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Posts Tagged ‘Print Publications’

Brightcove Comes To Yahoo Connected TVs, But Web Video Is Still Stuck In Widget Hell

If you own an Internet-connected TV that is compatible with Yahoo’s TV widgets (AKA, a Yahoo Connected TV), you may soon start seeing video produced for the Web on your TV. Brightcove announced today that media publishers using its online video platform can now distribute their videos through Yahoo’s Widget Engine, which powers the widgets on Yahoo-Connected TVs. These TVs are made by Sony, Samsung, Vizio, and LG, which show widgets along the bottom displaying data and content from the Web. These include your Facebook and Twitter streams, stock quotes, the weather, Amazon on-demand videos, and now Web videos powered by Brightcove.

A lot of print publications use Brightcove to power video on their Websites, and some of these already have Yahoo Connecetd TV widgets. These include MyRecipes, Cooking Light, Real Simple, Southern Living, Sunset, AllYou and ThisOldHouse. There are a lot of Time Inc. titles in there. TheStreet.com, Wine Spectator, Slate, and The Hollywood Reporter now also have TV widgets through Brightcove.

Yahoo also announced a partnership with MIPS Technologies today, which makes processors for Internet-connected TVs and set-top boxes. The idea that you need a special TV to watch video content from the Web seems strange. As long as it’s a flat-panel TV, why should it matter, right? But these integrations are more about bringing data to TVs from the Web in a friendly format. I’m glad Yahoo is pushing this along, but at some point hopefully open standards will develop so that any widget, data, or content from the Web can be viewed on any TV. Why should it go through a Yahoo widget? I get widgets from Verizon FIOS TV on all my TVs, even my old CRT. I don’t believe those are Yahoo Widgets.

The other issue is just getting people to use these widgets. I have yet to even set up my Twitter or Facebook widgets on my TV. I think I looked up the weather once. But if I really want to do all that Web stuff, I have my iPhone or my laptop. There is a reason WebTV failed. Widgets are not going to fare any better. However, if they can be used to put Web video on your TV, I could see that gaining traction. Except that you have to remember to click on the widget button, which is still an unnatural act, instead of just surfing through the regular channels. Once these additional Web channels can be incorporated into the digital guide through which people surf TV, then Web video can be treated just like anything else on TV. It shouldn’t matter where it’s coming from.

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Finally, A Web Annotation Product That Makes Sense: WebNotes PR

I am not a big fan of Web annotation services that let people add their own virtual Sticky Notes or comments to Web pages for others to see. But Web annotation is back with the launch today of Google’s Sidewiki. To be honest, I don’t have high hopes for Sidewiki. Marking up the Web has limited appeal to the average consumer.

A better approach, if you are not Google, is to make Web annotation an enterprise product and go after a specific industry that will actually value (and pay) for it. Boston-based WebNotes is doing just that by shifting its focus from consumers to professionals. Today, it launched WebNotes PR, which takes its basic Web annotation technology and turns it into a press clip service for public relations firms.

One thing PR firms do is keep track of all press and blog mentions of their clients and deliver these clips on a daily or weekly basis. These clip files used to come in the form of Xeroxed articles from newspapers, magazines, and other print publications,with the name of the client company highlighted every time it was mentioned. Some companies still get these dead-tree clip files, but for the most part they’ve been replaced by daily emails with links and other digital descendants of the original.

WebNotes PR lets someone at a PR agency highlight articles and blog posts online, add sticky notes, and pull excerpts into digital reports with links back to the highlighted versions. These reports can be sent out as emails or PDFs. The articles can be organized into folders. It supports keyword searches via Google News, Google Blog Search, Technorati, or Twitter, and these searches can be saved as an RSS feed. Any RSS feed from any publication can be added as well.

The highlighting and collecting are done via a browser toolbar or bookmarklet, and the service costs $300/user/year or $35/user/month. Any information source that can be accessed over the Web can be annotated (although if it is a password-protected service, the viewer must also have access). Here is an example of a what a highlighted version of a TechCrunch page looks like—you can drag the note around, but it is read-only. I personally have no interest in marking up Web pages for the random public, but if it was my job to mark it up for specific clients, this is the way I’d do it.

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Y Combinator Starts Seeding Ideas To Startups

Y Combinator sees no shortage of startups that apply to be a part of their funding cycles. But they don’t always see all the ideas they’d like to see come out of the classes. So starting with the upcoming Winter 2010 cycle, they have a new idea called RFS, Requests For Startups. Basically, Y Combinator will issue some ideas of what they’re looking for in any cycle, and will accept the ones that pitch the best way to do the idea.

Now, to be clear, Y Combinator will not be forgoing its usual method of combing over any and all startup pitches outside of the ones they lay out. “We don’t expect responses to RFSes will ever be more than a fraction of the applications we accept. We wouldn’t want them to be. Most good ideas should be ones that surprise us, not ones we’re waiting for,” Paul Graham writes on the site today. The hope is that this will help guide some new startups without solid ideas in the direction of something that is missing in the market. Or encourage ones that already have a similar idea to apply.

Y Combinator’s RFSes won’t describe exactly what Y Combinator is looking for, but rather will give a general idea, with the hopes that the startups can come up with even better plans than Y Combinator is thinking of, Graham says.

So what is the first RFS? Well, it’s something near and dear to our hearts: The Future Of Journalism. Y Combinator is wondering what the online content sites will look like in the future when print publications are gone. Certainly some, like TechCrunch, have gotten large enough to support themselves now, but most content sites are still built on the notion of content first, monetization later. Y Combinator notes that in the heyday of print media, the approach was often the opposite, there was a business plan in place before the launch. It believes that approach can still work, and has laid out a rough outline of what it’s looking for from startups that want to do this:

Groups applying to work on this idea should include at least one writer who can write well and rapidly about any topic, one or more programmers who are good at statistics, data mining, and making sites scale, and someone who’s reasonably competent at graphic design. These functions can of course be combined, and in fact it’s even better if they are. Xooglers would be particularly well suited to this project.

This RFS is just the first of 3 to 5 that Y Combinator hopes to get out there before the October 26 Winter 2010 class application deadline, Graham tells us. Startups applying specifically for these RFS ideas will be able to indicate that on their applications.

Graham notes that Y Combinator has sort of passively given ideas to startups in the past, like this, but thinks this new explicit call will lead to some interesting things.

We asked Graham if this new approach means these types of startups will get different financial deals from Y Combinator. “Not significantly,” Graham says. “Execution matters so much more than the idea that even if we supplied the entire idea we wouldn’t be entitled to more than 10% of the company,” he notes. On his post he gives a bit more:

We might ask for a little more equity from startups responding to an RFS, because we’d expect to contribute more to them. But at most a percent or two, and often nothing. Ideas count for something, but execution matters far more.

[photo: flickr/eran finkle]

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