Will Youtube answer UN Aid agency’s call?

The U.N food aid agency has called on film makers to help it raise the awareness of hunger and bring the reality of poverty to the “You Tube” followers.

A contest was launched on Wednesday by the World Food Program (WFP) for 60 second video that geared at creating a buzz in the online community about global hunger.

The WFP communications director Nancy Roman said that for those among them who did day-in, day-out backbreaking work of getting food to hungry people, it was sometimes discouraging how people understood that hunger killed a child every five seconds. The agency has posted its own video which is available at its site www.youtube.com/hungerbytes. Towards the end of the video, a message goes on saying, in about 850 million people go to bed hungry every night.

The five best films are likely to be posted on WFP’s YouTube site, with an overall winner receiving a trip to one of the relief operations. WFP said that filmmakers had a better chance of winning if they get play on networking sites like Facebook or Myspace before the competition’s deadline on July 2008.

This isn’t the first time WFP has come up with an awareness programme using computer technology. Earlier in 2005 it launched a video game in which players could plan and distribute food drops to the people in need.

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November 21, 2007 | Filed Under Internet, Tech News | Leave a Comment

Yahoo,Sony online video deal

Sony BMG Music Entertainment has come down to a licensing deal with Yahoo Inc that could make way for people to upload files with music, the companies said on Tuesday.

Yahoo said that the financial terms of the deal were not revealed. The agreement calls Sony to receive a cut of advertising revenue. The deal covers giving out of music videos through Yahoo player applications that users can place on other sites.

This agreement marks that Yahoo has reached a deal with a major recording company over licensing content in user created videos. Sony BMG is a joint venture of Sony Corporation and Bertelsmann.

The deal reflects the recognition of user created videos, which includes copyrighted content. Sony BMG also reached a similar deal with Google Inc last year. The agreement included Google subsidiary YouTube.

Major media and Internet companies issued a set of guidelines last month which required web portals that hosted user generated videos. Earlier, Yahoo said that it was deploying video identification and filtering technology early next year.

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November 20, 2007 | Filed Under Internet, Tech News | Leave a Comment

Flickr’s up for a big hit

Flickr, Yahoo Inc’s online photo-sharing site has planned to offer this week, a set of mapping features that makes it easier to find photos based on their location. Flickr will uncover a way for web users to browse photos from tens of millions of geographically located photos loaded to its site, flickr.

A service called “Places”, finds the latest hot-spots on the global map for photo contributions.

A senior director of product management at Flickr told that it was a new way to browse to know what was happening the world over.

Flickr’s service “Places” also allows users to search more than 100,000 geographic places in order to find photos that can get attention. Most of the global cities, countries as well as regions have their own quality pages.

Flickr drives in about 40 million monthly visits and there are about 2 billion photos that are stored on the site over the past three and half years. Almost 2-3 million photos are uploaded daily, categorized by users according to location.

The global map view lets users to see photos by theme. By clicking a category tag lets them to select photos, also giving a glimpse of what other users find interesting.

Places pages for about 100,000 locations including some local information such as weather and location’s current time. The senior director of product management at Flickr said that the site was adding in about 5000 new location pages every week.

The feature is mainly focused to give more local appeal to users, also attract travelers who seek to go beyond photos of landmarks and to places they plan to visit.

Flickr presently offers places in 8 languages- English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, and Chinese.

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November 19, 2007 | Filed Under Internet, Tech News | Leave a Comment

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