Animate Your Video Chat with Fix8

All you need is a web cam. Once online, you can select facial and other accessories to make you look like the real thing, whatever that is. Fix8 can also manipulate your voice and give you other editing tools to really mess around with your…face…avatar…digital persona…virtual self….

Besides video chat, you can also use good old fashioned IM to show off any of your own digital version. A mobile edition is supposed to hit the street "real soon now." In the meantime, you must download a PC application. Windows only. Yuk! Can't recommend you, Fix8 till you go multi-platform!


Several other companies let you record greetings and messages with personalized avatars. While Logitech was one of the earliest players, the most cost-effective business implementation I've found so far is from SitePal.

With Fix8, once you create the video, you can broadcast it on social sites and IM services including AOL, MSN, Skype and Yahoo. The company’s statement says “real-time” in several places, but it really NOT real-time communication via video - you must do the recording first. I couldn't test this yet, but we’re checking.

Fix8 has partnered with the Shanghai Media Group to offer something called “AuditionsTV,” where you can submit fix8 content for insertion into live or taped programming. And, if you think you have yen for it, you can search for TV auditions in your geographical area, served to you automatically - now, THAT'S COOL - and submit yourself.

Start a Video Blog in 5 Minutes the Magnify.net Way

As we have our iTV 21 channel on Magnify.net, it behooves us to report to you on new developments they are rolling out. It also behooves me to find and add the right content we can all learn from. Here is one about a subject as old as the web is: How to drive traffic to your site...



As my experience in setting up our channel and widget proves, we can expect them to deliver great add-on services.

One of these developments, now in private beta (you can sign up to it at: privatebeta@magnify.net ) is an online tool to build your video blog (vlog, for the technically less challenged amongst us) in a few minutes. All you will need is to connect your webcam after putting up your free blog page, to go live. Magnify.net promises to offer stylish and slick templates to make the graphic design process drag-and-drop simple.

Want to learn the ins-and-outs of about vlogging? Podcamp co-founder and online media guru Chris Brogan will host a daily video blog called “Attention Upgrade” to showcase Magnify's new platform during the private beta. This is a must for everybody interested in video blogging. In return, I ask that you provide feedback at privatebeta@magnify.net. Your input is requested!

The Webcam capture tool will also be available as a free add-on to the Magnify.net video channel creation platform. Thanks Steve Rosenbaum and team for that and all of the other new improvements and add-ons!

Free page design, layout, webcam support, video upload, and even revenue share on advertising inventory make Magnify.net the fastest growing video platform on the web. Already 20,000 publishers, like us, have built dedicated content channels on the Magnify.net platform.

Cybercast credit: iTV21 on Magnify.net and YouTube

Hulu, the anti-YouTube, launches

Hulu, the NBC Universal-News Corp. joint venture designed to compete with video site YouTube, has launched a test version of its site. But it is more of an anti-YouTube than a competitor, because it focuses less on user-generated content.





It comes after months of delay. NBC withdrew its video channel from YouTube last week, and also ditched Apple's iTunes in favor of Amazon's music service. (See my post about Amazon here.)

Hulu will be the exclusive online provider of videos from NBC and News Corp, and it will then syndicate the material to other sites, including AOL, MSN, MySpace, and Yahoo, but apparently not YouTube.

Hulu got $100 million in backing from Providence Equity Partners, and arose because of animosity from NBC and News Corp toward YouTube, in part because that site kept hosting vidoes containing copyrighted videos.

NBC had warmed up to YouTube last year, working with the popular video site to promote its vidoes, until Jeff Zucker took over NBC in February. The company then changed its tune, and filed a lawsuit against YouTube.

Spacecast the Lifenaut Way

The Terasem Movement Foundation has launched Lifenaut.com, a free online networking and personal data storage service that will "preserve one's individual consciousness so that it remains viable for possible uploading with consciousness software into a cellular regenerated or bionanotechnological body by future medicine and technology."





Couldn't embed the video about the site, so here is a link to it.

You can upload up to 7 GB of "mindfiles," including videos, pictures, music, and documents, which can be viewed by other "lifenauts." The Social Connections page allows you to create a sociogram showing connections to people you have met over the course of your life. 

A chatbot can read the your profile and respond to general-knowledge questions. Now, that I must explore further! An intelligent chatbot/avatar combination is something we could really use on all of our current and upcoming sites....

"In the future, the chatbot will become increasingly knowledgeable about the user's profiles and mindfiles, and infer information from tagged multimedia files," according to Bruce Duncan, Managing Director of Terasem Movement Foundation. 

Lifenaut.com is also "designed to test the hypothesis that conscious analogs of people can be brought to life based on sufficiently detailed mindfile data," according to a statement on the Terasem Movement Foundation website.

A conscious analog of me? It's hard to manage the real me most of the time!

Cybercast credit: Newmedia Publishing

DimDim's Free Web Video Meeting Service. DimDim???

DimDim is an open-source replacement for WebEx, the leading online meeting and presentation service.



Started by Deb Dutta Ganguly, who sold his company Advanced Internet Management back in 2001 at a tidy profit, DimDim finally launched its free service at DEMOfall. Like other web meeting software, DimDim can be used for broadcasting live video to hundreds or thousands of people simultaneously. However, according to Ganguly, it’s the only one that doesn’t require any sort of installation by the user to run. Also, if you’re in the U.S. having a meeting with someone in China, the transmission lag isn’t notable. The feature list is heavily dependent on what the service’s lead users have so far requested; Ganguly says that open source is all about accepting the innovations of users. And, since DimDim is open source, it will be free for anyone to run.

DimDim wants to make money from clients needing assistance with larger applications — for instance, a university wishing to hold a live meeting for a class of several hundred students. The company will also provide hosting for meetings, starting at about $99 a year for the service, with dynamic scaling provided by Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud. WebEx, by comparison, charges $39 per month.

Going with DimDim sounds like a no-brainer to me....

BlogTV Goes Facebook

BlogTV, a popular video streaming company in Israel, has launched an application on Facebook , like most any other software developer (over 6,000 by now). Big deal, you say? It also plans to enter the U.S. market with a mobile phone version already used in Israel for two years. Now, THAT could be a big deal, in my humble opinion, along with the embeddable LIVE SHOW, like the one below (if it's live now), that you get to create free. Another cool feature is the built-In live chat, letting your fans express themselves just as visually, as long as their vocabulary is up to the task….



I'm tempted to put our ever fledging Love Show by June video blog on it, specifically for cell phones … especially for the iPhone. Anyone has a solution to stretch 24 hours a few hours more?

Cybercast credit: BlogTV

Warning: Video Search Makes Phone a Second Pair of Eyes

Video-equipped cellphones, aka smartphones, could soon offer simple way to find useful information about the surrounding world. See the video demonstration below…



Currently, the best way to use a cell phone to find information about, for example, a product or an ad is by entering an internet search query with the keypad. Soon, however, it may be easier to simply record a video clip of an item of interest and have your REAL smart phone tell you about it instead.

Researchers at Accenture Technology Labs in France have developed technology that makes this possible using any ordinary 3G cell phone equipped with a video camera.
The prototype system, dubbed the Pocket Supercomputer, offers a simple way to seek out useful, hard-to-find information, says Fredrik Linaker who led the system's development at Accenture.

SIFTing objects

If a user records a video clip of, say, a foreign food item, the system can automatically identify ingredients that might cause an allergic reaction. Similarly, when shown a book, it can quickly perform an online price comparison, or find a review.

Live video footage is fed from the handset to a central server, which rapidly matches on-screen objects to images previously entered into a database. The server then sends find relevant information and sends it back to user.

The central server uses an algorithm called the Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) to match objects. The algorithm uses hundreds or thousands of reference points, corresponding to physical features such as edges, corners or lettering, to find a match. The process works no matter how the object is oriented, but objects must first be carefully imaged and entered into the central database.
Creating a database containing 5000 items takes about a day, Linaker says, although it then takes just a few milliseconds to match an object. "Eventually you could imagine having one enormous [general purpose] database."

Cybercast credit: YouTube

Wake Up to Video Served Fresh Every Day by Divvio

This start-up company is focused on building another "exciting new technology" to help you discover, organize, and share the most relevant video and audio content available on the web. As they say, "Wake up to fresh content served every day!"

Divvio claims that its patent-pending technology will deliver premium, popular, and hard-to-find content, customized exactly for you. It will constantly crawl the web and add a huge number of multimedia links to its index daily.

I did do a quick search for Million Dollar Web TV. It instantly found our web ad on Crackle, aka Grouper in a previous life.



Not bad - except we have that clip on all the other big video sharing sites too.

Divvio was founded in 2006.

Cybercast credit: Crackle

YourTrumanShow Launches Its VideoMap

YourTrumanShow launched a few months ago as a place to upload video diaries. It now offers VideoMap, a fun widget that lets you use video as a means for exploring and expanding your social network. See the screen shot below:



The widget creates a clear and easily navigable map of your social network with you at the center and your friends as nodes. Clicking on one of your friends will extend a map of their friends, and so on. VideoMap scrapes the videos that your friends (and their friends) have uploaded, and when you click on any of these people, you can browse through their videos and play them without leaving the widget.

In an alternative mode, seen in the screenshot above, the videos themselves become the nodes. Again, you start at the center but it’s your uploaded videos that surround you. Now, when you click on a video, the widget displays other VideoMap users that have uploaded the same video. Clicking on these people will let you explore their videos, instead of their friends. It’s an innovative way to find others who share your interests and discover new content at the same time.

JibJab the Right Way

All right, after getting instructions from JibJab Tech Support, I could actually star in my first funny clip, with my partner, June: Steve & June & Square Dancing





Do I want your vote? Hmmmm….

Cybercast credit: JibJab