Abhishek Tiwari

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

The rumor around GDrive has been around for last couple of years. There were those who even built software to utilize GMail’s storage space as a drive loadable onto your PC. The combined value of their effort in the online office space and the $100 laptop intiative along with the GDrive was touted as the next big thing.

Finally today Google announced (in a subtle way) their plans for offering additional storage to it’s users. Launched by their Picasa team, it is being positioned as a very simple and easy way to extend storage for your existing Google services. Currently you can extend it to support your GMail (current capacity: 2.8 GB) and Picasa Web Albums (1GB). Naturally they plan to extend it to other services like Docs and Spreadsheets. Users can simply purchase extra storage with straight forward plans listed below.

• 6 GB ($20.00 per year)
• 25 GB ($75.00 per year)
• 100 GB ($250.00 per year)
• 250 GB ($500.00 per year)

Read more »

Share This

This is very interesting. Just few days back I was talking about what Media Networks should do in order to catch up to the online social media phenomenon. While channel surfing last night I landed on ABC (Channel 7) and caught the later half of a new show called i-CAUGHT. Turns out that this was not just another TV show on ABC milking the online videos. This is a big initiative from ABC News. They launched this service yesterday and it was their first show at 10/9 Central.

I was pleasantly surprised to see a major network like ABC foray into this space, in order to bring the TV and Online Social Media experience together. I must say it was real weird at first, as I am not used to watching YouTube style videos on my TV (yeah, I know I need to buy the Apple TV). Also they had some seriously insane graphics on the show. It reminded me of minority report as the host flipped through the video. Here is the introductory video from i-CAUGHT.

Read more »

Share This

Few weeks back I wrote about Comscore publishing metrics around the online video market. They reported that Google was the clear leader with 21.5% of the market-share. This obviously is post their YouTube acquisition.

Since then there hasnt been much noise in the space. There have been few blurbs here and there about similar services offering incremental features but nothing groundbreaking to speak of. However while browsing TechCrunch today I stumbled upon a post about a new service from HongKong called MEGAVIDEO.

These guys are solely aimed at displacing YouTube from the #1 spot. Please bear in mind that they feature nowhere in the ComScore top 10. Talk about focus.

The video below presents their 10 reasons to use their service versus YouTube.

Read more »

Share This

Back in April Accenture conducted a survey of 110 senior media executives (TV, Radio, Music etc), where they see the growing ability and eagerness of individuals to create their own content as one of the biggest threats to their business.

Some of the stats were:

• 57% of the respondents identified the rapid growth of user-generated content — which includes amateur digital videos, podcasts, mobile phone photography, wikis and social-media blogs — as one of the top three challenges they face today.
• 70% of respondents said they believe that social media, one of the largest segments of user-generated content, will continue to grow, while only 3 percent of respondents view social media as a fad.

Read more »

Share This

First it was the Mechanical Turk and the Elastic Computing Cloud. People didn’t pay much attention. Then Mr.Bezos introduced the S3 (Simple Storage Service). It was one of the best services to come around in quite some time for the startup community. It was (and still is) the cheapest storage solution available with absolutely zero upfront costs. Check out this conversation between Arrington and Bezos. Om Malik also reported that how the startups were adopting this service.

Amazon also launched Alexa, which has become the defacto service for measuring web ranking and traffic analysis. I dont think I have to mention the popularity Alexa has gained since its launch. Now on August 2nd, Amazon added a new service to its quiver, the Amazon FPS (Flexible Payment Service).

Continuing its commitment to Web Services, Amazon has launched this service primarily for developers. This is a very flexible offering, which will allow developers of any eCommerce web entities to creatively offer various payment options. Frankly PayPal is getting old and slow. With PayPal there are many hard set rules, which do not offer developers much control. In addition using this service allows developers to leverage the 69+ Million Amazon users who have immediate payment access by simply using their credentials. Read more »

Share This