Veotag

Internet Scams

I manage the website for my wife who does photography.  I recently received the following (scam) email:

---

Hello,
We own the .COM version of your domain name jillrhodes.biz

We would like to offer you the chance to purchase the domain name.

Our internal valuations suggest this domain will sell for $400 to $500 but as you own the domain in a different extension we can sell the domain to you for only $195.

Let me know if you would like to go ahead with the purchase.

Thank you
Recap Domains

---

This was all great except that they did not own the domain they claimed to own.  I registered it and my wife can continue to do the portraits of children without paying someone to sell her something they do not own!

Be on the lookout for people selling you domains - they may be scam artists.

Veotag Customized Player

The latest Veotag enhancement is the ability to customize the look and feel of the Veotag player.  This allows users to make the Veotag experience appropriate to their particular application.  An example of this is the clever guys at jove.com .   Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE)  is an online research journal employing visualization to increase reproducibility and transparency in biological sciences. 

JoVE have customized the look of the Veotag player by taking advantage of the ability to change the CSS and player buttons to get a totally different experience than the standard player.  You can see an example of this here . 

They are also taking advantage of another feature in our system.  They found that their customers enjoyed our horizontal layout for watching videos on the site but sometimes needed  the ability to embed videos elsewhere vertically.  We have an option to switch the layout built into the system.  If you click here , you will see the layout presented vertically.

We expect many people to take advantage of this.  We are really trying to leverage the creativity you can apply in CSS a la www.csszengarden.com .  CSSZenGarden is a lesson on what you can do with CSS and after you browse it for a while, you will appreciate the power of what is possible with the customizeable Veotag player.

Streaming Charges

In today's marketplace, streaming has become an important commodity for any company using video to communicate its message.  Unfortunately, the way companies charge for streaming is nearly incomprehensible to anyone but the serious geek.  And even then, it is unlikely anyone can actually calculate the cost of streaming. 

Streaming charges are normally split between disk space fees and bytes transferred over the wire.  If you have a 15 minute video and people watch, on average, 10 minutes of the video, how many bytes did you transfer?  If you answered 2/3 of the total length of the file, you are wrong.  There is protocol overhead to consider as well as handshake cost, extra buffering, etc.  In some adaptive protocols, the amount of data transferred depends on what data rate the client can accept, and it allows for dropped frames.  The result is a mess for someone trying to determine their needs.  And we have not yet talked about storage costs, mirroring, etc...

Veotag has taken a different approach, more along the lines of what the telephone companies do (but without the hidden charges).  When our business customers pay us for streaming, we charge them by the minute of viewing.  We also shop around for the best price on streaming and pass on our market efficiency to our customers.  We take responsibility for making it easy for our customers to understand what they are paying for. 

Veotag believes that charging by the minute dramatically simplifies  the calculation of a client's needs and makes it easier to understand what is happening.  In addition, our advanced reporting provides our customers with reports that show statistics on the usage of their video that makes it possible to analyze how the video is being used.

Search Engine Optimization

We have recently added a very cool feature at Veotag related to search engine optimization.  If you go to Google and type "Woz talks about the early days of Apple" you will have a few choices.  When I ran it today, I got results that looked like this:

---

Chronicle Podcasts : The Woz talks about his new book, early days ...

Tech Talk: The Woz talks about his new book, early days of Apple and pranking Stephen Colbert. Steve Wozniak. Steve Wozniak ... sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=5&entry_id=9222 - 39k - Cached - Similar pages

Chronicle Podcasts : Apple

The Woz talks about his new book, early days of Apple and pranking Stephen Colbert. Steve Wozniak. Steve Wozniak. Steve Wozniak, who with Steve Jobs ... www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/category?blogid=5&cat=508 - 51k - Jan 15, 2007 - Cached - Similar pages [ More results from www.sfgate.com ]

<title>Guy Kawasaki Interviews Steve Wozniak :.. Woz talks about ...

Woz talks about the early days of Apple. about \ contact us \ tell your friends! \ terms & conditions \ privacy policy \ blog. © 2007 veotag.com. ... www.veotag.com/browse/tagDetails.aspx?pid=f072a6f9-85d9-4f2b-b350-1cd203cde09b&tid=8dd2211d-8973-4dab... - 8k - Cached - Similar pages

 

---

If you click on the one entitled "Guy Kawasaki Interviews Steve Wozniak..." you will be directed to a page on zbiz.tv .  The reason is that the Veotag player is now smart enough to figure out what page it belongs to.  Further, it knows what Veotag you clicked on and opens the page and then starts the video at the instant that corresponds to the query you entered.   

This search engine optimization is available to our paid customers. 

You may wonder why we have not been adding to our blog.  Veotag raised some money in December and we were in a quiet period while the deal was closing.  More about the product soon...

VIRP or BIRP? Did Google get it wrong?

Who broke the internet?

Now that video has created a wild west with people posting like crazy, nobody worrying about value, and a crazed land grab similar to people riding on horses to put down a flag and establish territory, what happened to the internet?

Remember that in the beginning (which in this case is not thousands of years ago), the internet was built with the idea that every resource was accessible through hyperlinking.  The genius of the idea was to create a standardized mechanism for fetching data and other resources using an agreed-upon protocol.  All you had to do was to follow the rules and you could get to everything.

Once people realized that there was too much stuff, people stepped in with search engines to make finding what you wanted easier.  Google and Yahoo made a mint with totally different techniques to do searching but both depended ultimately on availability of resources.  (Yahoo used people to create an intelligent hierarchy and Google used very sophisticated algorithms to rank things intelligently.)

Now we have the situation that people are posting videos to different hosting sites, paid and unpaid, and the hosters are putting roadblocks in the way of using the videos.  Veotag has created a text-indexing capability for any video and probably should be applied to every video to make it easier to find and to use.  However, with the roadblocks that are being put up to free use of the videos, we are moving backwards and not forwards.  With two of the big titans, Google and YouTube, talking about hitching up, the situation is likely to get worse.

Ultimately, the problem lies in how we get value from the resources we put on the internet.  We have the situation where the way that people track value is to put convoluted web code on their sites to create affiliates.  The value that is exchanged is either through advertising or purchase and the percentage is distributed through this link-exchange mechanism.  Since it is not a universal protocol, if you are not in the exchange program with another site then you are out of luck.  This is part of the reason why the big players are preventing access to their resources.

There is a solution which would solve this problem in an instant.  What is needed is something to sit on top of the Internet Protocol which helps to solve this value exchange.  Let's call this protocol VIRP, the Value Internet Resource Protocol.  The idea would be that there is an exchange between two internet sites on the value that is provided by handing off a customer from one side to another.  It would also permit the possibility of having multiple providers provide something on the same web page. 

You can imagine that people would then create web pages that were intended only to be part of other peoples' sites and there would be other people who produced only aggregations of these pages.  Veotag actually already falls into the former category and is a leader here.  Microsoft tried making the users' desktop an aggregator but that turned out to be too confusing.

The company that can be the registrar for the value exchange is likely to make a lot of money.  I hope that whoever is working on this product gives us the opportunity to invest.  However, knowing how these things progress, there will be large committees with vested interests working feverishly against such progress.

We will likely start with the Basic Internet Resource Protocol or BIRP (say it out loud and see how much you like the idea).  I just hope we get to VIRP before we are all in the AARP.