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Posts Tagged ‘rolling-out-its’

Aviary, the startup that makes a suite of impressive web-based creative applications, including editors for images, vector graphics, and audio recordings, is targeting a new class of customers: school teachers and their students. Today the company is launching Aviary Education, a product that allows educators to encourage creativity on Aviary in a safer (and easier to manage) environment.

Cofounder Michael Galpert says that Aviary has been popular at schools for quite a while. The appeal of Aviary’s apps are obvious — they’re free, and they offer more than enough functionality for most common media creation tasks. But Aviary.com has a few features that aren’t ideal for students. For example, it offers a section for popular creations made with its products, and some of these user-submitted contributions aren’t exactly ‘G’ rated. Likewise, students will occasionally craft an image that contains their photo, which wouldn’t really be appropriate to share publically (the default option is ‘private’, but students could activate public sharing when they shouldn’t). That’s where Aviary for Education comes in.

The new product allows teachers to create walled off Aviary ecosystems, where students can upload their projects and collaborate without worrying about having their work shared with the web at large (and they won’t be able to see Aviary projects that were done by users outside of the classroom). Teachers are given control over these virtual classrooms, and can use the system to assign projects, messages all students at once, and to introduce students to Aviary’s tutorials.

Aviary for education gives students access to Aviary’s image, vector, audio, and music editors. The product is free for now and Aviary will be rolling out its pricing plans this fall (premium options will include the ability to manage multiple classes, and more advanced tutorials and lesson plans).

This morning, we broke the news that YouTube would be rolling out its new, streamlined Watch page to all users. The aptly named page is the all-important portion of the site where you actually watch videos (it also features comments, ratings, and related videos). At an event at YouTube headquarters this morning, three of the key people involved with the launch — Senior Product Manager Shiva Rajaraman, UI designer Julian Fumar, and engineer Igor Kofman — walked us through some of the changes in the new design, the logic behind them, and some of the early results they’ve seen.

We first saw the new Watch page in January, when the site started allowing users to opt-in to it. To test the new design, YouTube also rolled it out to around 10% of its users. Among those users, YouTube says that it has see a rise in engagement (which includes actions like ratings and leaving comments) by 7%, and an increase in the number of videos watched by 6%. Those may not sound like huge numbers, but given that this is the world’s most popular video site, that translates into a lot of extra views.

So what changed? In short, everything is much cleaner. The YouTube team said that in 2009 the site added more features than they had in the two previous years combined, and things were getting cluttered. So they’ve decided to prune the hedges.

As we detailed when the redesign first become available,  the new site has streamlined the page header to place a much greater emphasis on search. It has also abandoned YouTube’s long-standing five star rating system in favor of a binary thumbs up/thumbs down system (a change that YouTube has discussed for months).

Less obvious changes: the ‘more info’ button, which used to be a bizarrely small link nestled under the video description, is now positioned directly under the video, with a much larger clickable area. The video uploader’s screenname is now more prominently featured above the video, as is the ‘Subscribe’ button (there will be an opportunity for YouTube partners to brand this area). The related videos listing, which makes up the page’s right column, will now be more consistently positioned. And you can now access the site’s detailed viewing statistics simply by clicking on the viewcount (these used to be tucked under a ’stats’ menu).

Earlier this month, Tumblr rolled out its first attempt at making money: a small ($9) fee to make your blog featured in a directory of blogs. Tomorrow, the service is officially rolling out its second revenue generator: premium themes.

The initial 13 themes being featured in this roll-out look pretty great. They come from 7 different designers and will range in price from $9 all the way up to $49. Tumblr declined to give the revenue split between the company and the designers but says that “most” of the money will go to the designers. The premium themes page is actually already live here.

This seems like a smart play for Tumblr. One thing that separates it from rivals such as Posterous is the attention to design. Tumblr already features over 350 free templates that any user can install with the click of a button. “There’s already been a ton of demand for this platform [premium designs] from our developer community, and we know it will add a spectacular collection of new themes and options for our bloggers,” says founder David Karp.

The roll out of this second premium feature is the latest in a huge amount of updates the service has unveiled in the past several weeks. Those include the ability to add static pages to Tumblr blogs, photo replies, video uploads, and even comments (sort of).

Tumblr is also just about to hit 4 million users.

Fresh off an $80 million acquisition by Shanda Games, Flash game advertising network and payments platform Mochi Media is launching a social gaming platform and a $10 million fund to invest in game developers.

Mochi Social allow developers to build social features into their games such as inviting friends, sending gifts, or posting to an activity stream. Mochi Social allows for the ability to broadcast in-game notifications to deliver news about game updates, friend activity or challenges.The aim of incorporating these features, allows for a game to transcend one social network by plugging into users social graph across all of their social media identities. The platform currently integrates with Facebook, MySpace and Twitter with more sites to be added in the near future. Currently in private beta, Mochi Social will be rolling out its first enabled game “Kingdoms at War” by A Thinking Ape next week.

A joint effort between Mochi Media and parent company Shanda Games, Mochi GAME Developer Fund is a $10 million fund that will help promising Flash and social game developers support their games through sponsorship, licensing and publishing deals. The fund will be used to assist indie Flash game development studios and game developers. Participating developers will gain access to technical, design and testing resources from Shanda Games, as well as development tools and distribution to nearly 40,000 websites from Mochi Media. Initial investments will be as much as $100,000 per game title.

It’s nice to see Mochi using its backing from Shanda to good use. And the addition of social features to Mochi’s development platform will no doubt be useful to game developers. As of June 2009 100 million people were playing games that included Mochi Media. The company also launched a payments platform for game developers last year.

On the verge of rolling out its new geolocation feature, Twitter is thinking ahead. One potentially powerful use for it will be to showcase trending topics happening in specific places. The overall Trending Topic area has long been getting out of control with spam (which Twitter is now working to clean up), but location-specific trends could be very interesting. And Twitter clearly knows this as it has announced a new feature for third-party developers to use: Trends API.

In a post on its API announcement Google Group, Platform team member Raffi Krikorian writes that at least at first, this will only be open to specific locations in the world. For example, he cites San Francisco and London as two potential places that will be serviced by this. São Paulo is another mentioned in a tweet. Krikorian also notes that:

At a high level, there will be two new endpoints:

• an endpoint to give a listing of all locations that trends are
  available for, and
• an endpoint to actually allow you to query by a specific location.

Twitter is using Yahoo’s Where on Earth IDs (WOEIDs) to tag the locations they have information for. Doing so gives them a way to use IDs rather than language-specific names for places. More on Yahoo’s GeoPlanet (which this is a part of) here.

It would also seem that at first these trends will only be available for real-time data. That is to say that there will not be daily and weekly data for location-based trends, Krikorian notes. (Twitter showcases these on its main page.) He goes on to say that may come in the future.

Find out more on Twitter’s API wiki here and here.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

I’m doing this just because no one really believes the stuff we get hit with here at TechCrunch every day. None of this ever gets posted. But I’m on a roll today, so why not.

And no matter how crazy the message, we do try to respond as helpfully as possible. We’re here all week, so feel free to email with any further relationship/legal advice requests. In fact, I’m thinking of starting a new once-a-day crazy email from the inbox series of posts.

We’ll update with any further response from Sarah.

From: Michael Arrington
Date: November 9, 2009 1:54:16 PM PST
To: Sarah
Subject: Re: sueing facebook??????

Maybe it’s time for a new boyfriend.

On Nov 9, 2009, at 1:42 PM, Sarah wrote:

Hi my name is Sarah and I have a quick question. My boyfriend got kicked off of face book for sending too many messages is there any way to get him back on if not then he is kicked off for at least a month. please contact me as [email removed]. please it is very important

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Video publishing platform Episodic is rolling out its publishing suite that lets users manage and measure video content, and use the platform’s monetization services which enable ad insertion and credit card transactions for both live and on-demand video streaming. Episodic is hoping to make its mark in the online video publishing space by offering additional features for easy monetization, distribution and customization.

The suite itself is made up of five functional areas, including the ability to create video libraries, customer metadata fields, and the ability to encode. The player itself works on both the web and mobile browsers. Currently, Episodic is formatted for the iPhone only but Android, Blackberry and Symbian device support are coming soon. Interestingly, Episodic also offers an ad server that is interoperable with all major ad serving platforms, letting users insert ads into videos via a fairly simple process.

Like YouTube, Episodic also offers an analytics engine that gives publishers real-time metrics and reporting around audience engagement, viewer performance, network quality and the quality of the overall viewing experience. And the platform offers users the ability to syndicate videos to other destinations like Hulu, iTunes and Amazon. With Episodic, content producers can also build custom branded iPhone applications around their media.

Episodic is trying to make a name in a crowded space chock full of popular platforms such as Brightcove, Ooyala and thePlatform. But the startup is offering a simple and easy way of monetizing, analyzing and syndicating videos, so it may have success in gaining a following.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Adobe is a big company, with a lots of products, but one of its strongest brands is Flash. So when Adobe contacted Envato, an Australian startup that operates a set of popular marketplaces for digital creative goods to change one of their marketplaces names, Envato had no choice. Envato operates a property called FlashDen, which sells Adobe Flash and Flex files like preloaders, galleries, site templates and utilities. Files are created and sold by a huge community of authors from all over the world.

Last week Adobe contacted Envato and asked Envato to change the name and URL of FlashDen so that it would no longer contain the term ‘Flash’, which is a registered trademark of Adobe. With little time, Envato changed the name from FlashDen to ActiveDen.

Seeing this change, we reached out to Collis Ta’eed, the CEO of Envato, and he mentioned that Envato received a letter from a law firm representing Adobe asking to change FlashDen’s name. Envato followed through, not wanting more legal problems with Adobe. Ta’eed also mentioned that “FlashDen” was filed as a trademark in Australia in January 2008 and entered on the Australian trademark register in August 2008. Envato is based in Melbourne, Australia.

I guess the main takeaway here is that if you are trying to help Adobe build its ecosystem of apps around Flash, don’t try to communicate that by including the word Flash in the name of your site.

Envato currently operates five “marketplaces” including ThemeForest, GraphicRiver, AudioJungle, VideoHive and now ActiveDen.

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