March 2010 Archive

YouTube marked the milestone with the announcement on its blog. That compares to 20 hours of video uploaded per minute last May, so this shows a 20% growth in total uploaded content.

While the massive amount of content and the storage space required is truly difficult for one to grasp, it is no surprise that YouTube is a superstar in the Google portfolio of brands. This portfolio has taken some bad hits recently with underperforming Google Buzz, Wave, and even the mobile entry Nexus One. Earlier this week, Hitwise even announced that Facebook overtook Google as the most visited website.

What better time to remind everyone that Google has a user engagement superstar in its portfolio.

Last week, RFI launched MalaysiaKitchenNYC.com, a website featuring Malaysian restaurants, cuisine information, news and events. The site is a one-stop place to learn about Malaysian food and its best dishes and ingredients.

After learning about Malaysian food, users can taste the flavors of the far east by trying one of the yummy recipes featured on the site. If cooking isn’t their forte, users can use the restaurant locator to find where to go for Malaysian food, whether they’re in NYC, Chicago or other cities across the country. The restaurant locator tool was custom built by RFI with customizable fields to show in each restaurant information pop-up, such as top dishes at that restaurant.

To celebrate the successful launch of the site, we got to try some Malaysian food ourselves from one of the restaurants on the site, Penang, located on the Upper West Side. I’ve never had Malaysian food but it was delicious! Everyone enjoyed it and the food was quickly gone. Below is a picture of RFI enjoying our Malaysian lunch.

[originally published on TheNextWeb.com]

Forrester Research finally announced the launch of its official analyst blog and social platform.

It has been about a month since Forrester sparked controversy with its decision to disallow their analysts to operate independent blogs (decision does not involve purely personal interest blogs).

There were many well known blogs affected by this decision, some examples being The Heretic by Tom Grant, Mobile Strategy by Julie Ask, and other Forrester employed individuals that maintained and cultivated their blogs outside of the official Forrester web property. While Forrester’s logic was well explained by Josh Bernoff, the issue at the center of the conflict seems to be personal exposure vs. benefit to the employer.

The new platform is being positioned as a customer focused improvement over the previous unregulated collection of blogs. From a customer perspective the consolidation does seem an improvement, but it remains to be seen if the analysts themselves have suffered any loss of motivation from this experience.