New video platform Wonder PL aims to take on Youtube

Online platform 'Wonder' offers ads free exclusive lifestyle content.

YouTube and Vimeo have a new competitor called Wonder PL which provides ad-free exclusive lifestyle oriented video content. The platform differentiates itself from YouTube by targeting professional content makers, SME's and brands to use its platform for an annual fee.

Wonder features full HD video support, a customizable channel pages, embeddable player and data-driven programming. The company claims that these features will enable content creators to target viewers more effectively.

The platform also features royalty-free music provided by Epidemic Sound. Users can follow certain channels, favorite items, browse and share videos with friends based on categories, or use the curated ‘Discovery’ tab. Users can access ‘click-to-purchase’ and ‘click-to-learn-more’ options on the videos to drive more traffic to their site.

Wonder PL has partnered with The National Film Board of Canada, Space NK, Universal Music Group, and Epidemic Sound among others, for featuring content. The video platform is backed by Universal Music Group, former Apple executive Pascal Cagni, Qualcomm Ventures, and a personal investment by Vice Media President Andrew Creighton.

The platform features topics from wellness to entertainment targeting women. It is charging its users $300 per year.

"We want to be the Whole Foods of video," said Sofia Fenichell, Wonder founder and CEO. "YouTube is Wal-Mart. "We know everyone is going to produce more video," Fenichell added.

YouTube which has over 1 billion unique users per month that watch over 6 billion hours of video. IAC/Interactive Corp's Vimeo charges up to $199 for its comprehensive features including additional storage and video on demand. Vimeo has over 22 million registered members and reaches 150 million monthly users.

 

YouTube reportedly building a version for kids under 10 years

 YouTube is supposedly designing a new version for kids under 10 years old.

Internet giant Google is reportedly building a version of YouTube just for kids under 10 years. According to reports, YouTube has even gauged the interests of video producers willing to create child-oriented content for the online video platform.

The Kids friendly version of YouTube will not require constant monitoring by parents over what content their child sees. The goal will be to offer a site to parents that will be free of both videos and comments that may not be child oriented. Parents could, for example, access a special app on a device or TV that includes only kid-safe videos.

YouTube already has a “safety” mode for filtering out inappropriate content as well as YouTube EDU, for educational videos for schools. However both the modes contain advertising that can sometimes be questionable and parents can't ensure that the content is specially tailored for a specific age group.

According to reports, YouTube for kids is still in the development phase and no details have been mentioned on how it will work. One possibility is that the usual ads on the video platform may be removed or at least tailored to suit child oriented content.

A representative from YouTube also said the following about the news: “While we’re always working on new and better ways for people to enjoy YouTube, we do not comment on rumor or speculation.”

YouTube has over 1 billion unique users per month that watch over 6 billion hours of video. The online video platform has starting monitoring video views and content for artificially inflating video counts. The move will ensure that advertising campaigns on the site reach the target audience. The portal has started specializing and is expected to launch a music streaming service in 2014 as well.

Indian Student develops a shoe that charges phones while walking

12th class Indian student develops water proof shoe that charges your phone by walking.

Rajesh Adhikari, a 12th class student from Nainital has created a shoe that can charge a mobile phone.

Adhikari stated that he got the idea of making the water proof charger due to heavy snowfalls in Nainital that usually led to power shutdown in the city for long hours. This inspired him to make a powerhouse out of a shoe that utilizes the energy generated out of the footwear when a person walks.

Apparently, the charger can also be used to light a bulb at home when there is no electricity by installing a battery in the shoe. Adhikari is now working on further modifications on the design that will make this shoe a wireless phone charger.

Adhikari explained, "When we raise our feet, the spring gets released and the dynamo starts revolving, which generates current. We can charge our mobile phones while we are walking."

Recently, three Bangalore based engineering students launched a free voice calling service called FreeKall, for those who don't have internet access. Registered users can make domestic and international calls for 12 minutes in 24 hours while un-registered users can make 3 minute calls. The service makes money by making people listen to 10 second advertisements every 2 minutes during calls. Freekall has tied up with a media agency called Streetsmart Media Solutions for the advertisements. Once the service goes live, registered users will be able to make unlimited calls. The company is aiming for nearly $30 million in revenue by the end of the next fiscal year.

 

Eclipse builds a bridge between desktop and cloud development

Project Flux will give developers an infrastructure for easily moving back and forth between desktops and the cloud

 

 

 

 

The Eclipse Foundation is looking to bridge desktop- and cloud-based development with its Project Flux, driven by technologists from Pivotal and IBM and intended to produce an architecture and infrastructure for integrating development tools across the desktop, browsers, and servers.

"You can connect your Web-based tools to your desktop tools," said Eclipse Executive Director Mike Milinkovich. The back end of Flux could be described as "Dropbox for your code," he said, and code can be stored in the cloud and can be interacted with via a desktop- or browser-based IDE.
Project co-leader Martin Lippert, of Pivotal, said Flux is intended to provide "a fully smooth transition between the desktop IDE experience and the cloud tooling." By bringing together cloud and desktop tools, Flux addresses a problem in which there has been a poor developer experience in the cloud, project co-leader John Arthorne, of IBM, said. "You have all these great development tools on your desktop, but your runtime is over in the cloud."
The goal of Flux, according to its Eclipse proposal page, is to provide a flexible platform and infrastructure allowing cloud-based tooling components to be built that are decoupled from each other and bridge the gap to existing desktop IDEs at the same time. Flux also would boost Java development. "One of the things that Flux is going to do is provide first-class Java language support for a browser-based toolset," Milinkovich said.
EclipseCon attendee Werner Wild, a teacher at the University of Innsbruck, in Austria, liked what he saw in Flux, particularly its integration between local and cloud development environments. "[Flux] looked interesting because I think that lot of developers are starting right now to develop for the cloud, especially debugging," Wild said.
Flux is still in an early proposal stage and is expected to be launched as an official Eclipse project in the next couple of weeks. Early code is due then as well. Eclipse already has a Web-based editor and IDE called Orion, but Flux is different in that it is intended to enable developers to flow back and forth between the cloud and desktop, Milinkovich explained.

Speedy attack targets Web servers with outdated Linux kernels

Cisco said the attack compromises legitimate websites to redirect visitors to malicious ones

 

Web servers running a long-outdated version of the Linux kernel were attacked with dramatic speed over two days last week, Cisco Systems said on Thursday.
All the affected servers were running the 2.6 version, first released in December 2003, of the Linux kernel, which is the core of the operating system. Most were running a 2.6 Linux kernel version released in 2007 or earlier, wrote Martin Lee, technical lead of Threat Intelligence for Cisco.

"Systems that are unmaintained or unsupported are no longer patched with security updates," Lee wrote. "When attackers discover a vulnerability in the system, they can exploit it at their whim without fear of it being remedied."
After the Web server has been compromised, the attackers slip in a line of JavaScript to other JavaScript files within the website. That code bounces the website's visitors to a second compromised host, which runs another JavaScript file.
"The two-stage process allows attackers to serve up a variety of malicious content to the visitor," Lee wrote.
The visitor is then served pay-per-view fraud pages, which load up advertisements. Other clues indicate some visitors may be served malicious software, he wrote.
One in 15 of Cisco's clients using its Cloud Web Security product had one of their users attempt to request one of the malicious URLs, Lee wrote. The company saw 400 distinct hosts, with a high number in the U.S. and Germany, affected on March 17 and 18, showing "the spread of this attack has been dramatic," he wrote.
About 2,700 URLs have been affected. Because the attack centers on compromising legitimate websites, "security awareness campaigns that train users to be wary of unknown websites may not be effective against trusted websites that become compromised to serve malware," Lee wrote.
The campaign highlights the need for system administrators to continually update their systems.
"Large numbers of vulnerable unpatched systems on the Internet are tempting targets for attackers," Lee wrote. "Such systems can be used as disposable one-shot platforms for launching attacks."

Facebook Introduces Video Ads, Promises They Won't Be Spammy

 Ads that look and feel like TV commercials but are targeted like display ads: For Facebook, that’s long been the holy grail — the chief hurdle being how to introduce them without annoying the bejesus out of its users.

After many months of tinkering, Facebook executives finally think they’ve got it right. Today the company officially introduced what it calls Premium Video Ads.
Nothing much has changed from the version it’s been testing in users’ feeds since December. The 15-second ads still start playing automatically, without sound, as soon as they come onscreen. Tapping on an ad expands it and makes it start over from the beginning, with audio.


Most interesting, perhaps, are the measures Facebook is taking to make sure the new ads, which reportedly will cost marketers as much as $2 million a day, don’t strike users as spammy:

To make sure Premium Video Ads are as good as other content people see in their News Feeds, we’re working with a company called Ace Metrix to help us review and assess how engaging the creative is for each ad — before it appears on Facebook. Ace Metrix will allow us to objectively measure the creative quality of the video in the Facebook environment, and highlight performance indicators for advertisers such as watchability, meaningfulness and emotional resonance. We’re taking this step in order to maintain high-quality ads on Facebook and help advertisers understand what’s working to maximize their return on investment.

Controlling the quality of advertising and its adverse impact on user experience has been a major point of emphasis at Facebook over the past year.