Here’s the deal, YouTube user GhostlyRich posted a video on YouTube in early December that showed that his Samsung Galaxy S4 caught fire while charging. While the battery did not explode (thankfully) you can clearly see the charging port is burnt. To no surprise, a burnt charging point rendered the device useless and seeing that the Phone is still under warranty, you would think Samsung would simply exchange the device and make good with the consumer to fix the issue.
Wrong. What Samsung has done, foolishly, is sent the user a document saying that they will exchange his defective device only after he pulls his initial video from YouTube. If Samsung was unaware of how the internet works, it’s about to find out that trying to quiet the user will result in a black eye for the company. Original video: 45,000 views. Demand letter: 277,000 views. (Thanks @ClarkeViper for the link.)]]>
The Web-based player experience is where Microsoft started before May, when the Redmond, Wash. company first launched its own YouTube app for Windows Phone. Shortly after Microsoft published the app on its Windows Phone Store, Google issued a cease-and-desist letter demanding Microsoft yank the app.]]>
Are the features that Google wants Microsoft to put into its browser those WebKit vendor prefixes? It's certainly relying on them in many of its web properties – and that would explain why it wants changes to Internet Explorer, allowing it to simplify the code in its JavaScript libraries and developer kits.
It's tempting to build apps that rely on the latest features, and if they'll run on most of the devices out there, well, the rest will catch up someday. But that's a rationale that assumes that the W3C will standardise on those experimental features, and that the resulting CSS and HTML markup will end up in new editions of current browsers quickly. His conclusion: "Google appears to be using user agent sniffing to deliver different experiences to different browsers — a poor approach to modern web design".]]>
The relevant industry is criticizing Google’s such rules as a violation of their right of choice. Smart TV operators have opted for HTML5 to escape from the clout of Android-based Google TV, so Google’s new requirements put brakes on HTML5-based smart TV operators.
An industry insider said, “Telling us where the YouTube app should be placed is an act of coercive sales tactics.” Can take up to three months to get approval, apparently.]]>
The five reasons I decided against taking money from YouTube:
1. The absurd 45% YouTube tax
2. A lack of marketing support
3. No direct sales force at YouTube
3. $0.20 to $0.30 on the production dollar in support (according to sources)
5. Trust
YouTube takes 45% of revenues? (Thanks @HotSoup for the link.)]]>
Both behaviors violate the cardinal rules YouTube imposes on developers who use its service. To get around those restrictions, it appears that Microsoft reverse-engineered some portion of the software used to access YouTube's basic functions, which are generally known as application programming interfaces, or APIs. If so, that could mean Microsoft can do just about whatever it wants with its YouTube app. Wonder how long this will be allowed, given that Google has somehow not got around to writing a Windows Phone version of the YouTube app in the past two and a half years?]]>
It does, however, speak to a larger problem YouTube faces: The site’s censorship is a shell game, one that relies almost entirely on users to flag offensive or sexually explicit content. If a video gets taken down, another will likely soon replace it, on another person's channel and with another set of views. Note at the top of the story: contains explicit material. So, possibly NSFW. (Though not if you have a Flash blocker on.)]]>
That led some folks to conclude that the views were "fake" and that nefarious "black hat" techniques were being cooked up by the labels to falsely inflate their views. The truth, however, isn't nearly as sexy.
Interviews Billboard.biz conducted with YouTube, label executives and analysts from Next Big Sound told a very different tale. Here's what really happened. They weren't faked. Start from there.]]>
YouTube is excited to be among the first.
Today we're launching face blurring - a new tool that allows you to obscure faces within videos with the click of a button. Great idea for activists. And anyone else who wants to film themselves doing things anonymously. Quite what the legal playout of this will be isn't obvious.]]>
Andrew Y. Ng, a Stanford computer scientist, is cautiously optimistic about neural networks. There Google scientists created one of the largest neural networks for machine learning by connecting 16,000 computer processors, which they turned loose on the Internet to learn on its own.
Presented with 10 million digital images found in YouTube videos, what did Google’s brain do? What millions of humans do with YouTube: looked for cats. Sounds trivial, but has huge applications.]]>