Jonathan Hensley | The Blog

Here are some interesting links from the past couple days:

• First Blu-ray Disc / DVD hybrid announced
  It sure took long enough to happen, but one of HD DVD's biggest benefits has finally made it over to the Blu-ray side. Yep, we're talking about a Blu-ray / DVD hybrid disc, with a single-layer of Blu on one side and a standard DVD on the other. Not surprisingly, the action's going down first in Japan, with Code Blue emergency helicopter doctor Blu-ray BOX (yes, seriously) as the first hybrid title. There's no word on when (or if) this technology will make it to US soil, but the sooner the better
• YouTube Unveils Unique View Counts
  YouTube has just released a new feature for its analytics platform that allows content owners to see how many unique visitors are watching their videos. While YouTube videos have long displayed their view counts to the public, until this point it hasn’t been possible to tell if the hits were coming from a wide audience or just a few devout fans who repeatedly watched the same clips.
• New search-by-style options for Google Image Search
  some time ago we launched face search, which lets you limit your search results to only images containing faces. More recently we also rolled out photo search, which limits results to images that contain photographic elements, ignoring many cartoons and drawings which may not be useful to you.
• Wireless Power Consortium to create universal wireless charging standard, insist that it’s like magic
  The group plans to first release a five-watt standard targeted at mobile phones, after which it'll take aim at laptops and other more power-hungry devices. Based on the flood of wireless-related PR we've been getting as CES gets closer, we're expecting some big things to happen in this space — it sounds like Energizer is also going to get involved, which could be interesting. We'll see how it plays out — hopefully this is the year we finally cut that power cord.
• Firefox Tops Business Security Risk List
  The list this year expanded to include 12 applications, up from 10 last year, due to the increase in vulnerabilities and the popularity of applications such as Skype and Yahoo! Assistant that are often used by employees within an enterprise.

  Five of the top 12 applications with known vulnerabilities include:

  - Mozilla Firefox, versions 2.x and 3.x
  - Adobe Acrobat, versions 8.1.2 and 8.1.1
  - Microsoft Windows Live (MSN) Messenger, versions 4.7 and 5.1
  - Apple iTunes, versions 3.2 and 3.1.2
  - Skype, version 3.5.0.248

• YouTube Finally Embraces HD
  YouTube has just launched a new portion of its site dedicated to HD content, allowing users to easily browse through what is now the largest archive of high definition content on the web. The move has been a long time coming - in the last few weeks the site has been gradually building up to a large scale HD launch with the introduction of a 16:9 video player and the ability to watch HD on selected videos, but until this point it has been difficult to separate the HD content from videos encoded at YouTube’s normal resolution.
• Pastebud Brings Copy and Paste to the iPhone
  Pastebud, a bookmarklet/webapp combo that works around the lack of a copy or paste function in the iPhone and iPod touch, has just gone live. And it's surprisingly elegant and painless, with a few small hitches.