Courtesy of AP
Several tech leaders including Microsoft chair Bill Gates and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley (pictured) announced upcoming programs at last week's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland:
Gates announced that Microsoft is developing an online payment system that he says could handle payments as small as "ten cents or one dollar a month" with "just a click." The system would presumably compete with credit card companies and services like Paypal. Several micropayment systems, mostly run by startups much less powerful and funded than Microsoft, have failed in the past few years.
Hurley said that YouTube will share revenue with video creators. (Blogger Jeff Jarvis shot video of Hurley's comments, shown below.) Hurley said the company didn't share revenue before because it preferred to first build a community around videos; if YouTube had paid users from the start, he said, those users would see payment as the goal and would leave for the first competitor to offer more. (Of course other motives surely played into the decision: YouTube was running on venture capital until Google bought it this fall.) While journalist Om Malik sees this as a death knell for YouTube competitors, paidContent's Rafat Ali suspects Hurley jumped the gun. (See ETP's best guess on how they'll do it here.)
The founders of Google admitted that obeying Chinese orders to censor search in that country had a "net negative" effect on the company. While Sergey Brin hinted last year that "perhaps now the principled approach makes more sense," his co-founder Larry Page countered this Friday, "I don't think we as a company should be making decisions based on too much perception."
Page and Brin also said they value newspapers and gave their own vote for better paid-content systems. "I should probably pay for the Wall Street Journal," said Page, "but I don't because it's a hassle."
Genesis singer Peter Gabriel courted media groups and Google seeking funding and technology for his group Witness, which trains documentarists and publishes their videos of human rights abuses.
Intel chairman Craig Barrett and "One Laptop Per Child" head Nicholas Negroponte sparred over their competing models of affordable computers for the third world. Negroponte, who has called himself the "good bin Laden," said: "Craig and I sometimes argue, and he called our thing a 'gadget.' I'm glad to see he's got his own gadget now. Craig has to look at this as a market, and I look at this as a mission."
