The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘video’

We’re big fans of Animoto, a website that lets you easily create photo and video slideshows matched to music. The site is constantly innovating its nifty product, most recently adding an iPhone app and the ability to incorporate video. For those not familiar with Animoto, the startup basically allows you to take your images, video and your music and mash them together to create cool videos. What makes the videos cool is the company’s technology that renders the pictures so they’re in-step with the music you’ve chosen, adding nice transition effects. This morning, Animoto is opening up its API, allowing partners to now incorporate Animoto’s compelling technologies into independent sites

The first API that being rolled out for the Animoto Partner Platform is Animoto Quickstart.  The API essentially allows any website to tap into Animoto’s video creation flow.  The aim is to make Animoto one click away from any website that has photos, videos or music.  Quickstart allows websites to connect their own content, including photos, video clips and music to Animoto as the first step in creating an Animoto video. So partners can integrate Animoto’s video slideshow creation tool into their sites. And the startup promises that Quickstart takes only hours to a partner to set up on a site.

For example, SmugMug, a photo sharing site that caters to professional photographers, uses Quickstart so users can ‘pass’ their photo albums into Animoto’s video creation flow. So is the user now has the option of making a slideshow from their hosted photos and simply needs to pick a song to complete their Animoto video. Once a user slicks to make the slideshow, he or she will be taken to Animoto’s site, where their video and photos will automatically be placed into Animoto’s site.

Another use case is a promotion Animoto is launching with iconic musician John Bon Jovi where fans of Bon Jovi can go to Bonjovi’s site to create an Animoto music video with Bon Jovi’s latest single and footage from his music video.  Pepsi also used the Quickstart API to help users create video slideshows in a contest involving its ShareTheJoy campaign.

With the launch of this API at SXSW, Animoto is partnering with music publication SPIN magazine to allow fans to promote their favorite South by Southwest bands for a chance to win prizes.
From now until March 31, 2010, fans are can create and submit Animoto videos featuring songs from top South by Southwest bands for a chance to win $1000 and a spot on Spin.com, and other prizes.
 
Currently Animoto has 1.4 million users and makes money off of its paid subscriptions. On its site its free to create 30 second videos, but you need to pay $3 per video to make an lengthier slideshow. The site sells a year long subscription to users for $30. A large part of Animoto’s subscription business are composed of professional videographers and photographers who pay $20 per year to create their own branded videos that they can download, and burn to a CD (and the slideshow doesn’t bear the “Animoto” logo). Animoto’s CEO Brad Jefferson tells me that 10 percent of users, so 140,000 people, are currently using some type of paid subscription on the site.The company is already cash-flow positive, which isn’t bad for a startup that’s less than three years old.

In terms of monetizing the API, Animoto isn’t charging any of its partners. In fact, its actually paying its partners in terms of affiliate fees. So if any partners lead new or existing users to the site who end up buying a subscription, Animot will give the partner a 40 percent cut of the first year’s fee.

The Quickstart API seems to be the first of a few sets of APIs that will extend Animoto’s technology onto the other sites. It’s a smart move. While many photo sharing sites have the ability to make slideshows, the technology is not nearly as fun and easy to use as Animoto’s. And Animoto is undoubtedly a compelling tool for an brand marketer to use for a campaign. Frankly, the possibilities are endless because Animoto is such an easy tool to use.

Laptops are becoming smaller and smaller and after we saw and lusted after the Sony Z series we were curious how the new Viliv S10 would perform.

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Exclusive first look at the Viliv S10 Blade

Editor’s Note: This guest post was written and reported by Steven Rosenbaum, the CEO of Magnify.net.

Today, the world of music, film, and the internet converges on Austin, Texas for what is fast becoming one of the key the places to launch new software products. For the folks at AOL, South By Southwest—know also as SXSW—will be a debutant party for AOL’s new Seed form of journalism.

AOL has it’s hopes pinned on that fact that SXSW will be the perfect place to both introduce the new Seed content machine to a large audience and test the concept of mixing freelance and pro-journalists to create a huge amount of original content. Seed has been operational for a few months now, but SXSW will be it coming out party, according to former New York Times writer Saul Hansell who is now the Program Director of Seed.

How’s this all going to work? Well, fielding an army of freelancers to cover SXSW’s 2000 bands is certainly a baptism by fire. AOL solicited freelance writers on its music site Spinner. Those interested in contributing were redirected to Seed, where they signed up. Hansell asked for work experience, music tastes, and clips. He says: “I can tell you now that we didn’t read the clips. We looked at these things to see if people can follow directions and if they didn’t write us 1,000 words when we asked for 100. And that was the criteria.”

Next, each of the more than two thousand bands that will play at SXSW were assigned to a Seedster to interview. Hansell says he had his fingers crossed. “I think we’re over the hump of my darkest fears,” he says, “and I had many of them. The first dark fear was we’d get total losers. The second fear was how good the interviews would be. “

Now, with first results surfacing on Spinner, Hansell says, “The people who sent us e-mails back were entertainment writers for weekend publications, kids in J-school who are also in bands, exactly the right type of people.” But they aren’t treated exactly like journalists. Hansell points out that Seedsters don’t get a press pass—if they want to hear the bands live they’ll have to buy their own ticket. But he expects some number of folks to try and hustle their way into shows by waving around their AOL clips. “That’s just expected.”

With clips like these, Seed writers are held to the same standards as any other freelancer on the AOL site. spinner’s editor Melissa Owen and her team edit the submissions and have final say on what runs and what doesn’t.

Why launch at South By Southwest? For Hansell, that was a no-brainer. “I know it is communicating our ambition. We are about reporting. We are about doing big and interesting things.” The big SXSW bet is that Hansell and his Seedsters can make more content, faster, better, and cheaper than anyone else. In addition the distributed community of potential contributors on Seed, AOL already employs 3,500 professional journalists on staff or as regular freelancers. And AOL has some interesting content search technology from its earlier acquisitions of Relegence and Truveo.

Man vs. Machine: The Bionic Solution

AOL has built a three legged stool to create content: part professional, part freelance, and part aggregated . . . but its model is far more hand-crafted than the other new players in the mass content creation space. “The essence of journalism has always been separating signal from noise,” says Hansell. “It’s all judgment. It’s all selecting the best bits.” What AOL hopes to create with Seed is an editorial machine which automates the assignment process as much as possible, but keeps the final selection part in human hands.

“I call it Bionic Journalism,” says Hansell. “Left brain, right brain. We are trying to take the best of a machine, which does lots of things over and over again, and a person.” It’s a tall order, and will take a lot more than a couple thousand band interviews to prove it works.

Is AOL trying to beat Google at the news gathering game? Hansell says it’s far more than that. “Google News will give you a whole clump of things that are probably about the same thing with a reasonable degree of accuracy. But it can’t tell you what it’s really about. It can’t summarize it. It can’t translate it into people language.”

The Ugly Economics: Not My Problem

So, what about cost? Some freelancers are complaining that the web doesn’t pay a living wage. “That is not my problem” Says Hansell. He quickly rephrases, “It is my problem but I didn’t do that, the world did that.”

He is however trying to sort it out. Asks Hansell: “How do you deal with the fact that the economics of the Internet can’t let you pay what people think that a freelancer can get paid? One way is you give them a bundle. If you give them ten of the same assignments, even if the price is low, by the time they’re done with the tenth one, they can do the tenth one in half the time they could do the first one.”

Here’s another one of Hansell’s analogies: “Seed is to freelancing as Ebay is to classified ads.” AOL’s Seed may be the future of freelance, but the math remains daunting; “The fact that we gave somebody ten interviews to do after she did one or two before, she’s delighted. That’s 500 bucks. That’s 500 bucks more than she was going to make doing something else, and it’s fun.” Well, “delighted” might be pushing it. Pumping out ten assignments for the price of what many professional freelancers charge for one will favor quantity over quality.

But if it all works—if Bionic Journalism can attract a massive audience and save AOL—what’s the home run? Here Hansell gets a little bit ahead of himself, but at least he is thinking big:

“It’s the most high risk improbable outcome, but the most exciting, which is that we become the most dominant force in journalism, broadly defined, in the Twenty-First Century. That’s what we’re shooting for. That’s what Tim is shooting for. That’s what I’m shooting for.”

And it all starts this weekend with 2,000 indie rock band interviews.

Steven Rosenbaum is the CEO of Magnify.net, a video curation platform that powers more than 68,000 web sites. Rosenbaum is a serial entrepreneur and Emmy Award winning documentary filmmaker. Watch his video notes of Saul Hansell talking about Bionic Journalism and AOL’s larger journalistic ambitions by clicking in the two previous links. .Follow Steve on Twitter.

Credit to Ring of Honor, the professional wrestling promotion, for embracing the Internet era. The promotion has launched a new download store that makes its extensive video library only a $10 download away.

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Ring of Honor figures out the Internet, launches video download store to discourage BitTorrent piracy

Yahoo is backing a cycling team. I don’t know why — but they’re doing it. And today their passion got a little boost: from Google.

Google is announcing tomorrow at the National Bike Summit in Washington, DC that Google Maps will now include biking directions in the U.S. Apparently, this was the most-requested feature for the service, as some 57 million Americans ride bikes.

Thousands of miles of bike trails have been added to the maps. And there is also step-by-step directions, much like you can see for driving or public transportation directions in the maps. There is also a new layer that shows bike trails and bike-friendly areas on roads. Yes, it’s a bike-lover’s dream.

To make this new feature happen, Google partnered with Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, a nonprofit group that converts old rail lines into bike trails. The group have given Google information on some 12,000 miles worth of trails in the U.S.

To coincide with the launch, Google also has a cycling contest. To enter, you simply have to tweet with the hashtag #bikewithgoogle. The randomly selected winner will get a voucher for $2,500 to be used at American Cyclery.

I fully expect that hashtag to be dominated by members of Yahoo’s cycling team tomorrow.

Find out more about the new feature in the video below.

It has been suggested that the album is dead. That’s a bit hasty, I think; such an established musical tool can only be detonated when both the patron and the artist turn the key

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In a world of tracks, Pink Floyd fights for the album

Just yesterday, we reported about Panasonic’s sales plans for their 3D devices in the US ( Samsung is ready , too). And today, Sony has announced [JP] prices and release dates for eight 3D BRAVIA TVs for the Japanese market. The company wants to sell a total of 25 million LCD TVs next fiscal year (a whopping 67% increase from its forecast for the current fiscal year that ends this month), with 3D TVs accounting for 10% of that number

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Sony 3D TVs go on sale in Japan (and probably the US) in June (video)

Remember the story about the school district that spied on its students at home? Well it just got boringer

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That student spying case is now officially boring

Making clocks out of hard drives isn’t anything new. The hard drive platters make nice shiny backgrounds for your traditional analog clock, and provides just a little geek panache to an ordinary timepiece.

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The coolest clock you’re going to see today: strobing LED hard drive digital clock

Apparently with a bit of geek know-how, a 1984 Macintosh can run OS X Snow Leopard. Who knew?

Excerpt from: 
DIY: Convert a 1984 Mac into a Snow Leopard machine