In the second installment of a series of open interviews with government leaders, YouTube is going to field questions to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, following the launch of the National Broadband Plan next Tuesday (The FCC is the federal agency that oversees all elements of the U.S. communications sector). The plan aims to connect all Americans to fast, affordable high-speed Internet.
I’m here at YouTube’s office in San Bruno, where the company is holding a press conference to discuss the launch of auto-captions. YouTube Director of Product Management Hunter Walk kicked off the event by discussing some of YouTube’s goals through the years — one of which is accessibility.
Walk said that a few years ago, accessibility meant giving users more ways to access their content (for example, through their mobile phones). Now, the company is focusing more on making its content accessible to even more people. Google software engineer Ken Harrenstein then took the stage to walk through some of YouTube’s initiatives on this front.
Harrenstein walked us through YouTube’s past feature launches, including the launch of captions and subtitles. In November of last year, the company began to roll out auto-captions on a limited scale, which use speech recognition to automatically transcribe what’s said in a video. And now, it’s going to enable the feature for all videos uploaded to YouTube where English is spoken.
If you head over to YouTube right now, you may find that the videos on the homepage are significantly better than usual. Well, maybe not — but at least they’ll have a strong bias for startups, Silicon Valley, and the tech industry in general. That’s because YouTube has invited us to be part of their ‘Curator of the Month’ program, which means we got to submit a playlist of our favorite videos, which will be shown on the homepage throughout the day. You can find our full list of choices right here.
To build the playlist, we polled the whole TechCrunch crew for their favorite clips, which range from JESS3’s State of the Internet to a Jeff Bezos talk on minimizing regret. There are a few oddballs in there too, like this bizarrely catchy song about Excavator Trucks (a favorite of TC co-editor Erick Schonfeld’s kids).
Every year the World Economic Forum names its Young Global Leaders, a list of up-and-comers from the worlds of business, politics, culture, and non-profits. Last year’s list included YouTube founder Chad Hurley, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Digg founder Kevin Rose, and Skype CEO Josh Silverman.
Today, the World Economic Forum named its 2010 Young Global Leaders. There are 197 people on the list overall, including celebrities like musician Wyclef Jean and fashion designer Stella McCartney. Some of the startup CEOs and tech execs on this year’s least include:
President Obama is going to debate the Republican detractors of his healthcare reform proposals at the big healthcare summit in Washington today. (Democratic Congressional leaders will be in attendance as well). This is not a closed-door meeting. Far from it, Obama wants to put the opponents of his healthcare plans on display in front of the American people?
But who is going to be watching C-Span or CNN or Fox at 10 AM (Eastern Standard Time) in the morning. We’re all supposed to be working. And frankly, healthcare debates put most people to sleep. But if you want to secretly slack off and even throw some questions to the politicians at the healthcare summit, you can watch it live from your computer on YouTube’s CitiizenTube
Slowly, but surely, Internet Explorer 6, long the bane of many a web developer, is dying. And you’re invited to its funeral.
A Denver, CO-based design company, Aten Design Group, has built a site to mark the occasion. At IE6funeral.com you can RSVP as to whether you will be able to attend the funeral service or not. It’s at the company’s headquarters in Denver, but those who aren’t able to attend in person are being asked to send flowers. For those who can attend, “Funeral attire is encouraged.”
Google Trends is a great tool to get an overview on terms people are searching for with the largest search engine in the world. It also shows interesting trends. And something is definitely going on with searches for a few large social networks using Google.
At some point in mid January, a group of sites including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, and Foursquare saw a huge drop in number of searches for their domains. 
Gossip mongers and sports fans alike are eagerly awaiting Tiger Woods’ press conference tomorrow morning, when he’ll confront the public and apologize for his string of affairs that tarnished both his image as a role model and his endorsement earnings. And, according to one source, you’ll be able to live stream it from the world’s most popular video portal: YouTube.
This is interesting for a few reasons. First, it’s going to get a lot of traffic, as many people will be at work and won’t be able to watch the conference from their TV sets. But it’s also another live video feed on YouTube, which historically has almost exclusively featured recorded content. Over the last year or so, YouTube has been experimenting more often with live feeds, with broadcasts including YouTube Live, numerous political debates and events including President Obama’s record-breaking inauguration, and more recently, earnings webcasts. But the Tiger Woods event, while certainly newsworthy, is a different beast. It’s related more to gossip and sports than it is to our nation’s future or Google news.
It’s been nearly two weeks since the Super Bowl, but the stats behind one of the world’s biggest media spectacles keep pouring in. YouTube has just written about the impact some of the Super Bowl ads have had on its site, offering rare insight into just how much attention those million-dollar advertising spots will get you.
During the days following the Super Bowl, YouTube reported an 18,000% spike in queries for “Snickers” (no doubt spurred by their ad featuring Betty White and Abe Vigoda). YouTube also says that mobile queries for Doritos rose by 5,000% (note that the Snickers stat was for YouTube’s entire property but Doritios was for mobile only — it’s a bit strange that they aren’t giving an apples to apples comparison).
Yesterday, we saw Microsoft shamelessly go after the iPhone with a video which played at Mobile World Congress for its new Windows Phone 7 Series. But it’s not just Apple that Microsoft is taking on with videos, it’s competitors like Google and OpenOffice.org as well.
On the Microsoft Office Videos channel on YouTube, you’ll find a series of videos which find Microsoft aggressively going after its competition. For example, here’s one in which Microsoft Office is compared to Google Apps and specifically, Google’s “low-cost” email service. Office, it seems deals with “real world” issues, Google Apps (and specifically Gmail) do not, according to the video.