Its not the first video-editing app for the iPad, but Avid Studio, which was released earlier today, stands out as one of the more sophisticated offerings out there. Its interface will be familiar to anybody who uses Avid's desktop video-editing suite, or even products like iMovie or Final Cut Pro X.

At the end of the day, any professional-quality video editing is going to be done on a desktop suite like Avid Pro or Final Cut Pro X. Avid realizes this and, in addition to Facebook, email and YouTube exports, it lets you push projects to their desktop application to take things to the next level.

But if you have basic or even somewhat sophisticated editing needs, this app will do it. For second generation iPads that come equipped with a camera, it offers a great way to shoot a few basic angles of video, cut it up and patch it all together on the go.

Very seldom is the raw video you shoot on an iOS or Android device ready for prime time once the record button stops. The ability to edit it directly on the iPad offers a nice middle ground between uploading junk and importing everything to the desktop for more extensive modifications.

At $4.99, Avid Studio for iPad is much more affordable than its desktop counterpart, although clearly Avid hopes you'll spring for that too if you like the tablet version. The company plans on raising the iOS app's price to $7.99 in a few weeks.

The 30-second clip (after the jump) sweeps from the moon's northern pole to the southern polar region, passing, among other features, the Mare Orientale, a 560-mile wide dry sea that extends onto the side we can see from Earth.

According to the press release NASA released with the footage:

In the video, the north pole of the moon is visible at the top of the screen as the spacecraft flies toward the lunar south pole. One of the first prominent geological features seen on the lower third of the moon is the Mare Orientale, a 560-mile-wide (900 kilometer) impact basin that straddles both the moon's near and far side.

The clip ends with rugged terrain just short of the lunar south pole. To the left of center, near the bottom of the screen, is the 93-mile-wide (149 kilometer) Drygalski crater with a distinctive star-shaped formation in the middle. The formation is a central peak, created many billions of years ago by a comet or asteroid impact.

The GRAIL program consists of two small spacecraft outfitted with cameras. They reached lunar orbit on New Year's Eve and New Year's day. This footage was taken on Jan. 19.

The moon is "tidally locked," so the same half of its body has always faced away from the Earth and, until now, remained unfilmed. It has, however, been photographed, first by the Russians in 1959. The dark side has experienced far less volcanism, perhaps because the crust is thicker there.

And for bonus awesomeness, here is a freaky photo of the giant Vesta asteroid, shot in September. It is located in the solar asteroid belt lying between Mars and Jupiter. Scientists are reasonably certain it is filled with the souls of the damned. Well, not scientists so much as me. Look at it. Creepy.

Farside moon photo byNASA/Goddard/Arizona State University

We've compared Showyou's previous versions to Flipboard and Instapaper, which is pretty esteemed company for an iOS app. As a set of features, those comparisons are apt. But the interface takes it a step further. The app takes full advantage of the touchscreen. It's a better interface than TV has ever had. And you don't just watch on your device; you can AirPlay it to your Apple TV and just use Showyou as the remote. Whatever it was about TV that Steve Jobs said he "finally cracked," it was probably something like this.

Showyou has this figured out in so many ways. No other app has this grid interface, for one thing. The main screen of all your videos flows under your fingers like Microsoft's Surface or something out of Minority Report, except this is something you can have right now.

When you go further in to the app, whether you're browsing a category or a friend's videos, the interface is reined in a little, going to a simpler, scrolling column. The new navigation drawer helps you get reoriented quickly and easily.

The sources of the videos in Showyou are your friends and the people you follow. It connects to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, Vimeo and Vodpod, which is a video curation site by Remixation, the company that makes Showyou. There are also some publisher channels, like The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, TED and more. The main grid shows videos from all the sources you're following, and you can narrow down by source, by topic or hashtag, or by the person sharing. It even has pretty fast search using all that social metadata, with an index of nearly 30 million videos so far.

Showyou is free, and it will become ad-supported as it grows. It's also considering a subscription service for certain shows or publishers. The big question is whether Showyou will get licenses for major TV shows or movies. "Not yet," its people say. "Maybe soon." But YouTube viewing is eclipsing TV, anyway. For iPad or Kindle Fire owners, or even for iPhone and iPod Touch, Showyou should be in your living room.

Now, along comes Spool, which promises to do much of the same link-saving as Read It Later and Instapaper, with the added perk of being able to do the same with video. We've been playing around with Spool, which remains in invite-only mode, for the past several days and found that it works (mostly) as advertised.

We also have invites available for those of you who want to try Spool out but don't want to wait around for an invite of your own.

Garg and Spencer are calling the technology behind the service SpoolBot, which Garg described as an artificial intelligence and computer vision engine. By residing on a server, SpoolBot can essentially translate content on a Web page into a format your device can understand. Garg said it was also good at keeping pace with changes on the sites where content is culled.

"What we wanted for ourselves was a simple way to have our favorite content always available, without worrying about which device I'm on (my Android phone vs. my iPad), where I am (inside, outside, home, work), or what kind of media it is (text, pdf, video)," Garg said in an email. "With one click you can save content from any of your devices, and that content shows up on all of your other devices too, is available offline, and is converted into a format that will work for you. So you don't need to worry about Flash and you don't need to worry about whether your phone has a PDF reader."

The one exception to that assertion that I found after a weekend of accessing a wide range of content in New York City's mostly WiFi-free subway system on my iPhone, iPad and laptop were YouTube videos, which can only be accessed with an Internet connection because of licensing agreements. As an aside, it also seemed as if YouTube videos accessed through Spool had more advertisements than when the same video was accessed straight through YouTubes site, and it was trickier to skip over ads using Spool than it is on YouTube.

I also didn't like that I couldn't tag videos and content or organize it into lists: my only choices were Unread, Read, Favorites and Archived. Garg assured me that adding some sort of organization and classification system was on the firm's to-do list and should be available within the next few weeks.

Saving material on Spool was, for the most part, easy. A Google Chrome extension allowed me to save videos and other content with one click. Setting up the widget on other devices was slightly more time-consuming.

Spool also connects to DropBox, allowing you to save content in a folder on DropBox and then have it automatically saved on your Spool. Users can also push content to Facebook from the Android app, the webapp, and the Chrome browser extension, with plans to add the feature to the Firefox extension and iOS app.

Users cannot, however, push content to Twitter. "We used to let users Tweet out from within the app. We've removed this feature because very few users used it," Garg said. "We're going to soon launch a feature to let users tweet links at us and we'll put those URLs into Spool."

Spool will remain in it's beta, invite-only phase at least until the Spring. ReadWriteWeb readers, however, can try Spool out without waiting for an invite.

As Reuters notes, Google reported that only about 11% of YouTube views are monetized. That's not all the revenue Google makes from YouTube, since its Universal Search features YouTube video results prominently alongside search ads. But the YouTube business is still under construction, and it's growing fast. As YouTube's reach begins to dwarf even television, the whole landscape of video content changes.

Big Content Partnerships

One way YouTube seeks to unseat television is by replacing its most important content. It's cozying up with pro sports leagues and Disney movies, and Google chairman Eric Schmidt has toured the world talking to TV execs about the future. As part of its redesign in late 2011, YouTube launched tons of original content channels.

The other piece of this arrangement is Google TV, for which Google has rather wild ambitions. At Le Web last year, Schmidt told attendees, "By the summer of 2012, the majority of televisions you see in stores will have Google TV embedded in it." That's quite a promise, but if Google can establish itself as a source of great original video content, the arrangement will be tempting for manufacturers.

Google's not moving into this space unchallenged. There's plenty of smoke surrounding rumors of Apple's plans to expand Apple TV beyond the hobby phase. iTunes is a valuable store of video content. But YouTube's importance in video cannot be overstated. Between the amateur creators that made YouTube what it is and the high-profile content deals on the table, Google has a key to the future of TV one way or another.

Social Video

Beyond the video content, YouTube can do things that TV can't. YouTube's late-2011 redesign put Google+ front and center, making one's social circles a part of watching and sharing videos. It even included prominent Facebook integration to make sure YouTube users could easily share somewhere, even if they aren't using Google+.

Google+ has lots of YouTube integration on its end as well. There's a floating YouTube search tab alongside the Google+ stream, and participants in a Hangout, the Google+ video chat service, can watch YouTube videos together. But Google+ is even a way to create YouTube content. Hangouts can be recorded and saved straight to a user's YouTube account.

YouTube's infrastructure allows Google to make even globally important, live events into social affairs. Tomorrow's State of the Union address will be broadcast live on YouTube, and then President Obama will answer questions live on the new White House Google+ page in a Hangout. Anyone can submit questions beforehand via the White House YouTube channel.

TV, as it currently stands, cannot compete with these kinds of features. YouTube, along with its integration into Google+, can reach more people in more significant ways than traditional TV can. That's not an exaggeration; by YouTube's fifth birthday in 2010, it reported "nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major U.S. television networks combined" every day. Since then, YouTube's daily audience has doubled again.

How much YouTube video do you watch per day?

Using HTML5 for video also satisfies that little open Web standards advocate in all of us. In addition to all that, it enables a new level of interactivity and allows video content to be integrated with, and enhanced by, outside data sources using APIs.

One Millionth Tower is a documentary film about high rise apartment building in Canada and how its inhabitants envision the future of their community. It uses the Popcorn.js toolkit, along with WebGL graphics and other JavaScript frameworks to create a dynamic, interactive video that pulls in data from various Web APIs and controls camera movement in the video.

As an example of what this technology can do, scenes in One Millionth Tower can reflect the current weather in Toronto, where the film is based, thanks to Popcorn's ability to integrate with live data from Yahoo's Weather API.

It can also be used to grab data from the likes of Flickr, Wikipedia, Google Maps and other popular Web services, allowing the video to be augmented with relevant Web content at timely intervals throughout the video.

The possibilities are only as limited as the Web itself. The Popcorn website has a collection of live demos that show how the framework has been used to enhance Web video and audio content.

We got one of our our first glances at the possibilities HTML5 brings to interactive Web video last summer when Google launched a browser-based music video for the band Arcade Fire. That "Chrome Experiment" as they called it utilized the 3D graphics rendering capability of HTML5, along with the ability to commandeer multiple browser widows at a time.

One Millionth Tower can be watched in most modern browsers, but the interactive portion of the project requires Firefox or Chrome.

We asked you this question earlier today and we culled your responses from Facebook, the original post and Twitter and we used Storify to present it all back to you. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

Over the past decades, the promise of video as a standard form of communication has been presented to us through many mediums, from Star Trek to The Jetsons and even through my old Avengers comic books over 30 years ago. While corporations utilize video conferencing technology at a rapid rate, it hasn't yet penetrated the daily habits of people across the globe but it will.

The core technology has been there for decades, but not the bandwidth and compression technology along with the hardware to make it an everyday utility. With the growth of Skype's video chat, Google's GTalk, Apple's Facetime and other services, combined with the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, video will become the standard form of communications versus SMS, voice only and even email in some situations within a few years. Drilling down further, here are a few trends that I see.

The days of text-based communications as a primary tool are reaching an end. SMS is slowly being replaced by mobile video chat services such as Facetime, Qik (acquired by Skype earlier this year) and Tango. Even just looking at Tango's numbers reveals a rapidly changing landscape. Two months after their launch late last year, it hit over 4 million users and now boasts 23 million users. I can tell you that those users are SMSing less often these days.

Video Will Replace Live Chat Communications

I see the same trend for Web-based text communications, whether through personal services, such as AIM, or business applications, such as various live chat services.

New Efficiencies And Disruptions Will Take Place Across Industries

One area is healthcare. The promise of telemedicine has been coming for over a decade, but I believe today's combination of technology, hardware and bandwidth will bring it to fruition. How much more efficient will doctor "visits" become? Unnecessary visits and waste will decrease while increasing the reach of various experts. Where else can video transform an industry? Education? Construction?

What other trends do you see with the coming ubiquity of video communications? I would love to hear other ideas or feedback on my thoughts!

Photo by jacopoL

The announcement comes after bids from several big tech companies evidently failed to pique the interest of Hulu's current owners. In July, we wrote about why Amazon would make an ideal owner for the service and fold it into its Prime video offerings. Other serious contenders included Yahoo, Dish and Google.

For Google, the purchase could have helped the company shore up its digital video properties, something thats crucial to its future advertising revenue, as well as to the survival of Google TV, which has been met by a lukewarm reaction by consumers so far.

Alas, it was not meant to be. Without offering a shred of detail, the company's owners have pulled off its "for sale" sign, at least for the foreseeable future.

Previously, if a YouTube user wanted to change a video, it had to be edited with other software and re-uploaded, meaning all the views, comments and links would be lost. Not only does built-in editing offer a much more convenient workflow, these basic features could probably replace outside video editing software altogether for everyday users.

YouTube video pages now have an 'Edit video' button, which brings up the editing tools. The controls operate with simple sliders, and the window below displays a preview. In a cute touch, there's also an automatic color correction button labeled 'I'm Feeling Lucky,' just like the button on the Google search page that takes you straight to a result page Google thinks you want.

When you click 'Save,' YouTube begins processing the edits, but you still have the option to revert to the original if the edits are not quite right. You can also save the edits as a new version for comparison. There is a policy, though, that 'popular videos' - those with over 1,000 views - and third-party content can only be saved as a new video. In other words, you can't change a video that has become a real eyeball-magnet.

Native light video editors, like Apple's iMovie, offer more features and power, but for everyday YouTube use, these tools ought to save users plenty of time and effort (and keep their eyeballs on YouTube.com, too).

Do these features look useful to you? Let us know in the comments.

Vimeo's Ryan Hefner said in a blog post today that Couch Mode "works great" on iPads and Android tablets. In my testing of the feature today I did not find that to be the case.

In testing Couch Mode, I've often had to hit the pause button and then play again in order for any of the Vimeo videos to load. The navigation pane disappears too quickly, the browsing function doesn't surface much information through the touch interface and worst of all: Couch Mode doesn't include a full-screen option! It looks like full screen, but the browser remains at the top of your iPad. It's nice to be able to go from one video to the next, but the aesthetic cost is too high for me.

Of course YouTube's Leanback doesn't work on an iPad at all.

Probably the best low-friction way to enjoy a continuous flow of videos on an iPad is the app for StumbleUpon, which we reviewed last month. (StumbleUpon for the iPad: Like a Magic Carpet Ride for Your Brain)

If readers know of a better way to do it, please let us know. It could be argued that an effective tablet lean-back video experience is an essential requirement for any real viable online short-form alternative to traditional TV. That's "meaningful" not just for the industry and its commercial interests, but for the greater diversity of video content and perspectives on the world so well exemplified by Vimeo itself.

It would be great to see Vimeo nail a lean-back experience for the iPad. I don't think they've done it yet though.

Tango now has over 18 million users in 190 countries using its video calling service. Unlike Apple's proprietary FaceTime, Tango works over 3G, 4G and Wi-Fi, while FaceTime is Wi-Fi only. And even though Tango's install base falls far short of Skype's 170 million monthly connected users, not to mention its 600 million+ registered accounts, it's growing fast. In fact, it's growing twice as fast as Skype itself did during its first year, TechCrunch recently noted. Today, Tango adds a million users every two weeks, the company says.

We covered Tango barely 6 weeks after its September 2010 launch, when the application had been downloaded over 3 million times by mobile users. At the time, Tango shared that its ambitions were to move onto other platforms, including the desktop, the tablet and the TV.

Tango for Mac on the Horizon

Tango has already conquered one of those three platform (tablets), and has apps for the iPad and Android tablets available now. With the forthcoming launch of the new desktop software, the company is hoping to reach the wider PC market, consisting of 1.5 billion devices worldwide. By this time next year, Tango CEO Uri Raz says there will be 100 million customers using his company's software.

The choice of going Windows-first on the desktop is obvious: sheer numbers. Tango CTO Eric Setton says that PC users comprise 70% of Tango's user base. But a Mac application isn't too far away. "We do plan to release on Macs and it's in our product roadmap," Setton says, "but we do not have a definitive timeline. It's an important platform for us and we aim to be everywhere."

$42 Million in Series B, Skype Investors Involved

Clearly Tango is on the fast track, having also just announced it has closed $42 million in its Series B round of funding led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, notably the first outside investors in Skype, as well as venture capital led by Len Blavatnik and Alex Zubillaga.

How Tango is Different

For end users, what makes the service different from Skype is a minimalist feature set. You can't buy credit or dial landlines, there isn't an IM-like "chat" feature and you can't accept calls from non-users. In other words, Tango does video chat and just video chat.

More importantly, though, it makes the process of doing video chat incredibly simple. There is no "setup" involved and you don't have to create a username or password to join the service - you just input your phone number. Tango then automatically fills its address book with other Tango users it finds on your phone. A similar process will be offered in the PC version, too.

On the back-end, to make that setup process happen quickly, Tango keeps a centralized directory of its users. This is different than Skype, which is based on a peer-to-peer model of communication, where data moves between end users' devices, not through Skype servers.

Tango is an interesting company to watch, somewhat like seeing Skype reborn as a mobile-first outfit. Whether or not Tango can ever reach the same heights as Skype, especially now as a Microsoft property with integrations planned in everything from IM to the Xbox, still remains to be seen.

The New York City startup Pixable has built apps (for Web and for mobile devices) to improve the way in which we consume the photo feed from Facebook. Pixable makes it easier to view friends' photos, listing them by friend but also by category. You can see, for example, new profile pics, most popular pics of the month, photos from family, as well as photos that are popular on Flickr and Instagram.

And now Pixable has added a new category and a new media type: videos. Pixable's categories distinguish between videos that friends have uploaded themselves (home movies 2.0, if you will) and those that they've shared (from YouTube and the like).

A Better Media Browsing Experience

By adding video content, Pixable steps into the ring with a number of other startups who are trying to improve the browsing experience - particularly on tablet devices - for this sort of content, including ShowYou, which we've covered in the past.

As it stands, Pixable's video offerings are only available via its Web app, not on its iPad or iPhone apps yet, although the startup is working on that. Pixable says it also plans to add better categorization for video content, to match what it offers for photos.

Pixable's competition may not be just other photo- and video-sharing startups, as Techcrunch's MG Siegler contends that Facebook itself may be launching a better photo-sharing app soon. For its part, Pixable says it still hopes to become the Web's "social photo aggregator."

But with the technology Google has licensed from SRI, image stabilization will no longer be a concern ... at least on Android. Google is implementing the SRI tech in its Google Talk application, to deliver better video on Android 3.0+ devices. And that may be only the beginning of Google's computer vision plans.

Image stabilization technology is over 20 years old, with initial applications built for defense use by DARPA. The technology was crucial to autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles and robotics. Someone driving a tank, for example, would get nauseous in 2 minutes if it weren't for stabilization technologies, Winarsky says.

But these days, the tech has made its way into more benign, consumer-facing efforts, like Google Talk, apparently. Here, the video chatting application captures the video from a device's front-facing camera and compresses the data before transmission. In the compression algorithms, the amount of bandwidth used increases with the amount of motion in a scene.

By stabilizing the video, SRI's software allows the compression to take up fewer bits. Simply put, it's more efficient. It takes less work and fewer resources.

What Could Google Do, Post-Video Stabilization?

Although SRI can't talk for Google or about its future plans in this area, saying only that it "fully hopes to work beyond this app with Google," Winarsky was happy to talk in more general terms about where computer vision technologies are headed.

Once you have the stabilization down, he says, you can then work on things like tracking objects that appear in the frame, tracking the motion of objects and recognizing those objects. Head tracking, for example, was demonstrated at this year's Google I/O where the stabilization technology was used in conjunction with a face-tracking API (application programming interface) that will arrive in a future version of Google's mobile operating system Android.

Put it all together - stabilization, image tracking and image recognition - and you have "augmented reality" (AR), a term that describes technology that lets your device "see" the world in front of its camera lens and then act on that data in some way.

Google, of course, is already experimenting with AR to some extent through its "Google Goggles" application which lets you use pictures to search the Web. Google Goggles can currently identify things like landmarks, books, art, wine and logos, but has recently started recognizing text, too, in order to perform on-the-fly translations between languages.

Facial Recognition in Video?

There are other things that stabilization can help to enable, says Winarsky. For example, facial recognition. Until an image is stabilized, such a thing would not be possible on video. After stabilization though, the same type of algorithms that currently work on still images could be applied to moving video.

Google already uses facial recognition in its online photo-sharing service Picasa (soon to be rebranded as "Google Photos"), so it's not a big leap to assume that Google could introduce something like that to its video applications and services someday. Facial recognition in Google Talk? YouTube? Google Goggles? Who knows?

Case in point: earlier this year, Google denied that it has a facial recognition app in development, after CNN published a report to the contrary, including an on-record statement from a Google employee confirming its existence.  And Google recently rolled out a smart update to search that allows you to search for things using only an image. And guess what? It works for images of people, too.

So why not make people chatting with you on video, seen through your camera lens or those appearing in online videos "Googleable" objects? There's only one reason not to: it's a little creepy. But creepy/awesome is the line Google likes to toe. For the company, it's not a matter of if something is possible - it's only a matter of when is the right time to release it.

Stabilization, on its own, may seem like minor news, but it's an important first step towards a future where the world itself, and all the people in it, are things you can Google just by looking at them.