YouTube prepares video rental service

YouTube is to team up with the Sundance Film Festival to unveil a movie rental service in the US, reports Computing.co.uk.

The project will initially offer five films selected from the festival. The titles will cost $3.99 through Google Checkout and will be available as streaming views from 22 to 31 January.

YouTube says it will also work with education and health groups to offer other rental titles. The service is a first for YouTube, which has traditionally provided its content for free.

You don't necessarily need money to make money today, claimed Richard Tan, who spoke at an event organised to encourage attendees to explore and pursue entrepreneurship, in Thimphu, Bhutan, writes Kuensel Online.

“If you want to make a lot of money today, it's with ideas,” said the owner of Singaporean firm, Success Resources, which primarily deals in organising seminars. Holding its first seminar in Bhutan, Tan spoke on creating employment opportunities using ICT and education.

“When you want to go into business today, you have two choices, traditional or on the Internet,” said Tan. He noted that aspiring Internet entrepreneurs did not have to be IT-savvy or technically inclined to start an Internet business.

Facebook more than doubled its US audience from 54.5 million visitors in December 2008 to 111.9 million visitors in December 2009, according to researcher comScore, says eWeek.

The success of the social network in its fifth year is the greatest for a Web company since that of Google, which went public after its fifth year and now earns nearly $2 billion a quarter in profit.

Facebook, which continues to add new features geared to retain and grow its loyal audience past 350 million users, soaks up 7% of all time spent online by users in the US.