KillerApp Sightings

The Internet video service Joost has attracted plenty of attention and subscribers in the short time it's been out. It's a promising application but, as we and many others have pointed out, it still needs some work. (That's why it's still in beta.) One of the drawbacks of a peer-to-peer application is that users need to download and re-install every new version or they can't use it -- and with frequent improvements being made to the software, Joost users have been doing a lot of downloading and re-installing. Flash developer Paul Yanez wondered if it would be possible to create a browser-based version of Joost that wouldn't have to be re-installed, and came up with the mashup demoed here, which duplicates the elegant Joost interface -- and incidentally fixes a few of the problems with the original -- but runs in the browser window.

Yanez says some of the advantages of his version, besides being able to run it from a browser, include open access to video sharing sites (compared with Joost's limited content selection), a webcam chat widget, and right-click functionality for the mouse button.

Posted by Editor at 4:38 PM | Permalink

New technologies have a way of giving rise to new art forms. One of the newest -- and most beautiful -- is a mobile-generated collective artwork emerging from an international art workshop at the Mix Studio in New York, led by French artists Olivier di Pizio and Gonzalo Belmonte.

Di Pizio and Belmonte are bringing together 20 French and American painters to create collaborative art, as they have done for more than 15 years. As in earlier collaborative work, each artist contributes photographs, documents, and other items from his or her own life and uses them in the work. This year, for the first time, the artists also will be using camera phones to populate a real-time collective media blog on Cellfish.com.

You can view the workshop on Cellfish.com, or receive the artists’ creations in real time on your cell phone. You can also go and see the collective digital creation at the FIAF Gallery in New York:

FIAF Gallery at the French Institute Alliance Française, 22 East 60th Street, New York
Free and open to the public, Monday, July 16, through Friday, July 27.
Gallery Hours: Monday through Thursday 11 am to 6 pm; Friday 11 am to 4 pm

Posted by Editor at 11:39 AM | Permalink

Two weeks ago, Google announced that its Maps application now featured street-level imagery of New York, Washington, Dallas and San Francisco. The images, using technology from Immersive Media Corporation, let users travel virtually down the street and look in every direction. Essentially, you can pan, rotate and zoom the camera just by using your mouse. There's a demo and instructions here.

But mapping isn't all that Immersive Media's technology is good for. The company's Web site shows applications for first responders (try clicking on the picture above), oil and gas exploration, tourism, film location scouting and sports broadcasting. The potential applications seem limitless. The demos on Immersive Media's site are videos, unlike the static photos on Google Maps. You can actually change the perspective of the video -- so that you're looking out the back of a car, for example, while you're driving down the street -- and you can stop the video to get a better view and look around some more.

Posted by Editor at 2:54 PM | Permalink

Hard on the heels of Joost comes Babelgum with a very similar offering - a peer-to-peer, ad-supported, streaming Internet TV service featuring commercial rather than user-generated content. Oh, yes, and the founders are Europeans (one of them, Silvio Scaglia, is chief of Fastweb, an Italian broadband telecom company) and the product's name sounds more like a snack food than an entertainment service.

Babelgum opened its beta site today, and while the company warns that this is a "true beta" and glitches are to be expected, the product seems quite clean. The user interface is intuitive and non-intrusive, and I encountered a minimum of the video stuttering that I found to be such a problem with Joost. Unlike Joost, the picture size isn't infinitely adjustable - there are full-screen and window modes, with two sizes for each - but on the other hand the video quality was so good that I didn't feel tempted to play with the screen size. And that's because Babelgum is serious about quality - they require content providers to supply high-resolution files so that users can view videos on full screen.

The quality of the videos themselves (I'm talking about content now, rather than viewing quality) is surprisingly high. The offerings, though limited, include music, news, travelogues, cartoons, documentaries and short features. Like Joost, Babelgum says it expects to line up a large selection of commercial content from both major producers and independents.

The system for finding content needs a little tweaking. There are nine ready-made channels in the channel directory, (though only three of them appear in the menu bar when you first install the software) but they don't include all the content you would think they should. For example, the music channel only seems to contain seven videos, but there's actually lots more music available if you search for it.

You can create custom channels based on tags -- a very nice feature -- but of course the tags are only as good as the people who tagged them. Right now there's nothing tagged with Spike Lee, for example, even though he is represented on the Fiction channel by a short feature. So until there are more users doing more tagging, finding what you want to watch won't be easy.

All in all, Babelgum seems like a strong contender and yet another reason to expect bandwidth demand to keep skyrocketing.

Posted by Editor at 2:18 PM | Permalink