A recent research that has been published in the last few weeks and was mentioned yesterday in the 8hands blog, states that 70% of Americans ages 15-34 would prefer checking their personal MySpace page than watching TV. It’s not a good sign to the TV industry, and it’s not the only one.

Social networks users, and especially MySpace ones, are spending 11 hours a week on net and only 9.4 hours watching TV. By the end of this year, 20% of the American households will have TIVO – meaning they are skipping advertising. YouTube traffic continues to grow during this quarter, despite part of the major companies forcing them to remove their content. According to Alexa, it’s the fourth site in the world wide web.

In addition, Speedbit has just launched in the last month a new download accelerator offering the ability to download full movie files in about 20 minutes. That’s five times faster than the regular speed. This clients’ downloads are growing and growing. P2P downloads are responsible for more than 50% of the world’s internet traffic. Not to mention Joost, that offers cable TV (still with a low quality content…) on the net.

Combining this information altogether, it seems like the internet (with TIVO) is going to harm TV as it harms the music industry.

The new generation prefers the internet: downloading content for free, more easily and in less time, or watching it on YouTube or Joost. If they reach TV they skip the commercials.

The TV industry should change their model. Otherwise, they might suffer large loss of their current revenues before the end of the decade.

k.

So now it’s official. Google is the leading brand of the world. Yes. Google had passed Coca Cola, Wall mart, Starbucks… People, please, get yourself a life. Doesn’t anybody in the world have anything better to do than to search the Internet? The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind.

If that’s the new world, I have a philosophical insight: Google’s mission is to “organize the world of information”. With this mission, and with knowing that it’s the leading world brand, basically, most of the world is searching in Google and this search builds its attitude to the world. Now we can say that the way Google organizes the world is the way we receive the world. The way we percept it.

Let’s take the search term “Hey clip” as an example. If you search for “Hey Clip”, the first result is the clip that two of our talented Logia employees created and published in YouTube. This clip has been viewed more than 14M times in the last year !!!!!!!!!!! Amazing number. But, this lippsync version is not the real “Hey Clip”. The real “Hey!” is a song by the Pixies, but there is no way someone will find it. For the Google user – Hey clip is the clip that Tasha and Dishka had produced.

It means that today’s Google algorithm is not just helping us to find information or “organize the information of the world”, but it also creates our perception about the world. It’s the world. It’s our world. The wired world.

k.

Have you seen the news service Myspace have just launched?

Isn’t it the weirdest thing you have seen for a long time?

I just can’t figure out what is the concept of this site. The user interface – long scroll, half of the screen for a banner. Content – It’s picking randomly items from the web… Yes, Just like that, and in any subject more or less. Well, maybe someone did try to put some sense in it, but I still can’t understand it. No hierarchy at all – even in Google news there are headline items and there are all the rest… Design – looks like web 0.2.

I really can’t understand. Aren’t they a sister company of Fox News? Can someone over there please explain them how should a news service be and look like?

k.

I woke up this morning in New York, after arriving in the middle of the night from San Francisco, and there it was, in my mail:The first media report about our new social media and instant messaging client 8hands, that offers the ability to aggregate all of the social media from MySpace, YouTube, flickr, RSS feeds and more into one, simple tool and use it during IM sessions.

StartupSquad gave us a very good feedback on the product we have all been working on for about a year, and which we just launched this week. I must admit that when I first saw the mail from Maya, 8hands‘ content manager, carrying the title “8hands in the media“, I thought it was a bad one… Otherwise, she would have given the mail a more happy title. But then I opened and read it – and it’s great.

So I truly hope all of you will love our product like Vivek @ StartupSquad… and if you like it (or not!) please feel free to let me know about it.

k.

“The mobile space is the most interesting thing around” said today Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, at the web2.0expo. So, I thought how lucky we are, that we are also working on a mobile version for 8Hands that will offer the ability to get all the comments from MySpace, friends requests, RSS feeds, Flickr pictures and YouTube videos directly to the mobile phone.

Last night was party time. You can see our colleague Debora scholtz at the Pageflakes party. After that I attended the Snap party. They launched a new and interesting product called Snapshot, offering the ability to see preview of websites’ content on blogs.

A few amazing figures from today:
Only 0.16 % out of YouTube users upload content !!!!!!!!

120,000 new blogs are opened each day, but only 21% of the world’s 70M blogs are active. All the rest begin to write and give up easily.

1.5M posts are written every day !!!!

3M bloggers write posts each day (not me !!!!)

And the most common language for blogs is Japanese (37% of blogs), English second (32%). On the language chart we can find Persian at no. 10 - blogging is fast growing in Iran…

These are the numbers from Technorati. With results like these, I think we are really only in the beginning of the revolution.

For those of you who need one more proof for the mobile importance, Nokia gave sponsorship to the conferences party. With their N series, they claim it to be the real web 2.0 machine. Offering 5m pixel camera, VOIP, and all the other PC-like features, they are really making big steps towards becoming an internet company and a mobile one.

k.

They are all over the place. Entrepreneurs. VC’s. Bloggers. I feel like everybody is doing web 2.0 something. Only the bagger outside the hall reminds me that there are still people who are not tagging, blogging and sharing. Or maybe he is doing all 3: blogging – he has a note stating how miserable he is (heart disease if you insist), tagging – well he is tagged. And sharing – that’s the only thing he really wants.

Anyway, as morning came today (Monday), I’ve downloaded the latest version of 8hands (www.8hands.com) our cool new product, and went to the conference hoping to show it to everyone there. I met Robert Scoble with a camera on his head as you can see in the picture below, and I gave him the 5 min. pitch on 8hands; How cool the product is, how it brings all the information in real time from myspace, Flickr, You tube and even Twitter. By the way – twitter is amazing. I just got addicted to this one liner blogging. So Robert broadcasted live my presentation on Ustream. Hopefully you will be able to watch it later on. He liked the idea.

This is the time to say thank you to our amazing team in Egloomedia that worked on the product.

Good luck for us all – and readers: please go and download 8hands now, tag it, blog on it and share it with your friends. Web 2.0, isn’t it?

www.8hands.com

k.

So I arrived today (Sunday – 15/4) to sunny San Francisco after a long trip which started more than 36 hours before in Tel-Aviv. Don’t blame me for having 8 oysters before I even got connected and started checking for emails…

The web2expo is really starting tomorrow. Today there were only few workshops and the party. Party 2.0. in party 2.0 you grab a beer and listen to 16 people doing there 5min presentation and the crowd is choosing one of them to be keynote speaker on Wednesday.

I drank my beer and put all my attention for the Ryan Stewart presentation. He spoke about the thing he is writing on his blog RIA – reach internet applications. I can just quote him explaining “…that they are more usable and more fun. Regular Web sites are like Wall-Mart, no fun, no real user experience. RIA is like an Apple store – makes you want to buy even if you don’t have the money”.

What more can I say? I am a believer in RIA too. Because of that we were working in the last year on a new amazing application called 8hands - (www.8hands.com) and starting today you can try our public alpha. “The next thing in RIA is mobile RIA”, finalized Stewart his presentation. Our mobile 8Hands will be exactly that, but first – enjoy our RIA.

Sorry for the dark pictures, the Flash in my mobile phone camera still needs an upgrade…

I promise to keep you posted about the conference.

k.

Coming from the far east, the first findings are quite clear – WiMax is Dead-on-arrival.

Informer had reported last month that Telegeography counts a whacking 1,057 subscribers to the WiMAX services in South Korea, the furthest advanced country to embrace this technology.

So far, $658m has been spent on infrastructure in Korea, which isn’t much if you’re trying to deliver coverage and speed to match the probably best 3G cellular networks in the world.

WiMax, for those who don’t know, is a technology that offers broadband wireless internet connection. Korea is the first country to deploy mobile technology – meaning you can be connected to the internet while you’re driving, for instance.

All of the big handset manufactures already announced that they will produce dual mode handset. Sprint, the American mobile operator, announced WiMax as its 4G technology.

So, will the WiMax takeoff or join other technologies that nobody use?

My bet is - somewhere in between. WiMax would be a great technology for developing countries, where there is no 3G infrastructure yet. It will also give cable and fix-line companies the opportunity to fight the mobile operators which became the giants of the new world. But, it will take time. Time for the handset manufactures to develop low cost handsets. Time for worldwide standard to be established. Time for the technology to mature (especially the mobile version). My bet – not less than 5 years from now.

k.