The iPad 3 launch event is this coming Wednesday, but before the device (if it’s even called the iPad 3) is unveiled, you should check out these concept videos from Aatma Studios showing what it could be. We looked at one video they put out earlier in the week, but they have also put out the following separate feature-specific videos.
It’s pretty much the same stuff you already saw if you watched the prior video, but if you want to share a specific part of it, you can now do so.
It would be a pretty slick device. Peruse our iPad 3 page for the latest news, rumors and content related to it.
The first video shows off “Edge-to-Edge Retina display”:
The second looks at internal magnets and NFC:
The third (and coolest) shows 3D multiplayer hologram functionality:
I may be proven wrong in a few days, but something tells me the real product will be a little less cool.
YouTube is one step closer to becoming a global video content delivery site by adding four new languages to the site – all of them being regional languages in India.
Aditi Rajwanshi, YouTube India partner manager, announced today in a YouTube blog post that the site can now be browsed in Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu. YouTube has been in India since 2008, but India’s size and vast amount of languages has made it hard for them to make the site friendly to all the people who live there.
Previously, YouTube has added support for Hindi, Urdu, Marathi, Bengali and Tamil. Considering that India has 30 regional languages, YouTube only has 21 more languages to go until they can account for the entire country.
YouTube just isn’t getting more language support. The video site is also working with creators to produce content in these languages.
For speakers of Telugu, YouTube has more than 100 films of Tollywood Cinema and a vegetarian cooking channel. Speakers of Kannada can look forward to music, drama and comedy content. Malayalam speakers can get Malayalam cinema videos from YouTube. Finally, Gujarati speakers can access TV9 for news.
YouTube has provided some entertaining and eductional examples of YouTube videos for each language. Check them out below:
Google launched Chrome for Android earlier this month. It’s in beta, and is only available for select countries and languages for devices running Ice Cream Sandwich, but an Android version of the browser has been long awaited. It’s bound to be popular as availability expands.
Google has uploaded the following video of engineers from the Chrome for Android team discussing the product for nearly an hour. If you’re developing for Chrome (or Android) you might want to take the time to watch.
Washington State University chemistry professor Aurora Clark claims to have adapted Google’s PageRank algorithm for use in moleculaRnetworks, which is designed to enable scientists to determine molecular shapes and chemical reactions “without the expense, logistics and occasional danger of lab experiments.”
“What’s most cool about this work is we can take technology from a totally separate realm of science, computer science, and apply it to understanding our natural world,” says Clark.
The software focuses on hydrogen bonds in water. “From a biological or chemical standpoint, water is where it’s at,” says Clark.
An interesting passage from the announcement about the project:
In living things, water can perform key functions like helping proteins fold or organizing itself around the things it dissolves so molecules stay apart in a fluid state. But the processes are dazzlingly complex, changing in fractions of a second and in myriad possible forms.
Much like the trillion-plus Web domains on the Internet.
Google’s PageRank software, developed by its founders at Stanford University, uses an algorithm—a set of mathematical formulas—to measure and prioritize the relevance of various Web pages to a user’s search. Clark and her colleagues realized that the interactions between molecules are a lot like links between Web pages. Some links between some molecules will be stronger and more likely than others.
“So the same algorithm that is used to understand how Web pages are connected can be used to understand how molecules interact,” says Clark.
The work is being funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Basic Energy Sciences program.
Today’s animated Google Doodle is simple, heartwarming, and slightly controversial?
Let’s start with the un-controversial part, which is basically 99% of the Doodle. A young lad sees the love of his young life playfully jumping rope, completely oblivious to his existence. Of course, he thinks – what about searching Google for tips on how to woo her? He tried flowers, chocolates, stuffed animals – to no avail. I won’t ruin the end, because it’s pretty cute.
I personally like Google’s message that even their search engine can’t really help navigate the maze that is a woman’s heart. Oh, and the Tony Bennett song “Cold, Cold heart” is also a nice touch. Check it out below:
Now, the “controversial” part (and I’m really emphasizing those quotation marks) involves an image that appears for about a second and a half near the end of the Doodle. After our young lad has won over his Valentine and they begin jumping rope together, Google flashes six squares that show other couples. You have and astronaut and an alien, a cat and a dog, cookies and milk, and what appears to be two depictions of same-sex couple on the bottom row.
The middle image of two men in suits, appearing to be at a wedding, is unmistakable. The image on the bottom left could be looked at as two women, although it’s not as clear cut as the male-male image.
On one hand, good for Google for expressing their feelings on equality. But one thing felt a little off about the ending collage of couples. It most likely wasn’t intentional, but the collage itself seems to undermine Google’s assumed message. Placing the same sex couple(s) next to a princess-frog couple and an alien-astronaut couple is an odd choice. Is the same sex couple to be thought of in the same way as fictional couples that don’t really exist? Twitter users also picked up on this:
The first one is a presentation from Google’s “Uber Tech Lead for Search Quality and User Happiness” Dan Russell. Here’s the abstract for it:
How well DO people search on Google? Although popular opinion is that “everyone is above average,” that obviously can’t be true. The truth is that self-perceptions of search expertise are often wildly over-estimated and that people, on average, actually use only a fraction of the potential of Google. They both don’t know much of what’s possible, and don’t understand where internet search capabilities are headed. Since the rate of change and improvements isn’t slowing down, in this talk I’ll examine where we are, and where we’re headed, and conclude with some heuristics for teaching research skills in the years ahead.
The video lasts about 36 minutes.
The second video comes from the Khan Academy, which Google’s first employee (after co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin) just announced he was leaving Google for. Russell also appears in this video, which is much shorter, about searching for similar images:
It looks like Bing’s counterpart to Google’s Matt Cutts, Duane Forrester, is now putting out Matt Cutts-style webmaster videos for Bing Webmaster Tools.
He posted this one about becoming an authority by building quality content and sharing properly:
“You being an authority means you’re an expert. You rank better,” says Forrester. “You get more traffic.That just leads to better business success for you, which is what you want.”
“The first thing is, you need to focus on fundamentals here,” he says. “What we’re really talking about is the quality you have – the quality of content you build and the quality of sharing you do socially. Those are really two critically important points.”
He gives an example of “how to build quality content” using eBay.
“Let me give you two scenarios,” he continues. “One: you’re going to sell a cordless drill on eBay, and you’re just going to take the standard information, images and such. Now, the second example, we’re going to sell the same product – the same cordless drill – but we’re actually going to take videos of that cordless drill in use. We’re going to show that cordless drill in its packaging, in its wrapper, in every way possible. We are going to amplify it. Lots of extra pictures. We’re going to do this all on our own. We’re going to write up descriptions. We’re going to put all of that together.”
“It’s pretty clear to see here by these descriptions that we’re going to have a standard view of an item for sale, and a really deep, rich, immersive view of an item for sale,” says Forrester.
The second version, he says, is the “quality”.
“That is what people are looking for to answer their questions,” he continues. “So when that comes to you content, you have to think of it in terms of, ‘Have I answered all of the questions this searcher has? Have I done it to a depth that satisfies them?’ If you can do that, you need to move on to the next step, which is sharing properly.”
“You get out there, and you’re sharing things on Facebook, or you’re putting it on Twitter. Any of the social media spaces that you like and you frequent, you’re putting this stuff out there.”
He says that before you submit this stuff, you have to ask yourself: Will my tweet or my post bring quality to my followers or my friends?
“That is a critical step,” he emphasizes. “They want you to bring them quality. They need you to bring them quality. You need to bring them quality. If you don’t bring them quality, they’re going to stop following you. If you bring them good quality links either to your content or to related content, they will continually engage with you. They will share you. They will like you. They will amplify that for you. That amplification – that signals that you’re becoming an authority socially.”
“Pull all of that together,” he says. “Now you’re starting to see things as the search engine sees it.
More on Forrester’s thoughts about search and social from a presentation he gave at BlogWorld in November can be found here.
Jimmy Kimmel posed a challenge to his audience last week. He wanted them to unplug the TV during the Super Bowl and film the reactions.
The videos have been slowly coming in, but I’m sure there will be more later on tonight. Keep checking back throughout the game as we’ll be updating with the latest and greatest prank videos.
We will update this story at the end with our top 10 videos. Check back often!
Last summer, a video leaked to YouTube called Gmail Man (actually, O365 MGX Copy at the time). In the video, the “Gmail Man” was actually a mailman that walked around reading people’s mail. He would then confront the people with ad keywords based on their mail.
“Sometimes, when a person loves their Gmail very very much, the two get together and an ad is born,” The Gmail Man says.
As the story goes, this thinly veiled attack was actually a product of Microsoft. The video leak came from the Microsoft Global Exchange sales conference, which occurred in July. It was apparently shown there as a sort of “rally the troops” exercise – everyone sitting around, having a laugh at the expense of the competition type thing.
But now, Microsoft has released the video officially on their YouTube channel and they are promoting it via Twitter and Facebook.
Here’s the video, which appears to be unchanged from the leaked version. The point of it still seems to be advertising for Office 365.
As I mentioned before, this video isn’t new – but Microsoft’s official promotion of it is. And of course, the timing couldn’t be more poignant.
Google’s new privacy policy has gotten some people up in arms. Basically, Google is combining dozens of privacy policies into one, and saying that they will use information from all if their products to help personalize other products. Say you searched for “bears,” the next time you log into YouTube you might have a suggestion to watch some bear videos.
Whether it’s truly a big deal or not, Microsoft has jumped on the opportunity to slam Google. On Wednesday, they took out full page ads in major newspapers that said Google doesn’t put people first. The ads detailed Google’s privacy policy changes and suggested users switch to Microsoft alternatives like Hotmail and Bing.
Google quickly hit back, doing a little bit of mythbusting on their public policy blog. Here’s a relevant snippet from that rebuttal that pertains to Gmail man:
Myth: Google reads your email. [Microsoft] Fact: No one reads your email but you. Like most major email providers, our computers scan messages to get rid of spam and malware, as well as show ads that are relevant to you.
Google goes on to talk about Microsoft’s own privacy policy:
We don’t make judgments about other people’s policies or controls. But our industry-leading Privacy Dashboard, Ads Preferences Manager and data liberation efforts enable you to understand and control the information we collect and how we use it—and we’ve simplified our privacy policy to make it easier to understand. Microsoft has no data liberation effort or Dashboard-like hub for users. Their privacy policy states that “information collected through one Microsoft service may be combined with information obtained through other Microsoft services
Wherever you stand on all of this privacy battle business, you have to admit that Microsoft’s Gmail Man ad is pretty funny.
Speaking of Gmail, one comedy group tackled the same kind of concerns with GMale, Google’s perfect boyfriend:
The Marvel Youtube channel has just posted a teaser clip from the Super Bowl spot for The Avengers, the Joss Whedon-helmed super superhero movie that’s sure to be one of the biggest hits of the summer.
It’s only a 10-second clip, but it surely packs a punch. You’ve got the Hulk, Captain America, Thor, Iron Man and even Scarlett Johansson’s beautiful self – and some major destruction. Check it out below:
The Avengers is definitely one of the most buzzed-about movies of the upcoming blockbuster season. When the initial Avenger’s trailer released, it broke the iTunes record for most downloaded trailer of all time.
The Avengers will release in 3D and IMAX on May 4th. If you choose to watch it in three dimensions, you’ll be able to watch it in style (with a slight fee). Fans choosing to pay an extra 5 bucks will be albe to don their very own custom 3D glasses modeled specifically for four different heroes: Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, and Captain America.
If you somehow missed the original trailer, you can watch it below:
Are you excited? Let us know in the comments. And be sure to check out some of the other leaked Super Bowl spots below:
Last night, Stephen Colbert hijacked the end of The Daily Show and demanded that Jon Stewart return control of his Super PAC money.
In 2011, Colbert created the Colbert Super PAC to raise money from fans, but more importantly as a way to poke fun at issues like Citizens United, corporate money in elections, and shadow organizations that pump out attack ads for political candidates. Colbert Super PAC paid for ads for a “Rick Parry” during the Iowa Caucus and most recently transferred ownership into the hand of Jon Stewart, so that Colbert could make a run during the South Carolina GOP primary.
During that time, the Super PAC changed names to the “Definitely Not Coordinating With Stephen Colbert Super PAC.”
But after it was over, Jon Stewart didn’t want to give back control of the PAC. It’s been a running gag on the two Comedy Central shows for the past couple of weeks. But last night, Colbert finally got it back. Check it out:
All of this is a bit (and funny as hell), but we shouldn’t forget that the Colbert Super PAC is real and it actually raised a bunch of money. But how much money?
That was disclosed on Tuesday, as the Super PAC officially filed a report with the Federal Elections Committee disclosing their financials. According to Colbert, this move shows his “deep commitment to transparency” by “disclosing [the information] several hours before being legally required to.”
The big number? $1,023,121.24.
“Colbert Super PAC has brought in a staggering $1,023,121.24, which my accountant explains to me that is a number far above ‘one,’ ‘two,’ ‘five,’ or even ‘many’” said Stephen Colbert, President and Returning Champion of Colbert Super PAC. “We raised it on my show and used it to materially influence the elections – in full accordance with the law. It’s the way our founding fathers would have wanted it, if they had founded corporations instead of just a country.”
Here’s the text from the actual filing, as it proves that even in legal documents Colbert retains his edge:
(image)
The FEC filing also disclosed the names of everyone who donated over $200 to the Super PAC. As Reuters found, one notable name was California’s Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, who contributed $500.
Today’s viral smash sports a pretty simple premise. If you grew up in the 90s or were really into pop music as an adult during the 90s, this is going to be a very awesome experience for you.
YouTube user BennyTheJukebox has come up with a 90s Megamix of all your favorite dance pop tracks from one of the best decades to be alive.
And he plays them all on the Melodica. Here’s a brief sampling of what you’ll hear in the mix:
Gonna Make You Sweat (C&C Music Factory)
What Is Love (Haddaway)
Blue (Eiffel 65)
Better Off Alone (Alice DeeJay)
Can’t Touch This (MC Hammer)
Coco Jumbo (Mr. President)
Break My Stride (Unique 2)
Moving On Up (M People)
Another Night (MC Sar and The Real McCoy)
Mr Vain (Culture Beat)
Jellyhead (Crush)
Baby Got Back (Sir Mix-A-Lot)
We Like To Party (The Vengaboys)
Enjoy:
How many of the songs do you recognize? Let us know in the comments.
If a Facebook Police unit existed, what crimes would they arrest you for? Excessive posting of dog photos? Second degree posting of political status updates?
Jimmy Kimmel imagines a Facebook Police unit that makes sure you respond to that girl that poked you awhile ago, accept your mother’s friend request, and change your profile picture to something more appropriate.
While discussing the new Facebook Timeline rollout, where every user will be required to update to the new profile, Kimmel wondered how Facebook would enforce such a mandate. With brute force, that’s how:
As you probably know, Kimmel is behind an annual event known as “National Unfriend Day.” On November 17th, 2011, Facebook users were asked to clean out their friends list by dumping everyone who simply failed to matter anymore. There was even a point system designed to let users know if they should unfriend someone. One of the top offenses, using the phrase “amazeballs,” was worth 40 points.
Maybe next year, the Facebook Police will make sure more people participate in NUD.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg contributed a bit of artwork to one of the walls at the company’s new headquarters. Video of that is making the rounds. I guess anything involving Zuckerberg and a “wall’ is supposed to be funny. But whatever. Here it is:
Facebook moved into its new home at Menlo Park last month. The campus consists of 10 buildings. There are 2,000 employees in the East Campus, with a vacant lot next door for “further developments”. The company says it is hoping to accommodate a lot more in the years to come.
Speaking of Facebook walls, the company announced today that it will begin pushing the new Timeline feature to all users over the next few weeks. It’s been available for a while, but now users will no longer have a choice if they don’t like it.
If you wanted to make the declarative statement “Last Wednesday’s internet SOPA / PIPA protests killed SOPA & PIPA,” there exists some pretty strong evidence to back you up.
First, Congressional support for the legislation took a nosedive following the protests. And it doesn’t appear that Wednesday’s protests simply happened at the right time – an emphasis on a foregone conclusion. You can actually see a seismic shift in support and opposition to the two bills, and the clear line of demarcation was Wednesday’s blackouts.
Then, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid delayed action on PIPA “in light of recent events.” On the same day, SOPA author Lamar Smith released a statement saying that he would not move on SOPA until there is “wider agreement on a solution.”
Of course, the DOJ’s takedown of MegaUpload the very following day took a little steam out of the successes of the protest. And there is plenty of other harmful legislation out there that threatens internet freedom and privacy. But there is no denying that for one day, the internet community did affect policy.
And one of the major ways that they did that was through social media – especially Twitter. #SOPA #PIPA and #Blackout hashtags reigned supreme through the whole day. People were buzzing about the protests. And Vimeo user Andrei Taraschuk has created a couple of cool visualizations showing how American Twitter users discussed SOPA on that day.
Here’s a video of Tweets from 8am to 8pm on January 18th containing the #PIPA, #SOPA, or #Blackout hashtags. Tweets are displayed in one-minute interval:
And here’s a video of tweets specifically about the Wikipedia blackout. As you might recall, Twitter kind of had a collective freakout about the perceived inaccessibility of the site:
Comedy Central’s late night duo took notice of yesterday’s SOPA Blackouts, as Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert Report both included SOPA-themed segments on Wednesday.
Colbert takes the stance that anything you need on the internet, he can provide. So what if reddit is blacked out? A certain photoshopped picture featuring a few of reddit’s favorite things will surely suffice.
Check out his take on the legislation below:
The Colbert Report
John Stewart, on the other hand, readily admits that he needs to do a little homework on SOPA and PIPA. He demonstrates this by looking up SOPA on Wikipedia only to find…well, you probably see where this is going:
Until recently, Colbert and Stewart had been less vocal about the topic than many on the internet desired. A top post on reddit about a week ago was from a redditor who said they attended a taping of The Daily Show and asked Jon Stewart to look into SOPA. On that night’s episode, he briefly mentioned the legislation at the beginning of the broadcast.
Driven by yesterday’s massive web protest, both Colbert and Stewart were basically compelled to devote large chunks of their shows to SOPA.
How do you think they did? Let us know in the comments.
YouTube, in their current quest to make the site more channel-oriented, has announced a new set of channels that deal with an already-popular topic on YouTube – action sports.
The four new channels are Alli Sports, Network A, Red Bull Channel and RIDE. Here’s how Youtube describes them:
Alli Sports: Whether you want tips from your favorite athlete on how to pull off their signature trick, a behind the curtain look into the lives of the biggest and fastest rising stars in the sports, or news and highlights from the industries most insightful analysts, The Alli Show, Step by Step, Inside AlliSports, AWSM on Alli and Frends Crew, are just a few of the shows on Alli Sports that will keep you up to speed on the latest and greatest moves and news in the industry.
Network A: Network A shares some of the most amazing performances and personalities in the history of action sports. Want to see the best tricks and segments from pros like Paul Rodriguez, Ryan Sheckler, Shaun White and Kelly Slater? You’ve come to the right place. In the coming weeks, new shows, new Channels, and an unprecedented level of access to action sports pros will be added.
Red Bull: The Red Bull Channel is bringing 13 new original episodic series that will chronicle the competition and daily lives of the world’s best action sports athletes including urban mountain biker and YouTube celebrity, Danny MacAskill, skateboarding pro Ryan Sheckler, action sports phenom Travis Pastrana and big wave surfer Jamie O’Brien. You’ll also be able to find new episodes of other popular series starting with the first episode of Livin’ Louie Vito that explores the life of professional snowboarder Louie Vito.
RIDE: Brought to you by Tony Hawk, RIDE is a 24-hour Channel devoted to the skateboarding lifestyle that will feature Hawk, Skatepark of Tampa, Jamie Thomas and Lance Krall among others. On “Tony Hawk’s Dissent,” subscribers will have behind-the-scenes access as Tony hangs out with different celebrities. Viewers can also get into the game with shows like “Shredit Cards,” where skaters upload their own skate videos and earn shopping passes based on the degree of difficulty and “One in a Million,” where amateur skateboarders will compete to become sponsored.
In the fall of 2011, YouTube announced that they would be expanding their channels by bringing in well-known personalities from various fields like music, sports, film, and comedy.
December’s homepage redesign put more emphasis on channels and made it easy for users to subscribe to their favorite content streams.
On Tuesday, YouTube announced a couple of new entertainment channels (Entertainment News TV & The Young Hollywood Network).
Carmelyne Thompson uploaded a video of the “12 Days of G+” as a holiday greeting to Google. For the project, the participants collaborated using: Google+, Hangouts, Google Chat, Google Voice, Gmail, YouTube, Chrome and Google Docs.
Thompson says in a Google+ post, that the video had two clear goals:
#1 To bring the G+ community members together to collaborate via hangouts (because we love hangouts!). We did everything in this video via a hangout collaboration. Brain storming, rewriting songs, scheduling, meeting, recording people and meeting participants who wanted to contribute their time. It was a wondrous experience.
#2 To show our appreciation to the fantastic Google employees who listens to our feedbacks, andGoogle makes Google+ a place where a community of real people can thrive. At Google+, one can meet new friends with the same hobbies, interests; and other like-minded individuals get together to talk shop in hangouts or just getting together even if we’re in different continents.
See, people love back and forth they get with Googlers on Google+.
Googlers are sharing the video on Google+ of course.
Note: Yes, Christmas is over, but the video wasn’t even uploaded until 12/27.
Google has put out a series of videos to help you better take advantage of their rich snippet offerings. Doing so can help your content stand out in search results, and inspire more clicks and search traffic.
In an increasingly difficult SEO landscape, anything that can accomplish that has got to be worth doing (within the rules). Here’s the entire series embedded for your educational enjoyment:
And here’s a bonus video from last year from Matt Cutts, talking about how long it takes for rich snippets to appear:
No, I’m not talking about Christmas greetings from ABC’s now-defunct Wide World of Sports, but that would be pretty cool, as well. Unfortunately, there aren’t any fitting such a category on YouTube, although, there are quite a few WWoS intro videos. What I’m referring to are the yearly collaborations from various sports entities, teams, and franchises, that wish fans the happiest of holidays. Normally, these video greetings are done in an awkward manner, but I don’t think I’d want it any other way.
This year’s versions of various Christmas greetings do not disappoint, either. We have some offerings from the world of college basketball, the EPL, and some students/fans of college basketball as well. If these don’t get you in the Christmas spirit, check your heart for coal deposits.
First off, we have the lovely ladies from the Gonzaga basketball team. I hope you guys shoot better than you sing (we kid because we care):
Next up we have fans from Abilene Christian University taking the basketball floor to bring us some wobbling Christmas joy:
I’m just glad they didn’t “Dougie.”
Next up, is an amazing video from the Arsenal soccer club. If only all Christmas videos could be this awesomely awkward:
This next video features the head basketball coach of the Providence Friars, Ed Cooley, playing the role of Father Christmas. It’s sweet, innocent and does a great job of relaying the appropriate cheer:
Here’s some more college basketball Christmas cheer, featuring the Illinois Fighting Illini and the Cal Bears:
And that, folks, is how we roll when it comes to Christmas. Keep in mind that this is festive holiday, and making such fantastic content like the above videos is a fantastic way to embrace the season.
