Ankur Gupta Online

Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube,said Saturday that the wildly successful site will start sharing revenue with its millions of users.

Hurley, who along with the site’s co-founders sold YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion in November, said one of the major innovations the site is working on is a way to allow users to be paid for content.

“We are getting an audience large enough where we have an opportunity to support creativity, to foster creativity through sharing revenue with our users,” Hurley said at the
World Economic Forum. “So in the coming months, we are going to be opening that up.”

Hurley gave no details of how much users would be paid, or what mechanism would be used.

This certainly seems a pretty good move by You tube(or should i say Google) to consolidate its position in the rapidly growing video sharing market with tough competitors like MSN’s Soapbox coming up..
Also one can expect to have better and more interesting videos from the site…
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AMD has high hopes for its upcoming native quad-core design

When it comes to quad-core processors for the desktop and server arenas, Intel has pretty much had the market to itself since November 2006 (if you don’t count AMD’s Quad FX platform). Intel’s quad-core processors were officially announced on November 14 in the form of the desktop-oriented Core 2 Extreme QX6700 and the server-oriented Clovertown Xeon 5300 series.Intel has been using its quad-core Clovertown processors to grab marketshare back from AMD in the server markets and has been putting significant pricing pressure on AMD. “Early indications are that Clovertown is contributing a meaningful amount of business to Intel in a surprisingly short period of time. It’s not marketing fluff,” said Mercury Research analyst Dean McCarron.

Technology Business Research’s John Spooner added that Clovertown “has allowed Intel to put some pricing pressure on AMD. Intel can tout a lower price per core, given that it’s pricing much of the quad-core Xeon 5300 line the same as its dual-core Xeon 5100 chips.”

AMD isn’t taking this news lightly and is prepared to fight back with its native quad-core Barcelona processors in mid 2007. Intel’s quad-core chips put two dual-core chips onto a single package while AMD’s approach has one quad-core chip on a single package. Read the rest of this entry »

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Wordpress, the software that powers most of the blogs released its latest version ie. 2.1 on the 22nd of January 2007.

I was quick to upgrade my blog to it as it has a lot of bug fixes and also interface changes..

I found the new version to be a bit quicker and also liked the new interface…

Here’s a sampling of what’s in the new version:

• Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again.
• Our new tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.
• The lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs.
• Our completely redone visual editor also now includes spell checking.
• New search engine privacy option allows you take you to indicate your blog shouldn’t ping or be indexed by search engines like Google.
• You can set any “page” to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.
• Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions. Domas Mituzas from MySQL went over all our queries with a fine-toothed comb.
• Links in your blogroll now support sub-categories and you can add categories on the fly.
• Redesigned login screen from the Shuttle project.
• More AJAX to make custom fields, moderation, deletions, and more all faster. My favorite is the comments page, which new lets you approve or unapprove things instantly.
• Pages can now be drafts, or private.
• Our admin has been refreshed to load faster and be more visually consistent.
• The dashboard now instantly and brings RSS feeds asynchronously in the background.
• Comment feeds now include all the comments, not just the last 10.
• Better internationalization and support for right-to-left languages.
• The upload manager lets you easily manage all your uploads pictures, video, and audio.
• A new version of the Akismet plugin is bundled.

…and much, much more. There are little easter eggs hidden everywhere, so the best way to find everything new is to just try it out. Read the rest of this entry »

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Microsoft today detailed three new distribution methods for customers looking to buy, upgrade or license multiple copies of Windows Vista. One such method involves Microsoft selling a copy of its operating system via the Internet for the user to download onto his or her system, marking a first for the software giant.

Microsoft will make Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 available for direct download via Windows Marketplace starting January 30 at suggested retail prices (but without the discs, packaging and manuals of the retail version). Windows Vista editions offered through Windows Marketplace will be available in English only, in either 32-bit or 64-bit versions. Windows Marketplace visitors also can find a wide variety of Windows-compatible hardware and software, including products carrying the Certified for Windows Vista logo Read the rest of this entry »

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Capping literally years of speculation on perhaps the most intensely followed unconfirmed product in Apple’s history — and that’s saying a lot — the iPhone has been announced today. Yeah, we said it: “iPhone,” the name the entire free world had all but unanimously christened it from the time it’d been nothing more than a twinkle in Stevie J’s eye (comments, Cisco?). Sweet, glorious specs of the 11.6 millimeter device (that’s frickin’ thin, by the way) include a 3.5-inch 480 x 320 touchscreen display with multi-touch support and a proximity sensor to turn off the screen when it’s close to your face, 2 megapixel cam, 4GB or 8 GB of storage, Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR and A2DP, WiFi that automatically engages when in range, and quad-band GSM radio with EDGE. Perhaps most amazingly, though, it somehow runs OS X with support for Widgets, Google Maps, and Safari, and iTunes (of course) with CoverFlow out of the gate. A partnership with Yahoo will allow all iPhone customers to hook up with free push IMAP email. Apple quotes 5 hours of battery life for talk or video, with a full 16 hours in music mode — no word on standby time yet. In a twisted way, this is one rumor mill we’re almost sad to see grind to a halt; after all, when is the next time we’re going to have an opportunity to run this picture? The 4GB iPhone will go out the door in the US as a Cingular exclusive for $499 on a two-year contract, 8GB for $599. Ships Stateside in June, Europe in fourth quarter, Asia in 2008.

Well we will have to wait n watch if this phone will be a runaway success or not and whether Apple will be able to meet its expected sales or not but at the moment it does seem a strong contender.

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