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Construction needs cloud flexibility
Australia’s embattled construction sector could benefit from cloud based information systems that can be switched on and off in lockstep with individual projects – with the exception of those organisations based in remote areas like the Kimberleys.
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Google and YouTube talking $1.6 billion acquisition
Stan Beer
Saturday, 07 October 2006 09:10
In the space of a few short months, the rise of YouTube traffic has been meteoric and the site now gets somewhere between 16 million and 20 million unique visitors a month.
Some pundits have postulated that the Google offer to buy YouTube is as much a defensive strategy as anything else. With Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, all said to be in the race to buy the largest repository of video clips on the web.
It is becoming increasingly clear that on the web content is king. Google, with no content of its own but a growing range of web services around which it sells advertising, may be keen to add another string to its bow and in the process prevent its rivals from getting hold of another lucrative web property.
In 2005, Rupert Murdoch was ridiculed when News Corporation paid US$580 million for MySpace.
Today, MySpace has about 100 million registered members and is one of the most visited sites in the world. Murdoch's previous detractors are no longer laughing because US$580 million seems like a bargain. Likewise, next year US$1.6 billion for YouTube may seem like a steal.
Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff recently predicted in his blog that YouTube will face the same fate as the original Napster, as has billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban. Both believe that the site will be sued out of business because of the large amount of material posted that is protected by copyright.
However, other analysts dismiss the comparison of YouTube with the early Napster as erroneous. Unlike the Napster of 2000, YouTube has a significant proportion of original content and already has agreements in place with content providers such as Warner Bros and NBC.
With a backer like Google, which is getting used to fighting legal battles centered around the free distribution of content on the web, it is unlikely that anyone would even attempt to suggest that YouTube is not going to be around in the future.
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