Google Video deletes all uploaded videos
Google Video BETA, now BEATUP and shutting its doors (likely due to pressures from MPAA and prospective YouTube Video Rental partners)
That should be the moral of the story with Google Video, which this month became the latest in a slew of innovative services to hit the chopping blocks in Google. Google Video Search, however, will still be sticking around; just don’t expect to find many videos other than YouTube user-generated content (and illegally ripped/ content), to which I suspect many content publishers will migrate their Google Videos if they haven’t already.
Google’s plan was executed (almost) flawlessly:
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Analysis of Virtual Currencies, Micro-payment, Lending & Donation solutions
I’ll start with a slideshow I’ve done on Virtual/Digital Currencies as a good visual explainer to set the tome:
The rest of this article will be as opinionated a review of the current landscape as I can possibly muster ; )
Virtual
PaySwarm | BitCoin | OpenTransactions
Donation
Lending
Micro-Payment
Paypal | Google Checkout | Moneris | 2checkout | MoneyBookers
PaySwarm
Rating: 8.5/10
Their approach to aim for an open W3C payment standard is the right approach. However, I’m concerned about the implementation and the lack of representation of various schools of thought on alternative monetary systems.
BitCoin
Rating: 8/10
Unfortunately BitCoin’s goals of being a decentralized currency are foiled by the fact that the programmer now assumes the role of policy setter, central banker, and issuing authority. The total number of BitCoins in circulation is hard-coded into the P2P software. As of this posting, the limit has been set by the BitCoin founder along with some input from the other developers in the community at 21 million (see: http://www.bitcoin.org/#block-…). The problem is that this limit has been decided at all, and hasn’t been to scale and grow naturally based on the number of holders of BitCoin currency and the economy therein created (i.e. rates of expenditure and exchange of BitCoins for items).
Thus, I see three problems with BitCoin in its current iteration:
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BC$ = Behavior, Content, Money
The goal of the BC$ project is to raise awareness and make changes with respect to the three pillars of information freedom - Behavior (pursuit of interests and passions), Content (sharing/exchanging ideas in various formats), Money (fairness and accessibility) - bringing to light the fact that:
1. We regularly hand over our browser histories, search histories and daily online activities to companies that want our money, or, to benefit from our use of their services with lucrative ad deals or sales of personal information.
2. We create and/or consume interesting content on their services, but we aren't adequately rewarded for our creative efforts or loyalty.
3. We pay money to be connected online (and possibly also over mobile), yet we lose both time and money by allowing companies to market to us with unsolicited advertisements, irrelevant product offers and unfairly structured service pricing plans.