Will Smith and Friends Launch YouTube-Like Music Video Website

YouTube has lots of rivals on the web, but when lots of label companies and artists ally to form a powerful video sharing service, it may be a real threat for the Mountain

View-based company Google. PluggedIn, a YouTube-like music video website providing up to 10,000 licensed clips, has just been rolled out, providing multiple advanced features to users looking for multimedia content.

First of all, there's the number of videos: 10,000 as the owner states. All of them come from EMI Music, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, independent labels or other companies. But what's important is that all the clips are licensed so it's obvious PluggedIn want to avoid YouTube-like copyright disputes.

Then, there's the video player which, according to PluggedIn owners, supports high-definition full-screen playback with no buffering. Moreover, the player provides DVD-like controls in order to improve the viewing experience.

Unfortunately, and you can take this as the worst aspect of the service, I couldn't have ANY viewing experience because I wasn't able to view the clips posted on the webpage. The reason? They're not available outside the US, which (excuse my language, please) sucks.

Getting back to the PluggedIn's attractions, you should know that Overbrook Entertainment, the company managed by Will Smith, James Lassiter and Ken Stovitz, is one of the service's strategic partners which obviously brings more licensed content on the website.

"The experience that the PluggedIn team has created is truly world-class," said Guy Primus, Head of Interactive Media at Overbrook. "They've reshaped the way people will enjoy music online by combining high-definition video with personalization, social networking and e-commerce tools. The fact that they've built all of this to be replicated across entertainment categories is even more remarkable, and we look forward to working with them on a variety of initiatives."

source : news.softpedia.com

Technorati Tags: youtube,music,video

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Google aims to penetrate Deep Web with HTML forms crawling

In a move aimed at taking the search engine giant closer to what's commonly called the Deep Web, Google Inc. Friday said that it has started experimenting to find ways for its search engine to index HTML forms like drop-down boxes and select menus.

Over the past few months, Google has been trying out some HTML forms to see if they could discover Web pages that otherwise couldn't be found or indexed for users, noted Googlers Jayant Madhavan and Alon Halevy, members of the Crawling and Indexing team.

"For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML," they noted in a blog post. "Having chosen the values for each input, we generate and then try to crawl URLs that correspond to a possible query a user may have made. If we ascertain that the Web page resulting from our query is valid, interesting and includes content not in our index, we may include it in our index much as we would include any other Web page."

If a site includes tools for preventing being crawled by a search engine, Google will adhere to those instructions, it said. In addition, Google will omit any forms that require password input or that use terms commonly associated with personal information like logins or user IDs.

The Web pages discovered using the enhanced crawling method will not come at the expense of the regular Web pages that are already part of the crawl, so this methodology won't impact page ranking, Google noted.

"This experiment is part of Google's broader effort to increase its coverage of the Web," Google noted. "In fact, HTML forms have long been thought to be the gateway to large volumes of data beyond the normal scope of search engines. The terms Deep Web, Hidden Web, or Invisible Web have been used collectively to refer to such content that has so far been invisible to search engine users. By crawling using HTML forms, we are able to lead search engine users to documents that would otherwise not be easily found in search engines, and provide Web masters and users alike with a better and more comprehensive search experience."

source : infoworld.com

Technorati Tags: google,html,crawling

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The Googlenairs

Google has been known for a long time as the best place in the world to work. They offer free massages, gourmet meals, and professional haircuts at their beautiful campus in California. That right there puts them above 99.99% of the other companies in the world. At any rate, you already knew all that so lets move on.

Have you ever wondered how much a Google employee makes? Well this data isn't extremely easy to find, if you don't believe me just search Google. However, here is some interesting statistics.
Google Programmer in Phoenix - $174,000/year
Google Programmer in California - $197,000/year
Google Programmer in Chicago - $222,000/year
Google Programmer in New York - $242,000/year
(according to Indeed.com)

...and thats just in salary. What other financial benefits does Google offer it's employees?

• 1) Google will pay $8,000 / year for you to continue your education. They just require you get at least 'B's in your classes.
• 2) If you refer another employee to Google's staff and they stay for 60 days, Google will pay your $2,000
• 3) If you are thinking about adopting a kid, Google will contribute $5,000 towards all the legal and adoption fees.
• 4) Depending how long you have worked at Google you can get up to 25 days (almost a month) paid vacation a year!

Now their is one more thing that is very interesting about Google employees financial lives. According to the New York Times there are estimated to be over 1,000 Google employees with Google stock worth over $5 million dollars. Woah wait! There are over 1,000 people working for Google who are worth OVER $5 MILLION DOLLARS! Even Google's former masseuse (did I mention employees get free massages) is a millionaire. Also, according to the New York Times, every employee that has been at Google for over a year is worth well over $250,000. Competing firms have said that Google alone has raised the average programmers salary by 50% over the last few year and with salaries and benefits like this I really don't doubt it.

source : cherryav.com

Technorati Tags: google,programmer,job

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Google Jumps Head First Into Web Services With Google App Engine

Our live coverage of the Google App Engine launch event is here (Update: we’ve built and launched a test application here).

Google isn’t just talking about hosting applications in the cloud any more. Tonight at 9pm PT they’re launching Google App Engine (Update: The site is live), an ambitious new project that offers a full-stack, hosted, automatically scalable web application platform. It consists of Python application servers, BigTable database access (anticipated here and here) and GFS data store services.

At first blush this is a full on competitor to the suite of web services offered by Amazon, including S3 (storage), EC2 (virtual servers) and SimpleDB (database).

Unlike Amazon Web Services’ loosely coupled architecture, which consists of several essentially independent services that can optionally be tied together by developers, Google’s architecture is more unified but less flexible. For example, it is possible with Amazon to use their storage service S3 independently of any other services, while with Google using their BigTable service will require writing and deploying a Python script to their app servers, one that creates a web-accessible interface to BigTable.

What this all means: Google App Engine is designed for developers who want to run their entire application stack, soup to nuts, on Google resources. Amazon, by contrast, offers more of an a la carte offering with which developers can pick and choose what resources they want to use.

Google Product Manager Tom Stocky described the new service to me in an interview today. Developers simply upload their Python code to Google, launch the application, and can monitor usage and other metrics via a multi-platform desktop application.

More details from Google:

Today we’re announcing a preview release of Google App Engine, an application-hosting tool that developers can use to build scalable web apps on top of Google’s infrastructure. The goal is to make it easier for web developers to build and scale applications, instead of focusing on system administration and maintenance.

Leveraging Google App Engine, developers can:

• Write code once and deploy. Provisioning and configuring multiple machines for web serving and data storage can be expensive and time consuming. Google App Engine makes it easier to deploy web applications by dynamically providing computing resources as they are needed. Developers write the code, and Google App Engine takes care of the rest.
• Absorb spikes in traffic. When a web app surges in popularity, the sudden increase in traffic can be overwhelming for applications of all sizes, from startups to large companies that find themselves rearchitecting their databases and entire systems several times a year. With automatic replication and load balancing, Google App Engine makes it easier to scale from one user to one million by taking advantage of Bigtable and other components of Google’s scalable infrastructure.
• Easily integrate with other Google services. It’s unnecessary and inefficient for developers to write components like authentication and e-mail from scratch for each new application. Developers using Google App Engine can make use of built-in components and Google’s broader library of APIs that provide plug-and-play functionality for simple but important features.

Google App Engine: The Limitations

The service is launching in beta and has a number of limitations.

First, only the first 10,000 developers to sign up for the beta will be allowed to deploy applications.

The service is completely free during the beta period, but there are ceilings on usage. Applications cannot use more than 500 MB of total storage, 200 million megacycles/day CPU time, and 10 GB bandwidth (both ways) per day. We’re told this equates to about 5M pageviews/mo for the typical web app. After the beta period, those ceilings will be removed, but developers will need to pay for any overage. Google has not yet set pricing for the service.

One current limitation is a requirement that applications be written in Python, a popular scripting language for building modern web apps (Ruby and PHP are among others widely used). Google says that Python is just the first supported language, and that the entire infrastructure is designed to be language neutral. Google’s initial focus on Python makes sense because they use Python internally as their scripting language (and they hired Python creator Guido van Rossum in 2005).

source : techcrunch.com

Technorati Tags: google,web services

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Google App Engine: When will Microsoft field a competitor?

On April 7, Google took the wraps off of more than many had expected: Not just a hosted database platform, but an entire hosted Web app platform, known as Google App Engine.

Google App Engine, which Google announced at its CampFire One developer event on April 7, as explained by TechCrunch, looks like this:

Google’s App Engine is “an ambitious new project that offers a full-stack, hosted, automatically scalable web application platform consisting of Python application servers, BigTable database access … and GFS data store services.”

I’ve heard rumors that Microsoft is readying a competitive hosted application platform. But more on that in a bit….
The database component of Google’s App Engine, known as “BigTable,” is aimed at Amazon’s SimpleDB — and Microsoft’s SQL Server Data Services (SSDS).

Or maybe not…

As Roger Jennings notes over on his Oakleaf Systems blog, Google’s BigTable (and Amazon’s SimpleDB) are really not a whole lot like Microsoft’s SSDS. As Jennings blogged this past weekend:

“My conclusion based on the Bigtable paper and SimpleDB documentation: Bigtable’s architecture and implementation have more in common with Amazon’s Simple DB than either database has with SSDS … Bigtable and SimpleDB aren’t relational database management systems (RDBMSs); both resemble multidimensional indexed maps of attribute/value pairs. SSDS attempts to hide the fact that it’s an RDBMS (relational database management system).”

When I spoke with Microsoft officials about SSDS at Mix ‘08, it was hard to get them to explain exactly what SSDS was. As I noted in early March:

“Microsoft officials were reticent to compare SQL Server Data Services to offerings from any competitors. But Gartner Vice President David Smith said the new Microsoft service was comparable to a service like Amazon’s SimpleDB.”

SimpleDB, which Amazon released into public beta in December 2007, is a complement and adjunct to the company’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) and Simple Data Storage Service (S3). It allows customers to store, modify and query data hosted in the cloud.

SSDS is just one of a number of developer-focused hosted services Microsoft is readying. Microsoft already has announced it is working on BizTalk Services, which are workflow services that extend the company’s BizTalk Server product. Microsoft also has unveiled beta versions of its Synchronization Framework, elements of which which sound an awful lot like the nearly abandoned WinFS (Windows File System).

According to one developer who said he believed Microsoft was close to fielding a hosted app platform: “A hosted workflow engine, with Microsoft’s killer tools behind it, could be their big ‘cloud’ killer service.”

source: blogs.zdnet.com

Technorati Tags: google,microsoft

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How to Skip Sex

Sex is considered the engine of the evolution. Without sex, we would all be similar clones. Sex brings diversity, but also it can repair the effects of negative mutations. Healthy genes from one parent can counteract the presence of a damaged (mutated) gene from the other parent, resulting healthier offspring.

Thus, theoretically, asexual species should accumulate harmful mutations over time, that would doom the species. But some microscopical "worms" called bdelloids, from the group of rotifers, challenge this: they have renounced sex for tens of millions of years. Their secret has been revealed by a new research published in the journal "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences": a powerful method to repair mutations.

Today, only about 2,000 of 2 million known species reproduce in a completely asexual way, without any fertilization of an egg by sperm being involved. And bdelloids have proved to be extremely prolific: these water invertebrates evolved into over 400 species.

To check the DNA repair mechanisms of the bdelloids, the researchers exposed the tiny worms to gamma rays, which cut into pieces the DNA molecules. Bdelloids kept on multiplying at gamma radiation levels five times over the maximum level tolerated by all the other animal species.

"We kept exposing them to more and more radiation, and they didn't die and they didn't die and they didn't die," said researcher David Mark Welch, an evolutionary biologist at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

These powerful DNA repair mechanisms did not evolve in order to resist such high radiation levels, not naturally encountered on Earth, but to stand extreme water loss, which can destroy their DNA at the same level. These creatures inhabit temporary pools and can experience complete desiccation at any moment.

The team discovered proof that bdelloids, like most animal species, had originally possessed two copies of each chromosome. But, at a given moment, the whole genome of the ancestral bdelloid got duplicated, resulting in an animal with four copies of each chromosome (a condition called tetraploidy, opposed to diploidy in most animals, humans included). This animal had four genes for each function.

The bdelloids preserved most of their extra genes, and "we believe they have kept most of their duplicate genes because they are serving as templates for DNA repair," Welch said.

DNA damage is a main factor in cancer, aging, inflammation and other diseases, and "being able to understand how animal cells can be so resistant to radiation may be of some interest in understanding how these conditions might be inhibited in human cells," Matthew Meselson, a molecular geneticist at Harvard University, told LiveScience.

source : news.softpedia.com

Technorati Tags: how to,sex,skip

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How to find opportunities for your business

Are you trying to find ideas to start your business? Keep your eyes (and ears) open.

It's been a while since I posted a business lesson and over the Easter weekend, I heard a joke that relates to even the smallest entrepreneur.

Here's the joke:

It is pouring rain in the flood plain of the Mississippi Valley, and the rising river begins to threaten homes, including that of a local preacher.

When water floods into the ground floor, a rowboat with police comes by, and the officer shouts, "Let us evacuate you! The water level is getting dangerous."

The preacher replies, "No, thank you, I am a righteous man who trusts in the Almighty, and I am confident he will deliver me."

Three hours go by, and the rains intensify, at which point the preacher is forced up to the second floor of his house. A second police rowboat comes by, and the officer shouts, "Now let us evacuate you! The water level is getting dangerous!"

The preacher replies, "No, thank you, I am a righteous man who trusts in the Almighty, and I am confident he will deliver me."

The rain keeps coming, and the preacher is forced up onto the roof of his house. A helicopter flies over, and the officer shouts down, " Please, grab the rope and we'll pull you up! You're in terrible danger!"

The preacher replies, "No, thank you, I am a righteous man who trusts in the Almighty, and I am confident he will deliver me."

The deluge continues. The preacher is swept off the roof, carried away in the current, and drowns. He goes up to heaven, and at the pearly gates he is admitted and comes before God.

The preacher asks, "Dear Lord, I don't understand. I've been righteous and observant my whole life, and I depended on you to save me in my hour of need. Where were you?"

And the Lord answers, "I sent you two boats and a helicopter. What more do you want?"

What does this have to do with being an entrepreneur?

Well, most people take things for granted or are blind to see opportunities around them. If you hear two or three people around you start a sentence with "I wish there was a/an <object>", "You know what I'd like to see?", or "Do they make something like <object>?", you are probably in a position to take action.

That last sentence is important. The key is to sit up, notice what people are missing, and take action. Don't let your ideas sit and ferment. Move on them!

Idea Generators

However, if you are coming up empty with ideas or opportunities, where can you find these opportunities?

1. Go Shopping (but keep your ears and eyes open) - Everyone is out purchasing products and this is a prime area of where to overhear someone asking where these items or products are located. If they are hard to find, they may head home and resort to the Internet for locating these type of niche products.
2. Social Networking Event - Gather your business cards and head out to a networking event. People love to put a face with the name and love to talk about their ideas with everyone. I had one person introduce themselves to me and I returned the introduction with what I do. They immediately said, "Hey, I've been looking for someone to do this <project>. Could you help me out or do you know of someone who could do this?" They've been a client of mine ever since.
3. Revisit what you've built - If you've built something for someone and there is a huge demand for this type of product or service, tweak it a little bit and reuse it. You may find out that you may be sitting on a goldmine when you release your revamped product or service.
4. Build a better mousetrap - If you have an idea, don't get upset because someone built one already. Two things to think about: 1). If no one improved on the wheel, we'd all have concrete wheels instead of rubber tires; and 2). Google didn't build a new search engine, they just improved it and made it better.

These are just a couple of ideas to generate opportunities, but there are many, many more. You just need to be aware of them.

Know when an opportunity comes your way and act on it.

Jonathan Danylko

Does anybody have other ideas on how to generate opportunities?

Technorati Tags: job,business,opportunities

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