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Posts Tagged ‘governor’

When Twitvid.io launched back in May, it was amid a mad rush of startups trying to become the “TwitPic of Video” for Twitter. This included another startup, Twitvid.com, which caused a lot of confusion among users. It also apparently brought out the cease and desist orders from Leo Laporte, who has the rights to the TWiT (This Week in Tech) name. Needless to say, the timing was right for a name change for Twitvid.io, and so they’ve done that. They’re now Vidly.

But the change is about more than just removing user confusion and clearing up legal issues, it also represents a shift away from a sole focus on Twitter. Vidly’s new goal is to be the most convient way for people to share video on the web, no matter what service they use. And they’re going to start that by launching an iPhone app that will allow users to easily upload videos they take to a range of services including yes, Twitter and Facebook.

And Vidly (which can also be spelled Vid.ly, as they own that domain as well as the dot com) already has a big time supporter: California’s Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yes, when he’s not busy doing Q&A sessions at Twitter HQ, the Governator is using Vidly to spread his agenda. Here’s Schwarzenegger’s page on the site.

While the first step is an iPhone app (alongside the website), Vidly co-founder Chrys Bader also says that BlackBerry and Android products are in the pipeline. “Basically, we want to be anywhere where there is a video audience. And not necessarily just in the U.S. either,” Bader tells us.

Along those lines, the company has taken a $500,000 angel round of funding from the likes of Ron Conway and other individual investors. The money is being used to staff up, since the company currently only has 2 employees.

Before Vidly was Twitvid.io, it was known as Fliggo, a Y Combinator startup. As Vidly, the startup still faces plenty of competition, though many are solely focused on Twitter video sharing right now.

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Slouchers on Twitter (you know who you are), take note: IBM is apparently working on technology that would enable you to blog or tweet straight from the remote control of your TV. The company has filed a patent for said technology with the USPTO, reports BaltTech.

The interesting part of the patent filing, which was submitted by IMB engineers last year but only surfaced online a few months ago:

A viewer selects a media program to view by use of a remote controller with networking capability.

Upon the viewer wishing to send a blog posting to a blog, the viewer determines whether a tag to be included in the blog posting is to be a pre-existing tag or a custom tag, wherein the blog posting comprises program information about the media program useful to identify the media program. If the tag is to be a pre-existing tag, the viewer selects the pre-existing tag from a plurality of pre-existing tags using the remote controller and if the tag is to be a custom tag, the viewer generates the custom tag using the remote controller.

If a protocol provided by the remote controller to send the blog posting to the blog allows a snapshot of the media program to be included in the blog posting, the remote controller takes the snapshot of the media program and includes it in the blog posting.

Imagine that: tuning in to Mad Men from the couch and letting your blog subscribers, Facebook friends or Twitter followers instantly know what you’re watching, even including a snapshot of the lovely Christina Hendricks, all by using your network-enabled remote controller.

According to the patent filing, the remote would even allow a viewer to not only communicate with a blogging service but also display responses to and from other bloggers with whom the viewer is communicating. That’s right, that means your buddies could be sending you an @reply or direct message with their opinions on the show (and the actress) and you’d be able to view the responses simply by using that super remote of yours.

Sign me up for one!

Screenshots from the filing:

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While it is well known that I once did a burlesque show under the name TrickleStar in Weimar Germany, many of you don’t know that TrickleStar is also a system for shutting down idling hardware next to your TV or PC. I’m here to tell you, my kleine Kuchen, that it’s really great.

Think about your own sad situation: you have a computer or TV that you turn off. The constellation of devices that orbit these central devices remain on or in a standby state. The TrickleStars solve that problem by turning everything off when the main items are off.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is heading to Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco today to do a live streaming webchat with co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone. Oddly, Twitter hasn’t posted about it on its blog, but much of the company is atwitter (see what I did there) over the arrival. And so is the Governor, who tweets, “If you want to send in questions for my webchat at twitter hq with @ev and @biz, now is the time. You snooze, you lose.”

So what’s the purpose behind the Governor’s visit and the webcast? Well, Schwarzenegger has just launched a new Twitter-based site for California, MyIdea4CA.com. Yes, he’s using the social network to crowd-source ideas for how to run the state. Here’s the way the site describes how the process works:

Ideas are submitted to the website through your Twitter account when you include the hashtag #myidea4ca along with your idea in your tweet. MyIdea4CA.com centralizes the Twitter conversation by indexing the #myidea4ca tweets so they can be searched, sorted, and ranked and extends the conversation by allowing users to vote and add comments.

So basically, it’s Digg meets Twitter — to help run the state of California.

But has the idea already gone to pot? Right now, the top three vote-getters by far on MyIdea4CA are all about legalizing marijuana in some way. All of the other most popular suggestions are about overhauling the education system. I’m not sure which seems less likely to happen.

I’m also not sure where the Governor’s live stream will be held, so I’ll update when I find out [Update below]. He should be at Twitter HQ any minute now judging from the tweets.

Update: It’s worth noting that when then President-Elect Obama, launched a similar “Idea Generator” with Salesforce.com, the top vote-getter was also to legalize pot.

Update 2: Schwarzenegger has tweeted out that the conversation is now going on live right here.

[image: Tri-Star Pictures]

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“We are winning!”

- Iraqi Information Minister Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf, declaring victory in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion, adding “We have them surrounded in their tanks.”

South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster pulls an “al-Sahhaf” by declaring victory in the Craigslist debacle:

Columbia, SC – “The defensive legal action craigslist has taken against the solicitors and my office is good news. It shows that craigslist is taking the matter seriously for the first time

More importantly, overnight they have removed the erotic services section from their website, as we asked them to do. And they are now taking responsibility for the content of their future advertisements. If they keep their word, this is a victory for law enforcement and for the people of South Carolina.

Unfortunately, we had to inform them of possible state criminal violations concerning their past practices to produce a serious response. We trust they will now adhere to the higher standards they have promised. This office and the law enforcement agencies of South Carolina will continue to monitor the site to make certain that our laws are respected.”

That’s nice. But here’s the truth. On May 13 Craigslist announced it would remove the erotic services category on its site. Despite that announcement and the subsequent removal of all pornographic and prostitution ads on the South Carolina Craigslist site, McMaster threatened criminal action against Craigslist management.

The reason? McMaster doesn’t care about Craigslist. But he does care about becoming the governor of South Carolina, and Craigslist is an easy target. He needs the press to see him taking a tough stance on crime, and a faraway but high profile startup is his meal ticket.

But Craigslist stood firm, and today filed a lawsuit in federal court against McMaster seeking declaratory relief and a restraining order.

McMaster’s statement declaring victory came after that lawsuit. And what he’s really doing is running away from a situation that has become a little too hard for him to handle. Craigslist bit back. He’s moving on to easier targets.

Our readers agree that, if pressed, they’d choose Craigslist over South Carolina. But what’s most interesting is that the conservative residents of South Carolina agree - McMaster is a jerk.

So pop the champagne bottles, another bad guy was disgraced today.

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Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie made some interesting predictions on the future of cloud computing at J.P. Morgan’s Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in Boston today (see below for the full transcript). Ozzie says that while the IT community is in the very early stages of cloud computing innovations, the future for companies’ data hosting will be in the mixture of cloud computing and on-premise data centers.

“But the high level pattern, which really I think we would all agree on, is that at some point in time every major enterprise, every company, every ISV is going to have some blend of software that runs on-premises and some that runs in the cloud, and everyone wants tools that they can use to in essence deploy some apps to part of their organization that might be in the cloud, another part of their organization that might be on-premises, to do that on an application by application or region by region by region or program by program basis.”

Not too long ago, Google added voice recognition to their iPhone search application. Not one to be behind the times, Yahoo! has gone and immediately done the same.

Well, that’s what we should have been able to say. Instead, Yahoo’s voice recognition add-on comes nearly 6 months after Google’s. Of course, Yahoo’s application is a bit more complex than Google’s, being that it also handles news, aggregates various social sites, and a good amount more beyond search. But search is Yahoo’s main gig. Combined with the fact that everyone hates typing, Yahoo should have done this ages ago.

Yahoo’s implementation is quite different than Googles - for better or worse.

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Michael Sheridan has resigned as CFO of music startup Project Playlist, we’ve confirmed. This comes just a couple of weeks after CEO Owen Van Natta resigned to take the top spot at MySpace.

Sheridan is a former News Corp. executive and was also previously the CFO of Facebook. One source says he walked out yesterday after a dispute over the acquisition of Total Music. Another source says the departure isn’t nearly as dramatic, and that Sheridan was simply part of the restructuring announced as part of that acquisition. This source says that new CEO John Sykes, who took over after Van Natta’s abrupt departure, is simply putting his own exec team in place. “Sheridan was one of Van Natta’s guys” says the source.

Playlist has not yet responded to a request for comment.

Whatever the true story is, Sheridan is yet another casualty of Van Natta’s abrupt departure from Playlist, a company he ran for just five months. He left Playlist in a shambles, and Skyes is left to clean up the mess.

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