Around the World

» In US: Internet users watched more than 10 billion videos online during December 2007, making it the single heaviest month for online video consumption since comScore started its tracking service. Google Sites ranked as the top U.S. video property with 32.6% share of videos (and YouTube accounted for more than 97% of all videos viewed at the property). Fox Interactive Media ranked second, followed by Yahoo! Sites and Viacom Digital.

» In Cuba: Fidel Castro resigned as president of Cuba. Brother Raul will now pick up the leadership baton. Raúl intends on consulting with Fidel on key government matters but also plan on carrying out sweeping reforms to make the government more efficient, improve salaries, eliminate costly subsidies, and phase out a dual-currency regime that caused distortions in the economy. Certainly curious to see what will unfold in the next months/years.

» In Canada: Molson-Coors and Diageo are investing in the Bar Channel, a video network that broadcasts directly to Canadian bars. The network uses a closed-circuit internet connection that feeds content to flat monitors, which it provides to bars. Since its launch in April, the Bar Channel has expanded to 88 Ontario bars, raking in $600,000 in first-year revenue. The business model is straight-forward: the network draws in bars by paying for monitors and related equipment. In exchange, the network manages the advertising. Bars may also sell 10 ad slots per month at about $300 each.

» In Japan: An experimental satellite was recently launched to provide high-speed internet across Asia, even when terrestrial infrastructure is down. The $342 million satellite circulates data of up to 1.2 Gbps — 150 times the average DSL connection rate (8 Mbps) and 12 times faster than fiber optic wires. This makes it the fastest consumer-ready high-speed data purveyor on record. Dubbed “Kizuna”, it will be operational in July and can be used for at least five years. Japan plans on using the satellite for emergency communications (when ground-based networks are cut off by disaster) and to provide web access to remote regions in Asia.

» In World: Interactive advertising revenues are expected to increase significantly from $45 billion in 2007 to $147 billion in 2012. Interactive advertising–including search, display advertising, classifieds and other interactive ad products–grew its share of global advertising revenues from 6.1% in 2006 to 7.4% in 2007. Note: this forecast does not include mobile ad platforms. Just imagine the growth rate projection if it did!

Facebook Update

» Facebook saw month-to-month traffic declines in December and January, according to separate reports from ComScore Media Metrix and Nielson Online.
Unique visits dipped by about 800,000 visitors in January. The question on everyone’s lips: Is Facebook plateauing? And on an even broader scale, is the social networking phase starting to slow down?

Newfangled Things

» Apple has a patent for a technology that automatically creates customized podcast mashups from various podcasts. When it comes out, users will be able to take portions of multiple podcasts that meet their interests, and download a combined podcast that includes the specified extracts requested. It’ll be like an RSS feed reader but in audio format.

» Microsoft has increased storage on Windows Live Skydrive to 5GB (previous limit was 1GB. On top of the extra storage, Skydrive has dropped the beta tag, and is now available in the following additional countries: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Finland, France, Guatemala, Honduras, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Turkey.

» NewsClipper is consolidating all news clips from major TV news networks into one location. No more jumping from site to site in search of video content! Video clips can be sorted by “most recent” or “most viewed.” You can create a playlist and sort by network or category (such as Politics, International, Domestic, Business, Technology, Sports, Weather, etc.). Currently, there is no search function but it’ll be coming soon (along with viewer ratings and commenting features).

» Yahoo is replacing its own software with Hadoop (a software known for handling large-scale distributed computing tasks) and running it on a Linux server cluster with 10,000 core processors. The Hadoop software does the same job 34% faster than the old software.

» FON recently launched Twitxr through their FON Labs group. It’s like Twitter but enables picture uploads when sending a message (great for use with camera phones). FON’s founder says it’s specially designed for the iPhone, and that they’ve created software that makes uploading text and a photo from the iPhone very easy. However, as a third party application, it isn’t officially available for the iPhone. Yet.

» Cookthink is like Pandora for recipes and has a database that returns results based on user desires (interesting!) Key feature is the “cookthink it” search tool. Users enter what they are craving and the site will suggest a recipe to match those cravings. Ingredients can also be combined. For example, if you’re craving a pasta dish that includes bacon and mushrooms, you can put all three ingredients into the search and the service will return a recipe. Recipes can also be searched using four categories of tags: mood (eg, hangover-friendly), ingredient (eg, chicken), cuisine (eg, Tex-Mex) and dish type (eg, quesadilla).

» Pingg is the latest site to join the plentitude of services that are trying to make the ‘online invitation’ experience better. The great thing about Pingg is that you don’t have to click through to a Website filled with ads just to find the address for a dinner. Users can choose from some 45 themes (like dinner party, baby, wedding, food, travel and eco-friendly). The best part: the invite, image, event details all come through in your email. Simple, direct. And you can RSVP from the email as well!