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Fascinating Facts About YouTube

Monday, February 21, 2011 at 7:53 PM Article by Unknown 0 Comments

PayPal’s Role in YouTube’s Creation

YouTube was created by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim in 2005. The three founders knew each other from working together at another Internet start up, PayPal. In fact, Hurley designed the PayPal logo after reading a Wired article about the online payment company and e-mailing the startup in search of a job. YouTube was initially funded by bonuses received following the eBay buy-out of PayPal. You could argue that if there was no PayPal, there would be no YouTube.

YouTube’s Origins as a Dating Site

The founding trio didn’t come up with the YouTube concept straight away. Legend has it that YouTube began life as a video dating site dubbed “Tune In Hook Up,” said to be influenced by HotorNot. The three ultimately decided not to go that route. The inspiration for YouTube as we know it today is credited to two different events. The first was Karim’s inability to find footage online of Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction,” and the second when Hurley and Chen were unable to share video footage of a dinner party due to e-mail attachment limitations.

YouTube Caused Problems For Utube

The domain name YouTube.com was registered on Valentine’s Day in 2005. This, however, caused a huge misunderstanding for Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment based in Perrysburg, Ohio. Its company domain, “utube.com,” was overwhelmed with traffic from people that tried to spell the video site’s name phonetically. The manufacturing company sued YouTube dismissed. Nowadays, it seems Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment has bowed to the inevitable — its business site has been moved to utubeonline.com and the original utube.com is a video-themed landing page for bad spellers. claiming its business was damaged by the video site, but the claims were

The First Ever YouTube Video

The first video to ever be uploaded to YouTube isn’t a classic by any means. Shot by Yakov Lapitsky at the San Diego Zoo it shows co-founder Jawed Karim in front of the elephant enclosure going on about long trunks. It has, nonetheless, racked up a very healthy 4,282,497 views since its online debut on April 23, 2005.

YouTube’s Annual April Fools Pranks

For the last three years YouTube has pranked its millions of users every April Fools Day. The first was a classic — every video on the site’s homepage was actually a Rickroll. In 2009 YouTube turned the site upside down and in 2010 an attempt to reduce bandwidth costs saw a “TEXTp” mode introduced, which translated colors in the videos into text. We can’t wait to see what YouTube has in store for 2011.

Some Jaw-Dropping YouTube Statistics

As of February 2011, YouTube has 490 million unique users worldwide per month, who rack up an estimated 92 billion page views each month. We spend around 2.9 billion hours on YouTube in a month — over 325,000 years. And those stats are just for the main YouTube website — they don’t incorporate embedded videos or video watched on mobile devices.

YouTube’s Social Stats

Social media-related YouTube stats are just as impressive. YouTube says that on average there are more than 400 tweets per minute containing a YouTube link. Meanwhile, over on Facebook over 150 years worth of YouTube videos are watched every single day.

The Most Viewed, Liked and Favorited Video

Not counting music videos (which due to licensing restrictions are often shown only in the U.S. on YouTube), the most viewed video of all time is the classic “Charlie bit my finger,” with an astounding 282,151,886 (at the time of writing). When you include music videos from the U.S.-only VEVO site, then the crown goes to Justin Beiber, whose “Baby” video has over 466 million views and counting.

Fascinating Facts About eBay

Monday, February 14, 2011 at 8:05 PM Article by Unknown 0 Comments

Founded in 1995, eBay is one of the notable success stories in the world today. As the world’s largest marketplace it has hundreds of millions of listings live at any given moment, become one of the largest companies in America & one of the most recognized brands around the world.

Throughout the years, the world has seen some of the oddest items listed on eBay, including, among others, old gum, entire towns, and even spouses. The fact that anyone can list almost anything, makes this site one of the most interesting places to find rare or outlandish items.

The Most Expensive eBay.com Purchase: A Jet

A Gulfstream II Jet that sold for $4.9 million in 2001 is the record for highest eBay sale price yet. The record sales price was more than three times the previous known eBay record of $1.65 million. The jet was sold by Tyler Jet (now, Tyler Jet Motorsports), the world’s largest business jet dealer at the time.

Mobile is Used for Big Ticket Purchases

Looking at mobile behavior on eBay’s apps, you can see that mobile commerce is an increasingly important focus for the company. One item is purchased every two seconds using eBay mobile apps, and in 2009, eBay users bought $600 million of merchandise using their mobile phones. On the last earnings call, eBay CEO John Donahoe predicted that number will nearly triple this year to $1.5 billion.

It’s no wonder that mobile is such a focus for the company. Users are shelling out big bucks on their mobile phones. So far in 2010, the most expensive item sold via eBay’s mobile app was a 1985 Piper PA-46-310P Malibu airplane for $265,000. The transaction was successful and resulted in the exchange of positive Feedback.

Another big ticket item bought via the eBay app this year was a 2007 Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder for $139,000. So far this year, it’s the most expensive car bought via eBay’s mobile app.
An exciting addition to the eBay app roster that will make mobile shopping even easier is Red Laser, a popular iPhone app that scans barcodes in stores, and returns the best prices for the same item online and at other stores. eBay recently acquired the app and will soon integrate Red Laser’s technology within its eBay applications like eBay Marketplace, eBay Selling, StubHub and Shopping.com.

The eBay HQ Building Names Reflect Categories on eBay

There are seven buildings at eBay’s headquarters in San Jose, California, and they are all named after categories on eBay.com: Collectibles, Jewelry, Motors, Music, Sports, Technology and Toys.
All of the conference rooms are named according to the corresponding building theme. For example, in the Motors building, rooms are named after type of cars, and in the Music building, rooms are take the names of various musical instruments.
True to its name, the Community building has a few distinct characteristics. It’s conference rooms are named after original eBay community terms, including PowerSeller, About Me, Feedback and Buy It Now. And it also houses two of the most social locations on campus, the cafeteria and the coffee house. Even more interesting is the fact that one of its conference rooms is named after an eBay community member, Jack Sheng.

The First Item Listed on eBay was a Broken Laser Pointer

On Labor Day weekend in 1995, computer programmer Omidyar wrote the code for what he called  an “experiment.” He wanted to know what would happen if everyone in the world had access to a single global marketplace. To test his idea, he came up with an auction website, where he listed a broken laser pointer that he was going to throw away. In the end, a collector bought it for $14.83.
Among the other items sold just a week after Omidyar launched eBay were autographed Marky Mark underwear for $400, a Superman metal lunchbox for $22, and a Toyota Tercel for $3,200.

The First AuctionWeb Logo Was Called the “Death Bar”

“The boxy black-and-white AuctionWeb logo … was so sinister the eBay staff had taken to calling it the ‘death bar,’” according to Adam Cohen in The Perfect Store: Inside eBay, a book explaining the story of eBay. Above you’ll find the original logos for AuctionWeb and eBay Internet. Steve Westly, one of eBay’s founding executives thought it was so horrible that it was scaring away potential corporate partners. You can see why employees might go a little bonkers after staring at these logos every day.

For a short period in 1997, the eBay logo was changed to a slightly more appealing navy blue design, as pictured above. It is difficult to find a trace of this logo on the Internet, as it wasn’t in use for very long and may not have ever existed on the website itself. One of the only places that it still exists is on an eBay listing posted by Jim Griffith, the first customer sales representative at eBay and the current host of eBayRadio.
Griffith’s listing described a stack of eBay brochures and stickers that he found in a trash bin at the eBay office. He included a detailed photo as well, watermarked with his seller name, uncle_griff. Upon finding the items, he couldn’t bear to see history tossed away, so he saved them and later sold them on eBay to benefit one of his favorite charities, The Disabled Online Users Association. In his listing, he commented on the blue logo design as:

“…one that didn’t last more than, well, probably a week if my memory serves me. And thank heavens for that! Can you imagine what eBay might have become with such a boring old logo? Still, it could have happened….”

Luckily, in 1997, the company hired CKS Group, an ad agency owned by Bill Cleary, Mark Kvamme, and Tom Suiter (all three of whom had previously worked at Apple Computers), to revamp their corporate identity, including visual imagery, typography, the website, and recommendations on advertising.

Cleary who at the time led the graphic design team that created the eBay logo, about the rebranding process and the idea behind the logo design. He elaborated:

“We saw that site as probably the first social networking site. People were aggregated around their interests like people who collected antique cars, people who collected toy soldiers, people who collected Civil War memorabilia. I called them ‘eBay tribes.’ With all of the various tribes, the site attracted a lot of different types of people. We wanted to create something that really resonated with the broadest base of consumers.”

Inspired by the visual imagery behind Eastman Kodak and Apple, among other brands, Cleary and his team created a logo that would appeal to the masses. The final result was the multi-colored logo spelled e-b-a-Y in overlapping letters with baseline shifts. The logo was chosen out of five or six other designs and had the “friendly, open and accessible” personality that the eBay team was looking for.

eBay was Originally Called AuctionWeb

The site we now know as eBay was launched during Labor Day weekend in 1995 as “AuctionWeb,” by entrepreneur Pierre Omidyar in his living room in San Jose, California.
AuctionWeb was just one of four sites housed under Omidyar’s umbrella company, eBay Internet. The other three included a travel site set up in loose partnership with a local San Jose travel agent, a personal shopper site, and a site about the Ebola virus. Check out the screenshot above of AuctionWeb, circa 1997.
The decision to change the name from AuctionWeb to eBay was made by Omidyar and Jeffrey Skoll, eBay’s first full-time employee and president, in mid-1997. The change was spurred by the fact that most customers referred to the site as “eBay,” and the initial media coverage, though sparse, also used “eBay” more than “AuctionWeb.” The actual name change took place in September of 1997 and involved a migration of existing users to a completely new platform with a more graphical website and home page. It also introduced the world to the multi-colored eBay logo we know today.
So, where did “eBay” actually come from? Long before AuctionWeb existed, Omidyar went to Sacramento to register the domain echobay.com for his planned business name Echo Bay Inc., but it was taken. He came up with “eBay” on the spot and registered it instead.

Tags: ebay , Naveen , Technofreaks

How To Make USB Drive Bootable?

Tuesday, February 08, 2011 at 10:08 PM Article by Unknown 0 Comments

#1. First step is to open command prompt and follow the procedure is as shown below.

Win + r -> cmd
Set the path in command prompt as C:WindowsSystem32>

#2. Then type “diskpart”, a new window will appear as follows.

C:WindowsSystem32>diskpart

#3. Next, type “list disk” command to show the status about the disks i.e. it displays the number of disks available in system.

If pen drive was inserted then it shows list disk as Disk 0 and Disk 1 as shown in figure.

DISKPART>list disk

#4. So, after finishing this one we have to select our pen drive disk to make it bootable. For this one use the following command as shown

DISKPART>select disk 1

Because our pen drive disk is 1 (compare the sizes of the disks then you can make a note which disk is our pen drive).
Next type “list disk” command to make sure that our drive is selected or not

DISKPART>list disk

Then it shows a star mark at left side to make sure that drive is selected.

The procedure is as follows

#5. Next we have to clear our pen drive memory space and make it empty. The command is as follows

DISKPART>clean

Then a message is displayed as follows “DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the Disk”.
Next type “create partition primary” to create a primary partition. The command is as follows

DISKPART>create partition primary

A message will display as “DiskPart succeeded in creating the specified partition”.
Next type “select partition 1” to create a partition. The command is as follows

DISKPART>select partition 1

“Partition 1 is now the selected partition” message will display.
Type “active” command to mark the current partition as active. The command is as shown below.

DISKPART>active

A message “DiskPart marked the current partition as active” will display.
The working of the above commands is shown in the below screenshot as follows

#6. Next we have to format that pen drive by using FAT32 File system. The command is as follows

DISKPART>format fs=fat32

Wait until the “100 percent completed” message to display.
A message “DiskPart successfully formatted the volume” will display.

Next type “assign” command assign drive letter or mount point to that disk. The command is as follows

DISKPART>assign

“DiskPart successfully assigned the drive letter or mount point” message will display.

After completion of all these process, then type “exit” command to exit that DISKPART windows and come back to first window i.e. C:WindowsSystem32

Finally we will completed to process for making a bootable usb drive by typing this last command in first window as shown below.

From the above figure we can make a note that

L – Pen drive or USB drive

J – Bootable DVD or we can mount a bootable O.S Image File (.ISO)

The final command is as follows

C:WindowsSystem32>xcopy J:*.* /s/e/f L:

A message “868 File(s) Copied” will display.

Finally we finished the procedure to make a Bootable USB Flash Drive or Pen Drive.

But to make it work we must do one more thing i.e. to change the Boot Settings.

Don’t feel bore I will explain it in a simple way.

Restart your PC and enter in boot settings (Press F2: mostly system contains F2 button as default) then it will redirect to “Boot option” and select “Boot USB Device First” and set it to “Enable” and then press F10 to save the changes and exit.

Tags: Naveen , Technofreaks , USB

Facebook Will End On March 15th?!

Saturday, February 05, 2011 at 10:26 PM Article by Unknown 2 Comments

PALO ALTO – Facebook continues to deny rumors it is shutting down on March 15. WWN, however, has confirmed that it is true.

On January 9th, WWN’s ace reporter, J.B. Smitts, broke the international story that Facebook was going to close down on March 15th because Mark Zuckerberg wanted to return to a normal life. The story caused a worldwide sensation, and J.B. Smitts has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for breaking it.

READ WWN’s ORIGINAL FACEBOOK STORY

Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg has publicly denied the rumors, saying, “Facebook is not going to close down. Not now, not ever. We’re just getting started.”

David Ebersman, the CFO of Facebook, and the man working with Goldman Sachs on the new Facebook financing deal said, “many people feel that the deal with Goldman Sachs will lead to a change in Facebook or that we might shut down so the government won’t force us to go public. All of those rumors are false. We are going to be stronger than ever after March 15th.”

But WWN has spoken to insiders at Facebook who strongly contradict the public statements of the executive management team.

Sources inside Facebook tell us that the company is already making plans on how to handle the big shutdown. “We can’t just turn it off on March 15th. There will be a revolution,” said one insider. “We have to prepare our users for the end of Facebook and offer them ways to keep their social networks alive.”

There are rumors that Zuckerberg himself will appear on the Oscars on February 27th, when The Social Network is sure to win Best Picture of the Year Award. New rumors are that Zuckerberg will make “an important announcement to the world” about the future of Facebook.

Meanwhile, there is panic all around the globe as Facebook users (and addicts) are frightened that they may lose their social networking community. Top celebrities Tyra Banks, Mila Kunis, Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, Justin Beiber, Ashton Kutchter, Carrot Top, Meryl Streep, Danny Bonaduce and the Real Housewives of New Jersey and Atlanta are all panicking about losing Facebook. “I’m addicted to Facebook,” said Tyra Banks. “Without it, my life is over!”

An online petition was started just hours ago to help persuade Zuckerberg and Facebook to remain open.

SIGN THE “SAVE FACEBOOK” PETITION HERE.

The organizer of the “Please Do Not Shut Down Facebook Petition”, Fritz Barnkopf, said, “we hope to get a million or more signatures before the Oscars, so Mark Zuckerberg will reconsider his tragic decision.”

WWN is following this developing story closely – constantly talking with Facebook insiders. We certainly are rooting for Facebook to continue because it’s an important part of our own social media strategy and leading source for our site visits.

Meanwhile, Sophos- a security website calls this as a hoax and gives an explanation on how this rumor all started. We just hope Sophos is right. Facebook shutdown will really hit many eCommerce firms who rely on Facebook, which is a great source of traffic. Also, it hurts those who advertise on Facebook Ads. Facebook has become public's choice and I just hope Zuck doesn't hurt them for his personal reasons!

Tags: Facebook , Naveen , Technofreaks

How To Delete Unwanted Applications On Facebook

Tuesday, February 01, 2011 at 11:18 PM Article by Unknown 0 Comments

If you have been using facebook for over 6 months you might have 50+ applications installed in your facebook account. This includes the ones you trust and some of them which get installed unknowingly while "allowing" it to use your profile data to calculate your top 5 friends.

By default, apps have access to your friends list and any information you choose to share with everyone. By installing the you have authorized these apps to interact with your Facebook account in any way they want.

So its not suitable to keep untrusted apps installed to your profile. Here is how you can remove them.

Step 1 : Click on "Account" at top right corner and click on "Privacy Settings".

Step 2 : On the "Choose Your Privacy Settings" page click on the Edit your settings link under "Apps and Websites".

Step 3 : Click on Edit Settings button.

You can also use this link to directly access the apps settings page

Step 4 : On this page you’ll see all the apps that are installed on your facebook profile. Click on the small [x] button to remove them.

Click "Remove" to uninstall the application. Similarly do the same with the rest of them to remove all unwanted facebook applications.