Web Trend MAP3 2008 Beta (map)

My favorite achitect designers from Japan have release a Beta map of web 2008. They present you with the 2008 Web Trend Map, in all its beautiful beta glory. This time they have taken almost 300 of the most influential and successful websites and pinned them down to the greater Tokyo-area train map.

The following diagram for 2007 was already amazing.

Internet Trends report

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Key takeaways:

• YouTube + Facebook page views > Google + Yahoo page views
• 6/10 top internet sites are social (youtube, live.com, facebook, hi5, wikipedia, orkut); none were on the list in 2005
• 16% of total time online is spent on “social connections,” up from 0% three years ago
• YouTube has 258 million users, 50% visit weekly or more
• >50% of Facebook users log in daily, 95% of Facebook users have used at least one third party application
• Skype revenue is $1.67/user/year, up 9% Y/Y
• 14 million photos uploaded daily on Facebook
• Google + Yahoo = 61% of U.S. Online Ad Revenue
• Google: $4.4b ad revenue in Q4, paid out $1.4 billion to partners
• Yahoo: $1.6 billion in ad revenue in Q4, paid out $429 million to partners

PageRank for Product Image Search (paper)

Authors: Yushi Jing(Georgia Institute of Technology and Google, Inc.), Shumeet Baluja(Google Inc.)
Abstract: In this paper, we cast the image-ranking problem into the task of identifying "authority" nodes on an inferred visual similarity graph and propose an algorithm to analyze the visual link structure that can be created among a group of images. Through an iterative procedure based on the PageRank computation, a numerical weight is assigned to each image; this measures its relative importance to the other images being considered. The incorporation of visual signals in this process differs from the majority of large-scale commercial-search engines in use today. Commercial search-engines often solely rely on the text clues of the pages in which images are embedded to rank images, and often entirely ignore the content of the images themselves as a ranking signal. To quantify the performance of our approach in a real-world system, we conducted a series of experiments based on the task of retrieving images for 2000 of the most popular products queries. Our experimental results show significant improvement, in terms of user satisfaction and relevancy, in comparison to the most recent Google Image Search results.

Viewdle, face recognition (website)

Viewdle, a startup developing facial recognition technology for video, has received an unspecified amount of funding fromKIT KIT Capital. As part of the deal, Viewdle will partner up with ROO, another KIT portfolio company focused on IPTV broadcasting. The partnership will provide ROO with full and exclusive access to Viewdle’s white label technology. Both companies will also work together to promote each other’s services. Reuters currently uses Viewdle’s technology to index the people in its video archives (see the Viewdle homepage for an example of what this looks like). A coverage of their presentation can be found here. The last (and only) time ROO came on a radar was over a year ago when News Corporation invested in the company without Fox Interactive’s knowledge.

VisualComplexity.com (website)

Visual Complexity is intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project's main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field. Not all projects shown here are genuine complex networks, in the sense that they aren’t necessarily at the edge of chaos, or show an irregular and systematic degree of connectivity. However, the projects that apparently skip this class were chosen for two important reasons. They either provide advancement in terms of visual depiction techniques/methods or show conceptual uniqueness and originality in the choice of a subject. Nevertheless, all projects have one trait in common: the whole is always more than the sum of its parts.

Oskope Visual Search Engines (website)

Playing with oScope, you will find a fascinating search application, that displays results visually from eBay, Flickr, Amazon, and YouTube sources. As a user you have several options for how the results are displayed (i.e. display as list, pile, graph, etc.). I found the graph option very useful when searching eBay results as it allowed me to view the results across two axes - the first from low to high price, and the other relating to the time until the auction closes. Yet another example of how rapidly the web is becoming visual/image-based!

New visual business & legal news (website)

An impressive business news website that uses IntellectSpace FN to show the 'story behind story' by visually mapping key relationships that shape financial & legal headlines. In presenting an alternative method of conducting market research & analysis, NewsVisual provides a visual picture of how common connections & personal relationships come into play amidst the complexities of major corporate deals & events.


In what appears to be a successful turnaround for an ailing auto company, Ford Motor CoCEO/President Alan Mulally in the company’s statement. Mr Mulally gave an indication of how the company’s plan will affect its future growth with the following comments:“In the past several years, we have substantially restructured these businesses. We believe this is an indication that our efforts to leverage Ford’s global assets across the world will bear fruit. Going forward, we remain committed to our key business objectives, including our goal of reaching North America and overall Automotive profitability in 2009 despite the challenging economic conditions.” The company’s leadership team has an excellent brain trust at its disposal. (NYSE:F) reported on Thursday that it went from a net loss of $282 million in the first-quarter 2007 to a net income of $100 million in the first-quarter 2008. This was a turnaround that had very little to do with luck or chance and had everything to do with the company’s cool-headed leadership skills. The company’s strategic plan for cost-cutting and growth paid off.“The results of this quarter are encouraging, particularly our outstanding performance in Europe and South America,” said Ford

Netvibes to open source its widget platform (website)

Netvibes a developer of customizable start pages plans to make its widget platform, application programming interfaces, and iPhone version open source, according to CEO Tariq Krim. We want to compete with Google widgets," Krim said. "Our container supports Google widgets and every other platform. If we release our code, people will leverage it and grow the reach of our platform." Krim hopes that supporting a broad range of platforms, including Windows Vista and Windows Live, Mac OS X, Opera, Yahoo, and Google, will inspire the developer community to adopt and innovate on the Netvibes platform. Netvibes will make money with sponsored widgets, Netvibes Universes, and business services. Opening up the code to developers will enable them to compete on more equal footing with Netvibes as well.

Web 1 2 3 4... Radar Networks (website)

As the Web swells with more and more data, the predominant way of sifting through all of that data—keyword search—will one day break down in its ability to deliver the exact information we want at our fingertips. In fact, some argue that keyword search is already delivering diminishing returns—as the slide above by Nova Spivack implies. Spivack is the CEO and founder of semantic Web startup Radar Networks and is pushing his view that semantic search will help solve these problems. But anyone frustrated by the sense that it takes longer to find something on Google today than it did even a year ago knows there is some truth to his argument. “Keyword search is okay,” he says, “but if the information explosion continues we need something better.” Today, there are about 1.3 billion people on the Web, and more than 100 million active Websites. As more people pile on, the amount of information on the Web keeps growing exponentially to accommodate all those seekers, and they themselves feel compelled to put their own personal and social information onto the Web as well.At a certain point, with billions and billions of Web pages to sift through, keyword search just won’t cut it anymore. It’s a needle-in-the-haystack problem, with the haystacks just getting bigger and bigger every second.

GoogleMap + Youtube = Video Map (website)

On Virtual Video Map you can view videos from different corners of the world. The map looks pretty crowded, so you can zoom in to focus on a country or a region. Click on a red balloon and play a video from that country: some videos are touristic, other videos are just funny. You can even find music videos. Now, local businesses can offer virtual tours of their facilities, post product demos, or as TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld put it, any small company can essentially put up its own TV commercial. Google Earth added YouTube video last year, so this expansion to maps is no surprise.But the big winner from this announcement is TurnHere, a company that creates custom videos for its clients. Not only is this another reason for local businesses to make enticing, professional-looking video, but the example used by the Google Maps blog is a listing for I Dream of Cake, featuring a video created by TurnHere.

Notes: This application cannot live without a search engine beside it. Exposing tones of anchors which handle youtube sized video will not drive to the best end-user experience, so the users can go away in few seconds. The tool will probably be used more for a part included in a specific website (restaurant, hotel, ...) so for professionnal and dedicated market places.

YouTorrent (website)

YouTorrent a fairly new BitTorrent search engine that has been getting positive reviews of late, so I gave it a shot. The premise is simple: YouTorrent is a meta-search engine that indexes torrents from other sites then prioritizes the results based on the number of seeds and peers each torrent has. As a meta-search engine YouTorrent doesn’t discriminate against legal and pirated content (yes, there is legal content on BitTorrent) so it’s a case of anything goes, and this is both a strength and a weakness. If you do frequently download using BitTorrent you’ll love YouTorrent, it’s quick and the results it gives negates the need to use other sites when searching for Torrents. On the other hand YouTorrent efficiently facilitates video piracy; sure, there’s an ongoing legal argument as to whether a search engine can be held liable for indexing pirated content elsewhere, but that didn’t help TorrentSpy when the Feds came knocking. The site is hosted in the Netherlands and has a Moniker hide your details service running on the Whois record, but chances are if the owners are in the United States, it’s probably only a matter of time until the MPAA or RIAA sends in the lawyers, so give it a shot while you still can.

Notes : Today, YouTorrent switches to legal torrent. “YouTorrent’s selling points are the great interface, an ad-less design, and its ability to search most of the bigger BitTorrent sites” and since launching in January has grown to a remarkable 10 million uniques per month.

Overstream (website)

This company from San Francisco offers to anyone the ability to add subtitles or comments to online video. It provides to users a simple way to add markers + comments and associated to the video, the player synchronizes and juts has to render the comments or subtitles on top of the video. It creates what they call "overstreams". The videos can come from youtube, or anyplace from the web with a compliant format. The UI implementation is based in flash, probably using the cuepoints concept of it.
Flash can read FLV or MPG4 H264,

Notes : Probably this kind of applications will ensure the localization of video for tomorrow, at least on the web, and through the web to local TV show. As of today, videos are limited most of the time to there own country and language areas. But targeting the local is not anymore the scope of media, and for a long time. We want the world and we want it now !!. One way to ensure globalization of media, is linked to the ability to generate languages: audio but also subtiltles will come faster, cost less, don't modify the orginal sources, sound, atmosphere. Juts because even on the film market, the consumers are asking to get the original voices ... with the subtitles, overstream opens the door to Global YouTUBE.