How YouTube conquered the online video market: Best of the Web

These days, YouTube is almost synonymous with online video. In fact, it’s difficult to imagine an internet where an amusing cat video is not a mouse-click away.

On the 10^th anniversary of the world’s favourite streaming video site, Mashable’s Todd Wasserman takes a look at the founders who built one of the internet’s best-known brands – and sold it to Google for a cool $US1.6 billion ($A2 billion at current exchange rates):

A decade ago, Netflix meant DVDs by mail, video referred to TV and the Internet meant simple text and pictures.

All that changed in about 20 months. That was the period in which three former PayPal employees created YouTube on Feb. 14, 2005 and sold it to Google for $1.6 billion on Oct. 9, 2006.

The journey began with a possibly fictitious dinner party in San Francisco and ended with a breakfast at Denny’s in Redwood City, California. In between, there were maxed out credit cards, arguments over copyrights, humungous rats, a cameo by MC Hammer and the exit of a third, mysterious founder. When it was all over, digital media would be completely transformed.

Five reasons why the cloud ERP market is set to grow in 2015

Over at Forbes, Louis Columbus lists five catalysts set to cause cloud ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems growth to accelerate this year. For example, Columbus says one of the factors is the growth of mobile, and that enabling sales, production and service teams with mobile devices can give productivity a shot in the arm for many businesses:

The more complex a manufacturer’s supply chain, distribution, selling and service channels become to support new business models, the more critical mobility is.  Traditional, legacy on premise ERP systems were often designed to support volume-driven business models and slowly-changing selling strategies. They were built for production scale, not market speed. The proliferation of new business models predicated on giving customers greater freedom in how they define their products require ERP systems that can scale quickly for product and service exceptions. One of the best tests of an ERP system is whether it can scale reliability across entirely new selling channels and provide an excellent customer experience at the same time.

Why home automation isn’t all it’s cracked up to be

In recent times, there has been tremendous hype about how the Internet of Things (IoT) is paving the way towards home automation. One of the players in the emerging market, alongside Google-owned Nest and Australian brands such as LiFX and Ninja Sphere, is US home automation brand Wink.

Unfortunately, as Adam Clark Estes discovered in this Gizmodo article, the reality of Wink didn’t quite meet the hype:

Last summer, when I stepped into an expensive-looking SoHo loft where Quirky was unveiling its new Wink system, I had high hopes. The plug-and-play platform was designed to turn any house with Wi-Fi and a couple connected devices into a smart home. Quirky set up Wink as a separate company and partnered with Home Depot so Americans could easily buy all their Wink-related products in one convenient place. Even Quirky’s longtime partner GE was buying into the platform and making some of its products Wink-compatible. It all sounded so ambitious, so appealing, and so impossible. Kind of like communism.

…

Pretty much as soon as my Wink hub arrived, the problems started, and it didn’t take long for that excitement to turn into frustration. Without going into the mind-numbing details of each individual point of frustration, let me sum up the experience very bluntly: Not a single Wink product worked as advertised right out of the box.

Indictments issued as Samsung battles LG over a broken washing machine

Finally, in September last year during one of the world’s largest consumer electronics shows, the IFA in Germany, Samsung felt a little dirty about the activities of its long-time rival LG.

German newspaper Berliner Kurier reported at the time about an incident in which “a group of people” allegedly damaged whitegoods at a major Berlin department store, Saturn im Europa-Center.

At the time, Samsung accused the head of LG’s home appliance division, Seong-jin Jo, along with other senior executives, of vandalising the doors on three Samsung washing machines that were on display in the store.

According to Yewon Kang in IT World, Samsung is still dirty at the situation. As of Sunday, Jo was reportedly indicted over the incident:

LG Electronics has released a video in defense of its executive who was indicted Sunday by prosecutors in Seoul for allegedly damaging Samsung Electronics’ washing machines before a show.

It released Monday closed-circuit television footage showing Jo Seong-jin, the head of LG’s home appliance division, testing Samsung products including washing machines, dish washers and refrigerators before the IFA electronics show in Berlin last September.