YouTube’s office space is located in San Bruno, California and is actually in what used to be the Gap, Inc. offices. These pictures range from mid 2007-mid 2008, so they are pretty accurate as to what it looks like. Oddly enough, the YouTube campus has a large swimming pool, which is something Google’s Mountain View HQ doesn’t even have.
Digg, the popular social news site, is to expand around the world in different languages, Kevin Rose, its founder and chief architect, told The Times.
The company, which last month announced it had raised $28.7 million in a new round of venture funding, has ambitious plans to take on copycat sites in Europe and the Far East.
News stories and other content on Digg are submitted by the site’s visitors, who also vote for the stories they like. The submissions with the most votes are posted on the site’s homepage, which represents a snapshot of the most popular online stories among the Digg community at any one time.
The site was founded by Mr Rose and others in 2004, initially focusing on technology stories. Bringing in other categories has rapidly driven traffic up.
Mr Rose, 31, said: “We are making plans to expand internationally. There are other sites out there and we are seeing how much traction they are getting.”
He said that 45 per cent of the traffic to digg.com was from overseas. London had the most people contributing to the site, he added, more than any US city.
He said the company, which is moving to bigger offices in San Francisco and almost doubling its staff to about 150 people in the next six months, hoped to start rolling out localised foreign sites by the end of 2009.
He said that sites similar to Digg were gaining popularity in countries like Germany, Japan and Spain.
“We want to evolve the existing site and we are making progress with our international plans,” he said.
Traffic to Digg has doubled in the last year to more than 30 million unique visitors per month.
Reports have suggested that both Microsoft and Google were interested in buying Digg earlier this year, but any takeover plans have come to nothing.
Digg now appears set on an independent course. The $28.7 million round of series C funding was led by Highland Capital Partners and includes previous Digg investors Greylock Partners, Omidyar Network and SVB Capital.
Mr Rose said his top priority was to improve the experience for users by developing a better recommendation engine, which would help users find content for their niche interests. He said the homepage would remain, but that Digg wanted to give users a more customised view.
“We want to make the site more personal,” he said. “If you Digg something we want to connect you to the people who are agreeing with you,” he said.
He also wanted to find ways of showing users the impact that they have by Digging a story – i.e. voting for it.
“Rather than just adding one to the number of Diggs per story, we want to show how many people you have spread the story to,” he said.
After telling the Future of Web Apps conference in London that his company was hiring new staff, Mr Rose said that things were going to get really tough in Silicon Valley because of the economic crash.
Start-ups and firms looking for second rounds of funding were going to find cash very hard to find, he told The Times.
Mature start-ups would have to consolidate and find ways to get profitable because companies looking to buy them out would only be paying “pennies in the dollar”, he said.
Now i'm just like every other person obsessed with getting the latest fix of your favourite tv show. I've spent hours searching TV site after TV site for the right link or a good video quality or even a DivX video but then about 6 Months Ago I stumbled upon (sorry for the pun) SideReel.com it had everything I need to ever watch TV online again, and to boot it had Films and the latest TV news so I was always up to date. It wasn't till about 3 Months later after I became a member did I realise that it was just like Wikipedia, except the only difference is that it is a home made Wiki software and not MediaWiki, but then that made me even more impressed with the site, not only have I found a great site in which to find my favourite TV episodes but a site that I can aspire to. I would love to make a website like SideReel.com, plus the way they have set things up they have limited liability for content displayed on external sites which in the immortal words are 'Genius'.
Here are some of the sites that I go to, to find tv episodes:
So take a look at all the sites listed and think to yourselves is SideReel not the best!
Now to all the YouTube video sharing lovers out there this is going to sound weird but has YouTube done to much for the internet, because of YouTube we have people addicted to watching videos online, gross stuff, fun stuff and news stuff. People have no time for anything else.
Nowadays on YouTube with the right amount of Viral advertising a stupid video can get over 10,000,000 Video Views and suddenly you have yourself an overnight internet celebrity.
Now me I realise that YouTube has been a ridiculos success (p.s. wish I started it), it has revolutionised the way we like to watch TV, If it weren't for YouTube you probably wouldn't know about all the latest songs on the market or what breaking news has happened over seas, but what about the little guys, people who before YouTube were making the waves, Pseudo.com was the first and obviously most successful, which begs another question during the dot-com boom how comes no one thought about bringing together a video sharing website instead of stupid sites like Kozmo.com, Anyway, I see other video sharing website having to invest heavily and promote the hell out of there product just to try and get half the amount of video views a day YouTube gets, Veoh for example, after Stage6 went people expected them to step up to the plate and become the new HD video viewing website even Stage6&DivX thought so but in jumps you YouTube with 'Watch In High Quality' and bang there goes Veoh's opportunity to become the home of high definition video viewing although I might say that the fact that Veoh are slightly looser with uploading TV episodes on the website than YouTube are.
Google to me are like the NewsCorp of the internet (although NewsCorp are involved with the internet i.e MySpace.com) when there is any opportunity to make money they are there at the very top cashing in all the checks.
YouTube when it first started was a simple video sharing website which contained no advertising then up jump Google with there grubby paws and steal YouTube away and turn it into a advertising marketplace and to make things worse since Google found out that if they capitalise on YouTube's ridiculous amount of user traffic that they can be making something like $440 Million dollars a year, Well good luck to the other video sharing website because YouTube is going universal.
Terry Semel
Non-Executive Chairman and Advisor
Jerry Yang
Co-Founder and CEO
David Filo
Co-Founder
Yahoo History
In January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo were Electrical Engineering graduate students at Stanford University. In April 1994, "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" was renamed "Yahoo!". Filo and Yang said they selected the name because they liked the word's general definition, which comes from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." Its URL was akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo.
By the end of 1994, Yahoo! had already received one million hits. The Yahoo! domain was created on January 18, 1995. Yang and Filo realized their website had massive business potential, and on March 1, 1995, Yahoo! was incorporated. On April 5, 1995, Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital provided Yahoo! with two rounds of venture capital, raising approximately $3 million.[12][13] On April 12, 1996, Yahoo! had its initial public offering, raising $33.8 million dollars, by selling 2.6 million shares at $13 each.
"Yahoo" had already been trademarked for barbecue sauce (and knives by EBSCO Industries). Therefore, in order to get the trademark, Yang and Filo added the exclamation mark to the name.
[edit]
Growth (1997–1999)
Like many search engines and web directories, Yahoo! diversified into a Web portal. In the late 1990s, Yahoo!, MSN, Lycos, Excite and other Web portals were growing rapidly. Web portal providers rushed to acquire companies to expand their range of services, in the hope of increasing the time a user stays at the portal.
On March 8, 1997, Yahoo! acquired online communications company Four11. Four11's webmail service, Rocketmail, became Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo! also acquired ClassicGames.com and turned it into Yahoo! Games. Yahoo! then acquired direct marketing company Yoyodyne Entertainment, Inc. on October 12. On March 8, 1998, Yahoo! launched Yahoo! Pager, an instant messaging service that was renamed Yahoo! Messenger a year later. On January 28, 1999, Yahoo! acquired web hosting provider GeoCities. Another company Yahoo! acquired was eGroups, which became Yahoo! Groups after the acquisition on June 28, 2000.
When acquiring companies, Yahoo! often changed the relevant terms of service. For example, they claimed intellectual property rights for content on their servers, unlike the companies they acquired. As a result, many of the acquisitions were controversial and unpopular with users of the existing services.
Dot-com bubble (2000–2001)
On January 3, 2000, at the height of the Dot-com boom, Yahoo! stocks closed at an all-time high of $118.75 a share. Sixteen days later, shares in Yahoo! Japan became the first stocks in Japanese history to trade at over ¥100,000,000, reaching a price of ¥101.4 million ($962,140 at that time).[16]
On February 7, 2000, the Yahoo! domain was brought to a halt for a few hours as it was the victim of a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). On the next day, its shares rose about $16, or 4.5 percent as the failure was blamed on hackers rather than on an internal glitch, unlike a fault with eBay earlier that year.
During the dot-com boom, the cable news station CNBC also reported that Yahoo! and eBay were discussing a 50/50 merger. Although the merger never materialized the two companies decided to form a marketing/advertising alliance six years later in 2006.[20]
On June 26, 2000, Yahoo! and Google signed an agreement which retained Google as the default world-wide-web search engine for Yahoo! following a beta trial in 1999.[21]
Post dot-com bubble (2002–2008)
Yahoo! was one of the few surviving large Internet companies after the dot-com bubble burst. Nevertheless, on September 26, 2001, Yahoo! stocks closed at a five-year low of $4.06 (split-adjusted).
Yahoo! formed partnerships with telecommunications and Internet providers to create content-rich broadband services to compete with AOL. On June 3, 2002, SBC and Yahoo! launched a national co-branded dial service. In July 2003, BT Openworld announced an alliance with Yahoo!. On August 23, 2005, Yahoo! and Verizon launched an integrated DSL service.
In late 2002, Yahoo! began to bolster its search services by acquiring other search engines. In December 2002, Yahoo! acquired Inktomi. In February 2005, Yahoo! acquired Konfabulator and rebranded it Yahoo! Widgets, a desktop application and in July 2003, it acquired Overture Services, Inc. and its subsidiaries AltaVista and AlltheWeb. On February 18, 2004, Yahoo! dropped Google-powered results and returned to using its own technology to provide search results.
In 2004, in response to Google's release of Gmail, Yahoo! upgraded the storage of all free Yahoo! Mail accounts from 4 MB to 1 GB, and all Yahoo! Mail Plus accounts to 2 GB. On July 9, 2004, Yahoo! acquired e-mail provider Oddpost to add an Ajax interface to Yahoo! Mail. On October 13, 2005, Yahoo! and Microsoft announced that Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger would become interoperable. In 2007, Yahoo! took out the storage meters, thus allowing users unlimited storage.
Yahoo! continued acquiring companies to expand its range of services, particularly Web 2.0 services. Yahoo! Launchcast became Yahoo! Music on February 9, 2005. On March 20, 2005, Yahoo! purchased photo sharing service Flickr. On March 29, 2005, the company launched its blogging and social networking service Yahoo! 360°. In June 2005, Yahoo! acquired blo.gs, a service based on RSS feed aggregation. Yahoo! then bought online social event calendar Upcoming.org on October 4, 2005. Yahoo! acquired social bookmark site del.icio.us on December 9, 2005 and then playlist sharing community webjay on January 9, 2006.
On August 27, 2007, Yahoo! released a new version of Yahoo! Mail that makes it possible for users to send instant messages to the largest combined instant messaging (IM) community including users of Yahoo! Messenger and Windows Live Messenger, to send free text messages to mobile phones in the U.S., Canada, India and the Philippines.
On January 29, 2008, Yahoo! announced that the company was laying off 1,000 employees as the company had suffered severely in its inability to effectively compete with industry search leader Google. The cuts represent 7 percent of the company's workforce of 14,300. Employees are being invited to apply for an unknown number of new positions that are expected to open as the company expands areas that promise faster growth.
In February, 2008, Yahoo! acquired Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Maven Networks, a supplier of internet video players and video advertising tools, for approx. $160 million.
Revenue
$7.22 billion
Alexa:1
CEO, Board Chairman
Sergey Brin
Director of Technology
Larry Page
Director of Products
Google History
Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page, a Ph.D. student at Stanford.[1] In search for a dissertation theme, Page considered—among other things—exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph. His supervisor Terry Winograd encouraged him to pick this idea (which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got") and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind). In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub", he was soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student and close friend, whom he had first met in the summer of 1995 in a group of potential new students which Brin had volunteered to show around the campus. Page's web crawler began exploring the web in March 1996, setting out from Page's own Stanford home page as its only starting point. To convert the backlink data that it gathered into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm. Analyzing BackRub's output—which, for a given URL, consisted of a list of backlinks ranked by importance—it occurred to them that a search engine based on PageRank would produce better results than existing techniques (existing search engines at the time essentially ranked results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page). A small search engine called RankDex was already exploring a similar strategy.
Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant Web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. Originally the search engine used the Stanford website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997. They formally incorporated their company, Google Inc., on September 7, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California.
The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of "googol," which refers to the number represented by a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros. Having found its way increasingly into everyday language, the verb, "google," was added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006, meaning, "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet."
By the end of 1998, Google had an index of about 60 million pages. The home page was still marked "BETA", but an article in Salon.com already argued that Google's search results were better than those of competitors like Hotbot or Excite.com, and praised it for being more technologically innovative than the overloaded portal sites (like Yahoo!, Excite.com, Lycos, Netscape's Netcenter, AOL.com, Go.com and MSN.com) which at that time, during the growing dot-com bubble, were seen as "the future of the Web", especially by stock market investors.
In March 1999, the company moved into offices at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto, home to several other noted Silicon Valley technology startups. After quickly outgrowing two other sites, the company leased a complex of buildings in Mountain View at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway from Silicon Graphics (SGI) in 1999. The company has remained at this location ever since, and the complex has since become known as the Googleplex (a play on the word googolplex, a 1 followed by a googol of zeros). In 2006, Google bought the property from SGI for $319 million.
The Google search engine attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design. In 2000, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords. The ads were text-based to maintain an uncluttered page design and to maximize page loading speed. Keywords were sold based on a combination of price bid and click-throughs, with bidding starting at $.05 per click. This model of selling keyword advertising was pioneered by Goto.com (later renamed Overture Services, before being acquired by Yahoo! and rebranded as Yahoo! Search Marketing). While many of its dot-com rivals failed in the new Internet marketplace, Google quietly rose in stature while generating revenue.
Google's declared code of conduct is "Don't be evil", a phrase which they went so far as to include in their prospectus (aka "red herring" or "S-1") for their IPO, nothing, "We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served — as shareholders and in all other ways — by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgot some short term gains."
The Google site often includes humorous features such as cartoon modifications of the Google logo to recognize special occasions and anniversaries. Known as "Google Doodles", most have been drawn by Google's international webmaster, Dennis Hwang. Not only may decorative drawings be attached to the logo, but the font design may also mimic a fictional or humorous language such as Star Trek Klingon and Leet. The logo is also notorious among web users for April Fool's Day tie-ins and jokes about the company.
Revenue
$ 16.593 Billion
Total Assests
$ 25.335 Billion
Alexa:2
CEO and Co-Founder
Jawed Karim
Co-Founder
Jordan Hoffner
Director of Content Partnerships
YouTube History
Founded in February 2005, YouTube is the leader in online video, sharing original videos worldwide through a Web experience. YouTube allows people to easily upload and share video clips across the Internet through websites, mobile devices, blogs, and email.
Everyone can watch videos on YouTube. People can see first-hand accounts of current events, find videos about their hobbies and interests, and discover the quirky and unusual. As more people capture special moments on video, YouTube is empowering them to become the broadcasters of tomorrow.
YouTube received funding from Sequoia Capital in November 2005 and was officially launched one month later in December. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen proceeded to become the first members of the YouTube management team and currently serve as Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer respectively.
In November 2006, within a year of its launch, YouTube was purchased by Google Inc. in one of the most talked-about acquisitions to date.
YouTube has struck numerous partnership deals with content providers such as CBS, BBC, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group, Warner Music Group, NBA, The Sundance Channel and many more.
In March 2007, Viacom introduced its much talked about $1 billion lawsuit against Google and YouTube. In a statement explaining why they were pursuing legal action, Viacom stated that “we must turn to the courts to prevent Google and YouTube from continuing to steal value from artists and to obtain compensation for the significant damage they have caused.” The lawsuit was preceded by a takedown request from Viacom ordering YouTube to remove over 100,000 clips from its stable of networks.
In May 2007 YouTube announced a revenue-sharing arrangement called “Partners Program” to cut in some of its biggest pro-am producers on the revenue generated from their videos. Partners at launch included LisaNova and smosh.
In June 2007 YouTube launched local versions in Brazil, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and the U.K. Additionally in June, Apple’s iPhone launched with a YouTube application, further extending YouTube’s penetration in the mobile market following its November 2006 partnership with Verizon’s vCast service.
Over the summer and fall of 2007 major announcements were made about advertising models for YouTube. In August, YouTube introduced “YouTube InVideo Ads”, a set of flash overlays displayed on the lower portion of videos. Advertisers are charged per impression, and the resulting revenue will be shared with the clip creator. In October, Google announced the inclusion of YouTube videos in its AdSense product. Site owners using AdSense can select videos from certain content providers, and ads will be served contextually as they relate to either the site or the video. Resulting revenue will be split between content providers, site owners, as well as Google.
In October 2007, YouTube announced a new service called “Youtube Video Identification” in order to assist copyright holders in protecting their content. With the service copyright holders upload full copies of their content to the service and complex algorithms are applied against YouTube’s library of clips to see if any match the uploaded content. Copyright holders can then either have YouTube remove the videos in question or allow YouTube to serve advertising along with the content and split the resulting revenue.
Alexa Rank:3
YouTube receives of 100 million video views each day, and apparently if they used advertising correctly they could make $440 Million per year and Google are said to ready to capitolise.