Aviary in Google Apps: A success story

Aviary is now available in the Google Apps Marketplace! Aviary delivers free design tools and templates to create, modify and share images, logos, presentations, audio tracks, podcasts & more. Teams can collaborate on multimedia projects. Now works directly in Google Docs. All of the key features of desktop editors with the simplicity and accessibility of a web-based application, for FREE. Check it out!

What is Zoho?

Nice video explaining what cloud computing is in general and what Zoho is in particular.

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Seth Godin and Tom Peters on Blogging

Why business gurus Tom Peters and Seth Godin blog. Really interesting and insightful.

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Bayan’s Lola Techie Campaign for Sky Broadband and Sky DSL

Lola Techie commercial from Bayan, a Filipino ISO. One of the more effective viral and traditional and new media marketing campaigns I have seen in a while. Great concept and execution.

In the commercial Lola Techie or “Techie Grandma” is having a webcam conversation with an unseen grandson whom she chastises for not sharing more Youtube videos or not replying to her Facebook chats. She has even resorted to “Super Poking” the grandson on Facebook and will soon “dropkick” him on the popular social networking site. You can follow Lola Techie on Facebook, Twitter and many other social networking sites. Kudos to the Bayan marketing team for actively posting and managing her different profiles to create a community online.

Interested in seeing Bayan post the results of this campaign if it is able to actually contribute to generating interest in Bayan’s Sky Broadband and Sky DSL service.

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Does Google Wave Represent the next “Wave” in Communication and Collaboration?

I watched with interest the screencast of Google’s Announcement of their new product called “Google Wave” at the recently concluded Google I/O Conference. Google I/O is the search giant’s annual developer event in San Francisco and was the perfect venue for their launch of a product they envision to be a new platform and really brings with it a new paradigm for communication and collaboration.

Google Wave (currently in developer preview) essentially brings together in a single place all channels for communication or collaboration a user may need such as Email, IM, Blogging, Microblogging and others. So what you may ask? Aren’t there a lot of unified communication applications (ie Skype)/messaging aggregators (ie Digsby, Pidgin)/content management systems (ie Sharepoint) that do the same thing?

Well not quite. Google Wave (from my understanding) does it in a slightly different, and ultimately more interesting and clever way: they treat each type of communication (be it text, posts, images, videeo, URLs, etc.) as discrete objects, which can be be presented, manipulated, aggregated, and distributed in countless ways and in real-time. They have come up with their own protocol to allow for easier federation and aggregation, and possibly faster transmission, unencumbered by the “legacy” limitations of other communication protocols (such as email) or proprietary limitations of other protocols (such as IM and Skype). They allow “hooks” into that data so that third party developers can easily extend it (ie on-the-fly spell checking, translation) or integrate it with other applications (ie posting on blogs such as Blogger, posting in microblogs such as Twitter, presenting on social networks or portals such as Facebook or Orkut), and other forms of data (ie video and photos). They really thought out the user experience, and really push the boundaries of what can be done today by programming using the web (they use HTML 5 and use the Google Web Toolkit as their presentation framework).

The best thing about Google Wave? Its completely open (as in open standards and open source) so that there will be no encumbrance to (Google hopes) its wide spread adoption. You can deploy it on-premise (behind the corporate firewall) or use it in the cloud (on Google’s own servers) and federate the servers so that servers can still inter-operate or communicate. In that way it is similar to email.

Its difficult to describe just what  Google Wave is all about. Check out this video demonstration so you can see and learn more about it for yourself:

Information R/evolution

This video explores the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information. This video was created as a conversation starter, and works especially well when brainstorming with people about the near future and the skills needed in order to harness, evaluate, and create information effectively.

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The Machine is Us/ing Us

The evolution of the Internet from “Web 1.0″ to “Web 2.0″ in just under 5 minutes. Learn more at: http://mediatedcultures.net

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Zoho Launches Zoho Gadgets

This is interesting. It seems these guys never tire of building new things into their platform. Zoho launched recently its Zoho Gadgets, which allows users to embed Zoho apps to be embedded in any OpenSocial compatible site or social network. This includes Orkut, iGoogle, Gmail, Friendster, Ning and Yahoo. Although not OpenSocial compatible, Zoho Gadgets also support embedding on Facebook.

Zoho Gadgets connects you to iGoogle, Facebook, Orkut, Gmail etc | Zoho Blogs

Zoho Gadgets launches today with the aim to connect Zoho applications with external applications. Zoho Gadgets, available at http://gadgets.zoho.com, can be integrated/embedded with online applications like iGoogle, Facebook, Orkut, Gmail & more. To start with, we are offering six Zoho gadgets.

* Zoho Docs (Including Writer, Sheet & Show)
* Zoho Mail
* Zoho Calendar
* Zoho Tasks
* Zoho Contacts and
* Zoho Planner

YouTube Symphony Orchestra @ Carnegie Hall – Act One

The world’s first collaborative online orchestra performed at Carnegie Hall on April 15, 2009. Selected by the YouTube community and several members of the world’s most renowned orchestras, the YouTube Symphony Orchestra is made up of over 96 professional and amateur musicians from 30+ countries and territories on six continents and represents 26 different instruments.

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Google Losing (Massive Amounts of) Money in Youtube

Google may be losing up to $1.65M a Day on YouTube–this is according to an article by David Silversmith in his blog at Internet Evolution.

He bases his assessment from research provided by financial firm Credit Suisse and Internet measurement provider comScore Inc. According to their estimates, Youtube is on track to serve 75 billion video streams to 375 million unique visitors in 2009. From this amount of users and traffic, it is estimated they earn only anywhere from a low of $90 million (Bear Stearns) to a high of $240 million (Credit Suisse). Revenues come from adwords and home page banner advertising, and premium dedicated channel content.

To earn this however, they spend an estimated $753 million annually on bandwidth and infrastructure. So, depending on whose version of
revenues you accept, Google is losing anywhere from $513 million to
$663 million annually on YouTube, or anywhere from $1.4 million to as
much as $1.65 million every day (see chart below).

Internet Evolution – David Silversmith – Google Losing up to $1.65M a Day on YouTube

You can read more of David’s post here, or read a post from Technologizer, which expects Youtube to radically shift its strategy and content to survive.

Now if Youtube is having a hard time monetizing its massive user base and traffic–what does this bode for the site’s smaller competitors such as Veoh, Brightcove, and others? Or for that matter sites that offer free services such as Twitter. What does this say about the viability of businesses whose business model is around free and user-generated content?