Open up your mind and say, ahh...

If you want to see your favorite music video or maybe an example of a do-it-yourself task you’re working on, where is the very first place online that you would go to? Chances are the answer is YouTube. Even though there are several other video services on the Internet, none come anywhere near the success and prevalence of YouTube. Since its beginning in 2005, YouTube has risen to the top in terms of sites visited (it’s the number 2 search engine behind Google) and has since held its place there comfortably.

Today’s infographic goes over YouTube’s history in its relatively short existence. The first video (called “Me at the zoo”) was posted in April of 2005 and a year and a half later in October of 2006, YouTube was bought by Google for an astounding $1.65 billion. They weren’t done growing yet though; within three years there were 1 billion videos being viewed daily, a number which quadrupled in 2012.

How long will YouTube be able to continue to grow and remain the most dominant video site? It’s hard to say for sure, but if current trends continue then YouTube will likely be around for a long time to come. For more information on the history and current performance of YouTube, refer to the infographic below.

What’s This?

Rumors of Apple developing a so-called smart watch — think of a small, wearable smartphone wrapped around your wrist — have been thrown around the Internet for some time now. But a New York Times story today suggests there is actually some truth to it.

The Times spoke with sources inside Apple’s Cupertino headquarters, and they have confirmed Apple is working on a wristwatch made of curved glass. That kind of technology already exists, so using glass that can bend to make it wearable seems like a real possibility, even today.

“You can certainly make it wrap around a cylindrical object and that could be someone’s wrist,” Pete Bocko, the chief technology officer for Corning Glass Technologies, told the Times. “Right now, if I tried to make something that looked like a watch, that could be done using this flexible glass,” he added, referring to Willow Glass, a bendable glass that his company has worked on.

At this point, though, it’s all speculation, since the company’s actual plans are shrouded in secrecy.

And even if Apple is indeed working on an iWatch, that doesn’t mean we’ll see it in an Apple Store any time soon. Although experts agree that wearable technology is definitely something we’ll see sooner rather than later — just think of Google Glass.

“Over the long term wearable computing is inevitable for Apple; devices are diversifying and the human body is a rich canvas for the computer,” Sarah Rotman Epps, an expert in wearable computing, told the Times. “But I’m not sure how close we are to a new piece of Apple hardware that is worn on the body.”

Would you buy an Apple smart watch? What are the features you would like to see a watch like that offer? Tell us your thoughts in the comments.

Graphic courtesy of Federico Ciccarese

A hack of our 43rd president’s email account this week netted not state secrets or major scandals–but it did reveal three paintings. We already knew that George W. was an aspiring painter, but until yesterday, none of his work had been publicized (except for a portrait of his recently deceased first dog, Barney). The three grainy shots of his handiwork were released by an anonymous hacker, alongside photos of George H. Bush, Ralph Lauren, and Bill Clinton.

It’s very easy to mock these paintings given their context. And plenty of people already have. Dubya is an easy target for reasons entirely outside of his skill or ambition as an artist. And certainly, when I first saw them, I laughed along with the rest of the Internet. But the more I look at them, the more interesting they become.

The two paintings, which seem as though they were painted in acrylic, show Bush in the shower and bathtub. In one we see his toes sticking out of the murky water as the faucet runs. The former is more interesting: It shows us Bush’s back as he faces the shower, while a reflection of his face stares from a hanging shower mirror. It’s a startling effect, and it immediately made me think of Jan van Eyck’s 1434 Arnolfini Portrait, which shows a posing couple reflected in a nearby mirror. I’m not arguing that Bush’s work is on a par with the 15th-century Flemish genius, but he is using a mirror in the same way van Eyck did–to point out his presence and reject the gaze of the viewer at the same time. There’s also something of David Hockney here, in the luxury bathroom trappings and the gridded tile background.

Write off the other leaked works as crude acts of stress relief if you will, but these two paintings are fascinatingly blunt. We’re seeing a man who’s thinking about his image, his role in public life, and his legacy. Wonderful New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz explains:

I love these two bather paintings. They are “simple” and “awkward,” but in wonderful, unself-conscious, intense ways. They show someone doing the best he can with almost no natural gifts–except the desire to do this. The reclusion and seclusiveness of the pictures evoke the quietude (though not the insight, quality, or genius) of certain Chardin still lifes. These are pictures of someone dissembling without knowing it, unprotected and on display, but split between the promptings of his own inner drives and limited by his abilities. They reflect the pleasures of disinterestedness. A floater. Inert. The images of a man who saw the entire world from the inside but who finds the smallest, most private place in a private home to imagine his universe. Of almost nothingness. Sweet, sublime, oblique oblivion. The visibility of invisibleness.

Read that as deep satire or sincerity, as you see fit. Either way, there’s some truth in it: these paintings put us in Bush’s shoes (had he been wearing any), and force us to look at life from the perspective of a former president who’s currently wildly unpopular. It’s uncomfortable–and isn’t that what good art is all about?

Facebook hit a billion users! Twitter is the new digital water cooler! Youtube is the future of TV! Ok, you get it right? Social media is transformative. So what? Every business that thinks about customer engagement through a technological lens will miss the very thing that will keep them in business for the long-term—the impact of technology on society and behavior and how it opens up new touch points and changes expectations as a result.

Depending on your business, you may or may not already have someone dedicated to your social media strategy. Whether it is aligning with your current business objectives and priorities is a different article. The focus for our time together right now is on how you will compete for the future of attention, wherever attention is focused. All signs at the moment point to mobile as the future of engagement and commerce as smartphones and tablets become the lens for how consumers see the digital and virtual worlds.

At the end of 2011, the U.S. alone was home to more than 100 million smart phone users. By 2014, 90 million people will use tablets in the U.S., which will represent 36% of the overall Internet population. Why is this important to your business? Regardless of size, the state of mobile now insists that you think through a dedicated experience for customer engagement and commerce alike.

For years, web designers would not only develop sites, but also test their aesthetics and functionality in multiple browsers using the most common operating systems. Additionally, user testing ensured that the desired click paths and outcomes were optimized. No site can truly launch until it performs as designed for the masses. As any designer will tell you, if the click path breaks down or introduces friction, visitor frustration and abandonment isn’t far behind.

Similar to the Web, mobile is now a dedicated channel that represents a means to an end. Or said another way, mobile has become an exclusive experience rather than a bridge between people and information on the traditional or desktop web. It is still largely assumed that people on mobile devices represent the minority of web users and thus require less focus and resources than those who use desktop or laptop PCs. But with the proliferation of smart phones and tablets, the balance is shifting. The question is; have you revisited your web and mobile strategies to meet the needs and expectations of your connected customers?

Let’s take Facebook as an example. The company faces a serious dilemma as its mobile site m.facebook.com, and its dedicated app for iOS, Android, Microsoft, and Blackberry, rival its classic website Facebook.com. In May 2012, comScore reported that for the first time, mobile users in the U.S. spent more time in Facebook than those using desktops and laptops, 441 minutes vs. 391 per month. While the company has designed successful mobile products to deliver optimized, on-the-go experiences for the small screens, it has not found a viable business model to monetize this profound shift. Facebook makes the lion share of its billion-dollar revenue by serving four to seven ads at a time on the desktop. On the mobile, it only presents a few per day in its micro news feed. If a tech-savvy company such as Facebook faces this quandary, chances are, you will as well.

In a mobile economy, apps become the currency of a new information exchange. One of the most fascinating and least understood aspects of apps is that they create a contained experience that essentially is its own Internet. Everything your customer needs or could possibly need should be included in the app. And those mobile browsers that need to hit the traditional web, visitors will expect to see a page optimized for the smaller screen. Think about it for a moment. How many times have you tried to hit a site from your phone or tablet only to quit in frustration when the site would not load correctly on your screen? You may or may not choose or remember to visit that site later and that’s just one example of how designing for experiences is as much a part of form and function as it is about platform-centricity.

That ‘s the point. Customer behavior is evolving. Technology is evolving. Is your digital strategy evolving? Is it considering shifts in attention, activity, and expectations and designing new experiences to react and lead accordingly?

The time is now to answer these questions and more…

Who on your team is thinking about designing mobile experiences? How is mobile tied to the overall digital strategy? How is social and mobile complementing your web strategy? More importantly, how are people connecting or attempting to connect with you and how would they define the experience?

Answering these questions will help you design for tomorrow’s digital strategy right now. The future of online experiences is distributed, but it is also integrated in its ability to tell your story while delivering exceptional experiences optimized for each channel. Like the classic web and social media, mobile is just one of the many channels that requires a dedicated approach. And, as we’re learning, mobile will become one of the most if not the most important channel for customer engagement.

The model home at Taylor Morrison’s Ladera housing development in Bee Cave, Texas, looks like any other modern house when you approach it from the road. There’s a large front door, five windows and a few plants to bring the place to life. It’s more of the same when you walk through the door either. There’s the landing to your left, a room immediately to your right.

In fact, it’s not until you take a few steps inside the house that you notice things are slightly different.

“This, to your right, is the children’s nook,” Kristin France tells me as I turn inside the house. “It’s got a full-on kitchen.”

“Every kid who comes through here, this is where they stop. They’ll just hang out here while the parents look around the house. I have a two-year-old, and I can guarantee that she’d be in here—and I’d have a hard time pulling her out. ”

What I’m looking at is a doorframe that’s about three-quarters short of normal. It’s nestled into a wall underneath the stairs, and around it is a painting that’s meant to allude to cottages. This is the children’s nook, and on the wall someone has painted a sink and stove.

“This was actually first designed to be here for a dog,” France says. “But any kid would love it.”

Ladera is not your traditional housing development. Rather, it’s a revolutionary social community—a series of what Taylor Morrison considers the interactive homes. For the first time in the history of homebuilding, a development company has decided to crowdsource the construction process. As France explains, every house on the Ladera lot will draw a certain semblance of inspiration from designs the company found on Pinterest.

If you haven’t heard of Pinterest yet, it’s likely that you don’t know any women. The site is the fastest growing social network on the Internet, a behemoth of beauty and inspiration that’s grown to more than 16 million users. The site has become the unofficial wish list for dreamers and believers alike—an online destination for one-stop window shopping. People pour through other users’ pinboards to find the objects they like most. When they find something, they pin it. Thus, their own pinboards become a vessel for the things they like and want.

And while we don’t have the cold, hard numbers to back it up, fromcircumstantial evidence, I feel safe in saying that a substantial amount of those users have filled at least one of their pinboards with a series of things they would like to see in their dream homes: lofty light structures, super modern kitchen constructions, cute little craft rooms and tiny nooks under the steps for their children.

France, a marketing manager at Taylor Morrison, is no different. She’s got a “My Next House…” pinboard with 77 different pins and says that’s how she got the inspiration to build these homes.

“We were doing our frame walk,” she remembers. “We always pick out of floor plans and what we’re going to build before anything happens.

“We were walking through this house and got to the steps, and I said, ‘We’ve got to make that a children’s nook under the stairs,’ because I knew that we had to make it a functional space. I pulled the image up on my phone, and everybody agreed.”

The kitchen design and craft room upstairs played out much the same way. France looked at the framework of the house and then consulted her pinboard. With the kitchen, she found a design that played to a long island and walkway. Upstairs in the craft room, she reverted to an old favorite: a two-sided desk that looks made for creative collaboration.

“We’re showing people that they can have these homes. I think that’s what Pinterest does,” France says. “Your hopes and dreams of what you could have or could create: We’re trying to make that a reality for people who can’t visualize it.”

France says Taylor Morrison is planning to build 260 different houses on the lot, with each pulling different dream designs from Pinterest. And while she laments the fact that the company can’t yet cater to personalized requests, the fact that she and her colleagues are able to show actual visualizations of room conceptions can be a legitimate boost for business.

“After years of hearing people say, ‘I wish you had done this’ or ‘I wish you had done that,’ this has helped create the solution,” France adds. “We’ve revamped a lot of our floor plans in the last two years basically to cater to all those requests.

“We made those decisions based on what’s popular and what these pinners are requesting. We could show that the room upstairs could be a study or craft room or baby’s room. These visuals help people move into them.”

The internet is a big place. Since it’s inception, the world wide web has become literally a world unto it’s own. Today, there are 2.4 billion internet users. That’s double what it was compared to the internet population in 2007. In addition to these users, the content is matched tenfold. It would take 7 million dvds for each hour the internet has existed to capture all of that data. So much information that it is estimated that by 2063 there will 4 times the amount it is today. That’s almost 966 exabytes. psst 1000 gigabytes = 1 terabyte, 1 exabyte = 1,000,000 terabytes! That’s a TON of information. This will take an incredible amount of energy to store and power. In fact, the internet itself uses about 1.5% of global electricity. All that electricity’s got to come from somewhere. This infographic delves into the unintended consequences that comes with all of the Cat memes and tweets that we hold so dear to our digital hearts. We should be informed and aware of how our internet is powered and how that power affects our world, for better and for worse.

I basically never use Siri. Half the time she has no idea what I’m asking her for, which is only funny when you’re not in a hurry. The times she’d be most useful to me, I’m usually out on the streets of New York City, and the background noise seems to confuse her, which leads to me yelling the same phrase at my phone over and over while worried New Yorkers hurry past me, shielding their children.I can’t remember the last time I used Siri on purpose, but I must accidentally launch her at least once a day. For some reason, it always happens when I’m on the subway: “Siri not available. Connect to the Internet,” she tells me in her humorless bot voice. Usually, the other people in my car pretend not to notice, tho earlier this week another passenger helpfully shook my arm with both his hands and told me, “Siri doesn’t work when you’re underground!” I thanked him and moved to a different seat. I should probably just turn Siri off, but I keep thinking I might suddenly think of a great reason to use her.

A quick Twitter search proves I’m not the only one who has a rocky relationship with Apple’s faceless lady:

I think Siri is a great idea and has lots of potential, but so far she hasn’t lived up to it. Maybe that will change with the iPhone 5 (or 6). As Ilya Gelfenbeyn, CEO of Speaktoit (Siri’s Android cousin), told Fast Company recently“The field is still in a really early phase of development. It’s something like the search engines in the beginning of the ’90s.”

Do you find Siri useful, or annoying? Share your best–and worst, and funniest–Siri stories below, along with any tips you might have for the unconvinced (me).

Image: Flickr user Scott Moore

Alright, alright, alright, it’s Monday and time to get this week under way, whether you want to or not. I’ve got a pretty cool infographic for ya’ll today, How People Look in Google and How to Look Better. Now you may be thinking I don’t do much on the internet besides Facebook and the like, there is nothing about me on Google. Well you’d be surprised, after I Googled myself then did an internet search I found there were several links relating to me and stuff I had done that I had no idea was on the internet. None of it is bad of course, being the saint that I am, but it was interesting to find things I had done back in Middle School posted on the internet.

Lucky for me the content that appears when I Google myself is positive but that is because of a conscious effort. When it comes to Google rankings the one link you should be truly concerned about is your top hit. However only half of people own their first link on a Google search with 1 in 4 having no positive content on their first page. If you’re a professional concerned with your image Linkedin is your best friend. It ranks highest in Google so you can provide that clean innocent image using that guy. Be careful with things like Youtube and Vimeo, even though Youtube is more popular Vimeo ranks higher. Everything you do on the internet really is archived. Be careful people and don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Click to enlarge

Whether traveling for business or pleasure, no one wants to arrive at a hotel to find expensive Wi-Fi access. Hotels could potentially lose business by charging guests high or hidden fees for Internet. But many establishments — especially luxury lodging — still charge a pretty penny to go online, with little guarantee for a fast connection, either.

According to a recent J.D. Power & Associates study, about 55% of all hotel guests access the Internet during their stays — up 20% from 2006. About 87% of that group is using Wi-Fi.

Although most travelers have come to expect connectivity to be cheap or included, it’s not always the case. The good news is there are ways to avoid paying for Wi-Fi at hotels all together.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind for your next trip.

1. Tether Your Mobile Device

It’s possible to tether your 3G or 4G connection from your smartphone to your computer, but many carriers charge fees to do so. Once you have added the service to your data plan, turn on your phone’s personal hotspot option, located in settings. By setting a password, you will be able to prevent other guests in nearby rooms from connecting to your hotspot.

2. Buy a Wireless Router

Although many hotels charge for Wi-Fi, some provide ethernet cables for you to use free. You can then connect your Apple AirPort Express or similar portable Wi-Fi hotspot device to send connectivity to your laptop and mobile devices.

3. Check the Lobby

It might cost you more to access the web in your hotel room, but some places offer free Wi-Fi in the lobby. To prevent guests from using valuable bandwidth to stream media on sites such as Netflix — which also takes money away from in-room pay-per-view — hotels often restrict free Wi-Fi in rooms, but open it up to guests at no extra charge on the main floor.

4. Find Nearby Connectivity

WeFi has a database of more than 132 million Wi-Fi hotspots worldwide, from small towns to urban centers. The company also has apps for both iOS and Android, so it’s easy to locate the closest Wi-Fi on the go.

How do you avoid paying for Wi-Fi at hotels? Let us know in the comments.

BONUS: 15 Travel Twitter Accounts to Follow

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, courtneyk