ginger's thoughts

When Google bought YouTube in October 2006, I wrote a blog entry about how Google video is a hosting site and that with the purchase of YouTube, Google has the opportunity to turn the Google brand back to video search.

Well, today, that prediction has come true and Google video has stopped hosting videos for users. So, things are now clear: YouTube is a video publishing site and Google video is a search engine.

Hold on: not so fast.

According to ComScore’s most U.S. search engine Rankings for August 2008, YouTube is the second largest search engine on the Web, ahead of Yahoo. At Vquence, we explain to customers that many people now use YouTube search as their entry point into the Web. Video is their Web. And when it comes to video, it’s all about YouTube.

Because people search for videos on YouTube, most videos that get published will have a copy on YouTube. Thus, YouTube is the dominant place to find video – not Google video. Also, YouTube is turning more and more into a search engine like Google: just this week they published “featured search results“, making a YouTube search result page look almost identical to a Google search result page: there is some featured content on top of the actual search results and there are some paid-for ads on the right.

Since it has taken Google such a long time to move Google video from hosting service to search service, I wonder if it’s not too late for Google video already. It feels now just like an add-on to YouTube – a place you go when all other searches fail.

Yahoo video search was once the best video search around. Then came Truveo and blinkx and a whole bunch more. Now, nobody writes about them any more – everybody just goes to YouTube itself or to Google Universal Search to go and find a video.

It would be nice if Google video search stayed around – if only as a discovery tool for when Web video goes directly onto our TVs. But I doubt, Google will find a good way to monetize it. YouTube’s search will be monetized quicker and more effectively.

I have spent a lot of time recently researching Sydney-based agencies to invite to the upcoming Launch of our Vquence VQmetrics service. This involved finding their websites, finding out about their target business (do they do online video?), finding a relevant contact, and emailing an invitation to them.

I am close to institutional confinement!

I do understand that agencies need to show off their creativity on their Website. The result of this is that most agency Websites are completely written in Flash. Fortunately I have the latest version of Flash installed, so I can load them all. But my Web browser and MacBook do not deal well with having more than about 5 tabs open with Flash content – my machine almost grunts to a halt. So, there goes the idea of opening multiple tabs at the same time while waiting for the lengthy Flashs of the sites to load…

Then, once the pages are loaded, it is always a surprise to see what the agency has come up with. At the beginning of the exercise it was a surprise. Later it became a nuisance. Now, I am utterly terrified before opening another agency Website. Will it break my browser? Will it start playing a video? Will it start playing music so loud that it blasts off my ears? Will I feel really stupid because I cannot navigate the site? Will I be able to locate the “Contact Us” section? Will they have bothered to publish an email address or do I have to fill in a stupid contact form that I know nobody will look at? Will the contact email work or just bounce?

It almost feels like the creation of the Website is a competition between the agencies as to who can create the maddest, most unusual, and most unusable Website.

Please, please! Can I just have a simple, usable site with obvious navigation, a simple and fast loading list of reference work, and a list of key people working at the agency with their email contacts?

Oh, and Mumbrella has just published a post that gives me scientific proof that this is a conspiracy against me by the agencies! No, stop that – I am not ready to be locked up yet!

I spent the last few days doing some nice research for Vquence, where I was able to watch lots of videos on YouTube. Fun job this is! The full article is on the Vquence metrics blog.

One of the key things that I’ve put together is a list of top 10 commercials for 2008:

There are many more details over at vquence.com.

Enjoy! And let me know in the comments if you know of any other video ad released in 2008 in the same ballpark number of views that is an actual tv-style commercial.

NOTE: I just had to change the list, because the SoBe Lifewater Super Bowl ad of 2008 actually came out ahead. It’s difficult to discover an ad that has neither ad nor commercial in its annotations!

Over at the Vquence metrics blog, I have just posted a blog post for this week that summarises all the features a publisher and reader can use on YouTube.

I thought it would be a simple task, since I have been following all of YouTube’s blogs and have previously published videos on YouTube. As it turns out, YouTube’s features set is so massive, that there were some surprises in stock even for me. It took a week to collect all this information (admittedly not full time).

Go and check out the blog post and see if I have missed any!

Yesterday was a long and fascinating day of discussions about innovation in Australia.

At this year’s Pearcey Medal and NSW Pearcey State Award event, the focus was on the recently released innovation report from Terry Cutler with a focus on the effects on ICT (Information and Communication Technology).

If you only look at the summary report, you will miss the structure of the full report, which is why I have outlined it here:

• Chapter 1 stalling not sprinting
• Chapter 2 the national innovation system
• Chapter 3 innovation in business
• Chapter 4 the case for a public role in innovation
• Chapter 5 strengthening people and skills
• Chapter 6 building excellence in national research
• Chapter 7 information and market design
• Chapter 8 tax and innovation
• Chapter 9 market facing programs
• Chapter 10 innovation in government
• Chapter 11 national priorities for innovation
• Chapter 12 governance of the innovation system

I took home a few very interesting observations from reading the reports and from the discussions at the Pearcey event.

But before I can comment, I have to state which organisations I see as ICT innovators in Australia.

• The government-funded ones are the Universities, NICTA and CSIRO (CRCs fall in the same general class).
• The big drivers of transforming new research outcomes into business are start-ups and the SMEs.
• Further innovation happens in large companies and multi-nationals with a stronger focus on incremental innovation rather than disruptive innovation.
• In ICT, we need to add another big driver of innovation: open source software. I’ll explain this later in more depth.

The following observations on VenturousAustralia and what I took away from the Pearcey awards are on these topics:

TOPIC: ICT and innovation

At the Pearcey awards, we had long discussions about whether ICT was appropriately represented in the report and whether the recommendations are pushing ICT further into a supportive role while missing our opportunities to innovate and lead in core ICT.

It is generally accepted that ICT has a major effect on the productivity increase of almost all Australian industries. DCITA reports show that in service industries, between 35 and 65 per cent of productivity growth is estimated to have been driven by technological factors—mainly ICT related. In manufacturing, the range was between 45 and 75 per cent.

And yet, we only spend about 0.55% of our government outlays on R&D and very little of this on ICT R&D, putting us third-last in the OECD (p. 65 of VenturousAustralia). These are shocking numbers. Does the report recommend anything to change this situation and help Australia stay at the forefront of ICT R&D and innovation?

Checking in the 228 page full report (see VenturousAustralia), we find that the recommended innovation priorities for government are:

• Agricultural and food security
• Climate change mitigation and adaptation
• Population health
• Tropical solutions
• Broadband applications

while complementary recommended private innovation activities are:

• Resource industries
• Space and astronomy
• Finance and risk management
• Marine industries

Is ICT reduced to a need for broadband and support in the other industries? Are we as an industry underrepresented?

As much as I was looking, I found no recommendation relevant to fundamental ICT research in the report.

So, it does burn down to broadband. At least, the one paragraph that refers to broadband applications as a goal suggests not to invest more in the National Broadband Network itself, but into the development of relevant applications – specific to local needs. This includes applications in health, education, open democracy, traffic systems, and public national collections of information and knowledge.

It is a shame that there is no explicit recommendation to support Australian research and commercialisation that will push the technical boundaries of important fundamental ICT technologies such as networking, mobile devices, digital media, information analysis, system complexity, or robotics.

TOPIC: Commercialisation of ICT innovation

As everywhere else, in Australia, too, the powerhouses of commercialisation of fundamental ICT R&D and innovation are start-ups and SMEs. Interestingly, the CSIRO and NICTA find it very difficult to turn their inventions into new companies or get existing companies to pick them up.

It has been identified that this has much to do with individuals and their drive (or lack thereof) to see their invention through from creation to commercialisation.

Interestingly, much original R&D is and has to be done in start-ups themselves. This is because the fundamental research performed in organisations like the CSIRO and NICTA may be independent of a current need of the market, while actual current needs in the market for research are not addressed.

I think, while VenturousAustralia talks a lot about the need for more education, this critical point of bridging the gap from R&D to commercialisation – a critical step to make an innovation useful – is not supported enough.

I have been thinking about this issue a bit (since I have come out of the CSIRO and now run a start-up) and have a suggestion.

There are some projects that support the placement of PhD students from universities into large companies to mentor them through their projects. However, I do not think we have any government supported placement projects for SMEs.

If the government would pay for a intern or a PhD student or a CSIRO/NICTA researcher to be placed in a start-up and do a research project there that has a direct use in the company and the IP would belong to the company with the researcher getting a share in the company and publications be done for the University/CSIRO/NICTA, then a commercialisation path would be built. It would help do more fundamental research, would help bridge the gap into commercialisation, would help the SME to do R&D, and would possibly help the researcher discover a more commercial side of his personality.

I had hoped for some recommendations like this in the report, but found nothing that directly focused on bridging this commercialisation gap.

TOPIC: Enabling SMEs to succeed

We were all positively surprised to see some of the recommendations in VenturousAustralia that will really support SMEs’ efforts in ICT innovation.

For example, the recommended tax credit would in my own (probably flawed) calculations be able to give us at Vquence a 50% larger tax rebate.

I was further surprised to see recommendation 10.6:
“The Australian Government should recognise its role as an active participant in facilitating innovation through procurement practices.”

This recommends a similar requirement for Australian governments as exists in the USA to spend a percentage of procurement on testing and using Australian innovative products and services.

Another recommendation that initially really excited me is recommendation 10.2:

“An advisory committee of web 2.0 practitioners should be established to propose and help steer governments as they experiment with web 2.0 technologies and ideas.”

It sounds like the recommendation means that we should push the boundaries of Web 2.0 more in Australia. However, when reading the report, it becomes clear what this recommendation means: the government should use Web 2.0 technologies that have been proven elsewhere to enable a more open communication, discussion, and collaboration between government departments and the public. As awesome as this is – and as much as it fits with the principles that we have been pushing in open source for many years – it is also limiting ourselves to the use of existing technology rather than pushing the boundaries by developing new technologies.

TOPIC: Regard for the contribution of Open Source

There is an enormous amount of innovation happening in the open source community and Australia is one of the big contributors to open source software internationally. However, the open source communities are often overlooked as innovators in ICT because commercial success from them is only visible indirectly, e.g. through a successful project in government, a successful new start-up, or a process optimisation in a multi-national.

In this report I am slowly seeing a recognition of this and the advantages of open technologies and open content.

In recommendation 8.7 you can read (extracted):
“Further exploration may be warranted to see if there are practicable ways of expanding the definition of eligible activities to include some of the less technically risky activities involved in innovation in services. In the immediate term, R&D on open source programs should qualify for the multiple sale test.”

This will enable Open Source work and services to be used for Tax Concession and Tax Credit – a big step forward.

Yet, the undertanding is still limited, I think.

Looking at recommendation 7.14:
“To the maximum extent practicable, information, research and content funded by Australian governments – including national collections – should be made freely available over the internet as part of the global public commons.”

I like the drive for opening up public content repositories in this. But I’d like to focus my observations on the part that states that “research funded by Australian governments should be made freely available over the Internet”. In my view, this is a great push towards supporting the open publication of research outcomes by Universities, NICTA, CSIRO, and CRCs. But I seem to be misunderstanding this bit, since there is no such mention in the Cutler report – it only focuses on content.

CONCLUSIONS

After all this criticism I have to say that I was rather impressed by the breadth and depth of the report. I was not able to cover all the good bits, which also include more support for investment activites. My criticism is only on the rough edges and I’ll take some time to feed it back, because I have a real belief that the feedback will actually end up in the final report.

Why do I think that constructive feedback will still make it into the report?

First of all, I think the committee has tried and mostly succeeded in succinctly putting into the report all the input they have received. I don’t think we have ever seen such a comprehensive analysis of the Australian innovation landscape beforehand.

But more importantly, I was at the Pearcey awards event, I heard some of the committee members speak about the process and respond to some of the feedback, and I heard Terry Cutler speak about it. I got the feeling of overwhelming support for ICT innovation and I hope we see a lot of the recommendations turned into reality.

I’ll end this lengthy discusion with Terry Cutler’s final words of the evening: “ICT is innovation”.

UPDATE: Charles Lindop just published the audio recordings of the event on his blog.

Today, three of the worlds that I am really engaged in and that tend to not have much in-common with each other seemed to come to a sudden overlap.

The three worlds I am talking about are:

• Social video publishing (through my company Vquence)
• One Laptop Per Child (I am really keen to see more OLPC work in the Pacific)
• Open media software and technology (through Xiph and Annodex work, as well as FOMS)

I was positively surprised to read in this blog message that Dailymotion and the OLPC foundation have partnered to set up a video publishing channel for videos that can be viewed on the OLPC. The channel is available at olpc.dailymotion.com. You can view it on your computer if you have the appropriate codec libraries for Windows and the Mac installed. Your Linux computer should just support it.

To understand the full impact of this message, you have to understand that the XO (the OLPC laptop) does not support the playback of Flash video by default. OLPC cannot ship the official Adobe Flash plugin on the XOs because it is legally restricted and doesn’t meet the OLPC’s standards for open software. Thus, children that receive an XO are somewhat cut off from social video sites like YouTube, Dailymotion, Blip.tv, MySpace.tv, video.google.com and others, even though there are lots of education-relevant videos published there.

The XO however ships with video technology that IS open: namely the Ogg Theora/Vorbis video codec and software. This is incidentally also the codec that the next version of Firefox will be supporting out of the box without need of installation of a further plugin.

Unfortunately, most video content nowadays available on the Internet is not available in the Ogg Theora/Vorbis format. Therefore, Dailymotion and the OLPC Foundation launching this channel that is automatically republishing all the videos uploaded to the Dailymotion OLPC group is a really big thing: It’s a major social video site republishing video in an open format to enable it to be viewed on open systems.

Julian Frumar used to be our Visual Communications Manager at Vquence until last year, when he left for new grounds and created a startup with two friends in Palo Alto called Omnisio. They received Y-combinator funding and worked hard on creating this video-centric Web2.0 startup in a very short amount of time.

Today, Techcrunch announced that Omnisio were acquired by Google to extend the YouTube technology base for an estimated US$15M. Congratulations, Julian!

PS: Rodney Gedda wrote a good review on this over at Techworld.

The W3C has just released a set of proposed charters for a new W3C Video in the Web activity with a request for feedback.

The following working groups are proposed:

1. Timed Text Working Group
2. Media Fragments Working Group
3. Media Annotations Working Group

Two further ones under investigation are:

1. Codecs and containers
2. Best practices for video and audio content

It is worth checking out the site and the three different working groups they are planning to create. Sure – the codec discussion is a big one. But it’s not as big as some of the other activities as to new functionality for video on the Web.

On Tuesday 24th June I attended the “Commercialising Video” conference held in beautiful Jones Bay Wharf in Sydney’s harbour. AIMIA and Claudia Sagripanti from VentureOne organised it together.

It was a mixture of case studies and panels. The case studies were talks by successful digital media companies, including Sony, Bebo, Viocorp, Clear Light Digital and Fox Interactive Media (really: mySpaceTV). The panels constituted each a moderator and a small number of industry experts that briefly presented on their knowledge on a specific topic and then discussed this topic led by questions from the audience.

I thought the format was very successful and the conference covered a broad range of current topics of interest in digital media. Panel topics included:

• mobile: challenges for getting video onto mobile and making a return on it
• business models: how to make money from online video
• sports video: what business models work with sports content
• metrics: why we need to measure video and what and how
• innovations: what innovative products are to be expected in the near future in video

I was one of the panellists on the metrics panel – my slides are here. The very last slide provides a very basic preview of the video metrics service that is in development at Vquence right now. Expect the final product to look much more professional, once I’ve included the awesome designs that we have just received from Chiz.

One thing that I took away from the conference is that the online video market is finally maturing and we are seeing business models that work. While they can roughly be classified into ad-supported, sponsored, and user-paid, there are many details that you have to take care of dependent on the service that you are providing. Ad-support can be inside the video e.g. in pre-roll, post-roll, mid-roll, overlay, or accompanying ads e.g. in dynamically loaded roll-outs, banners etc. Sponsorship is mostly used for non-profit sites. User-paid models are e.g. subscriptions, pay-per-view, pay-per-download. General video sites work not so well for ad-support as specialised sites. There is a lot of money for videos in specialised areas where your community is very keen to receive the latest video content fast, e.g. in sports.

In mobile in Australia, video business is still hard going, because the bandwidth costs are high, extra production cost is high, and because of challenges to get video into a usable form on such a small screen (e.g. soccer-ball is too small to be more than a pixel). This also means that the cost for consumers to get video is high, while the quality is still low. This obviously does not make for a very good market. The size of the iPhone screen, combined with the slow realisation by mobile phone providers that they have to drop prices for video transfers, may however totally change this situation.

Finally, I noticed that there was a large call for metrics. Measurement of the use of video and tracking the distribution of videos around the Internet, as well as measurement of advertising that relates to videos are all being requested to get more transparency into the business and mature the market. Initial services are available, in particular from existing Web Analytics and Internet Market Intelligence companies. However, the technology is new and we have a long way to go online and even more on mobile. This is a great opportunity for Vquence!

Thanks very much, Claudia, for organising this event and I hope there will be more to come in this space.

Today’s Google Developer day in Sydney was quite impressive. There were about 500 developers (and other random folks) there, curious to learn more about the services Google offers. With three parallel breakout rooms for the talks / code labs, there was plenty to choose from.

The introduction was well done, providing a quick overview of all the services and APIs that were the topic of the day – enough to understand what they are and tempt you to attend the in-depth talks.

I attended the Google App Engine talk first – not because I am a fan of python, but because I have an AppEngine account and my son Ben codes in python. I’d really like to play with AppEngine and get Ben to develop something useful (and me to learn some more python on the side). The talk gave a great introduction, which really enthused me. They build this little shout-out app on the fly and published it within the first 10 min. Now, I am collecting ideas for Ben to code up – if you have a neat little one, leave me a note.

I then went on to attend the YouTube talk. It was touted as a 201 presentation, but in the end just provided a cursory overview of the YouTube API. It was a good overview, but since we’ve been working with the API for a long time at Vquence, there was nothing new for me.

At the end of the talk, a developer requested YouTube to provide an API to access the new annotation feature. Since that is still in beta, they will be waiting to harden the technology for a bit before introducing the API. I suggested to them to look at CMML as the XML API. I explained that it would hold any annotation at any time point in any language. The on-screen placement is not currently covered by a tag in CMML, but could be added to the meta tags of the clips. I also suggested that if they found anything to improve on CMML, it would be possible since it’s not a finalized standard. I really hope they will check it out.

After lunch, I attended the two sessions about OpenSocial. I was considering using it for the new Vquence metrics site to do the widget layout. I quickly understood that this is not about layouts, but really about social applications. It would be cool if Ben would think up a social application that he could implement in python and OpenSocial and host in AppEngine. Something that him and his friends could share, maybe? Any ideas for an 11-year-old who learnt python on the OLPC?

At the end of the day, I was curious to learn a bit about Android before having to head home. But I only had a few minutes and the speaker had a slow start (repeating his slides from the introduction session) such that I quickly decided to leave and rather make sure I was at after school care on time!

Overall a worthwhile day – I met some friends, made some contacts, got to ask some questions, and had an awesome lunch with fresh sushi, hmmm. Google really knows how to spoil their developers!