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Posts Tagged ‘tinychat’

Chatroulette, a website that connects random strangers via video chat, has been receiving a lot of buzz. And we’ve seen it can be quite entertaining. Web-based chat startup TinyChat is launching their own version of Chatroulette, called TinyChat Next.

Similar to Chatroulette, you can be thrown into a room with strangers and conduct video chats with random people. When you tire of a person, you can simple move onto the next available user in TinyChat’s “Lobby”. It’s a fairly simple interface and idea, as we’ve seen with Chatroulette.

One differing factor is that TinyChat is trying to white label the technology by offering “rooms.” So for example, TechCrunch could create a room for entrepreneurs to chat about technology and meet random people who share the same interests. The idea is that if you can break down the chat topic by subject matter, the greater the chance of having a more compelling conversation with an absolute stranger. Similar to creating a a group chat on TinyChat, a room organizer would post a link to the room. People who join will randomly chat with other people in the room and can choose to skip to another stranger. PopJam also released a Chatroulette-like platform, except that is uses Facebook Connect to randomly send you into a Facebook IM chat with a total stranger.

At the moment, TinyChat Next is free to all users, even if you create designated, branded rooms. It seems like Chatroulette is a bit of a novelty that could wear off, but I think the idea of creating rooms according to subject or interest is compelling. It should be interesting to see if TinyChat can actually recruit users to test out and experiment with the service.

TinyChat, which recently upgraded its features, has been growing like gangbusters and recently won a Crunchie for best bootstrapped startup. TinyChat started out as a simple IRC-style chatroom app to complement conversations on platforms like Twitter, has been steadily building out its innovative platform to include video chat and screensharing options, live video streaming, and Facebook Connect.

We’re big fans of TinyChat, a web-based chat startup that has been growing like gangbusters and recently won a Crunchie for best bootstrapped startup. TinyChat started out as a simple IRC-style chatroom app to complement conversations on platforms like Twitter, has been steadily building out its innovative platform to include video chat and screensharing options, live video streaming, and Facebook Connect.

Now the platform is making chats more social with the addition YouTube video integration, document collaboration with Etherpad, and whiteboard features powered by the company’s own Flockdraw. The social YouTube feature allows a moderators to pay any public YouTube video for everyone participating in the chat. The administrator can also control were the video starts, pauses etc.

The Etherpad integration is as simple as using Etherpad itself (the service’s parent AppJet was acquired by Google last year). With the click of a button, you can activate an Etherpad for your chat, where multiple can collaborate on a particular document. And the Etherpad integration has all of its original features; including the ability to go back in the lifetime of your document, to import and export to a variety of formats, and unlimited sharing options. You can also save your document and reopen it in the chat platform at a later time. The Flockdraw Whiteboard integration is similar to the Etherpad feature, except for whiteboarding vs. document collaboration. The whiteboard options are basic; you can draw, paint, type, and erase. But it’s simple to use and fairly intuitive.

These social and collaborative features no doubt bring TinyChat’s functionality to another level. Now that the platform has screensharing, and document and whiteboard collaboration, TinyChat could become a staple for businesses. And TinyChat offers its API for users to build off of its platform. The big bonus: TinyChat is completely free. The chat startup makes money from advertising and has yet to monetize, although its main competitor TokBox has begun to experiment with a freemium model (TokBox also has Etherpad integration). Although the startup has raised no VC funding since its launch last year, TinyChat has continued to innovate and make its platform a compelling offering for chat. In fact, the startup seeing 5 million minutes of usage per day. And along the way, the TinyChat has morphed into a full-fledged collaboration platform.

Skype has been in the news a lot lately.  Over the past six months, rumors swirled that the peer-to-peer telephony service provider was going to be bought back from eBay by its original founders, to be spun off as a separate company and then IPO, and ultimately to be sold to an investor group (which was confirmed at the beginning of this month). Now Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis through their Joltid holding are suing eBay and the new buyers over copyright issues centered around core p2p technology used in Skype product which they have developed and own.

The rumors just won’t stop.

This time, however, it’s about the company’s product strategy rather than its general fate. A well-placed source tells me Skype management is actively shopping around for companies that provide web-based communication services such as browser-based calling and video chats.

To date, Skype has focused on desktop and mobile software to handle peer-to-peer based calling over the Internet. This is not surprising, because when Skype first started back in 2003 bandwidth costs were a an order of magnitude higher than they are today and desktop apps were the only way to go if they were ever going to make a decent profit from Internet-based telephony. But with bandwidth prices decreasing worldwide at a fast rate, it makes a lot of sense for Skype to at least consider moving into web applications and claim their ground. The fastest way to do that would be to pick up a startup with proven technology and early traction in that field, like TokBox, PalTalk or Tinychat.

Here’s another reason Skype might be looking at web-based communication service providers. What if eBay/Skype cannot develop a workaround that would allow them to continue the service without using the Joltid-owned source code powering its core peer-to-peer engine? It’s conceivable that might drive the company to consider purchasing companies with similar or related Web-based technology to speed up its move away from the litigation threat hanging over them.

Of course, companies talk to one another all the time and as far as we know there haven’t been any official acquisition offers from Skype at this point. But they’re definitely looking.

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Twitter is currently rolling out a couple of design tweaks for its web version.

The most apparent change is noticeable when you go to a user’s profile page. Instead of just a ‘Follow’ button under the person’s username, you’ll now get a newly designed follow button next to another button that allows you to follow, public message (or privately when he or she follows you back) or block the person in one click. Also, when you do a search for a popular trending topic, there’s a chance you’ll see a short explanation above the results about why it is trending (coming from WhatTheTrend.com). See an example for a search on ‘Jay-Z’ below. Finally, the default avatar that new users are assigned when they sign up without uploading a proper profile pic has been changed to something, well, better.

Slowly but surely, we’re seeing Twitter’s design when logged in change to one that inches closer to its recently launched new homepage, which was largely centered around search and trending topics.

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Today Palm held its conference call for its Q1 FY 2010 results, during which it outlined the performance of its roster of smart phones. It’s a day that has been long awaited by investors, who are eager to see how the company’s flagship Palm Pre has actually been performing. And the results are in, sort of. Across its entire smartphone line Palm shipped 823,000 units this quarter, and its carrier partners “sold through” 810,000, of which the “vast majority” were the Palm Pre (the others were older Treos). In other words, Palm still isn’t talking.

Up until now, Palm has remained mum on the sales of the Pre — its flagship phone that launched with much fanfare earlier this summer, but was quickly overshadowed by the iPhone 3GS launch. That didn’t change today, but we can glean some information from Palm’s statements: the term “vast majority” doesn’t really mean much, but assuming at least 60% of the sell-through figures were from the Pre, that would equate to more than 486,000 units. That’s more than what some have been expecting (a Bloomberg report cited an analyst predicting 400k units sold, while a MarketWatch report put the consensus at about 500K), and Palm’s overall smartphone sales beat analyst expectations.

Still, it’s hard to look back at major Palm investor Roger McNamee’s March, 2009 prediction that the Pre would obliterate the iPhone and think that the Pre’s launch was everything Palm hoped for. Let’s revisit that beautiful quote:

You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two- year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone. Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later.—Roger McNamee

Granted, everyone knew this statement was utterly ridiculous as soon as McNamee uttered it, but the Pre has failed to really reach blockbuster status by even the most generous definition. There’s a reason why Palm is not touting its sales figures the way Apple did when the iPhone 3GS sold 1 million units within five days of its release and 5.2 million in the quarter.

During today’s call Palm stressed that its success isn’t tied to a single device — rather, it’s about Palm’s webOS platform, which is now going to serve as the operating system for every future Palm release. It revealed in the conference call that more carriers are signing up for the Palm. And it will have a second shot at a smash-hit this fall, when it releases its smaller (and cheaper) Pixi in November. And a third shot after that, and then a fourth shot. Maybe one of these days it will get it right.

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Dan Blake from Harkness Labs - who is working on far more projects at the same time than he could possibly tell me about in just one conversation - recently filled me in on his latest Twitter-related venture, TinyPetition.

Basically, Blake is looking to address the apparent need for a tool that allows the many opinionated people that inhabit Twitterland to voice their concerns about anything that gets their hearts pumping: a digital petition engine that can quickly spread online thanks to the viral nature of Twitter and the concept of retweeting in particular.

We’ve already seen Twitition pop up, most recently for aggregating opinions from Twitter users on the iPhone 3G S upgrade prices AT&T is going to charge. So far, that service has racked up 41800 signatures for 730 topics. TinyPetition, in contrast, has only soft-launched its website so far and stands at about 5800 signatures for only 5 petitions. Still, Blake thinks he can eventually overtake Twitition, which prompts the question how he intends to do so.

Well for one, Blake has access to an existing user base of millions he could potentially draw from, as he also happens to be the guy behind this website called PetitionSpot, one of the most popular online petition services in the world. It’s a good start: PetitionSpot boasts about 4 million registered users (although Blake says it’s more like 2 million who have actively shared petitions since the site’s inception) and these are all people who have already expressed their interest in signing digital petitions, obviously. We’ll see how far this gets TinyPetition further down the line.

I’ve set up a test petition (unsurprisingly, about our quest to have Facebook management reconsider their policy on Holocaust denial groups), which you can find at tinypetition.com/facebookholocaust. Here’s my tweet about it, which I’ve shared from the TinyPetition website (something seems to have gone wrong with it).

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TinyChat, the simple, free web-based chat room we wrote about here, is now adding video conferencing and screen sharing to its list of features.

Once you create a chat room on TinyChat’s site, TinyChat will generate a unique URL that you can share with whoever you choose to invite to the virtual chat room. When users click on the link, they will enter the interface and will be able to input messages, change their usernames and enable video and audio conferencing. Powered by Adobe Flash, the video conferencing feature allows up to 12 different users in the chat room. TinyChat also lets you share any type of file with other members of a chat room. Similar to the site’s previous version, you can embed a badge on other sites and forums to spread the link to the chatroom. The video conferencing feature is very easy to use and the quality of the video isn’t terrible.

The startup has also rolled out a premium account, which is $20 per month, where you will be able to add screen sharing to members of the group. Once you enable screen sharing, you will be given a picture window, which can be dragged to the tab or screen where you want the webcast to take place. Additionally, the premium service lets you record and save video conferences as an flv file. The pro account also lets you create passwords for room privacy and offers higher quality video than the free account.

Of course video streaming and web conferencing is old news and there are significant amount of services that do the same thing including Cisco’s WebEx, Stickam, Ustream and a host of others. Entrepreneur Daniel Blake, who created TinyChat, TinyPaste and ControlC, says that TinyChat is aimed towards individuals and small businesses who don’t normally use these services but want an easy (and cheap) way to connect with others over the web. Blake also says that he’s hoping to sell the service to social networks like Facebook, to enable video chatting from the site. The interface of the new and improved TinyChat is still very spartan, but for a company or user who is looking for a free service and doesn’t need a whole bunch of bells and whistles, it could be an easy option for video conferencing.

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