Genesis of YouTube - long video

This is a long video of a lecture by Jawed Karim, one of the original founders of YouTube. This may be interesting to some of you, if you have an hour to kill.

The Making of YouTube

Here is an interesting video of early days at YouTube:

Fun Mentos and Coke video

In case you haven't seen this - Enjoy.

Compelling Product Demos

Online video is a great way to do it. Here is a nice example:

Google acquires YouTube

Google acquires YouTube for $1.65B in stock.

Congrats to YouTube founders for creating a company that is valued at $1.65B in less than an year. This is a truly remarkable achievement.

Did Google overpay or is this a steal?

Is this event going to herald another speculative (nee bubble) period, just like NetScape IPO started the dot com era?

Only time will tell.

Obviously Google places a high value on video content going online. Google wants to integrate their two crown jewels (search+ad platform) with YouTube video content and users. They outbid Yahoo to ge this done. Google is betting that they can get more out of YouTube in terms of monetization than Yahoo can. I think Google's track record so far on monetization of conent is pretty good. So this looks like a good bet.

Also, it will be interesting to see how Yahoo and MS try to play catch up in the online video space.

In any case, this development will only accelerate the unmistakable trend of video going online.