When serial inventor, pro candle maker and very early YouTube star Paul "Renetto" Robinett called me on the phone six months ago and told me he and a team were creating a new video service, I was interested. When I got to see the service on Robinett's phone in the lobby of the Driskill Hotel at SXSW, I was downright excited. This was my favorite new app that I saw in Austin. It's not publicly available yet, but it's finally getting close.
It's called Glmps and it's a social photo service - with a very important twist. It stores the five seconds before you snapped a photo in video - and saves the whole package together for context. It's cool; it lets you see a little bit of the story behind a picture and it turns video into a fun freeze-frame experience. Check out the Glmps I made of my lunch, below.
How big is YouTube? It's biiiiig - 3 billion views per day big. On this, YouTube's sixth birthday, the Google-owned video sharing service released a few impressive stats (via infographic, of course), detailing its impressive numbers. Today, users upload more than 48 hours - yes, two days worth! - of videos every minute. This represents a 37% increase in the number of uploads over the last six months and a 100% increase over last year.
Yesterday Seth Godin posted an essay on his blog about "The Future of the Library," a call-to-arms for librarians to envision their work less as a defender of a "warehouse for dead books" but as as a "producer, concierge, connector, teacher and impresario." To paraphrase the response of librarians on blogs and on Twitter: "Yes, we know." and "Yes, that's what we do."
One example of this "future of the library" that is indeed here now: the newly released New York Public Library app, available today via iTunes: Biblion: The Boundless Library. The app is a re-launch of the library's Biblion journal, but in a format specifically designed for the tablet.
Last summer, Google showcased the capabilities of HTML5 and the Chrome browser with an interactive short film "The Wilderness Downtown." Based on the Arcade Fire Song "We Used to Wait," the project was at once deeply nostalgic and technologically forward-looking. On stage at Google IO last week, the Creative Lab Team revealed their next music project, again directed by Chris Milk.
Google is finally launching its Google Music service at this week's Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco, a year after its reveal at the last event. The new service will be similar to what Amazon launched in March, an online storage locker where your songs will be stored in the "cloud." In this case, the "cloud" refers to Google's servers. Once your music is uploaded, you can stream it to your Android-powered mobile phone or via the Web to your computer.
While both Amazon and Google's offerings have the same basic concept behind their design, there are some notable differences between the two, as detailed below.
Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group announced an agreement today to acquire Flixster, a popular movie discovery application company that includes review site Rotten Tomatoes. Warner Bros. said in the announcement that it will utilize Flixster to launch initiatives designed to grow digital content ownership.
What does this mean for Flixster? Warner says that Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes will both remain completely independent. Flixster will be getting into content distribution through Warner Bros., a big leap in scope and functionality for a company that provides applications and access to reviews. Warner says that it will tie Flixster in with its announced "Digital Everywhere" application designed to organize and access consumers' digital libraries from any device.
Developers are always looking for a good API to hook their applications through to provide rich functionality to their applications. Photo editing company Aviary is releasing Aviary Effects API today to help developers add filters, effects and functionality to applications.
Aviary has also gone live with a new developer site to detail the functionalities of all of its APIs. In addition to the new Effects API, Aviary has had its Suite API and Feather API. The site has a simple explanation of all of Aviary's APIs with documentation and implementation details, code samples and the ability to test the tools.
Video artist Ze Frank used to say that it would take him all day long to produce each of his five to ten minute long pieces. That's not unusual: creation of multi-media content is incredibly time and resource expensive, especially compared to the creation of text content. That's why I have a lot of interest in today's public launch of Qwiki - a service that combines speech-to-text and assembled multi-media to create little slideshows based on Wikipedia entries.
Geeks are engaged in heated debate, some arguing that the technology is lightweight, that the product is limited and that the funding of the company to the tune of $8 million by Facebook's exiled co-founder Eduardo Saverin and others is a sign that Silicon Valley has lost its mind like it did in the original days of the dot com bubble. You know what, though? Mainstream audiences are really excited about Qwiki. I am too.
Is a post-TV future becoming easier to imagine, because of the Internet? That's one question raised by the news that SpongeBob SquarePants, the undersea mega-star of stage and screen, will premier his newest show first to his 16 million fans on Facebook and then only later on the old-fashioned boob-tube.
On Thursday January 27th, SpongeBob (or his people) will post a five episode anthology of episodes to his Facebook page, facebook.com/spongebob. The content will be simulcast on Nickelodeon's mobile platform. Facebook is the perfect place to broadcast new content to a large audience, considering its combination of market penetration, dizzying time-on-site, the newsfeed subscription model and the social notifications upon each subscription.
How long have you been hearing about both Apple's and Google's much-anticipated cloud music and media offerings? While we spent much of 2010 waiting to see which of the two Internet giants would get there first, another player was lurking in the background and is now stepping into the fray with an offering of its own. RealNetworks, the company behind RealPlayer, previewed Unifi at the Consumer Electronics Show today and we think that its device- and platform-agnostic offering could give the other guys a run for their money.
We sat down with Peter Kellogg-Smith, VP of emerging products with RealNetworks, who showed us around the cloud-based music and media offering that it plans to release in early 2011.
