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"The hologram of a DNA spiral that I'm holding in my hand," your professor might say, "can be turned, twisted or expanded at-will and everyone on this video call will be able to see me do it." Is that the distant future of education, sales and casual communication online? Not if Augmented Reality company Zugara has its way.

The company announced today that it is working on fast and easy shared webcam Augmented Reality and its first prototype is already available.

Last week, YouTube announced they will begin supporting the upcoming web standard HTML5 which allows videos to be viewed without an Adobe Flash plugin. Those who wanted to play around with the new HTML5-enabled website were directed to a separate experimental site called TestTube. However, noted the YouTube blog post, only Chrome, Safari, and IE users could give the new site a try. Firefox was notably absent from the list.

YouTube just launched a streamlined video player and redesigned video pages. The new video pages give YouTube a more minimalist and streamlined look, with a stronger focus on the video. For now, these new features are opt-in only. It is not clear when Google plans to make this new design the default theme for YouTube.

The good folks at UK open government consultancy Delib have just released a short documentary about the United States' first year since President Obama's Open Government memorandum.

The documentary was shot by Delib founder Chris Quigley over two months last year, both on location in Washington DC and via Skype.

A group of podcasters in Portland, Oregon have teamed up with internet friends around the world to create a new type of charity fundraiser, a live streaming telethon. Called 30 Hour Day, the event begins this evening. It will use streaming media services to deliver the content, the Causes Facebook application to collect donations, and Twitter to spread the word.

30 consecutive hours of music, variety acts, podcasts and other entertainment will raise money for local charity organizations. Will it work? Portland has a deep community of geeks and connections all around the web, so perhaps this group will be able to keep people entertained around the clock.

Being one of the first social networking sites in existence certainly doesn't establish you as the best or most popular. For this reason, Friendster leaked a video outlining its look and product features. According to TechCrunch, the company is set to release the new product features tomorrow morning. If the below video was meant to get prospective users excited for a revitalized service, they could have approached it from a different angle. Below are the top four reasons Friendster's new messaging needs to change.

We had almost forgotten about Orb, the media-sharing software that lets you stream video from your home computer to your iPhone or any other internet-connected device. In fact, the last time we had even looked at the application was November of 2008 when the company announced an update to their iPhone application which allowed you to stream live TV over the 3G network. At that time though, the desktop software portion of the Orb product was PC-only. As in Windows PC-only. Today, that has changed. Orb for Macintosh has finally been released so Mac OS X users can now stream their media over the net, too.

The Android team just released the first official video overview of the upcoming Android 2.0 release. The video, which is geared towards developers, shows off a number of interesting new features, including an improved accounts manager, better contact syncing, easier access to the Android Bluetooth API to connect devices and support for devices with different screen sizes. The demo also shows the smarter contacts application which now features a very smart new 'quick contacts' feature. The contacts application now highlights all the different ways to get in touch with a contact when you click on their avatar.

This morning, MySpace users got to see and participate in a live video chat with actor Gerard Butler and director F. Gary Gray through a MySpace promotional page that integrated popular streaming video site UStream.

Due to an unfortunate technical glitch, users ended up hearing the audio from the film's trailer over the interview audio. Overall, the audio was a mess, and UStream/MySpaceID integration for commenting was a popup-ridden, timeout-plagued, fail-inducing nightmare. Nevertheless, as a first-time integration of real-time, interactive video on one of the world's largest social networks, we suppose results could have been worse.

Google announced today support for enhanced markup for video search. This will allow webmasters to include important information, such as titles and descriptions, in machine-readable HTML along with the JavaScript or Flash videos themselves.

In a blog post, video search project manager Michael Cohen wrote, "We wanted to offer webmasters an additional tool, so today we're taking a page from the rich snippets playbook and announcing support for Facebook Share and Yahoo! SearchMonkey RDFa."

One exabyte is a billion gigabytes. It's one quintillion bytes. And yes, "quintillion" is a number so large, it almost seems made-up. But that's how much online video will be consumed by 2017, according to new reports from U.K.-based research firm Coda. Actually, to be precise, they're claiming that mobile broadband users accessing the net via laptops and netbooks will consume 1.8 exabytes of video. Per month.

While tax season is always a scramble, one of the best perks of being self-employed is the fact that you can generally arrive to the office / living room in your pajamas. Think about all the blogs you read on a regular basis. Now imagine those people in their underwear, because that's honestly how the foremost technology bloggers are dressed as they deliver you the latest news. But video chat threatens to unsettle this wonderful world of pants-less utopia. This past weekend, Google announced the launch of iGoogle voice and video chat.

One of the first appearances of a mobile phone in a major Hollywood movie was in director Billy Wilder's 1954 Audrey Hepburn classic, "Sabrina". Today, millions of phone owners across the world could recreate "Sabrina" from start to finish from the comfort of their hand held devices. In fact, if we chose to, we could mobilize a global streaming event. But let's be honest, the last thing we want to do is sit inside story boarding a pre-existing movie. It's the summer! Get outside, grab your phone and capture some of the great moments happening around you. Below are some of our favorite mobile video services.

Boxee just announced that the company has closed a $6 million Series B financing round led by Boston-based General Catalyst with participation by prior investors Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. Neil Sequeira from General Catalyst will join the Boxee board. Boxee will use this money to hire more developers as it gets ready to expand beyond the desktop and work on embedded versions for connected TVs, game consoles, and set-top boxes. In addition, Boxee plans to attract more content from independent producers and big media companies to its platform by offering ad-based and subscription-based services to them.

New York based video startup, blip.tv made a series of partnership announcements this morning at a live press conference held in the company's offices. Today, blip.tv is expanding their distribution network thanks to new partnerships with YouTube, Vimeo, NBC Local Media New York, and Roku while expanding their current relationships with other current distributors. Along with these deals, the company also revealed their completely revamped content owner dashboard, the central hub for managing media using their service.

Video apps that cater to Twitter users are all the rage at the moment, but this particular bandwagon is filled to overflowing with apps that rock jostling for mindshare with apps that barely function.

We've spent the past couple of days testing and retesting a slew of these sites, and we are ready to present our top five picks for sharing video content on Twitter. Read on to find out which app comes out on top and which ones didn't make the cut.

In a Beet.tv interview posted yesterday, Wikimedia deputy director Erik Moller gave a few clues as to the Foundation's train of thought when it comes to video editing and distribution.

In the interview clips, included below, Moller hints at the site's upcoming suite of editing tools and sharing options. He compares video to text and image content, subtextually posing the question: If other kinds of non-video content are so easy to grab, remix, and reuse, why not video, too?

As America celebrates its 233rd year of independence from England today, many red-blooded Americans will celebrate the old-fashioned way, by going outdoors, having a picnic or barbecue, decorating everything in red, white and blue and watching or holding their own fireworks displays. But in this rough economy lots of people are choosing to stay close to home. Who really wants to spend lots of money traveling, fighting huge crowds at the day's events and possibly blow off your fingers or light yourself on fire? Luckily we've got you covered.

This is a good day to stay home, watch a baseball game, throw some hotdogs on the grill, eat an apple pie and watch fireworks on your computer. earthTV, an international live TV channel, has cameras located in Los Angeles, Washington D.C., New York City, Niagara Falls and Honolulu and will be broadcasting live streams of fireworks displays beginning at dusk in those cities. If you just can't wait until then, go check out its timelapse showing Independence Day displays from years past.

Not too long ago, Joost was the poster child for the online video revolution. It featured a slick desktop player with innovative controls, good video quality, and it was developed by the team behind Skype and Kazza. It seemed like nothing could go wrong here, but somehow, Joost never managed to get any traction and after the first hype had died down, most users just abandoned the desktop player for in-browser video portals like YouTube and Hulu. After a long delay, Joost finally abandoned its desktop player strategy, but the company never managed to attract a large enough user base.

Today, Joost announced that it is mostly abandoning its original strategy and that the company will focus on offering white label video solutions for media companies and distributors instead.

Wikipedia, the free web-based encyclopedia used worldwide, will be adding video to their online repository in a matter of months. When the new system launches, you'll find a new button labeled "Add Media" on Wikipedia articles. Upon clicking this, you'll be prompted to search through three online repositories for relevant videos which can be added to the article. You can even select particular portions of the video instead of embedding the entire clip.