U.S. comScore video metrix stats are out today, with the number of video viewers rebounding in the month of May. According to the web metrics company, 183 million U.S. Internet users watched online video during the month compared to 178 million in April. ComScore reports that YouTube saw record viewership in May with an all-time high of 14.6 billion videos viewed and surpassing the threshold of 100 videos per viewer for the first time. The report also showed that 144.1 million viewers watched 14.6 billion videos on YouTube.com (which works out to 101.2 videos per viewer). In May, U.S. Internet users watched nearly 34 billion videos, with Google Sites taking the top spot with 14.6 billion videos, representing 43.1 percent of all videos viewed online. ComScore says that YouTube accounted for the vast majority of videos viewed at the property. Hulu came in second with 1.2 billion videos, or 3.5 percent of all online videos viewed, a slight increase from April. Microsoft Sites ranked third with 642 million (1.9 percent), followed by Vevo with 430 million (1.3 percent) and Viacom Digital with 347 million (1.0 percent). According to the release, 84.8 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video. The average Hulu viewer watched 27.0 videos, totaling 2.7 hours of video per viewer. The duration of the average online video was 4.3 minutes. In terms of number of viewers, nearly 183 million viewers watched an average of 186 videos per viewer in May. Google Sites attracted 144.6 million unique viewers during the month (101.2 videos per viewer), followed by Yahoo Sites with 46.0 million viewers (7.3 videos per viewer), and Vevo with 45.6 million viewers (9.4 videos per viewer). Vevo grew again this month, and moved up the list one position in the May ranking taking the #3 spot with 45.6 million viewers and an average of 9.4 videos per viewer. With respect to video advertising in May, Tremor Media once again took the top spot as the number one video ad network with a potential reach of 102.8 million viewers, or 56.2 percent of the total video viewing audience. ScanScout Network ranked second with a potential reach of 99.3 million viewers (54.3 percent penetration) followed by YuMe Video Network with 87.5 million viewers (47.8 percent). CrunchBase Information comScore Information provided by CrunchBase

Twitter just put up a blog post talking up its platform approach and long-term strategy. Surprisingly, the company has made some decisions that are sure to irk a couple of third-party developers and startups. Here’s the big news: aside from Promoted Tweets, Twitter said it will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API. That’s not so good news for TweetUp (and other Twitter-focused advertising startups like Ad.ly and Twad.ly). Particularly not the former, which just launched its live beta at TechCrunch Disrupt half an hour ago. Here are the reasons Twitter says it decided not to allow third-parties to advertise in the stream: First, third party ad networks are not necessarily looking to preserve the unique user experience Twitter has created. They may optimize for either market share or short-term revenue at the expense of the long-term health of the Twitter platform. For example, a third party ad network may seek to maximize ad impressions and click through rates even if it leads to a net decrease in Twitter use due to user dissatisfaction. Secondly, the basis for building a lasting advertising network that benefits users should be innovation, not near-term monetization. Twitter is uniquely dependent on and responsible for the long-term health and value of the platform. Accordingly, a necessary focus of Promoted Tweets is to explore ways to create value for our users. Third party ad networks may be optimized for near-term monetization at the expense of innovating or creating the best user experience. We believe it is our responsibility to encourage creative product development and to curb practices that compromise innovation. It is important to keep in mind that Twitter bears all the costs of maintaining the network, protecting the Tweet stream against spam, supporting user requests, and scaling the service. Indeed, Twitter will bear many of the support costs associated with any third-party paid Tweets, as Twitter receives support emails related to anything a user sees in a tweet stream. The third-party bears few of these costs by comparison. Twitter adds that when its new Annotations feature launches, there are going to be many new business opportunities on the Twitter platform in addition to those currently available. The company does recognize that for a few companies, the new Terms of Service prohibit activities in which some have invested resources. It will be interesting to see how those companies will respond to the news. TweetUp, for one, says they never planned to advertise in-stream, so this won’t affect them as much as you would think at first. Nevertheless, it shows that Twitter’s decisions on the way it moves forward with its platform and how to monetize it most efficiently should keep startups that base their entire business model on the Twitter platform on guard. CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase

I wrote before that Wall Street has a far bigger fascination with Brazil than Silicon Valley has. But since I got back from Brazil two weeks ago, I’ve had several conversations with Silicon Valley-based investors mulling scouting trips down South. Indeed, I’ve heard that at least one company I wrote about from my last trip to Brazil is deep in some funding negotiations as we speak. If the left side of the coast of the US is getting serious about doing business in Brazil, there’s someone they need to meet: Edivan Costa. He’s taken one of the biggest threats to Brazilian entrepreneurship, and fittingly, turned it into a startup itself. Sure Brazil is a growing market, but it’s not easy to build a company there. The government takes one-third of revenues in taxes, and Brazil has European-like labor laws that prevent companies from flexibly hiring and firing—a big negative for a startup ecosystem. But Costa’s company SEDI is helping with one big hurdle new companies face: Bureaucracy. On average, it takes 150 days to open a business in Brazil, requiring dozens of licenses and in many cases those licenses have to be continually renewed. SEDI specializes in making that painless, and Costa has spent 18 years learning how to get the process down to 30-to-40 days—without paying any bribes. He has 90 employees in twelve branches in Brazil. It’s one thing to start a business in an area other people are ignoring. It’s quite another to start a business out of something everyone else sees as the exact thing that’s thwarting entrepreneurship. Costa always had that entrepreneurial edge—growing up in Rio’s favelas he spent his youth collecting scrap paper and selling it to recyclers to pay for his school books. He thought he’d found his way out through every Brazilian kid’s dream—professional soccer. By the time he was 18, he was playing in the equivalent of the minor leagues in Sao Paulo, when his father fell ill and he had to move back home. He wound up splitting some office space with an attorney, doing his clerk work and eventually started offering that service to other attorneys and companies. Costa’s story is remarkable for a guy that grew up with few advantages. He was largely uneducated, had no investors and as an Afro-Brazilian he takes issue with the idea that Brazil is free from racism. Soon after starting SEDI, he was driving a nice car with a blond girlfriend on his arm, and a guy in a convenience store asked him if he was a Samba player, a soccer player or a criminal. He says he still gets confused for a security guard in malls, because he wears a suit everywhere he goes. (That’s him in the dramatic picture above.) But the only color that Costa’s clients care about is the red tape he helps them cut through, by keeping up to date with the myriad of changing regulations. Customers include WalMart, TelMex and Carrefour , along with a lot of other big national brands. He specializes in retail businesses with hundreds of stores spread throughout the country. SEDI did over $3 million US dollars in revenue last year, down from 2008 thanks to the financial crisis. But already in 2010, business is up 25%, Costa says. He serves about 8% of the top 500 companies in Brazil, so there’s clearly a lot of room to grow– or if he’s not careful for a competitor to eat his lunch. SEDI is a services business that likely won’t be the next big Brazilian IPO. But it could easily enable that company to open its doors. People always say the key to Silicon Valley’s startup infrastructure is the network of professionals skilled at getting a company up and running in a matter of days. Brazil still has a long way to go to get there, clearly, but SEDI helps. This seems like a no-brainer service every emerging market needs.

When bashing AT&T’s network, two cities usually come up above all others: New York City and San Francisco. AT&T has even acknowledged just how bad it is in those cities. But they’ve also said for a while that they’re working on making it better. And apparently now that work is far enough along that they’re emailing customers about it. Over the past week, AT&T has been emailing its customers in San Francisco to let them know that the network is getting better. “ We wanted you to be among the first to know! We recently enhanced the 3G network in the greater San Francisco area to provide better in-building 3G coverage, fewer dropped calls and a better overall wireless experience ,” says the email. It continues, “ With better coverage on the nation’s fastest 3G network, there’s never been a better time to be an AT&T customer .” In other words, “things are getting better, please don’t leave.” Hopefully, it’s a good sign if AT&T feels comfortable enough about its network to email its customers. Another good sign: AT&T did a great job this past week keeping its network stable during the SXSW festival (after failing badly last year ). Still, AT&T has been saying for a while that they’re working on fixing the network in San Francisco, and on any given day it can be as bad as ever. Below, find the full email being sent: We wanted you to be among the first to know! We recently enhanced the 3G network  in the greater San Francisco area to provide better in-building 3G coverage, fewer dropped calls and a better overall wireless experience. The great news is coverage in  Northern California will continue to improve as we expand capacity, optimize and add more sites in the coming months. With better coverage on the nation’s fastest 3G network, there’s never been a better time to be an AT&T customer. We thank you for your continued loyalty and look forward to sharing more good news soon. CrunchBase Information AT&T Information provided by CrunchBase

Editor’s note : This guest post is written by Marc Benioff , chairman and CEO of salesforce.com . In it, he responds to critics of his last guest post arguing that enterprise software should be more like Facebook. Two weeks ago on TechCrunch I posted “The Facebook Imperative,” which posed a simple question, “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?” It was the next iteration of the question I asked in 1999 that spawned salesforce.com, “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com.” If you have read my book, Behind The Cloud , you are well aware how that one question launched a company, and a movement. Its been an exciting decade. But the real excitement is just starting. Frankly, I’ve been amazed by the huge amount of responses, tweets, and comments (aka “the ruckus across the blogoshere,” as Joe McKendrick calls it ). It only strengthens my conviction that we are about to see the greatest revolution in enterprise software, ever. Well, really, the most exciting revolution in computing, ever. It will create more value for users, customers, and vendors by an order of magnitude over what we saw in the last wave. And, it’s really starting to happen right now. It is realtime. It is social. It is mobile. And, it is about time. Literally, it is about productivity. I’m energized by the excitement I see for a new generation of collaboration software in the enterprise to replace antiquated Microsoft Sharepoint servers and IBM’s Lotus Notes. I’ve enjoyed seeing my observation—that Lotus Notes was conceived before Mark Zuckerberg—reverberate around the web. But, the reality is the Facebook Imperative contained more than a funny line. It hit a nerve. We are all responding— debating —a question that is an imperative because we all need to take software to a new level, and now is the time. Microsoft and IBM have maintained the status quo on enterprise collaboration software too long, and it’s time for a change. There are an overwhelming number of you who agree that its time to transform the business conversation the same way Facebook has changed the consumer conversation. We are betting salesforce.com’s future on it. Approximately 40% of companies are already deploying or planning to deploy a social computing platform, a number that’s expected to rise, says Irwin Lazar of Nemeretes Research . Not everyone agrees, mostly the vendors that are milking their cash cows. But, make no mistake about it, this generation of social platforms is very different than the last. Charles Zedlewski emerged from a long blogging hiatus to argue that Facebook is designed for entertainment —not productivity. Well, that’s not surprising given that he works for SAP, one of the companies I have previously referred to as “innovationless”—in my view they remain the Anti-Cloud. Their actions speak for themselves. Still, I’m astounded that more enterprises haven’t figured out how to tap into the real collaborative power of Facebook and Twitter, and the new social models that they have pioneered. I consider Facebook and Twitter—and the ability to tap into my network of friends and followers—one the most productive ways I can start my day. Using these new Internet phenoms, I’ve tested new ad campaigns and elicited great customer responses, promoted my book to a large audience of people who cared, and with the help of my network, even named new products—all before I sat down for breakfast. I’m not alone; ask Vinnie Mirchandani for a sneak preview of his new book and read how Starbucks, Avon, and Pepsi are using these new social services to increase productivity in their enterprises. Or, look at how Causes , one of Facebook’s most popular apps, is having a fascinating impact on the future of philanthropy. While my admiration for Facebook is no secret, the fact is that the Facebook Imperative—much like The Amazon Imperative of 1999—is just a metaphor. Like all metaphors, they are terrific catalysts to introduce an idea and orient people. They are rooted in inspiration, but they do not funnel down to the granular details. And, there are details that make this movement entirely new in practice. The power of this new model is to create the next level of productivity, collaboration, and learning in the enterprise. And, I see it happening now in our own company. For years we’ve been reading about the potential for institutional memory to transform a corporation into a learning organization. But, have we seen it happen beyond very few unique organizations? A true paradigm shift occurs when the barriers of entry are removed for everyone. That is changing fast. With these new social models, there is a way to immediately leverage the knowledge of an organization. People with expertise and relevance are instantly looped in, can participate in the conversation, collaborate, and make contributions more simply than ever before. That will be the catalyst of this new productivity revolution—delivered through these new social enterprise platforms. We have deployed Salesforce Chatter internally through our own beta program , and we are now using the social models proven by Facebook and Twitter to run our company. Our new social enterprise is built atop our existing business information and applications. It’s not partitioned off from other enterprise applications, but is an integrated part of it—offering a new view of the data that is more productive and easier to use. Through enterprise sharing models, filtering and discovery tools, users have full flexibility over which people and data they follow—allowing them to fully maximize the value of their own feeds and eliminating the risk of “pollutants” some critics fear. I have learned more about my own company in the last three weeks using Salesforce Chatter than I have in the last three years. It reminds me of the time we went live with http://ideas.salesforce.com . The awareness I have today of what is happening with our employees, our customers, our products, our customer service escalations, and even the deals we are closing is spectacular. Social computing for the enterprise is about seeing what matters to your company, what is happening with your products, and among your people. It’s about the information you need to make decisions finding you. I’m amazed at the potential of this technology. There is just no way I can explain it to you in writing, so here is an actual screen shot that I took off my desktop to give you an idea of the flow (click to enlarge): It is time to let go of the past and start to create a compelling future for the software industry. I’m energized by the skeptics. It’s familiar. They all eventually convert to what’s important to customers, or become increasingly irrelevant. You don’t have to look any farther than last week when Steve Ballmer spoke to the University of Washington telling them Microsoft was finally “All-In” the cloud . Well, that only took a decade or two. No more software plus services, now they are 100% cloud too. Sure. I’m living in the post-PC revolution. I’m in a desktopless world that is about feeds and profiles running in all my browsers and mobile devices, and interacting in exciting new ways. It doesn’t matter if I am in the office, at home, or at Starbucks—I am productive wherever I am. The enterprise is not just going to the cloud, it’s now going social, and it’s going mobile. Facebook and Twitter have shown us the way. Like Microsoft, and IBM, not everyone has to get it yet, but eventually they all will. As they say: Shift happens. CrunchBase Information Marc Benioff Salesforce Information provided by CrunchBase