TechnoCloud

MTV parent Viacom is allowing web users to embed videos from a number of MTV sites, including Pimp My Ride, into their web spaces. This comes at a time when Viacom requested the removal of 100k+ clips from YouTube.

While this move shows Viacom’s desire to control the source of their content on the web, they are prepared to let users consume it at least partly on their own terms, whether embedded on a blog or in their social networking space. With the content contained in their player, they can potentially place advertising around the player or within the content to monetise their content in this space.

Check out our example below to see it in action.

So, Gmail is to open up to all users worldwide bringing to an end one of the great viral marketing campaigns of recent times.

When Gmail’s email service was first launched, it was invite only and I can remember the scramble among the early adopters to track down others with an account. Accounts were offered in the comments of blog posts, desperate people even bid for them on eBay.

All the while, the buzz about Gmail grew turning something that for most is a relatively dull part of their digital lives - email - into something to talk and even brag about.

Few realised at the time that they were witnessing one of the great pieces of viral marketing.

No doubt the release strategy also helped Google rollout their product gradually, as they went about improving the storage and adding fuctionality, benefiting from the goodwill of their ‘privileged’ group of users.

Having secured one of the early Gmail accounts, I gleefully gave out my Gmail invites to digitally ‘under-endowed’ friends, but stubbornly hung onto my Hotmail account hoping the extra storage would come and the interface would improve (they largely have). I have to access my Gmail account from time to time as part of accessing certain Google services, but am still not a full convert.

When it comes to email, some old habits die hard, no matter how good the viral.

Could Joost be the future of television? This venture, formerly known as the Venice Project has Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström behind it. These are the people who brought you Kazaa and then Skype. Read more here.

After Bill Gates’ explained his view on DRM to a group of bloggers, Steve Jobs has set out his vision for a DRMless world. At first sight it might seem that they’re both saying the same thing - i.e. that as content distributors, they perceive DRM to be an impediment to progress and not in the interests of the consumer. However, this interview with Bill Gates suggests that their positions are more divergent. To be fair, the interview with Bill Gates was over a year ago and it’s possible that in the intervening period Microsoft’s experience with Zune have left him with a slightly different feeling.

Anti DRM groups, such as Defective By Design have taken the views expressed by Jobs and Gates as support for their position. For another view on what’s happening in the music industry with regards to DRM, read this, which is written from a pro-DRM stance.

One of the joys of opening up your product to the development community is that you get applications that you would never have thought of and would never get budget approval to complete. Plus, their quirkiness can lead to great viral marketing.

To illustrate the point, take these examples of Skype ‘hacks’ from VoIP news:

1. From the useful: The Universal Chat and Language Translation add-on uses automated voice recognition and translation software and provides a text-only translation of many different languages. Handy.
2. To the questionable: KishKish lie detector - claims to analyse stress levels in the voice to detect whether someone is lying or not. So, when making that multi-lingual business negotiation, you might use this plugin to have the upper hand.
3. To the downright silly: the glorious Voice Analysis Love Detector. Combined with the two tools above, not only will you have the upper hand in the negotiation, but you will know whether they are lying to you because they are secretly in love with you!

Google has been steadily been building a suite of products tied into a single Google identity - think Gmail, Adsense, Google Video, Groups etc.. Now Google is taking further advantage of those user accounts (as well as trying to create a few more) by adding more personalisation to searches.

Now when you are signed into your Google Account, Google is offering a combination of personalised search recommendations and the personalised homepage, to bring, duh, a more ‘personalised’ search experience.

The goal is that it learns from your search history and preferences to bring you more relevant search results. So, when searching for ‘Saints’ it will focus on my footballing interests rather than my religious ones.

Those searchers that may have more ‘private’ search queries can sign out of their account, but for the rest of us it should result in a more satisfactory search experience, as it learns more about our personal preferences.

More loyalty to the Googleverse and better search results - they hope it will be a winning strategy.

P.S. Sorry for the rush of Google-related posts, but they have been doing some interesting things of late (plus I’ve re-subscribed to their blog).