Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Microsoft has launched a beta version of Soapbox, a direct competitor to the YouTube video upload and viewing site, but with the key advantage that it will be tightly integrated into the whole gamut of Microsoft online services.
Soapbox is being launched as an adjunct to the Microsoft Video download service. It will enable users to upload videos in various formats, assign categories to them and share them with others. Viewers will be able to browse through the 15 categories, find related videos, subscribe to RSS feeds, and share their favourites with their friends, while watching a video, another key differentiator from YouTube.
MSN Video already claims to be watched by more than 11 million unique users per month. According to Nielsen NetRatings, YouTube has nearly 20 million unique users per month. But both these figures are dwarfed by the number of MSN users - more than 465 million per month worldwide.
It remains to be seen exactly what Microsoft means when it promises that "Soapbox...will be deeply integrated throughout Microsoft's portfolio of online services, including Windows Live Spaces and Windows Live Messenger," but this has the potential to give it a huge advantage that stand-alone YouTube will have to work hard to match.
The beta of Soapbox on MSN Video is being made available on an invitation-only basis in the US. Anyone interested in participating is invited to sign up at http://soapbox.msn.com. Microsoft says access will expand over time by beta testers being allowed to extend invitations a limited number of friends. However, no date has been given for a commercial launch.
Soapbox will require Internet Explorer 6 or later running on Windows XP or later, and Mac users are not being excluded: Firefox 1.0.5 or later on Under Mac OS X is supported.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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