me (in which case I guess a webcast works), but others may not already know me and they may find my content through another website, search engine, blog, forum, or via a search on Izimi.

Here’s one of their interesting FAQs:
Does my computer need to be turned on for my friends to access a Webcast?
Yes, your computer must be turned on and Qnext must be running in order for your friends to access the Webcasts that you send them. This is because Qnext shares your stuff securely right off your computer; that’s why it only takes seconds to share an unlimited amount of music, photos, and files.

And another…
How do I know if another Qnext user has shared something with me?
When someone shares a Webcast with you, you will get a notification by IM. In the future, you can just click on the ‘+ sign’ beside their name to see all the Webcasts that are available.

So, like many P2P apps it still sounds a little ‘closed’ and a bit ‘point to point’. One of Izimi’s strengths is its openness: that ANYONE ANYWHERE ON THE WEB WITH JUST A WEB BROWSER can see my published media.

I think the talk of webcasts introduces another layer of complexity that the recipient doesnt want to have to bother with, why not just a URL???

D

An interesting article by Sam Sethi on vecosys comparing UK versus US tech startup investment.

I QUOTE…

Following the report from Paul Fisher on the state of the European VC market, it was interesting to find this report on Venture Beat concerning the size of investments made in the American VC market last year.

For all of 2006, investors backed 2,454 companies. Total investment was $25.75 billion, an 8 percent increase over the preceding year. - US Market

In 2006 that figure increased threefold with £79mn worth of early stage investments into 21 companies - UK Market

Is this why there isn’t a phlethora of successful UK companies?

OA by Sam Sethi on Vecosys is here

Profilactic Launches - MySpace, YouTube, Digg Aggregated

One of the most prevalent ideas in the social networking space is that we need to aggregate all our online profiles in one place - with our identities spread across multiple sites, we want to bring them all together in one central location. Iceflake, Ziki, FindMeOn and many others are pursuing this same strategy. It’s an idea called Digital Lifestyle Aggregation, named by PeopleAggregator creator Marc Canter.

Yet another new one launched in public beta last night after a few months of private testing - Profilactic provides a single profile page for MySpace, YouTube, Last.fm, Digg, LinkedIn, iLike and the hundreds of other social services you’ve signed up for. All this stuff is brought together in a feed - the same format employed by long-forgotten SuprGlu back in 2005. Profilactic users can also have a network of friends, and a mashed-up feed of all their friends’ content.

OA by Pete Cashmore is on Mashable

Advestigo’s AdvestiGATE filter is for spotting copyrighted content.

PARIS, Jan. 22 /PRNewswire/ -­ Advestigo, provider of content recognition technology, launches AdvestiGATE(TM) to automatically filter copyrighted files uploaded to user-generated content (UGC) websites.

In their own words (remember its their PR!)…

Video sharing websites, which might handle upwards of 65,000 newly uploaded clips every day, are permanently at risk of litigation by unintentionally distributing copyrighted content online. AdvestiGATE automatically filters uploaded content, putting a stop to accidental copyright infringement. Until now, this has been impossible. UGC websites can now develop sustainable, profitable business models without the risk of litigation, and copyright owners can safely decide how and where they want their content to be used.

AdvestiGATE uses Advestigo’s patented Theraography(TM) technology to calculate a fingerprint for each uploaded video file. AdvestiGATE then automatically cross-references new fingerprints against a database of existing fingerprints from copyrighted material; in a matter of seconds, files that contain full or partial, perfect or degraded copies of copyrighted content are identified and flagged.

AdvestiGATE can manage video and audio in one comprehensive solution. For audio files, it either relies on Advestigo’s audio fingerprint technology or interoperates with existing audio recognition technologies.

“Our technology, which is already in industrial use around the world - embedded in our range of peer-to-peer monitoring solutions - is shaping the future of online video sharing,” says Michel Roux, President and CEO of Advestigo.

AdvestiGATE is delivered on a plug-and-play 1U rackable appliance for seamless integration into existing UGC infrastructure. Scalability is assured through multiple appliances within a single process. Prices start at 15,900 USD plus subscription to a fingerprint database.

About AdvestigoAdvestigo is a technology leader in the fast- growing digital asset management market. Using Theraography, a unique technology that analyses digital content to generate content-based “fingerprints,” Advestigo provides solutions to automatically monitor and identify multimedia content.

DI> See also Gracenote which has something similar. Gracenote is generally known as the company that owns CDDB, the service that many apps use to look up CD titles and track names.

With P2P seeming to be gaining a bigger and bigger slice of attention, I keep wondering what the next P2P applictaion will be.

Like a lot of people I first came across P2P apps with file sharing like Napster and the like. Next i heard it spoken about in enterprise computing discussions, particularly in relation to a supply chain management product i was working on at the time (the guy who was talking about it then was John Ball), but back then I found it hard to grasp how P2P could be turned to anything more than the file sharing apps. How could a P2P platform be used for more than file sharing and actually be used to provide an enterprise computing platform for a set of business process applications? Now, I hear its called grid computing or various other names, Dion Hinchcliffe writes a lot on this subject.

So whats the next applictaion of P2P? Lots of news is out there about Joost (PKA The Venice Project), and its ‘effectively’ P2P TV. It was founded by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis the founders of Kazaa and Skype.

So here’s the pattern… Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis develop Kazaa (P2P file sharing, not the fist but nonetheless successful). Next they stay in P2P, and develop Skype (P2P computer telephony, VoIP or Voice over IP). Now they remain in P2P again and develop Joost (effectively P2P TV). See the pattern, its like they sit there and say “right, thats done, now what else can we turn P2P to”.

I have a new one, or rather I think Izimi may have a new one…. P2P Web site publishing. Here it is: At the moment websites get hosted centrally, and then distributed time by time upon demand to browsers that request the site’s pages (content).

Now, i contend isn’t that just like old fashioned media broadcast? OK, its not quite broadcast, but its still server to peer; the content gets centrally gathered, then delivered point to point to the media’s consumer.

With Izimi you could self-publish a website right there on your own computer. When you use Izimi to self-publish the content stays on your machine (no uploading to a hosting company) but its available to any one anywhere on the internet with just their browser via a regular URL (no need for them to have any special client software as you would with most P2P apps). You can do this with Izimi now.

But what happens when you turn your machine off? Hosting companies are useful because they give you resilience and allow your website to stay available even when you turn your computer off. Well, if Izimi were to remove that ‘problem’, is it a real alternative for central hosting? Almost.

The other point is bandwidth. When I am self publishing with Izimi it is my bandwidth that is used to deliver content to people who request it. Well, way back when we started Izimi we already had the multipoint download capability (its pretty standard P2P technique to distribute content to various places to allow co-operative supply of content). In this way a person requesting my content could be serviced by a whole bunch of peers in the network each delivering a fraction of the whole website, and this all happens in the background. So, the question of bandwidth becomes a moot one. P2P has always been good at this, so its nothing new.

SO, whats the point of all this? Simple. Izimi just may prove to be the next revolutionary P2P application, and that is website hosting. Afterall, why use a hosting company when you can do it easily yourself with no negative impact?

Strictly speaking of course you’d have to call it something different to P2P. Afterall its not really P2P (peer to peer) its P2B (peer to browser), and that is a GREAT advantage. It truely means that your content/media/website is available to ANYONE ANYWHERE ON THE INTERNET - no need for them to first have downloaded your proprietory client. Imagine is you could use Skype, Kazaa, and Joost without any download. Just think how fast and far it would spread.