communications industry structure, including mass media, advertising, and telephone companies
Yahoo! Answers has attracted a large number of active users. As of March, 2008, Yahoo! Answers had perhaps 25 million U.S. users and 135 million users world-wide. The U.S. and world-wide users have created 237 million and 500 million answers, respectively. The number of users is currently growing about 35% per year in the U.S. … Continue reading the value of Yahoo! Answers
The city of Burlington, Vermont is providing communication services for its residents over a new, advanced municipal fiber optic network. Burlington is a city of about 40,000 persons. The city department that builds the network, operates it, and sells communications services is called Burlington Telecom (BT). BT had been designed and operated to be self-sufficient. … Continue reading successful municipal fiber network
Nico Nico Douga is a Japanese video sharing site that has rapidly gained popularity in Japan. Nico Nico Douga was launched in mid-December, 2006. A little more than a year later, in mid-January, 2008, the site had about 5 million users. As of October, 2007, the site’s Japanese users amounted to 27% of YouTube’s Japanese … Continue reading success in online video sharing and social networking
Searching video is notoriously difficult. That implies a scaling problem for a large video repository like YouTube. Given relatively fixed amounts of video tagging and category information, more videos imply relatively less information for searching among videos and targeting ads to videos. YouTube’s announcement of new APIs for external use of the YouTube video platform … Continue reading video searching and ad targeting
The proposed U.S. federal government budget for 2009 cuts funding for the American Time Use Survey. The survey program costs $6 million per year to administer for its full sample design. That seems to me to be a small amount to spend for high-quality, publicly available data very relevant for understanding value generation in the … Continue reading spending time