global article

Global Article The internet has gone through three major evolutions and is currently witnessing its fourth. The internet started as the ARPANET and connected mainframe computers on dedicated connections. The second stage involved adding desktop PCs which connected through the telephone wires. The third stage was adding wireless connections to laptop computers. And currently the internet is evolving to allow mobile phone internet connectivity ubiquitously using cellular networks.

Prior to the widespread internetworking that led to the Internet, most communication networks were limited by their nature to only allow communications between the stations on the network, and the prevalent computer networking method was based on the central mainframe computer model. Several research programs began to explore and articulate principles of networking between separate physical networks. This led to the development of the packet switching model of digital networking. These research efforts included those of the laboratories of Donald Davies (NPL), Paul Baran (RAND Corporation), and Leonard Kleinrock's MIT and UCLA.

The research led to the development of several packet-switched networking solutions in the late 1960s and 1970s, including ARPANET and the X.25 protocols. Additionally, public access and hobbyist networking systems grew in popularity, including unix-to-unix copy (UUCP) and FidoNet. They were however still disjointed separate networks, served only by limited gateways between networks. This led to the application of packet switching to develop a protocol for inter-networking, where multiple different networks could be joined together into a super-framework of networks. By defining a simple common network system, the Internet protocol suite, the concept of the network could be separated from its physical implementation. This spread of inter-network began to form into the idea of a global inter-network that would be called 'The Internet', and this began to quickly spread as existing networks were converted to become compatible with this. This spread quickly across the advanced telecommunication networks of the western world, and then began to penetrate into the rest of the world as it became the de-facto international standard and global network. However, the disparity of growth led to a digital divide that is still a concern today.

Following commercialisation and introduction of privately run Internet Service Providers in the 1980s, and its expansion into popular use in the 1990s, the Internet has had a drastic impact on culture and commerce. This includes the rise of near instant communication by e-mail, text based discussion forums, the World Wide Web. Investor speculation in new markets provided by these innovations would also lead to the inflation and collapse of the Dot-com bubble, a major market collapse. But despite this, the Internet continues to grow.

YouTube, LLC is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. YouTube was created in February 2005 by three former PayPal employees.In November 2006, YouTube was bought by Google Inc. for 1.65 billion dollars, and is now operated as a subsidiary of Google. The company is based in San Bruno, California, and uses Adobe Flash Video technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging and short original videos. Most of the content on YouTube has been uploaded by members of the public, although media organizations including CBS and the BBC offer some of their material via the site.

Unregistered users can watch the videos, while registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos. Videos that are considered to contain potentially offensive content are available only to registered users over the age of 18. The uploading of videos containing defamation, commercial advertisements, copyright violations and material encouraging criminal conduct is prohibited by YouTube's terms of service.

Company history

YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. Hurley studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, while Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

According to a story that has often been repeated in the media, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen developed the idea for YouTube during the early months of 2005, after they had experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen's apartment in San Francisco. Jawed Karim did not attend the party and denied that it had occurred, and Chad Hurley commented that the idea that YouTube was founded after a dinner party "was probably very strengthened by marketing ideas around creating a story that was very digestible."

YouTube began as an angel funded technology startup, with help including a $11.5 million investment by Sequoia Capital between November 2005 and April 2006. YouTube's early headquarters were situated above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California. The domain name www.youtube.com was activated on February 15, 2005, and the website was developed over the subsequent months.The choice of the domain name www.youtube.com led to problems for a similarly named website, www.utube.com. The owner of the site, Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment, filed a lawsuit against YouTube in November 2006 after being overloaded on a regular basis by people looking for YouTube. Universal Tube has since changed the name of its website to www.utubeonline.com.

YouTube offered the public a beta test of the site in May 2005, six months before the official launch in November 2005. The site grew rapidly, and in July 2006 the company announced that more than 65,000 new videos were being uploaded every day, and that the site was receiving 100 million video views per day.According to data published by market research company comScore, YouTube is the dominant provider of online video in the United States, with a market share of around 44 percent and more than five billion videos viewed in July 2008. It is estimated that 13 hours of new videos are uploaded to the site every minute, and that in 2007 YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000. In March 2008, YouTube's bandwidth costs were estimated at approximately $1 million a day. Alexa ranks YouTube as the third most visited website on the Internet, behind Yahoo! and Google.

In October 2006, Google Inc. announced that it had acquired YouTube for US$1.65 billion in Google stock, and the deal was finalized on November 13, 2006.Google does not provide detailed figures for YouTube's running costs, and YouTube's revenues in 2007 were noted as "not material" in a regulatory filing. In June 2008 a Forbes magazine article projected the 2008 revenue at $200 million, noting progress in advertising sales.

In November 2008, YouTube reached an agreement with MGM, Lions Gate Entertainment and CBS which will allow the companies to post full-length films and television shows on the site, accompanied by advertisements. The move is intended to create competition with websites such as Hulu, which features material from both NBC and Fox.

Friendster is a privately owned internet social networking website and the first online social network. Its headquarters are in Mountain View, CA, US Friendster is focused on helping people meet new friends, stay in touch with old ones and sharing online content and media.^] The website is also used for dating and discovering new events, bands, hobbies, and more. Users can share content including videos, photos, messages and comments with friends via their profile and their network.

Friendster has over 90 million registered users and over 61 million unique visitors a month globally. The website receives approximately 19 billion page views per month making it a top 20 global website based on web traffic.

Over 90% of Friendster’s traffic comes from Asia. In Asia, Friendster has more monthly unique visitors than any other social network. The top 15 countries accessing Friendster today are the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, the United States, Singapore, Canada, India, Australia, the UK, Hong Kong, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, China, Taiwan and Korea.

History

Friendster was founded by computer programmer Jonathan Abrams in 2002 in Mountain View, California and was the first to introduce virtual communities and online social networking before the creation, launch and adoption of MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook and others

Friendster was founded to create a safer, more effective environment for meeting new people by browsing user profiles and connecting to friends, friends of friends and so on, allowing members to expand their network of friends more rapidly than in real life, face-to-face scenarios.

Friendster.com went live in March 2003 and was quickly adopted by three million users within the first few months Publications including Time, Esquire, Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly, US Weekly and Spin wrote about Friendster’s success and the founder appeared on magazine covers and late-night talk shows.

Today, Friendster continues to enjoy a membership base of more than 90 million registered users and continues to grow, especially in Asia In August 2008, Friendster hired ex-Google executive Richard Kimber as the CEO Kimber, who was previously the regional managing director of South Asia at Google, is focusing on Friendster’s expansion in Asia. In 2003, Friendster management received a $30 million buyout offer from Google, which they declined. The company was originally funded in 2003 with a $12 million investment by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Benchmark Capital, and private investors. Friendster received another $3 million in funding in February 2006 led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Benchmark Capital In August 2006, Friendster also received $10 million in funding in a round led by DAG Ventures, and Friendster announced in August 2008 that it had raised an additional $20 million in funding in a round led by IDG Ventures Today, Friendster is backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures, IDG Ventures and individual investors.

Japan's Miki Ando capped her junior career by winning the gold medal at the 2004 World Junior Figure Skating Championships in the Netherlands in March. That gave her a full set of World Junior medals - gold in 2004, silver in 2003, and bronze in 2002. "I was very happy to win the gold medal," Ando said. "I was able to keep my concentration for the whole week. Last year, Ando was very disappointed not to win the World Juniors and dedicated herself to winning the title this year. She even changed her skate blades to gold during the summer. "Gold is the color of champions," she said. "I wanted to be the champion so I changed to gold."

She also has another set of three medals from the ISU Junior Grand Prix Final - gold from 2002 and 2004 and bronze from 2003. It was at the 2003 Junior Grand Prix Final that she set an international record by becoming the first woman to land a quadruple jump in competition, but it still didn't get her to the top of the podium that year. "I have now landed the quad three times in competition," she said. "I do it about 60 percent of the time."

Ando has also won five Junior Grand Prix events since 2001, but until this season, she found it difficult to reach the top of the podium in Japan. She was third in novice in 2000, third in juniors in 2001 and third in seniors in 2002 before finally winning the Japanese ladies championship for the 2003-2004 season. That was another reason that she continued to compete as a junior. "I didn't think I was good enough for senior level," she said. Ando completed her best season by placing fourth at the World Championships in Dortmund, Germany just two weeks after Junior Worlds. Although the events were only a short distance apart, Ando returned home to Japan to make the adjustments in her junior program required for senior competition. "I would rather have stayed and trained in Switzerland," she admitted.

But the complexities of her training regimen required her to go home. She trains with both Nobuo Sato in Nagoya and Sachiko Kozuka in Yokohama. That requires her to travel one or two hours on the TGV train between training rinks. Ando trains two to three hours a day during the week and five or six hours on Saturday and Sunday. Off ice, she includes weight training with physical conditioning, but doesn't participate in any other sports.

That's a far cry from her earlier life when she participated in everything. "I did many, many things before skating," she said. "I tried swimming, cycling, playing the piano, calligraphy and many more things. I didn't start skating until I was nine after I went to the rink with some friends from school. I thought it was the most interesting for expression and playing a character." Within two years, she had landed her first triple jumps, a triple salchow and a triple toe loop, although she couldn't remember which came first. She landed her first triple axel while practicing at the World Juniors in Ostrava in 2003, but had actually landed the quad salchow more than two years before that. She is also practicing the quad loop and the quad toe loop and tries to throw a quad in every competition. "It's important for my future performances to always try the quad in my programs," she said.

Lea Ann Miller choreographs her programs. "She always chooses the music," Ando said. "I don't have one kind I like best. I'm trying different styles of music." She usually changes both programs each year as she did for this season. For the short, Ando used The Pianist by Chopin and for the long, Stravinsky's Firebird. Miller chose Firebird to symbolize Ando's breaking out this season, similar to her choice of gold blades as a symbol of a champion. Her exhibition program was to Moonlight.

Ando is in tenth grade. She likes biology and natural sciences, but hates math. "Schoolwork is difficult but my school supports me a lot so I don't have any problem doing my homework," Ando said. She isn't sure whether she'll attend college because she plans a career in skating. Right now she is concentrating on making it to the 2006 Olympics. "Later I want to be a professional skater like Yuka Sato," she said. "I want to show my performances to as many people as possible. Afterwards, I want to be a skating coach and train other young girls."

Off ice, she likes to go shopping, go out with her friends, dance, and chat via email, instant messaging and text messaging. One of her favorite pastimes is to make photos with her friends and print them out at photo shops. She also likes to collect videotapes; especially Disney animated films and Japanese anime. She keeps all the stuffed animals she receives and especially likes Snoopy toys and teddy bears. She also has two pets, a dog and a parakeet, which can say 'Hello and I want to eat' in Japanese.