YouTube Wants More of Your Time

YouTube might well serve over a billion videos a day, but it turns out the average user only spends fifteen minutes a day on the service… something that YouTube wants to rectify.

According to the New York Times, the folks at YouTube are working on tightening up the suggested videos that the video streaming service shows its users in an attempt to have them spend more time on the site per day. YouTube’s director of product management, Hunter Walk, aside from having a very impressive name, is working on the problem, and he sees telly as the model to emulate, saying,

“Our average user spends 15 minutes a day on the site. They spend about five hours in front of the television. People say ‘YouTube is so big,’ but I really see that we have a ways to go.”

Google Loses Against Groovle

Google took its case against Groovle to an arbitration board, which ruled that Google and Groovle are different enough not to cause the confusion that Google is worried about.

According to the Register Google took its case to the National Arbitration Forum, a body that has long been considered the people to talk to if you’re in trouble with similar domain names. The National Arbitration Forum ruled that Google’s complaint, that Groovle is “confusingly similar” to Google, wasn’t a valid one. Indeed, the whole thing quickly devolves into fairly open comedy from that point.

Court Rules iPods Don’t Deafen

Apple has won an appeal to an earlier ruling in its favour against the claim that the its iPod hardware was responsible for hearing loss among those who listen to the device at high volumes.

According to TechRadar, the case was levelled by two claimants who asserted that the iPod line range is “defective,” in that it allows user to listen to their various media at volumes in excess of those determined to be safe for sustained listening. David Thompson, the judge involved in the case issued a statement, in which he pointed out that,

Smartphones Prove Strain for O2

O2 has blamed the high data use from iPhone and other smartphone users for network strain it’s been experiencing in the UK.

It seems that O2’s deal for exclusivity when it comes to selling the iPhone, along with its range of other smartphones, has come back to bite it a little, with the high rate of demand for data services causing “disruption” to the network, which amounted to not being able to make or receive calls or properly access data services for some customers. O2 has responded by telling the Financial Times that,

Prey Sold Out… on Steam

Thanks to a massive price drop as part of its Christmas sale, Steam has managed, bizarrely, to end up “Sold Out” of 2K Games’ portal-throwing first person shooter, Prey.

Strange stuff...

One of the biggest reasons to opt with digital distribution for games is convenience, not only on the part of the end user, but for the distributor itself. Steam’s model, one would have thought, prevents it from ever having to post a sold out sign, since games should be practically infinitely reproducible. Apparently that’s not the case for 2K Games’ Prey, though so far the reason seems to be a little vague.

Dalai Lama Freed from Chinese iTunes

It seems that Apple has blocked the sale of apps related to the Dalai Lama in the Chinese version of its vastly successful App Store, apparently becoming the latest in a slew of tech companies to censor content rather than not trade in China.

Apple’s move to censor the Dalai Lama out of the Chinese version of the App Store comes just two months after the iPhone launched in China through China Unicom. Outside China, there is a raft of Dalai Lama applications to be had on Apple’s App Store, most being relatively simple offerings of philosophical advice from the man himself.

HP Goes on Trademarking Spree

HP has gone on something of a trademarking spree, soaking up as many strange words as you could reasonably shake a stick at, including Zeen and Airlife. They’re prompting some fairly wild speculation.

Word comes from Gizmodo of the latest news on HP’s new trademark acquisitions, as well as the descriptions of just what we might expect those names to represent when a product finally does hit. The Zeen is said to be a “portable handheld device for receiving and displaying text and images and sound; computer software for use in transmitting and displaying text, images and sound; computer peripherals; computer hardware.”

Xbox Live to Meet Windows Mobile

As had been heavily rumoured for literally years now, it looks as though Windows Mobile and Microsoft’s Xbox Live service will finally become intertwined in the coming months.

Word of the integration comes via Engadget, which noticed a job posting over at Microsoft looking for a Principal Program Manager whose responsibilities would include, “Xbox Live enabled games to Windows Mobile,” to say nothing of the laboriously worded, “avatar integration, social interaction, and multi-screen experiences.”

Google to Run Games Through YouTube?

It looks as though Google might be trying to ease its way into casual gaming with a patent that’s emerged this week detailing plans for building games on top of hosted video.

Word comes from Bnet that Google’s patent, which was filed way back in February of this year but only published now, is simply titled, “Web-Based System for Generation of Interactive Games Based on Digital Videos” and describes a way to add interactive features to a digital video and “in particular to interactive video annotations enabling control of playback locations and creation of interactive games.” It certainly sounds like an interesting idea, and one that would allow for some fairly interesting “Choose Your Own Adventure” projects… if nothing else.

Kindle Charts Dominated by Free Books

Alongside other ebook readers, Amazon’s Kindle service can provide some really interesting broad-spectrum data on what people want from ebooks. It turns out, most people want them for free.

It might seem a touch obvious, but Cnet is reporting that the majority of bestsellers on Amazon’s Kindle service are ones that are offered for free. The only problem is that it paints the ebook business as one in which publishers will be hard pressed to turn a profit; if customers aren’t willing to shell out their hard earned cash for a digital version of a book you could comfortably sell for over €10, then ebooks start to look like a dodgy prospect for publishers.