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Confirmed: Live Video On YouTube This Year

2008-03-02T21:01:00.001+05:30

First rumored in January, YouTube is definitely doing live video, and it’s happening this year.

Sarah Meyers got the scoop (video above), transcript as follows care of NewTeeVee:

Meyers: “When are you guys gonna do live video on YouTube?”

Chen: “2008. We’ll do it this year.

“Live video is just something that we’ve always wanted to do, we’ve never had the resources to do it correctly, but now with Google, we hope to actually do it this year.”

Now for the guessing game: which live video startup will fold first once YouTube dominates the market? YouTube will be last to market, but the same momentum that has seen YouTube dominate video will now be applied to live video. Like video, content creators want to be on the service that gives them the most exposure, no matter how good the alternatives area (after all, YouTube doesn’t offer the best quality video). YouTube already has the user base; live video streamers will flock to YouTube like a moth to a flame.

Yahoo’s MyBlogLog Adds An Activity Stream Feature

2008-03-02T21:01:00.000+05:30

MyBlogLog, a blogger social network acquired by Yahoo about a year ago, launched v.2 of their service tonight, with a significant new feature. You can see the MyBlogLog widget in the right sidebar of this site - it shows pictures and names of recent visitors.

The new feature is an activity stream of recent activities by all users on various social networks - blog posts, new photos, bookmarks on Delicious, Facebook updates, Twitter updates, etc. The image shows the new profile page - mine is here, and I’ve added a summary widget below.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the startup feature du jour. Facebook first popularized the news feed in late 2006. Later others took the idea and opened it up, creating a news feed around activities on a variety of social networks. FriendFeed is the most popular, and recently raised a $5 million round of financing. Plaxo, Soup.io, Iminta, Spokeo, ProfileLinker, MyLifeBrand, Fuser, 30Boxes, Mugshot, Readr and Second Brain all have variations. And now, Facebook is planning to open up their NewsFeed and allow users to add other services as well.

Yeah, I know. That’s way too many similar services to test out. If you’re a casual observer and just want to try out one service, go with FriendFeed (my account is here). People are flocking there, and starting to use it as a hub to leave comments and other content. If you’re already a Plaxo user, their Pulse product is just as good. Facebook isn’t open enough yet to really be called a competitor.

The new MyBlogLog features are a great addition to the product, but it’s not innovative enough to make a big impact. They do have a large community of loyal bloggers using their service, however (including me), and I’ll certainly keep an eye on the activity streams of the people I follow there.

Totspot - It’s A Social Network For Babies

2008-03-02T20:58:00.000+05:30

Ok, it’s a bit ridiculous that social networks for every conceivable market demographic exist. But I’m guessing, based on the success of Maya’s Mom (acquired in August 2007 by BabyCenter) and other social sites around parenting, that New York based Totspot could find a profitable niche.

The service, which is built on Ruby on Rails, just entered private beta. They are targeting new mothers who will create profiles for themselves and their babies, and add other mothers/kids as friends. A key part of the service will be recording milestones like the first crawl, steps, solid food, word said, etc. with text, video and photos. Users will then be able to have books printed with all of this material, for an additional fee.

Profile pages for members will not be available to the public. Users can either open them up to all Totspot members, or just their friends.

The company says they have not yet raised any capital but are currently talking to venture capitalists in New York and Silicon Valley. Sign up on their home page to request a beta invitation.

And if you have a baby, let me know if you think you’d use this.

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2008-03-02T20:56:00.000+05:30

YouTube for dance videos DanceJam has launched into open beta today after several months of private testing.

DanceJam offers dance battles where users dance off against each other, with viewers voting on the best video. DanceJam also offers general dance videos, including locally uploaded content and videos from external sites such YouTube.

DanceJam was founded by M.C. Hammer, and Geoffrey Arone and Anthony Young from Flock. The company has taken $4.5 million in funding over two rounds, with investors including Ron Conway, Alex Algard, Michael Tanne, Geoff Ralston, Alex Welch, Ariel Poler, Rustic Canyon Partners, Softbank Capital and Michael Arrington.

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2007-09-30T07:51:00.000+05:30

Jajah Now have Click To Call For Anyone

2007-09-29T00:24:00.000+05:30

Jajah will be officially announcing their click-to-call buttons on 01/10/2007. The buttons, which let people call the owner for free and anonymously, have been quietly in private beta over the past year. They are also taking on international calling card services and Jaxtr and Jangl, who already have click-to-call offerings on social networks and dating sites.

The call buttons are available to registered Jajah users and come as a bit of embed code you can put on your web page or at the end of an email. They come with several customizations. You can adjust the CSS styling, adjust the number it calls, and restrict which countries can try to call you.

When users click the button, the caller enters their phone number and Jajah connects the two parties over a VOIP line. The callee is then told who called and asked if they want to accept the call, say they’re busy, or blacklist the number. If they accept the call, the minutes are charged to their Jajah account, like an “800 number”. At two to three cents per minute, it can be used for some cheap long distance calling. For the cost conscious, Jaxtr and Jangl are still free, however.

cooking with video on cookshow.com

2007-09-29T00:16:00.000+05:30

how it’s easier to follow a recipe in a cookbook if there is picture? It gives you something to shoot for when you can see what the finished product is supposed to look like. Well, the same thing goes for online recipes. Except, why stop with pictures when you can include complete video tutorials?

two French entrepreneurs, Jacque Petit and Gilles Piedoye Peteui, thought when they came up with Cookshow.com. The site, which just launched on Wednesday, But the idea is solid: Let amateur and professional cooks alike upload recipes with short videos showing exactly how to prepare them. Then the audience can vote on which video recipes are the best. It’s a Youtube for all the wannabe celebrity chefs who can’t get their own show on the Food Network. And some of the videos are not bad.

As more people upload videos, the recipes should soon become pretty comprehensive. This could be a very successful model for online video. It’s a very targeted site trying to do one thing well: attract the best cooking videos. And tutorial videos work great on the Web because it fits in with the whole information-gathering mindset you are in when you are surfing. The site lets you search by cuisine, course, or ingredients. And there is even a contest for the best cooking video with prizes including a dinner for two and $500 gift certificates.

Flick.IM’s Back With IM As A Platform

2007-09-28T09:40:00.001+05:30

The guys who spent a lazy weekend writing a free iPhone IM client that currently has 30,000 users, Flick.IM, are back with a web chat client for AIM, MSN, Google Talk, ICQ, and Jabber. I know, another multi-service chat client - *sigh*. There’s already Meebo, eBuddy, KoolIM, and a host of other services integrating existing chat services. However, Flick.IM has a rather significant twist, they’re acting as a platform for integrating web applications into IM.

FlickIM is letting applications integrate right into chat messages or as widgets along a sidebar. For instance, a Yelp widget will let users search for restaurants and send the reviews to friends through a chat message. Similar to Facebook, users will be able to add and remove the applications and notify their friends about what apps they have installed. Another startup, Imified, integrates web applications into IM, but does this for desktop chat applications through commands to chat bots. Facebook is also a company to watch for this functionality.

For now Flick.IM has launched with a handful applications, but will soon let developers add their own widgets and services to the platform through an API released in the next two to three weeks. All the new applications and information will be available at Flickapps.com. While the depth of the API is still under scrutiny, it may even let developers provide contextually based services by scanning user’s conversations (with permission). For instance, if you’re talking about a movie, a Flick.IM application could automatically provide links and times for that movie.

Their starting applications included six widgets and two integrated services. The integrated services allow you to embed photos and videos right into chat messages. Photos are shared by uploadeding them directly, while videos can pulled from a YouTube video search by typing “/video VIDEONAME”. Non-Flick.IM users will get links to the pictures and videos instead of an embed. Widgets include restaurant search on Yelp, Google Gmail, Last.fm radio, LiveNation, Yoink’d video search, and a beercam for kicks. The Yelp widget has the greatest amount of integration right now. It lets you run a quick restaurant search and send the link to your chat box.

ZiiTrend: The Latest Social Prediction Website

2007-09-28T09:35:00.000+05:30

Do you think you know who is going to buy Facebook, or how many copies of Halo 3 will be sold by the end of the year? You can make your make your best guess on ZiiTrend, a social prediction site that launched on Monday. (The answers to those two questions right now are: No one and 6.2 million, respectively).

ZiiTrend comes up with a group prediction based on every player’s vote. Unlike a true prediction market like Trendio, though, where players actually trade virtual stocks around events and predictions are derived from the resulting price, ZiiTrend makes things simpler. You simply make a prediction, and ZiiTrend’s neural-network algorithm blends your answer with everyone else’s to come up with a statistically valid answer that captures the crowd’s intelligence. Rather than revolving around trading, which is hard for many people to grasp, the site’s main appeal is designed to be more around social news exchange. Similar to PlaytheDay, which creates group predictions out of a quiz, ZiiTrend wants to make the whole process accessible to more people.

Members who predict correctly are rewarded with higher status and their votes carry more weight when they make further predictions. The clever bit is a tag-based scoring system that makes the votes of good predictors count more only on questions whose topics match the tags that they’ve proven their expertise on. So if you correctly answer the question, “Who will win the 2008 Oscar award for best actor?”, your personal tag score will go up for any future questions that include the words “Oscar award” or “best actor,” but not for ones about “oil prices.” That’s a steal-able feature for any startups out there trying to build expert databases or knowledge-management systems.

AOL Is Gussying Itself Up for an Advertising IPO

2007-09-28T09:29:00.000+05:30

to prepare for a possible IPO, AOL will soon fold in all of the ad sales people who currently sell inventory across AOL.com (the group Mike Kelly oversaw) into Platform A, which is primarily driven by revenues from Advertising.com. In other words, AOL’s money-making focus will shift from selling ads on its own Web properties to selling ads on other Websites. AOL’s total advertising revenues are running at about $2 billion a year($522 million in the June quarter), and should eclipse subscription revenues soon (which were $691 million in the June quarter, and dropping like a rock). Falco’s bet is that those ad networks are the right eggs to offer up to the public markets. But this might end up being another rainbow-chasing move on AOL’s part.
Based on the past year’s deals in the online advertising space (Google/Doubleclick, Yahoo/Right Media, Yahoo/BlueLithium, Microsoft/aQuantive), Time Warner could expect to get a valuation of 18 to 20 times EBITDA for Platform A. I am not going to try to back into an EBITDA number for AOL’s advertising businesses, which it does not disclose. But another way to look at it is that Google agreed to pay 10 times revenues for DoubleClick. You could argue they are overpaying, assuming the deal doesn’t get squashed in Washington, because they are Google. But that would give Platform A alone a top-end valuation of $20 billion, which is what all of AOL was valued at when Google took its 5 percent stake.

YAHOO PODCAST WIND UP STARTING!!!!

2007-09-27T09:14:00.002+05:30

Yahoo Podcasts, a comprehensive podcasting search, directory and listening service that launched in October 2005, is closing at the end of October, a fraction past its second birthday.

There is no official word from Yahoo as to why the site is shutting, aside from a message at the top of Yahoo Podcasts that reads “Yahoo! apologizes deeply, but we will be closing down the Podcasts site on Oct. 31, 2007.”

Other podcast directories have struggled as a medium that years ago held so much promise was surpassed by the rise of video. Odeo was acquired from investors, then sold off, then acquired another podcast directory called FireAnt; and more recently the podcast provider/ directory Podshow is rumored to be closing a third round of funding this week as they run short of money.

YAHOO PODCAST WIND UP STARTING!!!!

2007-09-27T09:14:00.001+05:30

LINK FOR DOCSTOC

2007-09-27T09:12:00.000+05:30

THIS IS THE HYPER LINK TO JOIN DOCSTOC FOR 121NEWS READER!!!!!!!!!!!!!

http://www.docstoc.com/User/register.aspx

1,000 Docstoc Invites for 121NEWS READER

2007-09-27T09:09:00.000+05:30

Docstoc, a startup aiming to be the YouTube for professional documents, is giving away 1,000 invitations to its private beta to 121news readers.

Redeem your invitation by going here and entering “TC40″ into the “invitation ID” field. The first 1,000 readers to do so will get in; dawdlers will need to request an invitation using the form on Docstoc’s homepage.

CEO Jason Nazar says that there are currently thousands of free legal and business documents on the site. The company recently raised a round of financing and presented at the 121 conference during Session 4: Crowd Sourcing.

LINK GIVEN BELOW.....

New release of Google reader for i-phone

2007-09-27T09:00:00.000+05:30

Google has released a new iPhone specific version of Google Reader powered by the Google Web Kit.

The new iPhone Reader combines the Google AJAX Feed API with a user interface geared for use on the iPhone.

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2007-09-26T09:09:00.000+05:30

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2007-09-26T08:55:00.000+05:30

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2007-09-26T08:51:00.000+05:30

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Fuser: Manage All Your Email and Social Networking Messages in One Place

2007-09-26T08:49:00.000+05:30

Give Fuser access to your email and social networking accounts, and the website will organize all of the messages from those accounts in one place so you don’t have to bounce back and forth between multiple interfaces to handle them.
Fuser is still in beta and I ran into a few glitches while testing the site, but it certainly has promise. You can pull in accounts from any IMAP or POP email service and the social networks MySpace and Facebook. Once you have loaded your accounts, messages from all of them appear in one collective inbox. It’s impressive to see posts to my Facebook wall displayed like email messages next to my actual email messages.
Not only can you view messages from all of your accounts together, you can also reply to them as with a normal webmail client. If you want to reply to a Facebook wall post, you can hit reply and either leave a note on your friend’s wall or send them a Facebook message. It’s quite surprising how much of Facebook’s functionality Fuser has been able to extract out of that social network’s website.

Beyond organizing all of your messages in one place, Fuser plays around with the social network data to add a little functionality. You can view a “leaderboard” of your social network friends to see who communicates with you most frequently. Friends are ranked according to how many times they have sent you messages or posted on your wall, and you can view rankings according to certain time periods. Nothing terribly revolutionary, but their attempts demonstrate how it is still possible to mash up Facebook data from outside of the developer platform.

Graspr - online networking site

2007-09-26T08:41:00.000+05:30

Teresa Phillips, founder and CEO of Graspr and one-time Yahoo VP, says that “Graspr is not just another video site or social networking community.” While Graspr explicitly claims to be “the social media and learning company with the Internet’s largest user-generated video showcase for instructional content,” the site could probably be rebranded for any other purpose involving video and members.

This would be totally fine if there didn’t already exist a good video social network for instructional content. But several good ones do exist, including 5min, eHow, Sclipo, SuTree, Expert Village, Instructables, and VideoJug.
To be sure, Graspr works well enough. Everything revolves around instructional videos, so in many ways its like YouTube, et al. In addition to simply browsing and viewing videos, users can jump to particular scenes within videos, add notes to video segments, view related videos, open supplementary files attached to videos, and participate in discussion threads and chat rooms attached to the videos.
On the social networking side of things, users can create profiles and make friends. Their profile pages show all of the videos they have contributed, any of which can be grouped into series.
I’m tempted to label Graspr YASN, but to be fair they will provide an online video editing tool, which helps to differentiate them (well, maybe not from YouTube itself). They also have an ad-revenue sharing scheme in place to incentivise the production of content. I only wish their were more innovative aspects to Graspr that could get me more excited about it.