Despite the now infamous absence of Adboe’s Flash, video aggregator MeFeedia says that video on the iPad is a flourishing and growing trend according to the data the company has collected over the past three weeks.

The company offers a few stats and postulates that, among other reasons, the “lack of distractions mean people watch more video, for longer.”

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MeFeedia added HTML5 video support earlier this month – one of several alternatives available for video on the iPad – and says that its internal numbers show the iPad to clearly be a media consumption device, moreso than other users.

The company offers the following observations on its blog, noting that the “iPad was only launched a few weeks ago & this sample is for MeFeedia and MeFeedia Network only.”

• iPad is now the 5th most popular mobile device*
  *In terms of unique users, trailing only iPhone, iPod Touch, SymbianOS, and Android (in that order)
• iPad users consume 3X as many videos as web users (up from the 2.5X number that we first reported a few weeks ago)
• iPad users spend 4X as long watching videos as web users (up from 3X)
• iPad users consume 5X as many videos as iPhone users (up from 3X)

We think that the lack of multitasking as a reason for people to watch more video, longer, is likely a fair point. And, as we’ve previously argued, the iPad makes a great media consumption (rather than creation) device.

Discuss

The Internet of Things is the idea of a web of data provided by things like real-world devices and sensors. It’s something we’ve covered in great detail here at ReadWriteWeb because where there is data, there is a platform for services and mashups. When that data is intimately tied to our real lives off-line, that’s exciting. The Internet of Things offers a whole new world of opportunities for improved decision making, innovative services and (unfortunately) social surveillance. It’s loaded with implications to consider.

Whether you’ve got 5 or 30 minutes to spare, check out the two following videos (one short, one long) that both do a great job of explaining where the Internet of Things is at and why it’s so exciting.

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Last week industry thought leader Tim O’Reilly, the man widely credited with popularizing the term Web 2.0, gave an opening keynote talk about the Internet of Things at his organization’s MYSQL conference. Some readers here might assume that a MYSQL talk is too technical for them, but this was a speech that anyone could appreciate. We’ve embedded below two videos. The first is a great 5 minute explanation of the Internet of Things from IBM. The next is O’Reilly’s 36 minute keynote. We highly recommend you check both out for a great picture of where the future is headed.

Above, from IBM’s Smarter Planet. Below, Tim O’Reilly at the O’Reilly MYSQL conference.

Of course it’s not all peachy keen. As O’Reilly explains at the 18 minute mark, there is a battle over control of all this data the web is being flooded with.

“You see increasingly the giants of the internet are trading for their own account, they are building a platform in which all roads lead back to themselves. Now there is a contervailing force for openess, but we have to wary, we have to be aware of that, we have to work for openess in that web.”

What do you think about the Internet of Things?

Caption image from the Internet of Things 2010 Conference coming up in Tokyo this November.

Discuss

U.S. Internet users watched 28.1 billion videos in February, with Google sites leading the way as the top video property wit 11.9 billion videos, accounting for 42.5 percent of all videos viewed online, according to the latest report from comScore.

YouTube accounted for more than 99 percent of all videos viewed at the property. Hulu ranked second with 912.5 million videos, representing 3.2 percent of all online videos viewed. Microsoft sites landed in the third spot with 623 million (2.2%), trailed by Yahoo sites with 455 million (1.6%) and Turner Network with 318 million (1.1%).

More than 174 million viewers watched an average of 161 videos per viewer during the month of February. Google sites attracted 132.2 million unique viewers during the month (93.9 videos per viewer), followed by Yahoo sites with 53.5 million viewers (8.5 videos per viewer) and CBS Interactive with 45.3 million viewers (6.4 videos per viewer). The average Hulu viewer watched 23.3 videos during the month, representing another all time high for the property.

In February, Tremor Media ranked as the leading video ad network with a potential reach of 81.7 million viewers, or 46.9 percent of the total video viewing audience. YuMe Video Network ranked second with a potential reach of 75.5 million viewers (43.3% penetration) followed closely by Advertising.com Video Network with 74.8 million viewers (42.9%).

Other key findings from comScore include:

*83.1% of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.

*132.4 million viewers watched 11.9 billion videos on YouTube (89.5 videos per viewer).

*The length of the average online video was 4.3 minutes.
 

The App store for iPad is live and it includes a number of apps for business use.It’s a mixed bag, with media publications alongside apps from Cisco, LinekdIn and Box.net.

We got a demo of the Box.net app, and it provides a glimpse into how the iPad changes the customer experience, compared to the iPhone or a laptop.

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We’re not sure how a customer may actually use the app. The Box.net team says it may have an impact when a salesperson brings it to a sales meeting. They say the “business meeting” use case is there. But we agree with them when they also say that there will be a lot of use cases they did not anticipate.

Box.net focused on taking advantage of the larger screen and so it can be used in a number of orientations.

Initally, people will have the capability to view and share documents . Eventually, we can expect to see some of the new features that Box.net introduced in the past few months, including its viewer for watching videos in the Box.net environment. That would be interesting if no other reason than to see an enterprise-focused company adopt HTML5, as the iPad does not support Adobe Flash.

In the next few weeks, the company will add more features for the app:

• Download files from Box.net to the iPad
• Upload files from the iPad to Box.net
• Work with iWorks suite
• Ability to open third-party apps to edit certain files
• Launch the Box.net Ipad app from third-party apps

The iPad is not designed for creating documents. It looks like it better for viewing and sharing more than anything else. The keyboard is a shift that will take time to adjust to. Is the keyboard going extinct? If so, we still have a long way to go with the multi-touch experience.

The app is available for free from the App Store on the iPad or at www.itunes.com/appstore/.

Discuss

Today, YouTube migrated its user videos over to a new design. The design was available before now, and has been in development for months, but today was the day all the videos got their Sunday go-to-meeting clothes on.

In a January post, Julian Frumar, a YouTube user experience designer, commented on YouTube’s blog that the old design could appear “cluttered and a little overwhelming.” (Julian, by the way, is up for an Understatement of the Year Award.)

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In the intervening months, YouTube has experimented with a cleaner design that made “the video the star.”

Other changes besides the focus on the video include a thumbs-up/thumbs-down rating system to replace the 1-5 scale, a finessed up-next video list, an easier-to-find subscription button and integrated video and text comments.

Is it a hit so far? Er. Nuh-uh.

On today’s YouTube blog post announcing the change, there were… comments – hundreds of them as invested users chimed in. And the chimes sounded pretty discordant. As of this posting, the word “suck” was used 14 times, “terrible” and “shit” tied at nine times each, the word “crap” six times and “bad” five times.

Lies, damned lies and statistics? Maybe. Representative comments included the following: “Looks like crap, keep up the horrible work.”

Firefox Twitter sentiment analysis gave the changes a 15-12 positive-negative rating. But TwitterFeel disagreed, with real-time analysis overwhelmingly negative.

Discuss

The Google Apps Marketplace has launched a YouTube channel to promote its third-party partners.

Less than a third of the vendors have posted videos to the YouTube channel. Google Apps is not rocket science but the idea of integrating third-party applications into Google Apps is a new concept for most customers. The YouTube channel will by no means make an app successful. But it does provide a channel to explain what the product does and how it fits with Google Apps Marketplace. And the video can be used in different channels, too, such as on a blog or Facebook.

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So far, the YouTube channel includes 16 videos. Overall, 60 vendors are now part of the Google Apps Marketplace. Some of the videos are pretty professional, done in the Common Craft vein. But surprisingly, many are pretty mediocre, telling us little about the products and how they integrate with Google Apps Marketplace. Others tell too much about how the product works, not providing a clear value statement about the integration.

Of the videos on the YouTube channel, Aviary is one of our favorites. Aviary is a service with tools to create graphics, edit images and do basic design. In smart fashion, Aviary then uses its blog to show how they used their own tools to produce the video.

Jira Studios from Atassian is a service to manage software development projects. It’s short and to the point, telling us why the service is a value to customers.

The YouTube video from Concur Breeze is entertaining but it does not explain the product at all. Only in the last few seconds do we see someone doing their expenses online using the Concur product.

On the contrary, Expensify gets right to the point. It’s just 32 seconds. It looks like a video the founder made it with a USB microphone but that’s okay. He gets to the point – fast.

Mindmeister is mind mapping tool. They show the problem that comes when fleshing out ideas then go directly into a demo of how the product work and fits with Google Apps Marketplace.

Drawloop has a complex product to explain but 2:42 is a bit too long for most people. Tell this story in less than 90 seconds and we think it could have a lot more value for the viewer.

Conclusion

The vendors that created videos for Google Apps Marketplace deserve some credit for at least taking advantage of the YouTube channel. But what is it about trying to be cute? Some of these videos are like advertisements. That can be fine and well for a blog or for an event but it seems like a lost opportunity for a YouTube channel on Google Apps Marketplace.

Discuss

Google just launched a new Google Labs product for Google Reader: Google Reader Play. Reader Play is a new, highly visual way to browse your Google Reader subscriptions that is somewhat reminiscent of Google’s Fast Flip. It replaces the busy Google Reader interface with an interface that focuses on a single story. Whenever a post includes videos or images, Play with highlight these and give you the option to read more of the text as well. This new interface allows you to browse through the feeds you already subscribe to, but Google Reader Play also emphasizes Google Reader’s ability to recommend items from around the web for you based on your preferences.

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Big on Recommendations

As Google notes, Play will learn from your preferences, based on the articles you read and “like.” You can also choose from a set of categories (tech, entertainment, arts, business, etc.) and Google Reader will create a personalized stream of items just for you. According to Google, Play uses the same algorithm as the Recommended Items feed in Google Reader.

Play will even work if you don’t have a Google account. While you can’t star, like or share items, you can still browse interesting posts based on the categories you choose. This should make it a good tool for those users who don’t want to go through the effort of setting up a feed reader and subscribing to hundreds of different feeds.

Get Started

To use Google Reader Play, just head over here or look for “View in Reader Play” in the folder settings in Google Reader. You can switch stories by using your arrow keys or choose the slideshow mode that will automatically forward to the next story after a few second.

Discuss

Last year, Google’s Matt Cutts dropped the bomb (to put it in the exaggerated tone that many took the news in), that Google was considering taking site speed into consideration as one of many potential ranking factors for search results.

Is your site’s performance up to snuff? Comment here.

This of course freaked a lot of people out, but as Matt and Google as a whole has maintained, this would not trump relevance. It would be taken more into consideration when there are two sites of relatively equal relevance, but one site loads faster and delivers a better user experience. Matt reiterated this point in an interview we did with him this week at SMX.

WebProNews also chatted with Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer for Google at SMX, about website performance (speed), how that pertains to search rankings and the user experience, and some tips for making sure your site is up to speed, so to speak.

As far as site speed as a ranking factor, Ohye pretty much makes the same point as Cutts, and it’s probably not going to be something where all of a sudden all of the faster sites are ranking better and the slower ones are doing worse. But it does enhance the user experience, and she refers to a study that found that an optimized site actually increased conversions by 16%. So if you’re not optimizing your site’s performance for Google, maybe that’s a good enough reason on its own.

Watch the video to get some specific advice regarding some simple adjustments you can make to your site that can make a big difference.

If you’re one of those freaking out about getting your site performance optimized, you may feel better after hearing what she has to say, and realize that it might not be as big a deal as you thought.

By the way, Cutts also mentioned that the speed thing is completly independent of Caffeine.

Do you think site performance is a manageable attribute of your search engine marketing strategy? Discuss here.

This week, YouTube launched Safety Mode, an opt-in setting that helps users screen out potentially objectionable videos. We asked YouTube how it works. For example, is there human intervention involved?

"Safety Mode goes above and beyond the flagging system and manual review to use community signals to filter out content that may be objectionable," YouTube tells WebProNews. "YouTube’s filters use proprietary technology and algorithms to identify and filter potentially objectionable content."

That’s about as in-depth as they were willing to get on that, but YouTube has acknowledged that it’s not 100% perfect, calling it just another step in their ongoing desire to give users more control over what they see on the site.

Don’t expect YouTube to start accepting more "objectionable" content now that it has Safety Mode available. All content still has to comply with YouTube’s community guidelines.

To use Safety Mode, simply click on the link at the bottom of any video page. The setting can be locked on that browser with your YouTube password.

YouTube is readying the launch of an automatic captions feature for the site’s videos. This and a new automatic caption timing feature will make it easier for anyone to add captions to their videos, and will enable anyone to read captions on more videos.

"Since the original launch of captions in our products, we’ve been happy to see growth in the number of captioned videos on our services, which now number in the hundreds of thousands," says software engineer Ken Harrenstien, who helped design YouTube’s caption features. "This suggests that more and more people are becoming aware of how useful captions can be. As we’ve explained in the past, captions not only help the deaf and hearing impaired, but with machine translation, they also enable people around the world to access video content in any of 51 languages. Captions can also improve search and even enable users to jump to the exact parts of the videos they’re looking for." (emphasis added)

"However, like everything YouTube does, captions face a tremendous challenge of scale," adds Harrenstein. "Every minute, 20 hours of video are uploaded. How can we expect every video owner to spend the time and effort necessary to add captions to their videos? Even with all of the captioning support already available on YouTube, the majority of user-generated video content online is still inaccessible to people like me."

To help with this problem, Google has utilized its automatic speech recognition technology, and integrated it with YouTube’s caption system to offer automatic captions. The captions generated by this will not always be perfect, as you can imagine, but as Harrenstein notes, even when they are flawed, they can still be quite helpful. He also says the technology will continue to improve over time.

YouTube is also launching automatic caption timing to make it easier to create captions manually. With this feature, users can just create a simple text file with all the words in the video, and Google will use the automatic speech recognition technology to figure out where the words are spoken and create the captions for the video. That’s pretty useful stuff.

Google says both new features will be available in English by the end of the week. At first, auto-caps will only be visible on a few partner channels, so they can get feedback. Eventually, they will roll out more broadly.

Related Articles:

> YouTube Adds Captions Option to API

> YouTube Now Allowing For Captions

> YouTube Translation Should Help Globalize Videos

As you may know, Google has been sending out Google Wave invitations for a little while now. Many people are still finding these hard to come by, but others have been lucky enough to be selected and get their hands dirty.

Those who have been granted access to Google Wave have the ability to nominate people for invitation, but not directly invite people themselves. So in other words, you’re not getting in unless Google wants you to. They have to approve your nomination.

Unfortunately, that means those outside of the tech-savvy developer crowd and those who can actually access Google Wave, there is still a lot of mystery around the service. People want to know how it works.

The preview comes with a wave featuring a video from "Dr. Wave," or Product Manager Greg. The video is embedded below, but he points to different features within the interface, so imagine that it is placed as it is in the above screenshot.

Google Wave brings its own terminology to the table. For one, a wave itself is a collection of messages. Those messages within a wave are "blips." Blips can be edited and replied to. Anyone that is in the wave at the same time can see replies and blips being typed live in real time. That’s live. You can see the characters appear as they are typed.

If you really want to see how Google Wave works, watch this series of videos that Google provides in the preview (they’re all very short):

There are other videos that appear in the preview, but these are probably the most useful ones for showing how Wave works.

Now the version of Google Wave that people have access to is just a "preview." It doesn’t even come with a beta tag. It’s still quite early. Even parts within the preview version are clearly marked as under construction (things like key settings).

The videos provided do not begin to scratch the surface of the potential of Google Wave. With Google allowing developers to create apps or "gadgets" for it, the possibilities will likely be limitless. But as a general "getting to know you" for the common user, the videos provided pretty much explain the core of Google Wave.
 
Have you used Google Wave yet? Share your thoughts.

Related Articles:

> Will Google Wave Shape the Future of Online Communication?

> Is Google Wave Getting An App Store?

> Google Wave Invitations Roll Out/span>

IPhone app sharing service AppsFire (our review) has announced a contest to highlight the best still-unlaunched iPhone apps under development and ReadWriteWeb will be part of the judging. Called the App Star Awards, the contest will evaluate 30-second videos about apps under development.

The iPhone app environment is absurdly overcrowded and hard to navigate – AppsFire is one of my favorite solutions to that problem. The service lets you email links to apps you want to share on your phone. It’s simple but so useful! A contest to start the hype for apps before they get buried in the app store is smart.

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Below are my favorite iPhone apps right now, shared in an AppsFire widget. I hope this contest will expose me to all kinds of new apps that will eventually land on this list as well.

We’ll get to learn about great apps and the app makers will get a small amount of cash and a large amount of publicity. You can register to participate at the page for the AppStar Contest.

Google’s Matt Cutts has posted a new video talking about how Google deals with geographic targeting. This is a subject he has tackled on more than one occasion in the past, but in this latest one, he is elaborating on it a bit more, and explains that Google is looking more and more at this stuff as time goes on.

This particular video deals specifically with using Webmaster Tools to tell Google what country your site is relevant to. Cutts says the team that deals with what sites are relevant for which countries is starting to show, for example, dot coms a little bit more for other countries’ searchers. 

He says one thing Google is trying to use as a signal is what users specify in Webmaster Central. For example, if you own a dot com but you’re more relevant to a specific country like Australia, you can specify that.

"Now the one thing to be careful of is not to sort of mix that up," he says. "For example, there was a site that was talking about a directory of streets that was really, really relevant to Singapore. Whenever you loaded it up, even though it was a dot com, it pretty much started with the island of Singapore and that was all you saw. Well, this site, we thought was about Singapore and they went in to webmaster central and they sort of changed their setting to say, ‘no, no we’re relevant to the U.S.’"

"Now, if you do that, if we think that you’re relevant to a specific country like Singapore and you change it to the dot U.S.," he adds. "What that can end up doing is you don’t show up for people in Singapore as much as you might not show up as much for people in the united states."

So basically, don’t use this as a way to try and optimize for other countries just to get more views from that country. What will happen is you will be more likely to not show up as much anywhere. Watch the video:

Here are a couple more geo-related videos from Cutts. They’re all fairly short and to the point.

Google has announced a new feature for AdSense mobile publishers, which lets them serve text and image ads on their sites, specifically optimized for high-end smartphones like the iPhone, Android devices, and the Palm Pre.

With the launch of the feature, publishers can run larger AdSense ads on these phones, whereas before, they could only serve smaller ads.

"High-end mobile phones, like iPhone, Android-powered devices and the Palm Pre, continue to grow — Gartner estimates that global sales of smartphones will soar by 27% in 2009, to 177 million units. Naturally, as a result more and more people are browsing the web on the go," says Google software engineer Danielle VanDyke. "Because these devices offer a browsing experience that is similar to desktop computers, advertising on smartphones is a natural extension for any AdWords campaign."

Google says the addition of this feature will help "nurture the smartphone ecosystem," by encouraging users to create more mobile content.

To make the feature work, Google introduced a new JavaScript snippet that’s optimized for mobile "to reduce latency" on high-end mobile phones. The snippet also allows publishers to select additional ad unit sizes from common AdSense formats.

"However, if you’re targeting all mobile devices, or if you’re unable to make changes to your website, you don’t have to update your AdSense code in order to enable larger AdSense ads to show on high-end devices," says VanDyke. "We’ll automatically detect if the user is browsing with a high-end phone, and instead of serving a smaller mobile WAP ad, we’ll return a larger ad optimized for high-end mobile devices."

The new feature certainly opens up new opportunities for AdSense publishers, who have had some additional benefits announced recently. Just the other day Google announced that it would extend YouTube promoted videos to AdSense for example. Google also recently announced the addition of ad networks to the competition pool for AdSense.