You Tube Mobile goes live using H.263 streaming

I was reading the Multimedia Blog at S60.com and found this interesting post from Jukka. He was the first to report the oficial mobile version of YouTube, Nokia and YouTube announced the partnership earlier this year at 3GSM in Barcelona to put the videos on Nokia’s Nseries phones.

You can check it out by yourself at http://m.youtube.com, the specifications according to Jukka are:

• 3GP/RTSP streaming video (no downloads), when you click in any video it opens the RealPlayer.
• video codec H.263, audio codec AMR-NB
• video bitrate ~34kbps
• Streaming Server: Darwin Streaming Server v5.5.3 (Open Source) running on Linux

I’ve tested for a while on my E61 (using Wifi and EDGE) and worked pretty well, the audio and video quality is far from good, but you can definitely watch something and have a preview of the video on the go. Just one clue, don’t even bother to watch sports videos, they look terrible.

It’s interesting to see that the YouTube guys are using H.263, besides the fact that the new Symbian/Windows Mobile and other OS flavor phones already support MPEG-4, certainly the focus is on the mass. I hope they offer other options in the near future including the possibility to download the videos instead of streaming it.

Here are some screenshots:

Linus and Jonathan Schwartz light flame war

I got this links from Phillip this week and I wanted to share with you, it’s really fun to see a flame war from two top high profile tech guys. Linus first posted some comments about Sun and then Schwartz replied at his Blog and I really like Jonathan’s attitude, it was more sympathetic at least.

Linus mail: http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/6/12/232

And Jonathan’s answer: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/one_plus_one_is_fifty

Linus Torvalds talking about Source code control

Phillip Calçado sent me this very cool video with Linus talking about Git at Google. It’s a must have to see video. It’s funny to see him joking on CVS and making fun of Subvertion, too radical but, you know, that’s his character.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8[/youtube]

Oi Mobile launches campaign against operator’s lock on phones

Oi, one of the biggest mobile operators in Brazil, recently launched a big campaign, called “Bloqueio Não“, against the lock that some operators apply on their phones so that customers get stuck with them for a long period of time. The lock on mobile phones is a very common practice that telecom companies does around the world, so they can get their pay back from the discount they provide to their subscribers. So you can buy a brand new phone for almost nothing, but for that you need to sign or renew your contract for a period of two years or more.

Anyway, I’ve never saw an initiative like this one from Oi, that put the other Brazilian operators against the fence, they created a website where you can sign an electronic petition against “the lock” and you can also send a message to your operator complaining about it.

It’s a very bold move, that already get a lot of positive feedback from the users and some attention from the media, Oi is investing a lot of money on promoting this campaign using a lot of big Brazilian actors and stars on the ads, including the soccer popstar, Ronaldinho. The campaign was created by NBS agency.

Bloqueio Não Website:
http://www.bloqueionao.com.br/

Brazilian Mobile Operators Market Share:
http://www.teleco.com.br/en/en_mshare.asp

New Ask.com design

Last week Ask.com launched a new layout and some new features they are calling Ask 3D. Sometimes we are only checking on news about Yahoo and Google and we forget about the fourth player in the US market, Ask.com.

Unfortunately we don’t have Ask.com in Brazil, but is good to see that they are moving forward and innovating without copying Google and Yahoo moves. This new Ask.com is really good looking, the 3 panels are really useful, besides the fact that I think this is something for advanced users other than the average search user. They’ve added some new features that were available on the beta site, Askx.com, and there are a lot of new features, Check it out the complete list in here. And there is a interesting post at the Ask.com blog that talk about the transition from Askx to Ask 3D.

One of the coolest features is the improved “Binoculars“, which allow you to preview the website with larger images. Here is the image from a search for Globo.com

As Ask executives stated, the redesign may not take market share away from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, but it can increases the number of time the current users visit the site. Recently, in an interview to the Business 2.0 magazine, Jim Lanzone stated that Ask.com is focused on improving the search results, rather than on distractions like e-mail or blog services. “If we grow one point of market share, that translates to about 15 percent revenue growth,” Lanzone said.