Video-based social network Viddy is gaining traction, after amassing 38 million users in its first 16 months.
Often referred to as the Twitter for videos, Viddy is on the rise thanks to endorsements from celebrities such as Justin Bieber (who is just one of the app’s high-profile investors).
“I’m into Viddy because I can just be me and show my fans the fun parts of my day,” Bieber explains. “I’m big on talking with fans on Twitter and posting pictures on Facebook, but video is another level, and I like watching viddys my fans make for me.”
“Users shoot short video snippets, known as ‘viddys,’ and upload them from their iPhones and other mobile devices for their followers to watch,” explains the Los Angeles Times. “Like tweets, viddys capture everyday moments, with one caveat: They have to be 15 seconds or shorter.”
The network has attracted brands such as General Electric, Southwest Airlines and Diane von Furstenberg to share video messages, as the format allows for concise, engaging content.
Unlike notable Bay Area social heavyweights — including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram — Viddy is headquartered in Los Angeles (Venice Beach).
“We have the ingredients to create what can become the next Twitter, the next YouTube, the next Facebook, and that’s what we’re setting out to do,” says Brett O’Brien, Viddy co-founder and chief exec. “Our ambition is very large.”
Google is releasing an update to its built-in YouTube Video Editor this week, possibly making video production as simple and fun as editing pictures on Instagram.
“The user interface has been redesigned, removing some of the clutter from the previous version, and the many Instagram-style filters can now easily be seen during the editing process,” reports The Verge. “Changes are also easier to make on the fly, with the help of real-time, interactive previews. Combined with the service’s improved audio editing options, YouTube’s Video Editor is shaping up to be a rather resourceful tool for quickly cleaning up footage.”
In a related TechCrunch post, ReelSurfer launched in public beta this week. The Menlo Park-based start-up from Christian Yang and Neil Joglekar allows users to clip and share video content from any website.
“ReelSurfer set out to solve the problem of finding the right video clips online, which, using YouTube as an example, can often be a fool’s errand,” explains the post. “So the co-founders developed technology to convert long-form video into 30-second clips, allowing users to then save, share and buy that content.”
As part of the beta launch, ReelSurfer is offering built-in clip commenting and advanced profiles so users can link reel collections to a central page.
“This start-up is a complement to my ‘hyper-personalized offer’ project,” notes ETCentric staffer Phil Lelyveld. “It is also an opportunity for the entertainment industry to either negotiate new revenue streams or repeat the mistakes of the past.”
Google is rolling out its “smart” recognition program Knowledge Graph for improved search results. The Graph will include location-aware searching as well as more accurate results for wider search queries, like “famous graffiti artists,” CNET explains.
“The Knowledge Graph results will appear to the right of the traditional search results, but when clicked they’ll appear across the top,” the article states. “Visual components of the results, such as pictures, will appear as a horizontal scroll bar for easy navigation.”
Another update brings Gmail to Graph search results for U.S. users who opt-in. To find a certain email, just type “Gmail” and whatever the message pertains to.
“However, you’ll also be able to use more natural queries to bring up the e-mails you want to see. Type in ‘My Flights,’ and your upcoming flight itinerary will appear, complete with confirmation number and flight information such as number, time, and seat number,” CNET writes. “The feature will also leverage the Knowledge Graph so that a real-time update of the flight status appears, a quick way to check whether your flight has been delayed.”
The Google Search iOS app will also be updated in the next few days to include voice searches.
Calendar and Drive are expected to be integrated into Knowledge Graph search eventually, bringing all your personal data into the same sphere of global results — something privacy advocates are likely to dispute.
“If we are to build the future of search, we have to solve the hard scientific problems of speech recognition and natural language understanding,” says Amit Singhal, senior vice president for Engineering Search at Google. “We will have to build artificial intelligence. We’re not there yet, but we’re taking baby steps today.”
Engadget reports that the release of the 12-bit RAW Blackmagic Cinema Camera has been delayed.
“The camera is ‘in the final stages of Thunderbolt certification and internal testing’ and manufacturing will follow as soon as that’s done — probably in the second week of August,” according to the post. “It will still hit the market with the $2,995 price tag, Canon lens mount, 15.6 x 8 mm sensor and built-in SSD recorder intact.”
The company also claims to have identified the cause of aliasing previously reported and has posted new videos to back up the claim.
As noted during NAB, the new Cinema Camera touts a 2.5K sensor with the ability to capture film quality video.
According to Blackmagic Design’s April press release: “One of the most important features of the camera is its super wide dynamic range of 13 stops, allowing feature film quality images. Commonly people focus on more pixels, however often this just creates a higher resolution, but still ‘video’ looking images that suffer from highlight and black clipping that limits details. Blackmagic Cinema Camera’s wide dynamic range eliminates this problem and provides film quality with dramatically more detail retained in black and whites in the image.”
For those interested in the camera’s capabilities, check out the videos recently shot by DP John Brawley.
Starbucks and Square have agreed to a $25 million deal to bring mobile payment solutions to Starbucks.
The deal officially applies to 7,000 Starbucks stores, but TechCrunch suggests it could expand to allow Square to reach international markets, as Starbucks currently boasts 20,000 worldwide locations.
TechCrunch speculates that other mobile payment options, such as Here from PayPal, will continue to push card-free payment on a global scale.
“The consumer is going through a seismic change in which cash is eventually going to be obsolete,” notes Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz.
“Pay with Square lets the company forge relationships directly with consumers rather than with merchants — and that means that whatever happens under the hood — whether it is about NFC or QR, or even if it decides to lift off the credit card platform to a different kind of financial instrument altogether — that customer relationship will remain, something that could be welcomed by a population that doesn’t really care about which technology does what,” explains the post.
Amazon has released “Living Classics” for Facebook. It is the company’s first “moving object” game on the social network and represents another foray into the mobile gaming market.
In the game, players control a family of foxes as it ventures through fairy tales like “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Wizard of Oz.”
Amazon continues to expand into mobile gaming with its new gaming options — such as tracking achievements, accessing leaderboards and syncing devices — offered through GameCircle for the Kindle Fire.
“In addition to debuting the above-mentioned Facebook app, the Seattle-based retailer took the opportunity to introduce its newly minted Game Studios, which Amazon says will focus on creating innovative, fun and well-crafted titles,” TG Daily reports.
“Amazon’s decision to debut GameCircle and ‘Living Classics’ at this juncture is likely anything but arbitrary,” notes the post, “as the Seattle-based corporation is reportedly prepping at least three new Fire devices for launch later this fall. ”
Link to the post to access the “Living Classics” video trailer.
Facebook is launching a new advertising unit to promote sponsored mobile apps. Facebook will promote the apps as it does with naturally generated game recommendations.
The unit “joins Facebook’s ‘sponsored stories,’ which is the social network’s core product for brand advertisers,” explains Advertising Age.
The advertisers looking for installs of mobile apps will pay Facebook on a cost-per-click model and can target customers based on age, gender, location and interests.
“The promoted app will surface as a recommendation alongside apps that are being recommended organically based on a user’s history and social graph under the headings ‘Try These Games’ and ‘Try These Apps,’ but will be flagged with the text ‘sponsored,'” explains the post.
“Clicking on a promoted app will send users to the App Store if they have an iOS phone or to Google Play if they have an Android device,” notes the post. “According to the announcement on Facebook’s developer blog, the platform has sent users to those sources 146 million times in the last 30 days via clicks in their news feeds, timelines, bookmarks and the App Center it rolled out in May.”
Tablet shipments are expected to outpace those of notebooks by 2016, the same year an estimated 350 million smartphones will be used in the work place. In response, corporate America is starting to reorganize to meet the demands of new technology.
“Companies will soon be spending upwards of $1.3 trillion annually to equip employees with mobile devices and apps, according to Forrester Research,” reports Fortune.
Already, research shows 41 percent of companies accommodate the use of individually purchased tablets. Another 30 percent of companies even have sanctioned programs for partial deployment.
In the future, Fortune expects to see six new tech adaptations become commonplace: 1) projectors with tablet-friendly VGA adapters; 2) more robust Wi-Fi networks to combat cellular dead zones; 3) wireless printing from Web-connected printers; 4) desks outfitted with docking stations and mounts for mobile devices; 5) mobile shops for troubleshooting, which reinvent the IT experience; and 6) a chief mobility officer who manages the expansion of mobile for both employees and customers.
“It certainly seems that the industry as a whole is in a slump,” IHS iSuppli analyst Craig Stice says of the PC market. The bad economy paired with the growth of tablets has created a very weak demand for new PCs.
“Market research firm IDC reported that PC shipments totaled 86.7 million units last quarter, down 0.1 percent from the year earlier period. This was far below IDC’s projection of 2.1 percent growth,” reports Fortune. “Gartner also reported the decline in sales, counting approximately 87.5 million units.”
“Who out there now needs a PC and doesn’t have one?” says Bob O’Donnell, vice president of clients and displays for IDC. As sales in the developed world are slowing down, PC makers are looking to promising developing markets like Brazil, “…but that isn’t enough to keep the industry in good shape,” O’Donnell continues.
“A shaky economy, meanwhile, is convincing consumers they don’t really need an upgrade,” the article states. For example, high prices probably contributed to the lackluster adoption of the highly-anticipated Ultrabooks.
Windows 8 is unlikely to be able to help the flailing PC market as it will possibly also drive up prices. Users may also hold off if the update isn’t easy.
If you count tablets as PCs, Apple has surpassed HP as the top PC vendor, selling 17 million iPads and 4 million Macs in the second quarter of 2012. While the rest of the market struggles, Apple’s prospects are still positive; “… as Apple continues to dominate in the tablet space it could see some growth with its desktops and notebooks,” Fortune concludes.
Apple co-founder and Fusion-io chief scientist Steve Wozniak recently spoke out against cloud storage, suggesting that dependence on outside storage will lead to significant problems.
“I really worry about everything going to the cloud,” he said during an interview. “I think it’s going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years.”
Wozniak argues that by agreeing to cloud terms of service, users sign away their ownership of content. When content is on a personal computer, the user owns the information. But by storing data in the cloud, the consumer signs away control, according to Wozniak.
“I want to feel that I own things,” he explained. “A lot of people feel, ‘Oh, everything is really on my computer,’ but I say the more we transfer everything onto the Web, onto the cloud, the less we’re going to have control over it.”
“A major irony of Wozniak’s remarks is that he works for Fusion-io, which is working to improve cloud computing with flash storage and specialized applications,” notes VentureBeat.
New computer software is now outsourcing menial tasks to people across the world, creating jobs in areas with dramatic unemployment.
“That software, developed by a start-up called MobileWorks, represents the latest trend in crowdsourcing: organizing foreign workers on a mass scale to do routine jobs that computers aren’t yet good at, like checking spreadsheets or reading receipts,” writes Technology Review.
MobileWorks assigns tasks using an algorithm, having multiple workers do the same jobs to ensure accuracy. While workers only get paid cents for each task (maybe a few dollars an hour), “overseas crowds have become essential to legitimate businesses,” the article states.
“The price of having MobileWorks have five people look over a receipt is cheaper than the cost of hiring a high-school student at minimum wage to do the task once,” says Jessica Mah, CEO of Web start-up inDinero.
Unfortunately, some jobs posted to MobileWorks and other crowdsourcing sites were for more nefarious purposes, like influencing search results, generating clicks on ads or proliferating spam.
MobileWorks co-founder Anand Kulkarni expressed his frustration about “spammy jobs.”
Despite setbacks, his goal is to have crowdsourcing “behave much more like an automatic resource than like individual and unreliable human beings.”
The UK Ministry of Defense recruited a group of academics to develop over-arching estimates of the financial cost of Internet crime.
The numbers are high — to no surprise — but our “extremely inefficient” efforts to control cyber crime are misplaced, according to the researchers.
“Our figures suggest that we should spend less in anticipation of cyber crime (on antivirus, firewalls, etc.) and more in response — that is, on the prosaic business of hunting down cyber criminals and throwing them in jail,” the team wrote in their report.
The full findings, linked on the Businessweek article, break down the costs in various categories. Some interesting numbers:
The money stolen via cyber crime amounts to roughly $1.997 billion, with conservative estimates. By comparison, the money spent on defense comes in at around $25.84 billion.
The most money was spent for user cleanup (when antivirus programs fail) and business security, each amounting to $10 billion.
The most successful cyber crime was the Advanced Fee Fraud, which takes about $1 billion from consumers who pay a small amount upfront or a larger fortune to be released.
Ever gotten an email from your contact, saying they’re stranded traveling abroad and need your money? That scam has accrued over $10 million.
Other defense costs include $400 million for law enforcement, $1 billion each for patching vulnerabilities and bank countermeasures, $3.4 billion on antivirus protection and $40 million on ISP cleanup.
“People renting DVDs and Blu-ray Discs through retail stores, kiosks, and Netflix’s mail service totaled more than 62 percent of all movie rentals in the first half of the year, according to NPD Group,” CNET reports. “In contrast, those renting digital movies via subscription streaming, pay TV video on demand, and Internet VOD added up to only 38 percent.”
However, the popularity of discs is waning, with rentals dropping 17 percent in the last year. Kiosks now represent 45 percent of physical rentals after video stores have faded away.
Digital movie rentals, on the other hand, have increased 5 percent so far this year.
Netflix’s Watch Instantly service played an important part in this jump, accounting for 66 percent of all digital movie rentals. “The company recently announced that it had added 530,000 U.S. streaming subscribers in the second quarter while losing 850,000 customers of its DVD service,” notes CNET.
While Netflix maintains popularity on connected devices (tablets, smart TVs), much of its content is still only available as physical rentals. Also, the streaming content lacks special features like commentary or bonus material.
So it’s not over for discs just yet. “Video streaming needs to catch up with physical rentals in both availability and options for it to truly take off in the market,” the article suggests.
Hungarian 3D display company Holografika is demonstrating its HoloVizio C80 glasses-free 3D system this week in SIGGRAPH’s Emerging Technologies section at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
“It uses a silver screen that is as shiny as tin foil,” notes ETCentric staffer Phil Lelyveld. “As you move off-axis, the image on the far side fades out. But it is an effective, multi-view 3D experience seemingly devoid of sweet-spot transitions.”
“Holografika is pushing proprietary light-field technology to produce natural 3D view,” explains the press release. “The C80 glasses-free 3D cinema system has a 3,2m x 1,8m reflective holographic screen to create stunning 3D scenes, videos, that appear behind or in front of the screen, with continuous parallax in the entire field-of-view, where viewers can even look behind the objects.”
“The 3D projection engine is based on compact LED modules optimized for the purpose, delivering an exceptional 1800 Cd/m2 on-screen brightness, which is unique for LED projection systems as of today,” adds the release. “The HoloVizio C80 is a front projection optical arrangement that can fit various cinema rooms and easy to upscale. The 60 Megapixel system is controlled by Holografika’s Cinema PC Cluster.”
Holografika is demonstrating the system’s capabilities with 3D images/video, animation, CG and interactive 3D applications. For those attending the conference, the company is located in the Concourse Foyer, ET-21.
According to media consultancy Attentional, 113,000 people in the UK donned their 3D glasses for the London Olympics 2012 opening ceremony. Pocket-lint takes a closer look at the number to determine whether it is good or bad news for 3D adoption.
By comparison, 27 million people watched the opening ceremony on BBC. Another way to look at it is comparing the number of 3D-enabled TVs.
Taking into account the number of people who have 3D TV sets and access to 3D content from BBC, “…just 1 in 10 people who own a 3D-ready TV watched the opening ceremony in 3D. Not great,” the article suggests.
However, there are caveats. For one, the opening ceremony could be considered a more social, group viewing experience — one inhibited by limited numbers of 3D glasses and dark viewing.
The technology does show some sign of growth: Wimbledon 2011 saw a 3D audience of 18,000, which grew to 30,000 in 2012. While it still only accounted for 0.18 percent share of overall 2012 Wimbledon viewing, the London 2012 ceremony had 0.4 percent 3D viewing.
“So the verdict?” Pocket-lint asks. “It seems 3D TV numbers are growing, but at a very slow pace, especially when you consider just how many people still prefer to watch television without glasses.”
