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Posts Tagged ‘Aim’

An Ecosystem Is Born: Animoto Opens Up API

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 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 clicks 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 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 is composed of professional videographers and photographers who pay $250 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 have paid for at least one product 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, it’s actually paying its partners in terms of affiliate fees. So if any partners lead new users to the site who end up buying a subscription, Animoto will give the partner a 40 percent cut of the first year’s consumer subscription fee or $50 of the first years pro subscription 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.

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feature: Hands-on: Mozilla’s pocket-sized Firefox mobile for Maemo

Mozilla announced last week the availability of Firefox for Maemo 1.0, the first official release of Firefox Mobile for Nokia’s Linux-based smartphone operating system. It offers adequate browsing performance, support for add-ons, and a finger-friendly user interface that includes popular Firefox features like the AwesomeBar.

This Firefox variant is based on the Fennec project, which was originally launched in 2007 with the aim of bringing the full Firefox browsing experience to modern handheld devices. In the time that has transpired since the inception of the project, advancements in mobile computing hardware have significantly boosted the performance of smartphones. That factor, coupled with Mozilla’s aggressive optimization efforts, have made it possible for Firefox to become a mobile browser.

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Wolfram|Alpha: The Use Cases

Earlier this year at the SemTech conference in San Jose, I sat down with Wolfram|Alpha’s Russell Foltz-Smith. Wolfram|Alpha bills itself as a "computational knowledge engine," a nerdy and unfortunately not very intuitive description. Because it’s hard to grok, most people have categorized Wolfram|Alpha as a new type of search engine. The site got a lot of press when it launched in May, as many pundits saw it as a challenger to Google. However in our own extensive tests of the product before launch, we concluded that it isn’t a "Google Killer" and that it has more in common with Wikipedia.

Even now there is still confusion about what Wolfram|Alpha is and what its main use cases will be. In this interview with Russell Foltz-Smith, we discuss what people are using Wolfram|Alpha for now; and more importantly what its uses will be in the near future.

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Editor’s note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we’ll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year – and ahead to what next year holds – we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It’s not just a best-of list, it’s also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Wolfram|Alpha: What is it Good For?

Wolfram|Alpha is a product that was built on top of founder Stephen Wolfram’s Mathematica product, a software tool for mathematicians that was initially released in 1988. The aim is to allow users to type human-like statements and have computations done on those. Wolfram|Alpha was first conceived and started development about 4 years ago, and just 6-8 months ago the team gave serious consideration to taking the product to a wider consumer audience.

I started out by asking Foltz-Smith what the Wolfram|Alpha team thought of all the media hype around their product, particularly about the "Google Killer" theme which many media outlets reveled in. Foltz-Smith replied that they were expecting to be compared to Google, but not to that extent. Their team was a little surprised there wasn’t more discussion around Wolfram|Alpha’s similarities to Wikipedia and Freebase (although he noted that ReadWriteWeb certainly covered that!). Regarding the Google comparisons, Foltz-Smith said that they didn’t give into the hype – they stuck to what their goals were.

I remarked that many people still seem confused about what Wolfram|Alpha does and what it can be used for. Foltz-Smith said that people will use it for different things. The crux of the product though is that it allows people to compute and calculate things.

But will mainstream people use Wolfram|Alpha? Right now, it seems to be focused on mathematicians. Foltz-Smith replied that yes, eventually Wolfram|Alpha will find a mainstream audience. It has started specific, but it will go broader. First, he said, it has to "pass a test" with "serious users" – by which he means academics and computational users. If it’s useful for them, claimed Foltz-Smith, it will then go mainstream.

Use Case: Education

One real-world use case we talked about was using Wolfram|Alpha in education. Russell Foltz-Smith said that Wolfram|Alpha could be used to automatically generate problem sets for students, and then research those sets.

A recent article in education website Chronicle.com argued that Wolfram|Alpha may have a less desired effect: encouraging cheating and laziness in students. This is because Wolfram|Alpha not only solves complex math problems, it "also can spell out the steps leading to those solutions."

Stephen Wolfram told Chronicle.com that computer-algebra systems like Wolfram|Alpha actually improve education – because they allow students to explore complex problems on their own and intuitively determine how functions work, rather than just learn rote processes. Wolfram claimed that "it’s better to let them [students] stand on that platform and go further."

Either way, it’s clear that Wolfram|Alpha and similar computational software will force the education system to adapt and change. Students now have a new (and certainly easier to use, as it’s on the Web) platform on which to compute things. There’s no point in the education system pretending it doesn’t exist. If you’re interested in tracking the progress of Wolfram|Alpha in educational settings, there is a wiki devoted to ‘Teaching Undergraduate Math with Wolfram|Alpha.’

Use Case: Computational Journalism

This one was described to me as "anomaly spotting." For example with the current interest in swine flu news, Wolfram|Alpha could be used to fact-find and compute interesting trends. As Foltz-Smith described it, Wolfram|Alpha could "automatically enhance news."

Foltz-Smith noted that CNN and other major networks do this already (analyze data), but that it’s expensive to do. The end results on CNN are added value things like interactive maps and fancy diagrams. Wolfram|Alpha could make this type of data gathering and analysis presentation inexpensive and common place amongst all kinds of news operations – including good old blogs.

Use Case: Sports Watching

Imagine sitting in your sofa in the lounge, remote control in one hand and your favorite beverage in the other. You’re watching the Friday night game on TV, it’s a close game and you’re curious about which team has the better chance of winning. Why, check Wolfram|Alpha of course! In real time, Wolfram|Alpha could compute statistics about not just the history of the two teams – but the history of the location of the game, the weather, the season so far, etc.

As Foltz-Smith explained it, Wolfram|Alpha would be able to do "chained queries" – queries made up of multiple parts. For example: which quarterback had the best winning record in games played in the rain during the 1970s.

Other Use Cases

We also discussed medical and scientific use cases. Although there are early examples of Wolfram|Alpha in health, such as a nutrition label generator, Foltz-Smith was generally cautious about medical uses – because a lot of health data "can’t be wrong." He noted that in use cases like medical research, the issue of data fidelity is key. For example with the human genome, you have to take great care of that data and associated algorithms. Also he explained that as something like the human genome scales, how do you do QA?

Foltz-Smith admitted that the Wolfram|Alpha team is still working on these and similar issues. But they have a lot of people devoted to solving this problem. Some types of data could be crowdsourced, e.g. in linguistics, but other data needs different approaches.

Conclusion

It was interesting to hear about some of the potential uses of Wolfram|Alpha. We at ReadWriteWeb think this product has a promising future. If Web 2.0 was about creating data (user generated content, to use the most familiar term for this), then the next generation of the Web is all about using that data. Wolfram|Alpha is premised on using and computing data.

Let us know in the comments what use cases you see for Wolfram|Alpha, and whether you’re aware of similar computational web apps.

See also:

• Wolfram|Alpha: Our First Impressions
• Wolfram|Alpha in Action: Our Screenshots
• Mixed Emotions: Our First Hands-On Test Of Wolfram|Alpha
• Wolfram|Alpha Launch: Here’s What You Need to Know
• Wolfram Alpha Gets Its First Update

Discuss

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Google Experimenting With Browser Login For Chrome OS

Google has made a change to Chrome OS to move the user login from the machine to the browser. Our guess is Google is, or will eventually use, Google Friend Connect to facilitate login.

The feature was first mentioned on October 13: “Using Chrome as our login manager has a number of potential benefits.
Explore these tradeoffs and decide what to do about the login manager.” The code was checked in on December 14: “An early version of this change is finally in. It’s not ready for daily use yet, and we haven’t gotten the network picker on there or anything yet, but at least we’ve got a baseline in there. I’m filing issues for the follow-on work.”

There are lots of potential benefits to having users log into machines via the browser. In particular it makes syncing easier and furthers the notion that you can log into any Chrome OS machine and have exactly the same experience as you would on any other machine. The fact that users can’t download any software to Chrome OS computers furthers this experience.

But it’s also clearly interesting from an identity standpoint. Facebook and Twitter are both making strong plays as the defacto online identity for hundreds of millions of Internet users. Facebook Connect in particular is becoming a very popular way for third party sites to easily add identity and login features to apps (it’s what we use on our own CrunchBase).

But people using Chrome OS devices will be logging into the Internet first and foremost with a Google account, or via Friend Connect (which currently allows signin via Google, Twitter, Yahoo, AIM, Netlog, OpenID, etc.). By centralizing authentication once, Google can then use the same Friend Connect credentials to automatically login to sites that support it.

If Chrome OS becomes popular, it will be a very powerful weapon for Google to compete with Facebook Connect.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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Roku adds 10 new free content channels for its set-top video players

Roku offers a trio of set-top boxes that can download movies and TV shows from the web and show them on your TV. Now the company is adding 10 new free content channels to its service.

You can use a Roku box with a Netflix subscription or the Amazon Video on Demand service to watch movies or TV shows on your TV. You connect a Roku box to both your TV and the web. Then you can cruise through the Netflix catalog and watch movies instantly as they stream via Wi-Fi or Ethernet to your TV set.

Now Saratoga, Calif.-based Roku is adding access to these sites: Blip.tv, Facebook Photos, Flickr, FrameChannel, Mediafly, MobileTribe, Motionbox, Pandora, Revision3 and TWiT. The sites cover everything from Internet audio to video podcasts to professional web content and photo sharing. You can access all of the sites on the TV using the Roku Channel Store. The aim is the give consumers more choice and control over their Roku player experience, said Anthony Wood, chief executive and founder of Roku.

Roku has opened up its channel store to developers who can add their own content channels in the future. Consumers can access the store by creating a Roku account, which lets them manage their channels and personalize their entertainment options. Roku customers can add or delete channels as they wish, and they can browse through new channels as developers create them.

Roku’s three players are the Roku SD, the Roku HD, and the Roku HD-XR. All are compatible with the Roku Channel Store. The store will be delivered to all existing Roku customers in the next two weeks. The company, founded in 2002, launched its first box in May 2008 and updated the models in October. The Roku SD sells for $80.

Roku has 50 employees. It competes with Apple TV, Vudu, Tivo, and connected Blu-ray movie players, not to mention cable TV services. The company’s investors include Wood, Netflix and Menlo Ventures. The company says it has sold hundreds of thousands of units.

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ARM sets up Android gadget development effort

Google’s Android mobile operating system is picking up steam. The latest evidence is a move by ARM, the low-power chip design company, to create an Android Solutions Center that will make it easier for companies to build Android-based gadgets.

The solution center consists of a bunch of tools that companies can use to create their own Android hardware, built around ARM’s chips, said James Bruce, mobile segment manager for ARM, in an interview. More than 35 companies are joining the group in support of Android gadgets.

The solutions center can share development resources and other learnings from among the gadget makers. Ziilabs, for instance, has a design of a $150 circuit board that can be used to create a gadget based on the Android software. A major new wave of Android devices is expected to hit the market in 2010, Bruce said.

“A lot of devices are in development and we are confident this move will accelerate that,” he said.

ARM’s aim in supporting the Android effort is to get more gadgets on the market that use ARM chips

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The quest for a truly open smartphone: can it be done?

The recent release of the Symbian kernel source code under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) has generated some discussion in the open source software community about the challenges of building a truly open smartphone platform. Software freedom advocates are concerned because none of the existing open source mobile platforms with mainstream viability are entirely open.

OpenMoko, a company that spun off of FIC in 2007 with the aim of building an open smartphone, was once regarded as a promising contender. The company ran into difficulty, however, and was ultimately forced to halt its phone development efforts and pursue alternate projects. OpenMoko found that the cost of producing 3G smartphones was prohibitively high for independent device makers and it was simply not possible to do without using proprietary firmware.

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ARM takes aim at Intel, sends Cortex A9 to GlobalFoundries

AMD’s fab spinoff, GlobalFoundries, has announced a deal with ARM to make the latter’s Cortex A9 parts available on the former’s 28nm half-node process. This makes GlobalFoundries the first company to work with ARM on a 28nm A9 implementation, and it’s a win for ARM because it makes any GlobalFoundries customers into potential ARM customers.

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