YouTube announced the launch of YouTube Everywhere. This opens up YouTube services and functionality to be used on every website or application that wants to integrate with YouTube and use its services. You can set it up so that your users can upload videos to YouTube and never leave your site. You can retrieve your user’s videos and play them on your site, with a player that you get to brand. You can add/edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc).

This move means that anyone can build a YouTube like capability into their website or application and take advantage of YouTube’s full capabilities and you can do it for free. This is an amazing tool kit that will allow people to build all kinds of interesting applications. All of this will be great to see.

There are also a number of other big implications:

• It increases rate at which GooTube will become the central repository for video content on the web.
• Google will become the largest content delivery network we’ve ever seen. This is bad news for the other players in video distribution business, such as Britecove or Maven Networks.
• And it could be bad news for players such as Akamai, if Google gets way ahead and opens up its content delivery network further.
• GooTube will collect enormous amounts of data about what’s happening with video everywhere on the net and that will be really valuable to advertisers.
• Everything everywhere will speed up a lot, and that means publishers and developers better figure out how they compete in that world.
• Flash/Adobe just increased in value as this will increase the dominance of Flash even further.

Here’s the video version of the release:

Leave a comment with other implications or applications you would like to see people build with this.

You can find more discussion at Techmeme.

Click here follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/alexnesbitt

Technorati Tags: YouTube, Google, online video

Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, announced that the Google acquisition of Doubleclick is official. And then in true corporate mumbo jumbo he helps us read the tea leafs: Layoffs Coming Soon.

An immediate task we’ll undertake over the next few weeks is matching and aligning DoubleClick employees with our organizational plan for the business. This will involve determining the right staffing levels for all functions and will ensure that we have the right people assigned to the right responsibilities within Google. We plan to complete this process in the U.S. by early April.

Outside the U.S., the steps we will propose are subject to consultation with employee representatives where applicable, and of course any decisions will be made in accordance with local law. The exact timing of the process outside the U.S. will vary based on the needs and requirements of each region.

As with most mergers, there may be reductions in headcount. We expect these to take place in the U.S. and possibly in other regions as well. We know that DoubleClick is built on the strength of its people. For this reason we’ll strive to minimize the impact of this process on all of our clients and employees.

My translation:We will immediately figure out who at DoubleClick we want to keep and who we want to fire. That will happen now in the U.S. Outside the U.S., labor laws make it harder to fire people, but we will get rid of those people at some point too. And then we will get back to kicking Microhoo’s butt.

More discussion at Techmeme

Via a post by Dave Winer at Twitter:

Click here follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/alexnesbitt

Technorati Tags: Google, Doubleclick, layoffs

The folks at Google must be smiling tonight. Microsoft has been lured into putting a bid in for Yahoo. This is a waste of time, money and energy by Microsoft and that should make the Google folks more confident that they are on their way to overtaking Microsoft in the battle for leading technology company on the planet.

Combining two companies that DO NOT GET IT is NOT a recipe for competing with one that does. So let me get specific about what I mean by NOT GETTING IT as it relates to Microsoft and Yahoo. Anyone who has used Google Adwords as an advertiser and Google Adsense as a publisher and done the tests on the competitive products from Microsoft and Yahoo knows what I’m about to describe.

When I set up a campaign at Google Adwords, it is an automated process that is rich with interaction and feedback. I can test a campaign, keywords and ads in a very responsive manner that allows me to set it up, test it and optimize it quickly. Yahoo’s equivalent service was a captive to the belief that permeated Overture/Goto that only human editors could screen ads to make sure that they were relevant. It would take days under that process to do what Google did in minutes As a result, I advertise at Google and do so with Yahoo when I get around to it, if ever. (BTW I told this to the senior team at Yahoo’s search marketing group, but they either didn’t want to hear it or could not change the business process that had been set in place 4-5 years before) Since then, Yahoo has tried to reinvent its ad platform and Microsoft has launched their own version, but both still lag way, way behind Google.

How will Microsoft be able to merge two hugely expensive computer platforms when neither is yet good enough to compete with Google’s ad platform? And the same problem exists when you look at it from the publisher side. Google’s Adsense delivers better ads than does the equivalent Yahoo product despite huge investment by Yahoo. What will Microsoft do, scrap one deficient set of systems for another or try to make both work? Either way, the path leads to doom and gloom for both Microsoft and Yahoo.

There is obviously much more to both Microsoft and Yahoo than search and search advertising, but let’s be clear. Search based advertising is the engine that powers Google and everything it does. Social networking/media, a la MySpace and Facebook, has huge potential and Yahoo should have been the king of that domain given all their acquisitions in that arena over the years, but if Yahoo can’t turn My Yahoo, Flickr, GeoCities, De.licio.us etc. into a Social Media powerhouse how can we expect Microsoft to do so.

I can only hope Yahoo turns down Microsoft and they come to their senses. Yahoo can still do great things with the audience and assets it owns by changing its focus to become the queen of social, instead of the king of search. Microsoft should stop listening to bankers and get back to making products that work well and can out perform the competition.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, social networking, social media, search

UNICEF, One Laptop per Child (OLPC) and Google today announced the launch of “Our Stories” (www.ourstories.org), a joint initiative to preserve and share the histories and identities of cultures around the world by making personal stories available online in many languages.

Using laptops, mobile phones and other recording devices, children will record, in their native languages, the stories of elders, family members and friends. These stories will be shared globally through the Our Stories website, where they can be found on a Google Map.

By making these stories accessible around the world, the Our Stories project hopes to contribute to a better understanding of our shared humanity across countries and cultures, across religious traditions, across languages, and across generations.

“Information technologies can help young people around the world learn more about each other,” said UNICEF Executive Director Ann M. Veneman. “Our Stories will promote dialogue across borders and cultures and give young people a voice on a wide range of issues.”

Low-cost XO laptops by One Laptop per Child will serve as a foundation to help build this digital archive of personal stories by providing children in developing countries with easy-to-use technology to record their stories and interviews.

“One Laptop per Child is very excited about partnering with Google and UNICEF to capture the thoughts and feelings of children and their communities around the world,” said Walter Bender, President of Software and Content/COO, One Laptop per Child. “The XO laptop is a tool for sharing and collaboration and this project is a great way to build a global community.”

The Our Stories website will initially include stories collected by Brazil’s Museum of the Person and stories recorded for UNICEF by young people in Ghana, Pakistan, Tanzania and Uganda.

Our Stories has taken inspiration from the StoryCorps® project in the United States founded by MacArthur Fellow Dave Isay. “StoryCorps is proud to lend its experience in recording the conversations of nearly 30,000 Americans to this global undertaking,” said Isay. “These efforts teach us that the lives of everyone – whether they are in New York or Nairobi – matter, and that they will not be forgotten.”

More stories from more countries will be added to the site every month in an effort to preserve an oral history of humanity in the 21st Century.

“Google as both a company and as a culture loves a good story,” said Elliot Schrage, Vice President of Global Communications and Public Affairs for Google. “We’re proud to support the Our Stories global initiative and we hope that this collaboration will not just encourage better storytelling but better listening to stories.”

Leading figures have already lent their voices to the project: Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah, Queen of Jordan and UNICEF Eminent Advocate for Children, and Ishmael Beah, UNICEF Advocate for Children Affected by War and best-selling author of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, have all recorded messages welcoming users to the site and encouraging them to share their stories.

Here’s an example of one of the stories from Africa

The New York Times is reporting that:

The two companies said on Wednesday that Microsoft would invest $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook. The investment values the three-year-old Facebook, which will bring in about $150 million in revenue this year, at $15 billion.

While I’m happy for the Facebook and Accel folks(Jim Breyer of Accel Partners bought into the promise of Facebook early on with a $12.7 million investment, now worth $1.65 billion on paper - Way to go, Jim!), it seems like an incredibly high valuation for a company with $150 million in revenue.

It goes to show the power of greed, liquidity and fear in driving up the value of a term sheet. Microsoft, Google and Yahoo all saw huge dollar signs available to whoever gets to serve ads on Facebook(the greed factor). Facebook has done an excellent job playing them off against each other to get some competing offers from Microsoft and Yahoo (the liquidity part) and to drive it home, Microsoft is desperate to stop the Google train somewhere(the fear part).

To put the valuation in perspective, Yahoo is worth $41.6 billion on almost $7 billion in revenue, so to me it’s hard to see how a $15 billion valuation makes sense on $150 million in revenue even if Facebook is on a revenue rocket.

So now that I have put my two cents into the discussion, I wanted to know what other folks think so I reviewed the Techmeme links to see what leading bloggers think about the deal. Here’s a few llinks that seem to round up the opinions

Don Dodge - This isn’t about valuation

Terrence Russell at Wired : Three Reasons Microsoft Underpaid For Facebook

Web Strategy - Why this deal makes sense

TechCrunch - Face Book is Now the 5th Most Valuable US Internet Company

TechDirt - The Difference Between Sense and Non-sense

And while they all seem to know that the valuation is wacky they do point out that Microsoft only put $240 million at risk, got a strategic foothold and perhaps blocked Google. Although Google has it’s own Facebook like site, Orkut which is on it’s own high growth path.

It will be interesting to see how the rest the social networking war plays itself out.

UPDATE: Apparently, the dumb money is flowing behind Microsoft’s strategic investment with two PE funds putting in another $500 Million.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google

Google has now integrated Youtube video into Adsense. This is straight from the Google blog Inside AdSense:

AdSense isn’t just for ads anymore; it’s also a place to get video content for your site — and earn extra revenue at the same time.

We’re excited about the launch of video units — a new way to enrich your site with quality, relevant video content in an embedded, customizable player. Simply embed a snippet of code and have relevant YouTube partner content streamed to your site. You can choose categories of video to target to your site, select content from individual YouTube partners, or have video automatically targeted to your site content. Companion and text overlay ads are relevant and non-intrusive. To further blend the YouTube player into your site, you can also customize the color scheme and layout as well as choose from three different player sizes.

Here’s the video:

The blog post says “Video Units” should be visible on the Adsense Setup page, but it’s not showing up there for me so they may be still in the process of rolling it out.

UPDATE: Here’s the what the Video Unit looks like. They also have a smaller and bigger one.

Technorati Tags: adsense, google, youtube, video units, video ads

Google has just announced a release of a presentation tool for Google Docs.

Starting today, presentations — whether imported from existing files or created using the new slide editor — are listed alongside documents and spreadsheets in the Google Docs document list. They can be edited, shared, and published using the familiar Google Docs interface, with several collaborators working on a slide deck simultaneously, in real time. When it’s time to present, participants can simply click a link to follow along as the presenter takes the audience through the slideshow. Participants are connected through Google Talk and can chat about the presentation as they’re watching. Not wanting anyone to feel left out, we’ve made the presentation feature available in 25 languages.

Technorati Tags: Google, Powerpoint, Google Powerpoint, Google Presentation

Via TechMeme