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YouTube founder Jawed Karim gave an interesting lecture this week at his alma mater, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He describes how he thinks YouTube fits into the Internet’s history of killer apps, with some nice stories about the early days of a company whose success has left many grasping to understand it.
Karim traces [...]

Things are heating up in the consumer file-syncing space, with startups aggressively boasting about their feature adds. Boulder-based ProtectMyPhotos, which you can read about in this TechCrunch post, offered us the “exclusive” on their addition of auto-synchronization from their mobile and browser apps down to the photo (or other files) stored on a Windows PC. [...]

Unless you’re a hardcore gamer, you’ve probably never heard of Guild Wars, and that would be strange, because after World of Warcraft, it’s arguably the biggest success story in MMORPG gaming. Its 2.5 million player base makes it second only to Warcraft, but it’s not even listed on MMOGchart.com, the online world tracker that’s [...]

The DSL ecosystem might be in for a rocky ride, at least in the near term. A few days ago we had pointed out the slowdown at AT&T and BellSouth when it came to net new adds. Embarq did not meet analyst expectations, and many are worried now. UBS Research says that all signs are [...]

Online shopping is supposed to be worth $211 billion in the U.S. alone this year, according to Forrester. At this point everyone from the big guys, the established names, on down, has a shopping comparison site, helping people find their way to hundreds of thousands of web-based stores and often taking a cut of consequent [...]

Odeo, a San Francisco-based podcasting start-up has decided to call it a day. The company started by Pyra Labs (Blogger) co-founder Evan Williams has completed a management buyout. Evan Williams, Biz Stone and other Odeo employees have started a new company called Obvious Corp., which has acquired Odeo assets from podcasting company’s venture capital backers. [...]