The BBC sat down with Bill and Melinda Gates at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland for a 14-minute video interview today, during which the couple discussed foreign aid and the economy. "We're certainly going to look back at this one and say, 'Boy I wish we'd caught that sooner, I wish the overspending in the U.S. market, the financial [...]

A Senate provision helping subsidize high-speed Internet could mean hundreds of millions of dollars in tax credits for Verizon, Saul Hansell reports in Bits today. Last month, I asked Verizon's Executive Director of Network Operations in New York City Chris Levendos how the new administration's plans for broadband buildout would affect Verizon; it looks like today I got my answer. "We're [...]

Savory Cities, the restaurant website that profiles restaurants in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Seattle, has the largest library of editorial restaurant videos on the web, Co-Founder Chris McBride told Andy in an interview  last month. Since restaurant reviews by users can be highly subjective, Savory Cities strives to provide trusted information to foodies by publishing documentary-style [...]

HANOVER, NH -- Through intentional or mistaken breaches, hospitals and insurers are allowing a large amount of private medical data onto P2P networks such as Gnutella and Limewire, according to a report just released by M. Eric Johnson, an expert in cybersecurity and privacy at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.  The paper will be published later this month [...]

Adobe announced early today that Flash 10, the newest version of its ubiquitous Flash web plug-in which drives a vast majority of video consumption, has reached an installed base of 55 percent of global users of Flash. Why is Flash 10 better?  Last summer at Stanford, I interviewed Adobe's Jim Guerard, the executive in charge of the company's dynamic media [...]

comScore has come out with a ranking of the fastest growing U.S. Web sites.  As Erick Schonfeld points out in TechCrunch, some of the sites have grown as a result of mergers.  Some, however, appear to be just plain popular.  Break Media, the video network for young adult males, is on fire. comScore reports it is the fastest growing U.S. [...]

PETA, the activist animal rights group has landed some attention and possibly a viral video hit with its  "banned" Super Bowl television spot featuring an attractive female model getting intimate with a pumpkin, asparagus, broccoli and an eggplant. But hey, not one darn beet! Veggie Love has been rejected by NBC for the Super Bowl due to "a level of sexuality [...]

YouTube came out the victor today in the comparison of best HD video sites by CNET.com's Webware, impressive for a site so new to HD. Webware's Josh Lowensohn writes that "YouTube was the runt of the litter last year, and one of the reasons we put together the initial comparison." This year's competitors were Vimeo, Facebook, DailyMotion, SmugMug, and Blip.TV. [...]

CollegeHumor finally announced the details of its new show, "The College Humor Show," which will debut on MTV Feb. 8. The office comedy will be a longer version of the site's "Hardly Working" series, which executive producer Sam Reich told us off the record back in August. You can read Chris Albrecht's story about the news today over at NewTeeVee. I [...]

The English service of broadcast network Al Jazeera saw a 600 percent increase in worldwide viewership of its website's streaming footage during the conflict in Gaza, The Associated Press reports. Sixty percent of those viewers were from the United States, the AP says.  As one of the few news organizations with video crews in Gaza, where journalists were barred by Israeli [...]

When Microsoft Office releases its web applications into beta this year, it has a good shot of surpassing Google Docs right off the bat: The mainstream reliance on Microsoft Office makes Microsoft web apps a natural extension. "I think that one of the things that makes us a little different is that we're really trying to make the experience between going [...]

We read with interest the January cover story in Wired by Thomas Goetz titled "The Truth about Cancer...Don't try to cure it. Just find it." The piece is about Don Listwin, former heir apparent to Cisco's John Chambers.  Listwin left the company in 2000 with a personal fortune of some $100 million. Devastated by the death of his mother to ovarian cancer, [...]

Sony Music Entertainment has licensed Kyte's digital media platform for use by its artists in the U.S. and Germany, Kyte announced today. SME artists Franz Ferdinand and John Legend had already created Kyte channels to connect with fans--John Legend recently used Kyte to upload a behind-the-scenes video of celebrities meeting Barack Obama at the pre-Inauguration concert on the steps of [...]

Big win for the Los Angeles-based EdgeCast Network, a new content delivery network (CDN) backed by Disney's Steamboat Ventures, has backbone deal with Deutsche Telekom.  Om Malik at NewTeeVee broke the story earlier today.  Last year, I interiewed James Segil, company president, at the Conteninople conference in Manhattan.  Jame told me his company can provide the same services as Akamai [...]

The creative team behind the successful Barely Political franchise is going to unleash their funny on tech world, Next New Networks announced today. The digital network launched a new comedy site called Barely Digital, which will be adding videos about "gaming, gadgets, websites and comptuers" over the next few weeks, according to the website. It currently has up four original videos: [...]

TED, the annual California gathering of movers and shakers in society, politics and business, is a completely closed affair, invitation only and very expensive.  Since 2006, speeches from conference have been edited and presented for free as short episodes online onto a site called TED Talks.  Virginia Heffernan, a New York Times television critic and columnist raves about the site [...]

While media companies large and small are figuring out how to monetize Web video with advertising, the demand for businesses and institutions to have video on their web sites, or as part of their marketing mix, is exploding.  According to the Kelsey Group, an advertising research  firm, small businesses will spend $1.5 billion in Web video advertising in 2012. According to [...]

The New York Times has been providing resources and visibility around its online video, and the audience appears to be substantial, with  some 544,000 unique visitors in December, according to numbers provided to Beet.TV by Nielsen Online. The number of uniques in November was higher, as expected because of Election Day, with 681,000. The video numbers are quite small compared to overall [...]

Checking out the new White House blog, we saw the YouTube clip of the President Barack Obama's  Inauguration speech. Looks good.  But we wonder if all the White House videos will be hosted by YouTube. Sure, YouTube has massive reach and scale but there are issues about YouTube's tracking of cookies and privacy, as Chris Soghoian pointed out on CNET News.com [...]

Social networking site Bebo, which AOL purchased for $850 million last year, is now hosting video on its site, the company announced today. The site has already driven significant video consumption with its open platform that accommodates outside players, and now it will provide video publishing tools from Motionbox to allow users to upload and share personal videos. Andy interviewed [...]