YouTube has just turned six years old, and has more milestones to report to the world on its relentless growth.
Founded in 2005, YouTube’s ease of use and potential has attracted hundreds of millions of people to the service. The idea that a video in almost any format could be uploaded by the user, and then converted and provided on its own YouTube page (and could be embedded anywhere else) attracted drones of people to the service.
That growth only seems to accelerate for YouTube, which is now reporting that over 48 hours of video is uploaded to the site every single minute. So in just one minute, two whole days of video content has been added to YouTube’s incredibly vast digital vaults.
To compare that to last year, it represents a 100% increase in the amount of content being uploaded at any given time.
All of that content needs viewers to have any purpose on the video sharing giant, and YouTube is now reporting that it delivers 3 billion video views every single day.
Now YouTube is challenging its users to keep up the momentum , so that it can one day in the near future reach 72 hours of video footage per minute, and 4 billion daily views. To help this, the service is constantly making improvements to aid content creators and to provide its service on as many platforms as possible.
Result for: improvements
Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom predicts that Microsoft will capitalize on its $8.5 billion acquisition of the service.
“Skype’s full potential hasn’t been realized yet,” he said in an interview at the e-G8 forum underway in Paris. He suggests that Microsoft could push Skype into higher places if they expand it more into the mobile territory and if they make dramatic improvements to the quality of video calling on the Internet.
“I think that Microsoft has a huge opportunity to integrate it into a lot of their different services,” Zennstrom said. “Of course they have so many different assets. If they do a good job integrating Skype, the company can grow even more.”
Zennstrom will sell all of his shares in Skype once the Microsoft deal closes, and will no longer retain a management role at the company which he founded with Janus Friis in 2003. Skype has grown a lot since then, and touts 145 million users per month. eBay also owned Skype from 2005 until a consortium (of which Zennstrom was a part) bought it back in in 2009.
Microsoft can combine Skype services with many of its own existing products and services. One possibility is integrating it to the popular Outlook application so to provide video conferencing for business users. It will likely use Skype to boost its position in the mobile space however, after making several moves in the territory recently, such as partnering with Nokia.
“We still all travel a lot for meetings because you can’t match the intimate experience of seeing someone in person, even with Skype video calling,” he said. “There is a lot more work to do on the core technology to improve quality of video calls.”
Result for: improvements
Cultofmac has reported today that Apple CEO Steve Jobs is pushing hard to get Wi-Fi syncing for the upcoming iPod revamp coming later this year.
The company has apparently been testing the tech for the last two years.
Jobs has made Wi-Fi syncing one of the top priorities for the media players, which are becoming less and less relevant as more people simply buy iPhones or iPads.
So far, Apple’s engineers have had issues with “reliability, signal strength, case design and battery life” when trying for Wi-Fi syncing.
The current method for syncing involves connecting to your PC via USB cable.
Using a carbon fiber design, which the new iPods are said to have, “the engineers have found many improvements” but it is still nowhere near perfect.
