When YouTube hit the internet in 2005, it changed the way we view videos online. Suddenly Web users could search for almost anything and watch related videos instantly. Now viewing video has become an everyday activity and users all over the world spend billions of hours watching online video.

I have been fortunate enough be part of a closed beta realease for a new video service called Image2Play developed by Korean startup Enswers. As soon as I used Image2Play, I knew straight away that it had that ‘wow’ factor which could definitely revolutionize the online videos space in the same way that YouTube has. I took a closer look at the company to find out more about Image2Play and its other services.

Enswers was founded five years ago and the company’s name is a combination of ‘entertainment’ and ‘answer’. Essentially, the company aims to provide entertainment-related solutions and products, and is deeply involved in online media and search technology. Enswers recently announced that it had been acquired by major operator KT, but the company has been busy developing several products over recent years.

Image2Play

Image2Play is Enswers’ latest service which searches for videos via images on a webpage. Operated through a browser plug-in, the service automatically takes all images displayed on a webpage and runs them through its database of millions of videos in a matter of seconds. If the image returns a match, a play button is displayed in the top-right corner, after which the click of the button instantly plays the video match. Originally only a Chrome plug-in was available but recently support for both Internet Explorer and Firefox was added to the closed beta.

While using the closed beta, I was surprised by just how often I used the service. Whether browsing a news site or blog, once the play button pops up, it is very hard to resist clicking to watch related video content. Though videos appear to only be a minute long, it is enough to give you more information on the image or simply watch a good portion of the video it came from. Enswers also plans to allow embedding in blogs so users who do not have the plug-in installed can still view videos via the service.

Worldwide, the number of users uploading content continues to grow and finding videos or clips of copyrighted material has become a lot harder these days due to sites like YouTube clamping down on unlicensed uploads. Enswers has solved this problem by going straight to media outlets from the beginning and it has agreements to prevent any breach of copyright.

The extensive amount of video available from major networks, cable channels and even movie channels is very impressive. The benefit for broadcasters lies in publicity and revenue, as Enswers also intends to add marketing and purchasing features — users could, for example, purchase a DVD series or movie from the matching search result.

The domestic market in South Korea is Image2Play’s primary target market but the service has already picked up considerable interest internationally. Earlier this year, Enswers was chosen from a number of teams from Korea, China and Japan to demonstrate at the AsiaD conference in Hong Kong. As the video below shows, COO Sherman Li showed how Image2Play technology can also be used in conjunction with mobile devices.

Other Services

Enswers’ other products have also helped the company’s success. In early 2011, it acquired popular Korean entertainment site Soompi, a service that allows users to subtitle episodes of foreign TV programs and dramas so a wider audience can enjoy them. Enswers revamped the website using its own media technology. The site has been hugely successful worldwide drawing approximately 6 million visitors per month, boosted by the growing popularity of Korean dramas and music around the world.

One of the company’s earlier services – enswer.me – is a video search tool which utilizes a number of different video sites including YouTube, Veoh, Hulu and other international sites such as China’s Youku, Japan’s NicoNicoDouga and Korea’s Pandora.tv.

Searches through the service cross-reference to filter out irrelevant duplicate videos, showing the number of overlapping videos that exist across the services. According to its website, Enswer.me uses “proprietary ClusterRank search algorithm and VideoFuse large-scale clustering technology” to do this.

Enswers’ products and technology are also licensed to other businesses, such as Platform-V, a P2P platform which monetizes downloadable content while ensuring copyright of content is protected. Other solutions such as audio fingerprinting technology and interactive TV with smartphones are also listed as solutions that Enswers offers.

Though Image2Play will initially be aimed at the domestic market first, PR manager Kim Ju-yeon explains that Enswers sees the service as having worldwide potential:

“Of course all companies compete in the market, but going global is one of our main goals and we can reach it with our technology.”

➤ Enswers | Image2Play

Gideon Yu has had quite an illustrious career in technology, having been the former CFO at Facebook and before that, YouTube. Yu led the negotiations for the $1.65B sale of the latter company to Google. Last year, he decided to take the leap to sports and joined the San Franisco 49ers as the Chief Strategy Officer.

In less than a year, Yu has gotten a promotion and it’s a big one. Today, the 49ers announced that Gideon Yu is now the President and Co-Owner of the team.

Here’s what Niners CEO Jed York had to say about Yu’s promotion:

Gideon brings us a truly unique set of experiences and talents, and he will be a guiding force in our drive to continue the winning tradition of this franchise. He’s both a visionary and the ‘go-to’ guy who can lead us through the enormous opportunities ahead such as, the stadium construction, expansion of our brand and its businesses, and positioning the franchise for the future. We have more to do now than ever before, and Gideon is the right person to get the job done.

The San Francisco 49ers became the toast of Silicon Valley again after a stellar year that saw its head coach Jim Harbaugh win NFL’s “Coach of the Year” award in his first season at the helm.

Unfortunately for those of us in downtown San Francisco, Yu is working hard on a Santa Clara stadium project, taking the 49ers further away from its core fanbase.

Google has been tinkering with the black bar that shows up at the top of any Google property that you’re on. It’s a powerful way to let its users seamlessly jump back and forth between the huge number of services that the company offers.

Currently, the Google bar lets you share things on Google+ and displays a few top-level links to things like Google Maps and Gmail. We reported the new look a few days ago, and it according to an official post from Google, those changes should start rolling out for everyone very soon.

The Google bar will also carry a handy unified search box at all times.

Currently, your Google bar looks something like this:

Among the changes rolling out are the inclusion of YouTube, Calendar, and Documents into the top-level links:

A link that got the heave-ho was Shopping, which currently gives you a variation of Google search with items you can compare prices for. The link to Video went to a Google search for videos and that has now been replaced by a direct link to YouTube.

I’m pretty excited about Calendar and Documents getting the top-level treatment, but I’d rather be able to customize what gets shown in the bar, which would make it way more useful for me. For example, with Google Drive reportedly coming out in the next few weeks, it’d be nice to have fast access to it whenever I’m using another Google product.

At the end of last year, we told you about a new project by YouTube called the “YouTube Slam“. The project pits two videos against one another in a “hot or not” style competition. The site lets you watch two videos and decide which one is better, or in the case of comedy, funnier.

That project alone wasn’t scientific or geeky enough for Google, so the company decided to delve deeper into what makes videos funnier and how the company can detect that you enjoyed it more than any other old video.

One place the company decided to go was within the comments on all of the videos that participated in the YouTube Slam. By looking at the content of the comments, it found that many people would leave a quick “hahaha” or “LOL”. Comments that display the humor you found in the video can help the company rank the popularity of a video in a slightly different way. This data on top of what it was already collecting with your votes, might just tell us which videos are actually funnier.

Surprisingly, the company found that the more o’s you put in your LOL comments on the video, the funnier you thought it was. It was a pattern it picked up time and time again, so Google has decided to build it in to an algorithm which ranks the funniest videos:

Next we needed an algorithm to rank these funny videos by comedic potential, e.g. is “Charlie bit my finger” funnier than “David after dentist”? Raw viewcount on its own is insufficient as a ranking metric since it is biased by video age and exposure. We noticed that viewers emphasize their reaction to funny videos in several ways: e.g. capitalization (LOL), elongation (loooooool), repetition (lolololol), exclamation (lolllll!!!!!), and combinations thereof. If a user uses an “loooooool” vs an “loool”, does it mean they were more amused? We designed features to quantify the degree of emphasis on words associated with amusement in viewer comments. We then trained a passive-aggressive ranking algorithm using human-annotated pairwise ground truth and a combination of text and audiovisual features. Similar to Music Slam, we used this ranker to populate candidates for human voting for our Comedy Slam.

How scientific is it exactly? Your guess is as good as mine, but the minds at Google always come up with a way to quantify huge amounts of data so the “LOLSignal” sounds just as good as any other.

If you haven’t participated in the YouTube Slam project yet, it’s a fun way to kill boredom for hours on end.

There is no doubt that the White House has become more social than it ever has been since Barack Obama was elected president. His campaign team took to Twitter to discuss important topics during his campaign in 2008, and continues to do so in 2012, which is also an election year.

The work that his campaign has done in the last four years will have a lasting effect on the White House forever, though. On the 30th, Barack Obama will be answering questions live in a Google+ Hangout. Read that sentence again, crazy right?

Tonight’s yearly State of the Union address is President Obama’s most important speech this year, as it will serve as a report card for how he’s done during his first term. Having said that, it will be the most interactive SOTU address the world has ever seen. Here are just a few ways that you can watch the speech live at 9pm ET and interact with the Presidential staff afterwards.

Watch live on YouTube

YouTube has become a huge part of the Obama administration. His weekly addresses have hundreds of thousands of views, and serve as the perfect archive of his progress to date.

The White House goes so far as to provide the schedule for the SOTU on its site along with a gigantic embed of the YouTube feed that will be switched on at 9pm ET. There is no mention of news channels or television on this page whatsoever, it’s all about the web. The White House also promises a brand new experience with an “Enhanced Version” that will display supporting statistics, graphs, and other information on top of the broadcast.

Send tweets to the White House

During the SOTU, White House staff will be actively monitoring tweets using the hashtag #SOTU on Twitter. After the speech, the White House promises that that it will be answering questions and interacting with those who are using the hashtag. This type of interaction during such an important event is unheard of, and the democratic process has become more transparent than it’s ever been. You can also drop questions onto the White House Facebook page, but it doesn’t seem to be getting as much push as Twitter is.

It will be interesting to watch which questions get responded to on Twitter, because the White House is bound to get inundated with a lot of tweets quickly, and some of them might not be so nice. The Washington Post reports that tweet tracking site Topsy shows that the #SOTU hashtag has been used over 13,000 times as of 2pm today, and the speech hasn’t even started.

Needless to say, these won’t be the type of polished questions that the White House is used to fielding from a trained press corp.

Ask questions on Quora

While YouTube and Twitter seem like commonplace for the White House at this point, one interesting twist was its promise to answer questions on popular geeky Q&A site Quora.

According to AllThingsD, White House officials will answer the questions posed to them in the “coming days”, as the site doesn’t have quite the same real-time expectations that Twitter does. It’s also likely that users on Quora will ask more in-depth questions, as they’re not held to using 140 characters like you are on Twitter, either.

On a special SOTU page that Quora set up, you can ask your questions starting now, as well as watch the live stream of the speech.

Will you participate?

It seems like the White House has everyone covered with interactive technology when it comes to asking the questions that they want answered, but it will be interesting to watch the spikes in activity based on what the President is talking about. Those types of stats and graphs will probably be made available tomorrow by Twitter.

This will most certainly be the most interactive speech made by a United States President ever, and we’ll all be watching to see how the White House staff handles the explosion of content that comes out of it.

Will you be watching the State of the Union Address tonight? If so, how? Tell us in the comments!

Two days ago, the White House joined Google+. It has announced its first order of business: a post State of the Union Google+ Hangout where you can ask the President Barack Obama your questions, and even become take part in the video chat.

Here’s what the Google+ team had to say about it today:

Exciting announcement: you can now submit your questions for President Obama for an exclusive Google+/YouTube interview at +The White House on January 30th. The President will answer a selection of your top-voted questions, and a few people will even get to join the first-ever Presidential hangout!

While the White House originally suggested that it would hold Hangouts, the fact that your questions can be answered by the President is pretty cool. When you visit the YouTube page of the White House, you’re presented with a submission form to ask your question:

You can then click a “thumbs up” or down on the questions and the ones that end up being the highest rated will be a part of the live Hangout on January 30th at 5:30 p.m. ET. The cut-off for submissions is midnight on January 28th.

This is a first of its kind for the White House, and turns Google+ users into the press corp. If your questions are among those that are voted up to the top, you might get to join the live Hangout with President Obama. In just two days, the White House has been circled by 15,437 users, so it’s safe to say that there will be a number of questions asked during the process.

➤ Your Interview With The President

The Google+ team has announced yet another new feature today, this one lets you record video from your webcam right from Google+, allowing you to skip YouTube altogether. It’s yet another feature that hopes to make the network more social and all encompassing.

Here’s what the team had to say about the new feature:

Google+ has long been the place to share and interact with video — Whether it’s using Hangouts with your friends or watching YouTube videos. Today we’re making video a bit more fun by letting you record and share videos of yourself using your webcam. To get started, click the video icon in the share box and choose Record Video. Once you’ve authorized Flash to access your camera, you can start recording. And once you’re done, the video appears as an attachment to your post — ready to share with your circles.

Once you click the video button, you’ll see the new “Record Video” link, which will take you to a page that asks to access your webcam, much like what you see on YouTube. This feature is perfect for sharing private messages with certain circles without having to use YouTube’s interface and sharing the link or searching for it on Google+.

I’d love to see this feature become available for replies, as this could bring back some of the old magic Seesmic captured for a while with its time-shifted video chatting service. Pepper in some of that speech recognition technology Google has been working on, and Google+ could become a huge source of video conversation.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I truly believe that Google+ is the glue that will hold all of Google’s services together. We’ve already seen integration with its social network on Gmail, Docs and search, and it looks like the company is testing deeper integration on YouTube.

The integration that we’ve become accustomed to is the toolbar that shows up at the top of these services, which allow you to share something to Google+, go to your profile, and see your notifications.

If you don’t currently have a YouTube account and channel, you can see the integration just by logging into YouTube with your Google credentials. The familiar Google+ toolbar shows up at the top, which appears to be a test since everyone else is left without the toolbar:

It’s likely that Google is treading carefully with altering the popular video site which has a community that has been around long before any of its social efforts. This move makes absolute sense, and is just one step closer to weaving Google+ into a highly trafficked property. Currently, you can share videos from YouTube on Google+, but the experience is hidden under the “share” button, which also features Facebook and Twitter:

I suspect the +1 button to appear more prominently on YouTube over the next few months, which should increase numbers of Google+ users and provide the social network with more content than ever before. Since this integration is only being tested on Google users without a YouTube account, it could be a while before everyone starts to see it.

I’m not sure if this is something to be proud of or scared silly over. Either way, eBay Classifieds did some heavy lifting and dug into the phenomenon of adding your dogs and cats to social networks.

There’s nothing I can say about it really, since my dogs Rocky and Adrian are both on Twitter.

Apparently, Twitter isn’t as popular as YouTube pages for pets, which is a bit of a surprise to me. I guess 140 characters is too much to ask for from a pet consistently.

The below infographic about the socialization of our pets online was partly inspired about our piece on the matter in 2010. Enjoy!

Google developers aren’t taking a holiday break, apparently. YouTube and members of the Google Research team have come up with a fun way to engage users by pitting two videos against each other, asking you to choose your favorite. The company calls it YouTube Slam.

Here’s what YouTube had to say about the experiment:

Then come play YouTube Slam—a video discovery experiment we cooked up with folks from Google Research. Each week a new crop of videos battles head-to-head in Comedy, Cute, Music, Bizarre and Dance Slams, where your votes determine who wins the Slam and gets featured on the leaderboard.

This feels a lot like Mark Zuckerberg’s original project FaceMash, which was reminiscent of HotOrNot. On both of those sites, you’d vote for the person you felt was more attractive. This time around, you’re voting for YouTube videos. It’s a smart way to drive community engagement and video views.

Along with watching videos that you might not have seen before, you can get points for accurately predicting the crowd favorite with your vote, and see how your points stood up to the rest of the community at the end of the week. While it doesn’t appear that there any prizes for winning, this is definitely a boredom buster.

➤ YouTube Slam