In December I wrote about Thwapr, a video-sharing service focused on mobile videos. Instead of building apps for smartphones, Thwapr chose to make its videos auto-playable on as many phones — smart or dumb — as possible without any software downloads, including apps.
This week, Thwapr has added one-click Facebook and Twitter sharing to video clips hosted at Thwapr, as well as a “Thwap It” button to share over its own social network. The catch is: There’s no catch. You needn’t sign up with Thwapr, either to share or to receive a clip. In that way, Thwapr is just like YouTube.
CTO Eric Hoffert gave me a demo over the phone. As you can see on this test page, all you need do is click the Facebook or Twitter button to send a tagged link and comment to your own network. The Thwapit button lets you send a message to someone else’s mobile phone, with a link to a video that will automatically play on more than 200 models of phone.
The most serendipitous part of the service, Hoffert says, is that many recipients aren’t aware that their phone can play video clips until they click: “On a BlackBerry 8330 or a Droid on Verizon, Thwapr serves streaming video in RTSP format. On a more modestly powered Motorola Razr feature phone on Sprint, it serves a downloadable 3GP video file delivered via HTTP. Thwapr knows the pixel resolution of your phone’s screen and whether or not it’s a touchscreen. We resize the video to fit.”
The latest upgrade improves video quality as well. “If you shoot video on a BlackBerry,” Hoffert said, “it’ll play on some other phones with higher resolution than BlackBerry supports. On Android, we’ve just doubled our video quality. It looks great.”
Thwapr was founded in 2007 with funding of $3 million from angel investors . The company is headquartered in New York City and has 15 employees.
Companies: Thwapr
torsdag 25. februar 2010
Embargoer forklares med fargerike tegneseriefigurer
Vi i VentureBeat er helt fint med embargoer (de er tidsstempler PR folk legger på pressemeldinger, det er forstått at journalister ikke vil publisere en historie før gitt tidspunkt). Embargoer gi oss mer tid til å jobbe på en historie, så vi ikke styrtende ut et halvferdig post for å slå GigaOm. Likevel kan prosessen suge moro ut av en hverdag: PR person emails meg å spørre om jeg vil respektere en embargo på noen varme nyhetsmelding. PR person samtaler for å se om jeg har lest posten min. PR person spør meg for å si det skriftlig at jeg vil respektere boikotten. PR personen skriker i telefonen til å vekke meg fra napping på tastaturet mitt. Gjenta 10 ganger daglig. Dette Tekst-til-film tegneserie går gjennom standard prosedyre. Jeg har ennå ikke funnet ut hvem som opprettet den. Anyone?
Vi presenterer nye VentureBeat ukentlige nyhetsbrev
Jeg er glad for å introdusere en helt ny måte å bo på toppen av all den innovasjon som VentureBeat dekker. I dag kan vi kunngjøre lanseringen av 4 nye ukentlige nyhetsbrev på e-post: VentureBeat Week in Review, MobileBeat Week in Review, GamesBeat Pulse og GreenBeat Week in Review. Så mye skjer i en gitt uke at det er ofte vanskelig å holde tritt med alle overskrifter, produktlanseringer, oppkjøp og investeringer. Og hvis yrkesliv holder nese til slipestein, det er aldri så lett å se bort fra nyheter totalt og ender opp mangler store historier. I tillegg til å merke de største nyhetene i uken og gir deg vår tar, vil nyhetsbrev holde deg i kretsen om alle kommende hendelser som VentureBeat er vert, samt arrangementer som vi tror bare du bør vite om. Vi har også omorganisert RSS-feeds slik at det er mye enklere å finne feedene du kan være interessert i, samt velge leveransen mekanisme som fungerer for deg. Hvis du ikke er interessert i å lese feeds eller ikke har tid eller kunnskap, er det nå veldig lett å få en email oversikten over alle overskriftene ... skummet historien titler og så bare les hva som interesserer deg mest. For eksempel å få en liste over alle VentureBeat overskrifter i innboksen hver dag, klikk her. Vi vil sende ut de første nyhetsbrev innen en uke. Abonner her: http://ping.fm/CDEgu Tags: email, feeds, nyhetsbrev, RSS Selskaper: VentureBeat
DVD-anmeldelse: 'September Issue' co-stjerner skinne
Mens «Vogue» editor Wintour bærer et preg av wariness i "The September Issue", en godt utformet doc om mote mag, er slakk plukket opp av chatteprotokoller kreative direktør Grace Coddington og überly fabelaktig stil guru André Leon Talley.
Review: Motorola Devour
Kort versjon: Hei damer! Din Droid er her. Motorola Devour (det er faktisk sluke, men jeg nekter å rope på deg) er en sosial media Android-telefonen med stil nok til å slå ned en million Droids. Men er det bare én murstein i Android veggen? Funksjoner: Amazing ekstrudert aluminium case MotoBLUR UI Full tastatur Avtakbart batteri 3,5 mm hodetelefonkontakt Positivt: Removable [...]
Obama’s plans are a good thing for space flight
John Carmack is the founder, president, and lead engineer of space flight company Armadillo Aerospace. He was also the co-founder of id Software, creator of classic computer games like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake.
In the interest of disclosure, Carmack notes that about 25 percent of the funding for Armadillo Aerospace has come through NASA.
There has been some wailing about how the newly proposed changes in NASA’s direction are “throwing away our future in space” by canceling the internal development of new launch vehicles. In reality, we won’t actually be losing anything. And focusing on commercial sourcing of space transportation may be the most beneficial thing NASA has ever done.
For years now, whenever a reporter asked me what I thought about returning to the moon with the country’s existing Constellation technology, I said something along the lines of “It’s like watching a slow motion train wreck. It isn’t going to end well.”
I have an excellent working relationship with the parts of NASA that my company deals with, but honestly, I thought the program was going to drag on for another half decade and piss away several more tens of billions of dollars before being re-scoped due to failure to deliver.
Cutting the internal NASA launch vehicle development now, as President Obama has proposed, is a Good Thing. We weren’t going to wind up with Ares V rockets delivering Altair landers to a moon base. It just wasn’t going to happen. Schedules would slip, requests for additional funding would be denied, and milestones would continue to be pushed years into the future until they were finally just canceled. After a hundred billion dollars was pumped through NASA, we would be left with, at best, a capsule launched on the world’s most expensive expendable rocket. Slow motion train wreck.
The United States has some pretty decent rockets today (the EELVs from Boeing and Lockheed Martin), and if SpaceX can deliver with the Falcon-9, we will have something that can again be competitive in the international market. The arguments for NASA building brand new rockets instead of making use of existing ones rested on two points: That the existing rockets weren’t big enough to handle the tasks, and that they weren’t “man rated” or safe enough for our astronauts. Good arguments can be made against both points, but it is remarkably easy to make a PowerPoint presentation look like a better idea than the existing state of the industrial market.
The real reason that new launch vehicles were integral to NASA’s plans is that NASA wanted to build rockets. I don’t really blame NASA — hey, building rockets is fun! It just isn’t the best organization to do it.
Yes, NASA built the Saturn V, but success at something like that is much more a function of the people than the institution, and almost all of those people are retired or dead. It would do a worse job at it than the companies that have actually built a new rocket in the last two decades, and the development effort wouldn’t have any additional economic benefit.
I remain optimistic about the future of man in space. The potential is, quite literally, unlimited. The physics isn’t changing. Relevant technologies continue to improve. NASA’s budget has a better chance of contributing to the advancement of spacefaring when it isn’t shoveled into doomed and redundant work.
Space can be more to the country than just an occasional spectacle to cheer.
Companies: Armadillo Aerospace
People: John Carmack
In the interest of disclosure, Carmack notes that about 25 percent of the funding for Armadillo Aerospace has come through NASA.
There has been some wailing about how the newly proposed changes in NASA’s direction are “throwing away our future in space” by canceling the internal development of new launch vehicles. In reality, we won’t actually be losing anything. And focusing on commercial sourcing of space transportation may be the most beneficial thing NASA has ever done.
For years now, whenever a reporter asked me what I thought about returning to the moon with the country’s existing Constellation technology, I said something along the lines of “It’s like watching a slow motion train wreck. It isn’t going to end well.”
I have an excellent working relationship with the parts of NASA that my company deals with, but honestly, I thought the program was going to drag on for another half decade and piss away several more tens of billions of dollars before being re-scoped due to failure to deliver.
Cutting the internal NASA launch vehicle development now, as President Obama has proposed, is a Good Thing. We weren’t going to wind up with Ares V rockets delivering Altair landers to a moon base. It just wasn’t going to happen. Schedules would slip, requests for additional funding would be denied, and milestones would continue to be pushed years into the future until they were finally just canceled. After a hundred billion dollars was pumped through NASA, we would be left with, at best, a capsule launched on the world’s most expensive expendable rocket. Slow motion train wreck.
The United States has some pretty decent rockets today (the EELVs from Boeing and Lockheed Martin), and if SpaceX can deliver with the Falcon-9, we will have something that can again be competitive in the international market. The arguments for NASA building brand new rockets instead of making use of existing ones rested on two points: That the existing rockets weren’t big enough to handle the tasks, and that they weren’t “man rated” or safe enough for our astronauts. Good arguments can be made against both points, but it is remarkably easy to make a PowerPoint presentation look like a better idea than the existing state of the industrial market.
The real reason that new launch vehicles were integral to NASA’s plans is that NASA wanted to build rockets. I don’t really blame NASA — hey, building rockets is fun! It just isn’t the best organization to do it.
Yes, NASA built the Saturn V, but success at something like that is much more a function of the people than the institution, and almost all of those people are retired or dead. It would do a worse job at it than the companies that have actually built a new rocket in the last two decades, and the development effort wouldn’t have any additional economic benefit.
I remain optimistic about the future of man in space. The potential is, quite literally, unlimited. The physics isn’t changing. Relevant technologies continue to improve. NASA’s budget has a better chance of contributing to the advancement of spacefaring when it isn’t shoveled into doomed and redundant work.
Space can be more to the country than just an occasional spectacle to cheer.
Companies: Armadillo Aerospace
People: John Carmack
Yammer Communities åpne døren for B2B Microblog samarbeid og mye mer
Som vi rapporterte i går kveld, har Yammer nettopp annonsert at de vil begynne å tillate brukerne å melde seg for microblogging service uten e-postadresser som er tilknyttet deres selskap domenenavn (f.eks jason@company.com). Denne nye funksjonen, kalt Communities, åpnes tjenesten til mindre formelle organisasjoner, og selv familier. Og det åpner også døren for B2B samarbeidet, som er hvordan Yammer synes å være primært markedsføre den nye funksjonen Communities vil lanseres 1. mars. Dette er et stort trekk for selskapet. På en telefonkonferanse i morges, sa Yammer konsernsjef David Sacks at ett av problemene med Yammer så langt har vært at kommunikasjon på tjenesten har vært begrenset til intern bruk i en bedrift. Spørsmålet mange mennesker løp inn var at de hadde ønsker å samarbeide med sine kunder eller forretningspartnere også, men hadde ikke en måte å gjøre det uten å invitere dem til bedriftens interne nettverk (som ofte var ikke et alternativ) .
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