History of YouTube

Here again, I am kicking off new Web History series where I will share about History of various web initiatives. Hope I will do justification to these blog series by contributing decent content across each series in the coming days :) Wish me luck :)

Jokes apart, it always important to know the history which tells us how the current successful venture evolved and its early struggles. Hope you agree with me.

Whose History are we looking today??!!

Well, I know that you would have already guessed it from this blog post title.

But I have to announce it formally that it is going to be YouTube and put its logo before I begin this post :)

So here we go, lets see how YouTube born…

Who founded it?

YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. Haven’t seen them yet??!! Don’t worry, here they are

I hope you can identify who is Chad Hurly, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim in the above snap..Go figure :)

So how it happened?

• Chad Hurley & Steve Chen developed the idea for YouTube during the early months of 2005, after they had experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen's apartment in San Francisco.
• Jawed Karim did not attend the party and denied that it had occurred, and Chad Hurley commented that the idea that YouTube was founded after a dinner party

"was probably very strengthened by marketing ideas around creating a story that was very digestible."

When YouTube jump into the action??!!

• YouTube's early headquarters were situated above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California.
• The domain name www.youtube.com was activated on February 15, 2005, and the website was developed over the subsequent months.

First YouTube Video – Me at the zoo - an 18 seconds video!!!

The first YouTube video was entitled Me at the zoo, and shows founder Jawed Karim at San Diego Zoo. The video was uploaded on April 23, 2005, and can still be viewed on the site. You can watch the video here :)

As we speak now, February 16,2009 , this 18 seconds !! video is viewed 576,808 times

When YouTube went live and heights climbed thereon

• YouTube offered the public a beta test of the site in May 2005, six months before the official launch in November 2005.
• The site grew rapidly, and in July 2006 the company announced that more than 65,000 new videos were being uploaded every day, and that the site was receiving 100 million video views per day.
• It is estimated that 13 hours of new videos are uploaded to the site every minute, and that in 2007 YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000. In March 2008, YouTube's bandwidth costs were estimated at approximately US$1 million a day.
• Alexa ranks YouTube as the third most visited website on the Internet, behind Yahoo! and Google. If you are interested in viewing the ranking details, it’s here for YouTube, Google and Yahoo

Google acquired YouTube

In October 2006, Google Inc. announced that it had acquired YouTube for US$1.65 billion in Google stock, and the deal was finalized on November 13, 2006.

YouTube History Video

To add icing to the cake(yeah, you have to agree that this blog post of mine is indeed a delicious cake !!!), here is the video ‘The History of YouTube’

Hope you enjoyed it…

Stay tuned…

How am I doing??!!

• If you are wondering ‘Hey..Why this question now? You haven't grown yet’, question me here
• If you feel ‘You are ok pal..Keep trying’, let me know that here
• If you don’t know what to say, no problem, let me know that here

Bottom line, I love to hear from you all :)

Thanks for visiting my blog :)

Aaron Carter - Crazy Little Party Girl

One of my favorite song during my dancing days(which needs a separate series to share :) )..

Really a peppy number.. I like the kid Aaron Carter those days.. Not sure what he do now…

Let's party friends :)

How to report Spam in Twitter?

As any other social networking tool, Twitter also crowded with spammers every hour and every day.

You wake up one day and excited to see that Barack Obama is following you only later to realize that it’s a fake one

How to report Spam?

Reporting spammer to Twitter is very easy. Just two steps all together. All you have to do is

• Follow the official Twitter Spam report a/c which is @spam
• DM(Direct Message) to the @spam a/c under the following format – d spam <spam user name>

For Example, if you want to mark a spammer named @fakebarackobama, then you have to send a DM as

d spam @fakebarackobama

That’s it, Twitter will take care of dealing with the spam a/c & most of the time their response is very quick :)

Contribute to a cleaner & Greener Twitter environment

Start reporting spam to Twitter & contribute towards cleaner Twitter environment. I report averagely 6-10 spammers per week

Let’s make Twitter a great & peaceful place to communicate :)

Hope this helps

Happy Twittering !!!

What catches your eye in Google Logo?

We all have been googling for years now. Let’s do an exercise on this. Please answer the following question

What catches your eye in Google Logo?

Why this question?? And that too all of a sudden…

Well, when I am writing my first part of the ‘Great Facts from 'The Google Story' , my 3 year old daughter Kamali saw the Google logo in the book cover and said to me

Papa.. I can see there are 2 blue,2 red, one yellow and one green in it

How about that..It never striked me..been googling for years...Kids have and make amazing observations...

Hence had a thought of why don’t I ask the same question to you all and love to see different views on this…

So please participate in answering this question and it will be fun :)

Our NIIT Get together after 6+ years

Hi NIIT Vadapalani Mates:

Welcome you all again…After 6 years, some of us met on February 25, 2009 at Raahat Plaza, Vadapalani

People who came are Sathya, Subha, Shankar Suresh, Ragesh, Pradeesh, Harish and Me

It’s nice to meet them after such a long time and we had a blasting time at Namma Veedu Vasantha Bhavan.

Sankar started the good time by asking the waiter who came for the orders to first get two A/C ..as the a/c room was really hot… LOL…

Technically, we gave stress testing to the waiter by ordering items, cancelling some of them and reordered..believe me.. it’s total chaos over there but we enjoy every bit of it :)

TIDBITS

Let me give you small tidbits before sharing you the most awaited get together pictures…

• Subha Narmadha…unbelievable..she almost converted the get together meet to a MLM Insurance Meet by canvassing the insurance policy..man…we really had a tough time in bringing back the environment to Get ToGether…phew..ask Sathya…And more importantly, we all made sure that she will no more send a big mail especially with Ramarajan favourite pink,green color font…Sankar said he took the entire day to read her big mail and still couldn’t understand it…LOL
• Sankar is at it usual best..cracking jokes and pulling other people legs..
• Harish and Suresh stills seem younger as they were when we studied at NIIT.
• Harish looked the serious guy among the batch. Man…he recently bought a flat at Saligramam which is good given the market rate. When I asked him how many square feet was the flat..he shell shocked me saying it is 4000 and he got it for around 30 lakhs…World started to spin around me as I am shocked at the shocking cheep deal… He clarified me immediately that he meant Rs.4000 per sq.ft and flat is around 1200 sq ft..Phew…
• Suresh is down to the earth and measured his words. I can bet that he didn't speak more than 30-35 words that day. He is like a drunken oops sorry sleephish…Hmm..would have got strong instructions from his Home Minister :)
• Ragesh..lots of secrets..I can’t reveal it now..Loads of surprises awaits in the future
• Sathya..same old do good person. Hasn’t changed an iota. (Sathya, neenga sonna madiriye solliten. Payment en bank a/c la transfer pannidunga)
• Last but the not the least, myself and Pradeesh are the heavyweight people among the group with me clearly leading.. I am working on reducing my weight but don’t when I am going to succeed in that. Friends, wish me luck :)

PICTURES

As usual, first is the quick slideshow

Now to download the full resolution pictures with geo and face tagged, please go here

If you want to view photos by individual person, go here

What next?

You may ask..You should ask..Sankar marriage pictures coming up..Waiting for Ronald to pass on the pictures..

Stay tuned.. And don’t forget to drop your comments…

Will see you all soon…

Great Facts from ‘The Google Story’ – Part 2

Here I am back again, with the second part of Great Facts from 'The Google Story' 

Here we go..

What does the name Google mean?

"Google means a very large number," Page said. "It is the number V followed by 100 zeros. And we were trying to come up with a name. We were confused about how to spell this, and so we actually spelled it incorrectly. It is a mathematical term and it is spelled g-o-o-g-o-l. So that is the right way Google is spelled. Most people don't know that, fortunately."

Larry’s aim was to download the entire web in a week??!!

"Google was started when Sergey and I were Ph.D. students at Stanford University in computer science," Page began, "and we didn't know exactly what we wanted to do. I got this crazy idea that I was going to download the entire Web onto my computer. I told my advisor that it would only take a week. After about a year or so, I had some portion of it."

How does Google make money?

"Google gets paid for every search that happens, more or less, mostly through advertising," Page said. "People pay for advertising. We are very lucky in that we chose to make ads relevant rather than having flash banner ads. It helps us have the best search engine. We also get paid by other companies, like AOL, that use our search engine."

Having a healthy disregard for the impossible

"So optimism is important," he went on. "You have to be a little silly about the goals you are going to set. There is a phrase I learned in college called, 'Having a healthy disregard for the impossible,'" Page said. "That is a really good phrase. You should try to do things that most people would not."

Brin and Lary – made and depend for each other

Supremely confident about their achievements and vision, Brin and Page had been on a roll ever since they started working together. They wanted no one—neither competitors nor outside investors—to come between them or interfere in any way. That combination of dependence on each other, and independence from everyone else, had contributed immeasurably to their astounding success.

Do you think Google was the highlight of your career? the first student asked Brin and Page.

"I think it was the smallest of accomplishments that we hope to make over the next 20 years," said Brin. "But I think that if Google is all we create, I don't think I would be very disappointed."
Page felt otherwise. "I would be very disappointed," he said. "We have many years left to go."

Sergey Brin wants more failures before every success ??!! How about that??!!

"We run Google a little bit like a university," Brin explained. "We have lots of projects, about 100 of them. We like to have small groups of people, three or so people, working on projects. Some of them, for example, are related to molecular biology. Others involve building hardware. So we do lots of stuff. The only way you are going to have success is to have lots of failures first."
The students applauded. The idea of eventually succeeding after failing first, of not being afraid to fall down, resonated with them immediately.

A Project closer to the Google Founder heart is TRANSLATION !!!

"A project that is closer to our hearts," Sergey continued, "involves translation, and I was asked about Hebrew to English, which is not one of the ones we are working on. One of the most important aspects of information access is that a lot of information is not in languages that you understand. We have an existing translation service, but we think we can make it exceptionally better."

Hope you like these facts too.. Let me know what do you feel..

If you missed the Part 1 of this series, you can view it here

Great Facts from 'The Google Story' – Part 1

Last week, I purchased an amazing book ‘The Google Story’ by David A.Vise & Mark Malseed from Landmark, Chennai.

Just finished the first chapter today titled ‘Introduction’. Many facts are very interesting and useful. So I thought, why don’t I share those great facts to you all and here I am kick starting Great Facts from ‘The Google Story’ series

Interesting facts from the book are given in block quotes and I just gave title to each fact !!! Hope you will find this useful

Yahoo prevented Google Founders to become Standford Ph.D’s..all because of just refuse to spend $1 million !!!

Yahoo!, AltaVista, and many other major search engine and technology companies approached by Stanford University turned down the chance to buy Google's search system for $1 million. Their refusals forced Stanford Ph.D. students Sergey Brin and Larry Page to reluctantly drop out of school and start the firm. By the summer of 2005, each of the founders had a net worth of more than $10 billion.

Google knowingly forego 10’s of millions of dollar ever day!!!

Google does not seek to make as much money as it could in the short run. The most obvious example of this is the Google homepage, considered the most valuable piece of real estate on the Internet. A quick trip to www.google.com will confirm that Google displays no advertising on this page, forgoing tens of millions of dollars in revenue and profits to give users a higher-quality search experience.

Google Servers aka PC!!! Yeah..You read it right

Most important technological advantage distinguishing Google from would-be competitors is that its employees assemble and customize all of the personal computers the company uses to carry out searches. This is perhaps Google's best-kept secret.

Experts generally regard personal computers as commodity products, akin to toasters, but Google assembles, deploys, and is constantly improving the performance capabilities of more than 200,000 inexpensive PCs. It builds and stacks them atop one another in refrigerator-size racks, stringing them together with patented software and wiring. No enterprise has more computing power than Google with its network of garden-variety PCs on steroids.

"They run the largest computer system in the world," Hennessy said. "I don't think there is even anything close."

How Sergey Brin, Larry Page & Eric Schmidt together make things happen?

When it comes to products, Brin and Page operate in a hands-on manner, pushing hard for the introduction of new features and offerings at a blistering pace. Some of these changes are highly visible; others, hidden from view, provide users with better and speedier search results. The founders have time to focus heavily on what matters to users because their colleague, chief executive officer Eric Schmidt, tends to the company's business affairs. This sets them free to do what they do best. However, the entire trio at the top gets involved in both business affairs and product development. Brin, it turns out, is quite a good deal-maker and Page is adept at finding ways to cut costs, notably in the vitally important area of electricity needed to power and cool Google's computers.

What's Google average team size….It is 3 !!!

At Google, the preference is for working in small teams of three, with individual employees expected to allot 20 percent of their time to exploring whatever ideas interest them most. The notion of "20 percent time" is borrowed from the academic world, where professors are given one day a week to pursue private interests. Because the company lacks the usual layers of middle management, the hierarchical structure found in traditional corporations is nonexistent. At the same time, no other company has Google's combination of brains, immense computing resources, and focus on long-term results, vaulting it into a league of its own. These days, other companies have a tough time competing against Google for employees.

To google means "to search." !!!

That the company's name has become a verb in English, German, and other languages is testament to its pervasive influence on global culture.

How far did the Google travelled till now?

Google and its founders have traveled far. At the same time, both they and the company are still young—and this is just the beginning.

And for this series too, it is just a beginning. I will share more great facts as and when I read those from this great book :)

Before I close, just want to add one more fact

My 3 year old daughter knows ‘The Google Story’!!!

While I compose this post, I just visited Amazon to get the purchase link for this book. My 3 year old daughter(she is just onto her pre school and just know to say ABCD orally) just passed by and happened to see the ‘The Google Story’ book cover on the site(given below). And you know what she said…

’Papa…Is it not the book that you were reading yesterday’

Wow!!! Power of Google!!!

Please remember that I have just extracted a drop from this great book and I highly recommend to but the book. It’s really worth the money…

Hope you liked this post…

Let me know what you feel about these great facts..

See you soon…