Bigger Isn't Always Better... But in This Case, We Believe It Is

Over the years we've heard a lot of feedback from you about what you'd like to change about YouTube, and the size of our video player is always top of mind. That's why today we're excited to announce a bigger YouTube player.

We're expanding the width of the page to 960 pixels to better reflect the quality of the videos you create and the screens that you use to watch them. This new, wider player is in a widescreen aspect ratio which we hope will provide you with a cleaner, more powerful viewing experience. And don't worry, your 4:3 aspect ratio videos will play just fine in this new player.

As always, we welcome your feedback and encourage you to share your thoughts with us on this exciting, new change happening for all videos on YouTube.

Example - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQuFBjMk9tc&feature=dir
Resource - Official YouTube Blog

Malaysia among top five with internet access in Asia Pacific

BANGKOK, Nov 19 (Bernama) -- Malaysia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea and Singapore are the most connected countries in the Asia Pacific region, with 55 per cent to 80 per cent of their populations having access to the Internet by 2007.

In contrast, the bottom five -- Myanmar, Timor-Leste, Tajikistan, Bangladesh and Cambodia -- have less than one per cent of their populationd using the Internet while the average for region is 20 per cent.

The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (Unescap) said that despite significant progress that Asia and the Pacific had made in utilising information communication technology (ICT), a significant disparity still remained in access to the Internet between high-income and low-income countries.

It said the wide gap appeared despite its study which showed that both phone and Internet use had increased over the last five years since the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) was first held in 2003.

"How to overcome this 'digital divide' is the focus of a meeting being held in Bangkok with participants compromising ICT experts from governments, the academia, UN and other international agencies and the private sector, including from Microsoft," Unescap said in a statement.

The agency said the number of mobile phone subscribers increased by nearly 70 times in South Asia between 2000 and 2007 and by over 40 times in Central Asia while in Southeast Asia, which has a relatively more developed market, the number of subscribers still grew by about 10 times.

"Yet, the growth is the fastest in the poorest countries in the region. The least developed countries in the region as a group had seen their mobile phone users increase by close to 80 times," it said.

The expert group meeting, WSIS+5 and Emerging Issues in Asia and the Pacific, is intended as a platform to discuss technical aspects of ICT development and solicit expert views on key issues -- such as problems with
infrastructure -- which need to be addressed at the regional level.

Among issues being discussed are the current status of ICT and the implementation of the WSIS Plan of Action in the Asia-Pacific region and key emerging issues that are standing in the way ICT connectivity in developing nations.

Also in the agenda is the integration of ICT in effective disaster risk reduction programmes, for example, by providing technical solutions such as region-wide early warning systems, and better communications systems to assist with disaster recovery. (Bernama)
Resource - UNESCAP

Hong Kong Launches Wi-Fi On Public Buses

Hong Kong's Citybus and New World First Bus jointly announced on November 17, 2008 that the first bus with free Wi-Fi services has been put into operation and ten buses of 11 routes will be installed with Wi-Fi equipment within two weeks.

Elaine Chan, deputy head of corporate communications of Citybus and NWFB, says that the Wi-Fi services is a value-added service for local residents, aiming to provide convenient Internet surfing for passengers and to promote the development of Wi-Fi in Hong Kong. The first batch of ten Wi-Fi buses will be put into use in two weeks for a three-month trial. After gauging the reaction of passengers to the new service, the company will decide whether or not to extend the service to more buses.

Chan says the Wi-Fi services will first be available on buses of 11 routes, which are mainly long-distant routes. The first Wi-Fi bus launched on November 17 is currently serving Route 112. The company started to prepare for the Wi-Fi services one year ago and the services have been tested from various aspects to ensure their stability. In addition, the company has done a lot regarding the network security. Apart from the technology against hacking, the services will filter pornographic and gambling websites so that wayward passengers can concentrate on other matters while surfing.

Jointly owned by Chow Tai Fook Enterprises Limited and NWS Holdings Limited, Citybus and NWFB say the new bus mobile Internet services will improve the quality of life for the public.

Resource - chinatechnews

Alchemy

Welcome the preview release of codename "Alchemy." Alchemy is a research project that allows users to compile C and C++ code that is targeted to run on the open source ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2). The purpose of this preview is to assess the level of community interest in reusing existing C and C++ libraries in Web applications that run on Adobe® Flash® Player and Adobe AIR®.

With Alchemy, Web application developers can now reuse hundreds of millions of lines of existing open source C and C++ client or server-side code on the Flash Platform. Alchemy brings the power of high performance C and C++ libraries to Web applications with minimal degradation on AVM2. The C/C++ code is compiled to ActionScript 3.0 as a SWF or SWC that runs on Adobe Flash Player 10 or Adobe AIR 1.5.

Alchemy is primarily intended to be used with C/C++ libraries that have few operating system dependencies. Ideally suited for computation-intensive use cases, such as audio/video transcoding, data manipulation, XML parsing, cryptographic functions or physics simulation, performance can be considerably faster than ActionScript 3.0 and anywhere from 2-10x slower than native C/C++ code. Alchemy is not intended for general development of SWF applications using C/C++.

With Alchemy, it is easy bridge between C/C++ and ActionScript 3.0 to expand the capabilities of applications on the Flash Platform, while ensuring that the generated SWCs and SWFs cannot bypass existing Flash Player security protections.

Adobe is providing some example libraries, and developers are encouraged to share their ported libraries.

The Alchemy preview is prerelease software that is not supported by Adobe and may contain bugs. It is therefore advised that Alchemy not be used to generate code for use in production.

Watch Branden Hall, CTO of Automata Studios, discuss his experience working on the Ogg Vorbis porting project using Alchemy.

We are making this software available to gauge community interest in Alchemy and welcome your feedback. Please use the feedback link below to request features, make comments and report problems. Please also note that this is a research project and there is no assurance that there will be a shipping version of Alchemy.

Resource - Adobe

Microsoft looking to China to create new products

Microsoft Corp. expects its Beijing research center to start producing breakthroughs that could lead to global products in health care and other areas, the software giant's chief research officer said Wednesday as the center marked its 10th anniversary.

Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people) is part of a wave of companies that are expanding research and development in China to serve its fast-growing market and take advantage of a huge Chinese talent pool of scientists and engineers.

Microsoft says its Beijing center, one of six, already has exceeded expectations, producing 260 innovations that have been added to products sold worldwide. The center is Microsoft's biggest outside the United States, with 350 researchers.

"They are increasingly poised to produce technical breakthroughs that may in fact be the basis of a whole new business for the company," said Craig Mundie, the company's chief research officer.

Mundie said the lab is expected to take the lead in developing business-oriented products for developing countries and possibly health care-related software.

Microsoft's Beijing team is best known for its role in developing an electronic tablet that recognizes handwriting. It also has worked on speech recognition and advanced graphics used in video games. The company says its researchers have been awarded 1,000 patents in China and abroad.

Dozens of other companies also operate research and development centers in China, including Intel Corp. (nasdaq: INTC - news - people ),Hewlett-Packard Co. (nyse: HPQ - news - people ), General Electric Co. (nyse: GE - news - people ), German's Siemens AG (nyse: SI -news - people ) and Nokia Corp. (nyse: NOK - news - people )

In Beijing, Microsoft has relied on Western-trained Chinese researchers but the country's own universities are starting to produce "highly capable" specialists, Mundie said.

"It is a very good source of talent. Particularly at the K-12 (kindergarten through 12th grade) level, China is probably doing a better job than either Europe or the United States in preparing young kids for jobs in engineering and science," Mundie said. "There is more vitality in science, technology, engineering (and) math-type of subject matter in the younger grades than there is in other parts of the world."

Microsoft also has research labs at its Redmond, Washington, headquarters and in Silicon Valley; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Bangalore, India; and Cambridge, England.

It has expanded in China despite rampant Chinese piracy of software, music and other intellectual property that has cost the company heavily in lost potential sales. The American Chamber of Commerce in China says the threat of theft has made some companies reluctant to work on their most advanced technologies here.

Mundie said Microsoft is less concerned about theft of technology during research because its software is made up of many small elements and individual employees have access to only a few of them.

"The value of being able to harness this global work force to work on global problems outweighs the risk of loss of one component," he said.

Globally, Microsoft's research agenda over the next decade includes "natural user interface" to let users control computers with speech or gestures instead of a keyboard or mouse, Mundie said.

That will depend on "multicore chips" under development that put multiple processors on a single chip, Mundie said.

Such chips will allow computers to run complex functions such as speech recognition by dividing up complex tasks among different processors, though that will require new programming techniques, he said.

Microsoft has spent a decade working on developing such strategies, according to Mundie.

Resource - Forbes

A picture of a thousand words?

A scanner is a wonderful tool. Every day, people all over the world post scanned documents online -- everything from official government reports to obscure academic papers. These files usually contain images of text, rather than the text themselves.But all of these documents have one thing in common: someone somewhere thought they were they were valuable enough to share with the world.

In the past, scanned documents were rarely included in search results as we couldn't be sure of their content. We had occasional clues from references to the document-- so you might get a search result with a title but no snippet highlighting your query. Today, that changes. We are now able to perform OCR on any scanned documents that we find stored in Adobe's PDF format. This Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology lets us convert a picture (of a thousand words) into a thousand words -- words that can be searched and indexed, so that these valuable documents are more easily found. This is a small but important step forward in our mission of making all the world's information accessible and useful.

While we've indexed documents saved as PDFs for some time now, scanned documents are a lot more difficult for a computer to read. Scanning is the reverse of printing. Printing turns digital words into text on paper, while scanning makes a digital picture of the physical paper (and text) so you can store and view it on a computer. The scanned picture of the text is not quite the same as the original digital words, however -- it is a picture of the printed words. Often you can see telltale signs: the ring of a coffee cup, ink smudges, or even fold creases in the pages.

To people reading these documents, the distinction between words and pictures of words makes little difference, but for a computer the picture is almost unintelligible. Consider a circle. Should it be read it as a zero, the letter 'O', just a circle, or the ring from my coffee cup? People learn to answer this kind of question very quickly, but for the computer it is a painstaking and error-prone process.

To see our new system at work, click on these search queries. Note the document excerpt in the search results, along with the full text presented after the 'View as HTML' link:

[repairing aluminum wiring]
[spin lock performance]
[Mumps and Severe Neutropenia]
[Steady success in a volatile world]

Resource - Google Blog

Coloratura on demand: Met Opera adds HD streaming

Opera tends to be a love it or hate it form of artistic expression; I fall strictly into the latter camp, since I tend to feel the vocals ruin what otherwise might be a fine piece of music. That should provide some useful background for the following statement: I have watched online streaming of opera in HD, and I came away impressed.

Next week, New York City's Metropolitan Opera will launch a service that allows opera buffs to stream performances to any computer with a broadband connection and enough horsepower to handle the HD.

The Met Opera has always been interested in getting its performances out to the opera-loving public that exists far beyond its New York City environs. It has broadcast live performances on PBS stations for years and, two years ago, it started offering HD recordings as well. These recordings, as well as historic, audio-only broadcasts (one dating from 1937), will be made available through the service. The Met plans on adding both archival and new recordings as time goes on. Those performances will be sold for both ad hoc and subscription viewing. A single performance will cost $4-5, while the monthly subscription fees will run in the neighborhood of $15.

"I am delighted that the Met’s incredibly extensive archive of video and audio performances will be so easily accessible to opera lovers everywhere," the Met's Music Director, James Levine, said in a statement. Opera lovers may have easy access to the streams, but that doesn't mean they'll actually be able to do anything with them. The HD video comes in a Flash wrapper, but the recommended system requirements for HD are pretty hefty: multicore processor, a gigabyte of free RAM, and 32 MB of video RAM. Most computers sold within the last two years should fit the bill, but I have no idea of what the Venn diagram of opera lovers and owners of current hardware looks like.

The Met offers the curious a preview site where users can see how well their setup will work out. In my case, additional software was needed before the stream would play, but the service quickly popped up a window that tested the new code before it launched into the preview clip. They were apparently not kidding about their minimum hardware requirements; my 2.3 GHz Core 2 Duo devoted much of its attention to keeping the clip running, and my disk has been thrashing ever since, as most of the programs I use seem to have been pushed into virtual memory. Maybe installing Flash 10 would help here.

The network was even more problematic, as the stream pretty much saturated my DSL connection, resulting in some stuttering and sporadic screen freezes the first time through. A second viewing went completely smoothly, however, suggesting that hitting pause at the start and letting the download run for a while ahead of viewing would eliminate any trouble. What that didn't eliminate was the CPU requirement, which kicked my laptop's fan into an audible spin; not the sort of thing an opera buff is likely to tolerate.

But live opera is as much about the visuals as the sound, and here, the service really impressed. Switching to full screen mode was, in a word, stunning. And remember, I don't really go for this stuff.

Some people clearly do and, with a price that's in line with various movie services, the Met Opera's video streams are likely to find some takers. How many is hard to judge, given that the audience will need a combination of initial interest, hefty hardware, and significant bandwidth.

Still, the fact that we're considering the size of the audience says a lot about the status of online video, which has shot from curiosity to cultural phenomenon in a few very short years. I will ponder that as I hunt down some decent music to listen to, like Beethoven's 7th.

Resource - Ars Technica

IM: Not coming soon

In October 2006, just three months after Twitter launched publicly, we added IM support—i.e., the ability to get and send tweets via XMPP/Jabber/Google Talk. I was a big fan of this feature, because this interface, which millions of people were already familiar with, seemed a perfect fit for Twitter’s real-time nature.

In December of 2006, we extended that support to AIM, enabling a much bigger number of users to interface with Twitter via the same system they talk to their friends on all day.

While off to an early start, since then, our IM feature has been, well…spotty. We first killed AIM support after struggling for months to make it reliable (which was a side-project to trying to keep the service as a whole reliable). And our Jabber support has been up and down until about four-and-a-half months ago when it’s just been…down.

We’ve been unclear about its status and what to expect; I want to clarify that now.

First: I know a lot of people love this feature. I’ve heard personally from many folks who say it’s critical for their enjoyment of Twitter. So it kills me that we haven’t been able to deliver on this consistently. And the bad news is, we don’t have a quick fix.

A New Way of Doing Things
If you’ve been using Twitter for a while, you’ve probably noticed that things have gotten much more steady on the Twitter ship in the last few months. There’s a lot of reasons for this. Besides some key hires and herculean efforts from top-notch engineers, there’s been a conscious decision to try and not make promises we can’t keep. That is, we want to be solid on our current offerings before adding to the load and getting in a precarious situation again.

The fact is, our infrastructure for IM was never ready for prime time. Like a lot of things, it was built rapidly when we were small and had to be completely re-thought in order to support a much bigger user base. Since we were (famously) having trouble keeping up with that demand in the core service, IM, which was used by a minority of users, always got the shaft.

Startups are all about launching things that are not ready for prime time—because startups don’t live in prime time. You can always rush to make something ready if people like it. Except when you can’t. The process of going from being able to throw things at the wall and see if they stick, to really thinking carefully about how something’s going to scale and effect the system as a whole, is an inevitable evolution that companies go through (if they’re successful). Sometimes they do it gracefully, sometimes less so.

To summarize, we want to bring IM back. We intend to bring IM back. But we’ve officially moved it from our Things That are Broken list to our Things We Want to Build list. Based on our analysis, the cost-to-benefit for IM for the most users is not as high as some other things—so it will be a while before we tackle it. Like any budget (in this case, the budget of our limited engineering time), tough calls need to be made—especially in these times. And while we don’t expect everyone to agree with this decision, we at least want to be straightforward with you.

Sorry we haven’t been very communicative on this before. Saying it was “coming soon” was more of a case our our wishful thinking (that we would get to it real soon now) than wanting to mislead.

Thank you for your understanding and patience.

-Evan Williams

p.s. - Like other features that Twitter doesn’t have natively, IM support could be built by a third party using our API. In fact, it has been: Check out excla.im. It may or may not be ready for prime-time either, but it’s very promising. (Hi, @harper!). (There may be others.)

Resource - Twitter

Yahoo Web Analytics to finally give Google some competition

Yahoo must have adopted a strange new policy of putting acquisitions to good use, exhibited in its latest form by the announcement of Yahoo Web Analytics. Marketed as "an enterprise site analytics tool," the private beta of Yahoo Web Analytics reveals a clear initial focus on business and commercial web sites, and some unique features could give competitors like Google a run for their money. Yahoo Web Analytics is the result of Yahoo's April acquisition of IndexTools, a web analytics software provider geared toward online marketing. With such a quick turnaround into a Yahoo product, albeit as a private beta for Yahoo's 150,000 small- to medium-size business web site customers, it's clear that Yahoo is gunning to gain share in a market it arguably should have been neck-deep in years ago.

Yahoo's choice to acquire IndexTools and the upcoming features in Yahoo Web Analytics also speak loudly for how badly the company wants a piece of the market. Specifically, Yahoo Web Analytics boasts "near real-time" data aggregation and visualization, which—if true—will be a significant leg up on Google Analytics' typical 8- to 12-hour turnaround time.

In addition to faster data, Yahoo will also provide all analytics data in raw form, instead of a periodic aggregation of things like total visitors to a page. This access to data becomes quite significant with Yahoo's promise of a forthcoming API, another feature that Google Analytics doesn't match—at least not yet. This API will allow developers to access data for things like aggregating popular content, comparing with other data sets, exporting for backup, or moving to another system.

Being Yahoo's primary competitor in the free analytics space, though, Google is unlikely to let this challenge go unanswered, especially since Yahoo now offers an appealing combination of hosting and analytics packages. If Yahoo wants to gain relevance in this space, it's going to have to act quickly and open the beta up to the rest of the market. Perhaps most importantly, Yahoo will have to get the API in the hands of developers before Google ramps up to feature parity and removes the temptation for customers to switch.

Resource - Ars Technica