Blancer.com Tutorials and projects

Every big publisher on the Web wants to be able to serve up ad-friendly videos, but creating them can be a pain. But there are already plenty of high-quality videos out there in every subject imaginable. With that in mind, Answers.com has quietly launched Video Answers with about 200,000 videos from video distribution network 5min on everything from home repair and fashion tips to cars and travel.

5Min is already one of the largest video networks, with more than 110 million video views a month and 30 million unique visitors across 800 partner sites. But Answers.com will become its biggest partner by far. 5Min syndicates videos from about 1,000 online video producers, including CBS, Hearst, Scripps, and WatchMojo. Anytime one of 5Min’s videos matches a question asked on Answers.com, WikiAnswers, or ReferenceAnswers, video results will show up and they will play on the new Video Answers page. Advertising revenues will be split between Answers.com, 5Min, and the video publisher, with roughly a third going to each.

“What we are really building here is ability for every publisher to have their own video section without producing because I think there is no ROI for production,” says CEO Ran Harnevo. The videos in his network are all in highly-targeted, evergreen niches like yoga or food videos with low double-digit CPMs. Video producers ca extend their reach beyond their own sites by syndicating with 5Min and make some extra cash.

5Min’s model contrasts with Demand Media’s, which produces its own videos at $50 or so a pop and shows them on eHow and its portfolio of search-friendly niche sites. AOL also wants to get into this game with its recent acquisition of Studio Now. But 5Min’s philosophy is to let others produce the best videos, and focus on distributing them at scale, while splitting the downstream revenues. “Destinations are just not big enough today,” he says.

For some time now, Twitter has been working on a new API: the Twitter Streaming API. The idea behind it is to allow third-party Twitter clients to receive continuous tweet updates in realtime. As developer advocate Taylor Singletary notes today on the Twitter Development Talk Google Group, limited testing of this new feature (also called “User Streams”) for desktop clients has now begun.

Currently, TweetDeck and Echofon, two popular Twitter desktop clients, have access to the new API for testing. Singletary notes that not all users of these clients will see this new tech in action at first. Instead, there will be a more gradual roll-out with each app. Once that occurs, Twitter will start opening up the Streaming API to other clients as well.

Twitter first started talking about this new API this past April at their Chirp conference. Others have already been internally testing it for some time as Twitter is also testing out its new Annotations feature through the API.

While the feature is very cool and makes third-party clients much more interesting, the Streaming API also helps Twitter significantly. As Singletary notes, “The transition to User Streams should return considerable capacity to the
REST and Search APIs, increasing stability for Twitter users & developers alike.” With their recent scaling problems, one of the aspects hurt the most by limits Twitter had to impose is the API. Services like TweetDeck and Seesmic rely heavily on the Search API for their various windows — so obviously, this was a problem. The Streaming API should alleviate that quite a bit.

And there’s more. Singletary notes that:

Additionally, several interesting new event types are available: Favoriting, retweeting, following, and list additions are also streamed along with direct messages, mentions, the user timeline and the home timeline.

Again, all of this should help ease strain on the rest of Twitter’s APIs. The only question is: how long will it take to roll-out in a meaningful way? Twitter says that an open beta is tentatively scheduled for Q3 or Q4 of 2010.

At the end of the message, Singletary also hints at a new API product called Site Streams:

Application developers needing to consume multiple, simultaneous user streams will be served by an upcoming Streaming API product called Site Streams. Stay tuned for more information on that when we’re ready.

[thanks Richard]

It seems that all Kindle orders have been frozen and, it seems, that Jeff Bezos is hanging around New York right now and will speak on Charlie Rose tonight. While I seriously doubt that Bezos will whip out the Kindle 3 on the Charlie Rose show (he’ll probably talk about ebooks outselling hardbacks) it seems there is definitely something afoot.

Read more…

We broke the news yesterday on Facebook’s most recent acquisition – social activity service Hot Potato. Like most of Facebook’s acquisitions, this deal looks to be mostly about getting a great team of engineers on board, not about the product.

And like many of these acquisitions, investors in the acquired company don’t stand to make much money. Facebook is paying around $10 million in cash for Hot Potato, we’ve heard from a source with knowledge of the deal. Employees will also be getting stock options which could prove to be very lucrative down the road. But investors aren’t getting any stock in Facebook.

This is very similar to Facebook’s very first acquisition, Parakey, back in 2007. That deal gave shareholders just $4 million or so in cash to split – giving them their initial investment back plus a small return. All the stock went to employees.

Hot Potato raised around $1.4 million in a single round of financing prior to the acquisition.

Most investors won’t balk publicly at deals like this, they’re way too concerned that they’re seen as entrepreneur-friendly so that they can get access to future deals. But privately they gripe. Putting money to work for only a 1x or 2x return is a great way to go out of business for startup investors, when so many of their deals never pay anything back at all.

In fact some of these deals could theoretically be a violation of various corporate and securities laws that require shareholders of a given class to be treated equally in an acquisition. But without investors actually complaining, it’s unlikely any lawyers will ever get involved.

Also, stock options are clearly being granted for future services of the acquired employees, not for past work done at the acquired startup.

Another way investors can “complain” is by simply scuttling the deal – they usually have veto rights over an acquisition baked into their deal agreements when they invest. But that, again, would be seen as completely anti-entrepreneur and would kill future deal flow.

So for now investors will simply grin and bear it. But as these types of deals become more and more common we may see changes to various state corporate laws in the future that put limits on how much consideration might be given in cash to investors in an acquisition v. how much is given to active employees in stock options on an acquisition.

Knol, Google’s platform for sharing articles about specific topics, appears to have been shutdown. It’s unclear if this is a temporary or permanent situation. We’ve reached out to Google for comment.

We’ve long been speculating as to when Google will shut down Knol. The knowledge-sharing site has essentially been reduced to a “Craigslist wannabe.” The original idea behind Knol was that people could collaboratively write definitive articles about any topic they like and get rewarded by earning a share of the AdSense revenues for each page they author. Unfortunately, no one seems to be reading anything on Knol and the product never really panned out.

Eventhough this outage may be temporary, it may be time to put Knol out of its misery. Google has previously shutdown other under-performing projects such as Lively and Google Notebooks.

Update 2:49 PM PDT: Google informs us that this down time is in fact temporary, “We’re working on restoring it for users as soon as possible.”

Unless someone at Research In Motion is taking the time to screw with all of us, it looks like we might have an official name for their long-rumored BlackBerry tablet project: BlackPad.

Word of the name comes not from a disgruntled employee, nor from a prototype left at a bar; this one’s straight out of a good ol’ fashion WHOIS lookup on a domain. According to registration records, RIM purchased BlackPad.com just days ago.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

If we’re hearing any one thing from developers that is scaring’em away from Android, it’s that Android apps are just way, way too easy to pirate. Hell, you don’t even have to go through shady third party download sites; just buy an app, copy it to the sd card, and refund the application. Ta-da! (Read: Don’t do that.)

Google’s been talking for some time about a new, considerably more secure system for protecting applications from pirates and dishonest refunders. Today, that system goes live.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>