Recently Jawed Karim (the lesser-known YouTube founder) gave a talk at the Univ. of Illinois at Urbana Champagne called "YouTube: From Concept to Hyper-growth". I found it to be much more interesting (and intelligent) than the Facebook "book". Anyhow, I thought I would give a quick summary for those of you who don't want to spend ~50 minutes to watch it (although you might want to consider it).
The first 30 minutes are about the YouTube concept, why the video sharing idea made sense, etc. Somewhat interesting but not too much new here.
It is the last 20 minutes that are more interesting (at least in my opinion). Here are the interesting bits:
- Jawed talks about the secondary (or enabling) technologies that made YouTube possible. Macromedia Flash 7 was just as important to YouTube as general trends such as increased availability of broadband to home users, proliferation of digital cameras and camera phones, and cheap dedicated-hosting bandwidth. In fact, one of YouTube's (few) true technical innovations was using Flash for video playback.
- The first outside reaction after launch (the site had very few users initially) was that their friends thought that the site was OK but nothing spectacular. VCs found idea to be "cute" but that's it. The founders even wrote to Wired -- no reply. Jawed's conclusion: "There are no experts. If you are doing something new, you are the expert".
- Then he talks about the early marketing effort; what worked and what didn't. They emailed their friends (hey, it worked well for the "Hot or Not" founders). It didn't work, very few video uploads. At this point they were getting a bit desperate. They placed an ad in Los Angeles Craigslist, something like "if you consider yourself a cute girl, post 10 videos and we'll pay you $100"....No replies.
- So, they decided to revamp the site, and make it more community-oriented rather than just video hosting. They added features like the "Related Videos" section, made it easy for users to "spam" their friends directly from the site, made video sharing easier, etc.
- It started to pick up. In August of 2005 Slashdot posted "YouTube is Flickr for video". Traffic jumped and never dipped.
- They started pitching to VCs (again) and Sequoia invested 3.5M based on a single data point -- the Alexa graph showing growth of traffic from April to August 2005. That money helped to pay for hardware, bandwidth, new hires, and marketing (iPod-a-day giveaway).
The YouTube-Google deal has been analyzed to death, and this post is already long enough, but here are some parting thoughts. At some point YouTube became truly viral. In general, people don't send emails saying "hey, check out this cool site/service". Instead, they send emails saying "hey, check out this cool/funny/crazy video" (and that happened to be a YouTube URL). Remember the "Chronicles of Narnia" SNL skit? That's when a lot of people heard about YouTube for the first time cause the link to the video was spreading in emails like a virus. YouTube is obviously a winner although I'm not positive that they could have truly survived as a business if Google didn't buy them. So for me it was more along the lines of a giant lucky "flip" (and there's nothing wrong with that)
On a side note, its interesting to note that this video got only 4 "diggs" while lots of rather dumb articles gets digged to the front page. I guess that's because the majority of digg readers don't even RTFA, let alone watch 50-minute video
A couple years ago, it seemed that we were poised on the edge of a "smart" phone revolution. And by "smart", I mean the true "smart" phones, those that had operating systems that were open and could run 3rd party applications. Multiple Symbian phones were finally starting to show up on the market (some even looked stylish!) and there was buzz in the air about Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform. And yet, what happened?, two years later, we get the Apple iPhone. Stylish, feature-rich, and supposedly running OSX, yet still a closed system, much like the iPod. In other words, its an appliance, not a computer. Which makes me wonder if there is even a need for phones with an open, computer-like operating system. Recently I read an article on Om's Blog, about the issues that Nokia is having with its N-series phones. Frankly, I'm not surprised, the unwashed masses dont care about having a "wearable computer", they don't care that the phone's operating system is open, in fact, form-factor and design mean much more to consumers than the ability to install applications on a phone. The RAZR was a huge success despite its dumb operating system and clunky UI. In fact, if you look at the Japanese/Korean markets, they have very advanced phones with many advanced features, all running on closed operating systems. In the other corner, there are the recent open mobile projects such as openmoko and greenphone, both of which are dedicated to developing a phone with an open OS. It's a romantic idea guys, but it's not going to sell like the RAZR (but keep plugging away! the engineer in me wants to see you succeed). 
