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Google just announced a new grant program that will distribute $5 million to "new and emerging YouTube partners. According to Google, the YouTube Partner Grants program is designed to find the best new ideas and production models from YouTube's content partners. As Google notes, many successful YouTube partners are able to generate substantial revenues, but they still lack the resources of studio-backed production houses.

In a world where crowdsourcing has become a mainstay of politics, a new site from the Democratic National Committee is taking the idea one step further and asking voters to find damaging videos of opposing lawmakers and candidates.

The Accountability Project is pretty simple: you can upload and view videos, or track down Republican candidate events. There's no voting or comments; it's essentially a platform for videos to go viral. So far, uploads mostly consist of tepid footage of conservatives criticizing Democrats. But when compared to other political crowdsourcing projects, the site stands out as one of the more potentially disruptive ideas in this midterm election.

Augmented Reality, Internet of Things & the Interplanetary Web

Vint Cerf was one of the key engineers in the development of the Internet, email and more. Since 2005 he has worked at Google as the company's Chief Internet Evangelist. This Spring Cerf gave a talk inside Google called Reimagining the Internet. His entire 80 minute talk is worth watching, but below we've excerpted the 10 minutes we expect would be most interesting to ReadWriteWeb readers. Think some of these ideas are crazy? Vint Cerf thinks they could be the future.

Solving CAPTCHAs - the text puzzles with distorted letters that many sites use to ensure that you are human - has become a daily reality for many Internet users. Sadly, these tests are often a major source of frustration, too. And while CAPTCHAs are used to provide a decent level of security for site owners, many of these systems have now been broken or are getting gamed by hackers who simply hire cheap workers to solve them manually. NuCaptcha, a Vancouver, B.C.-based company, aims to change all of this with a new video captcha system that launches today.

Cisco announced today the Cius, an Android-based seven-inch tablet computer aimed at the enterprise. The device will feature both front and rear-facing cameras, Cisco TelePresence-compatible video conferencing and access to applications such as Cisco Quad, WebEx and AnyConnect Security VPN Client, as well as access to the Android app store. The launch further diversifies Cisco's offerings.

May 2010 was a great month for YouTube. Not only did users of Google's online video service stream more videos per month in the U.S. than ever before (14.6 billion), but according to online analytics firm comScore, every single YouTube user now watches more than 100 videos per month. In total, Google's video properties now command slightly more than 43% of the online video market. No other online video service currently owns more than 3.5% of the streaming video market. In total, about 183 million Internet users in the U.S. watched online video last month.

Adobe Systems announced today that its Flash Player 10.1 software for mobile devices is now being released to its platform partners. The plugin-based technology, which allows for a range of interactive elements including video, games and even advertising, is already available for Google Android phones running the latest operating system revision, code-named "Froyo," but technically known as Android version 2.2. This OS now runs on Google's Nexus One and is expected to arrive on other Android phones like the Motorola Droid, Motorola Milestone, HTC Evo, HTC Incredible, HTC Desire and the Samsung Galaxy S.

Adobe has also now shipped Flash Player 10.1 for mobile to its device partners who will then prep the software for launch on Blackberry (RIM), webOS (Palm), Windows Phone 7, LiMo, MeeGo and Symbian smartphones.

The one notable exception to this list is, of course, Apple's iPhone.

When the popular iPhone application for Facebook got a dramatic refresh last summer, lead designer Joe Hewitt said that the inability to view Facebook videos was a real disappointment. This weekend that changed, and Facebook iPhone users now have a very nice experience viewing videos on their mobile devices.

A quiet update to the application on Friday fixed a number of small bugs but the biggest change was the introduction of video. Facebook sees 2 billion video views each month, which is the same number YouTube sees every single day.

Looking to save money on your wireless bill? Have the new iPhone? Maybe you should start making video calls instead. With this week's launch of the new iPhone 4 and its accompanying software, the Apple smartphone now enables a video calling feature by way of a new application called "FaceTime." And apparently, these videos calls, unlike their voice counterparts, are free.

Radvision's Tsahi Levent-Levi, writing for No Jitter, sums up the obstacles for widespread telepresence use in the enterprise: "It costs so much to purchase such a system and make room (literally!) for it and install it, that even large enterprises will only have 1 room per building for it." The situation leads to upper-level executives' needs taking priority to the needs of the rank-and-file. And that leads to lower overall use of the system.