… users are uploading something like 15 hours of video per minute to YouTube.

Simply mind-boggling. That’s roughly 2½ years worth of video uploaded every single day that needs to be stored, transcoded, hosted and streamed.

One recent report concluded that the company was losing nearly half a billion dollars a year, while another pegged it at a more modest $174 million.

So Soapbox is dead. Does anybody care? Didn’t think so.

The interesting part is how hard it is to carve out your niche in what is supposed to be the most decentralized of cyber-worlds.

The truth is that Soapbox never stood a chance. YouTube was always the place to go for user-generated videos…

Just by looking at its history and timing, Soapbox was more of a desperate attempt than a serious competitor.

Admittedly Microsoft didn’t try very hard, but the visitor numbers must have been devastating if they decided to can the project completely. All the more props to companies like Vimeo for successfully competing in this space.

Take a service with one of the worst reputations with regards to quality, take away the only positive aspect it had (free stuff) and start charging money for it.

Brilliant!

… each handset model is designed with a customized user interface…

Despite their advanced hardware, handsets here often have primitive, clunky interfaces…

Even cell phones have become so advanced that developing a new interface for each new phone just doesn’t work anymore. You just have to invest in a mobile OS platform that you can evolve over a long period of time. Re-inventing the wheel for each new hardware iteration has simply become impossible.

As someone who’s writing software for a living this is in no way a revelation to me. I’m somewhat shocked, albeit not exactly surprised, it has taken this long for the message to trickle up the corporate chain.

echo "Hello World!";