Hulu, a video platform that I profiled on last October has officially launched to the public. It can be viewed as a move by Hulu’s owners, i.e. News corp. and NBC Universal to regain control over the Internet video sector. Despite the fact that a huge popularity of YouTube on the Web, Hulu has a big potential to improve and further conquer the market, as several favorite shows or movies such as The Simpsons, The Office, Saturday Night Live, House, The Big Lebowski or Ice Age can be found on the site.

However, neither content nor brand names, are enough to gain global market share. As Hulu still remained a close system and only available to the U.S. users, it will not gain any attention of the users outside of the U.S. In this scenario, users will always support the video platform that they are allowed to access and they’re comfortable with. Even this site has the most attractive selections and variety of titles, this is not ensure that they will have the competitive offerings.

via [AP]

For users looking for alternative with which to replace Google or YouTube when searching for the Unix or Linux videos, UnixTube seemed to be a fantastic site that fulfill these type of needs. Although the videos appeared on this site are mostly fetched from YouTube, UnixTube presented a golden platform for users when they want to share their favorite Unix/Linux related videos with their friends. Unlike any other video platform, an user do not need to tag the videos in order to make those video more searchable, you come to this site, you’ll roughly know that you could only find Unix/Linux videos here. At this moment, there are not many videos, less than 100 that mostly uploaded by an user called FreeWorm.

However, thus far, this site has not lived up to its full potential as Unix/Linux have both not as popular as Windows or Mac in the end-user market. Users can treat all the videos on UnixTube as tutorial videos, topics such as Fedora installation, run Linux, Zimbra and Samba integration can be found on this site, particularly useful for the Unix/Linux beginners.

via [Digg]

Silicon Valley, best known as a region with the highly concentration of high-tech firms, spin-offs, startups, and also an important market for venture capitalists. However, not that many know thoroughly about its history. There is a recent video uploaded to YouTube (as embedded in the below) whereby you can watch it and grasp some basic data about its origin as well as the evolution of this region. If you favor of the text version instead of video format, then there’s a Web page purposely designed for the Silicon Valley history (click here). If you like me, love to read University working paper, here’s another link for working paper entitled, “the Dynamics of high technology firms in Silicon Valley (PDF).”

I’ve been watching a video clip entitled, “High Performance Web Sites and YSlow.” If you want to know about the performance golden rule of your Website, or how to improve end-user response time, watch it and the video is embedded in the below.

I enjoyed this video very much, a highly informative and impactful video.

I’ve came across this site ShowOrNot for some times now, and it seems this site is gaining momentum slowly. Apparently, from the whois record of the site’s domain name, it is a one-man project from Malaysia and there are lot of Malaysian Chinese visiting to this site regularly. Most of the videos found on the site are their favorites, and was considered to be evidence that ShowOrNot is the one-stop video site for Malaysian, more favorite than YouTube, at least for them, albeit that this site is much away of the attention that YouTube attracted.

On this site, you’ll come across users’ profiles, mostly Malaysian Chinese, their brief backgrounds, videos that they uploaded, i.e. in the My Gallery, and friends they made on this site. ShowOrNot also provided sections such as “todays’s hightlight,” “most watch,” and “Top Ranking.” To some Malaysian, they like this site because the videos uploaded there are those filtered by their friends. There’s a saying that friends are all alike, those videos shared there are the favorites among all the South-East Asian people.

Until today, YouTube was still the most popular video sharing site on the Web, but many of the South-East Asian retained fondness for this site. It showed that the world is much bigger than what we thought it was, and there are several small sites that started to carve out their own niches in their respective countries. Look at Friendster, there are more people talk about Friendster in Asia South than Facebook or MySpace. I even read on the Web that some people coined this site as “Friendster + YouTube = ShowOrNot.” Why don’t they mentioned, “Facebook or MySpace + YouTube = ShowOrNot?”

Today Reuters ran an interesting story entitled, “NBC Universal removes YouTube channel,” in an attempt to make way for Hulu, expected to launch at the end of this month. Hulu, a joint venture of NBC and News corp. has been widely regarded as a YouTube strong competitor even it is still not officially goes live at this moment. It would served as a more flexible platform that stocked with movies, TV episodes, and of course the entertainment content from these two successful media companies. Given the brand name of NBC and News Corp., it is common sense to assume that it will attract some well-known partners when it is fully launched in the market.

Hulu, though still in private beta, you can go to their landing page and submit your email address in order to get the invitation.

The other day I came across a new visual search engine that called oSkope. I believed it has been released on the web for a month or two. As stated on their landing page, oSkope is a visual browser that fetch and organize the items from Web services such as Amazon, eBay, Flickr and YouTube. Users are allowed to select one of these four services and play around with it, the search results display can be viewed in a variety of ways such as in the mode of grid, stack, pile, list or graph. Click on one of the thumbnail images that can be enlarged when mousing over, and in the right-hand side of the image will display a dialog box that list the item’s product and price information. For an instance, a book image fetched from Amazon will list the book’s particular details. For every book, you will find that there is a link that provided in order for an user to go to the Amazon’s original book page and buy the book.

Visually, oSkope meet the users’ needs when they want to get a better browsing experience. The establishment of these visual search engines tend to complement the existing search engines such as Google or Yahoo! However, if I’m looking for a specific book or photo, I prefer go to the Amazon or Flickr Website and enter the specific search query. Nevertheless, there is still room left for a visual search engine to further grow on the Web and oSkope might well situated to make money through the referral programs of Amazon or eBay.

Starting from August 15, Google will shut down its premium video service, the download-to-own or rental services on Google Video. Google’s decision to shut down its paid rentals and download service came last Friday, with the email sent to each of its video customers. Google’s main intention was to provide the full focus on YouTube, rather the another video service created by Google. At the time, customer are entitled for $2 Google checkout bonus for the video that bought but cannot play. However, the bonus will be expired in the 60 days.

No doubt the success of YouTube has indeed made Google Video increasingly irrelevant. It’s the question of when Google will shut down the Google Video, and whether they will satisfy with the revenue that could only be generated via advertisement on YouTube in the future.