Was Typing class in school so much fun that you want to go back and relive it? Do you have an unhealthy obsession with keyboards? Do you like competing at everyday, normal tasks? If any of these apply, now you can compete online against random people at typing thanks to TypeRacer. It’s typerific!
In the never-ending stream of people launching web operating systems while everyone waits for Google O/S and Windows Cloud, comes Cloudo. As well as having one of the funnier names, it seems (it’s on private alpha at the moment) to boast some neat features. You can make the GUI look like Windows, OSX, or Linux from a drop-down (sweet!) and they make it easy to share files with your friends. Being a European company, of course they made a mobile “skin” for their operating system too.
I signed up for the Developer Alpha, so hopefully I get in to have a look sometime soon. From their docs, it looks like it’s running on Javascript so I’m curious how one goes about creating an app (without being able to p0wn the whole O/S). But slick Alpha site at least 
In my aimless Internet-wanderings today, I ran across Start Your Tube. Want to start your own YouTube for your dancing sheep videos? That’s now an option…and with revenue sharing to boot 
w00t.
Or you can just set-up your own video site in 10 steps on Debian, but it’s really your option. Wow, broadband video is commonplace now
As I try to slide into my Christmas vacation, I was thinking about how TV networks should be distributing their TV shows online. It’s a given that play-on-demand, web-browser-based video players are the standard right now, but the number of people still downloading content using Bittorrent really show that the needs of the viewers aren’t be serviced. Which raises the question: why can’t TV networks distribute their shows, DRM-free, on Bittorrent?
From what I understand, it comes down to two central problems:
As a result of each of these problems, the majority of TV networks seem to take the approach that Bittorrent can be brought-down by enhancing strategies/technologies that do take into account rights/monetization concerns. For example, web-browser based streaming of their shows can be geo-fenced (locked down by IP-blocks by country) and surrounded by advertising. DRM-ed downloads can be locked down by country and littered with video advertisements. But with Bittorrent still dominating web traffic, it seems foolhardy to write-off the technology.
Which brings me to the (obvious) conclusion that the TV networks should work with Bittorrent instead of fighting it, by coming up strategies that do allow them to manage rights and make money. There has to be a way, and with the same amount of resources they spend fighting the trend, I’m sure they could flush out some ideas.
The central problem with Bittorrent downloads is their slowness. But direct downloads from the TV network websites cost too much bandwidth. So I suggest a mash-up: the TV networks could seed Bittorrent traffic to videos to which they own a license, but only to people in their country who are using Bittorrent on a page with advertisements. For example, say CTV owns the online rights to “South Park” in Canada. They create something like BitLet that allows visitors to download any episode of “South Park” already floating around in cyber-space but only if they are Canadian and doing so via that webpage. CTV could rely on the anonymous “pirate” encoders to do the encoding, while they reap the benefits. The visitors get faster download speeds and CTV gets to serve ads while the download is going (and metrics on the number of Canadian downloads of that show). Win-win! They could even take it a step further by stitching in ads to the finished download. As long as it was tastefully done, they could append an ad to the beginning of the video to further monetize the whole process.
At the end of the day, TV networks should start focussing on the reality of how people download TV on the internet. Just because they don’t like it, doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. They just need to figure out how to satisfy their own demands in emerging marketplaces. And to do that, they need to start thinking about them
Time Machine is the new killer feature of Mac OS X Leopard that performs an automatic backup of your machine, and the race is on in to be the first to get it using Amazon S3 to save the backups. Amazon S3 is basically unlimited storage for $0.15/GB/month. When you combine that with Time Machine that can do almost continuous backups of system changes, a user could have a backup of their machine without ever having to connect to an external hard drive. For MacBook users, it’s the perfect solution; who wants to connect your notebook to an external hard drive every night?
My money’s on ElasticDrive or JungleDisk (already talked about back in January) to get it figured out first. Who needs football when you can gamble on software development? 
Couldn’t Apple have let us connect Time Machine directly to iDisk? Despite iTune’s success, I still don’t think Apple gets the web…
In the ever-growing list of cool Media Center third-party software, I ran across mcePhone (thank Apple for the camel-case) that let’s you make Skype calls right from Media Center or a Media Center Extender. Since the Xbox 360 can be a Media Center Extender, MCE+Xbox+mcePhone = VOIP on your Xbox. How do I dial Bill Gates on this thing?
WARNING: This blog entry is super geeky. Proceed only if you know what an “elastic computing cloud” is
This article is a little older, but I was blown away when I saw it. The Enomaly Open Source Consulting group has been able to get Windows Server 2003 running on the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud. I hadn’t heard of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (”EC2″) until the other day, but it’s almost as amazing as their S3 storage offering.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables “compute” in the cloud. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction.
Supporting only *nix operating-systems initially, it was a challenge for EC2 to support Windows Server. However, Enomaly was able to run Windows Server via the processor emulator QEMU. They then packaged the image into an AIM (a EC2 computing image) running the Windows Server 2003 trial. From there, you can put your own Windows license onto the server, Remote Desktop in, and away you go!
Some nights, I’m just blown away by what some developers are able to achieve. Elastic computing clouds, attached to unlimited bandwidth, provides a massively scalable architecture on which to build complex web applications that scale effortlessly. Akamai’s content delivery network is about to look very antiquated
As I mentioned yesterday, I’m a big fan of the feature-set being developed by the people at Mojiti. I’ve started following their blog, and today they added another innovative feature: community translation. They’ve provided an interface for users to translate all the text on the site (1117 phrases) from English to one of 31 languages. Once all the translations are made for a particular language, they roll it out on the site.
For an international site like Mojiti (who doesn’t love watching guys being hit in the groan with footballs in any language ), this sounds like a great way to grow your traffic and attract a much broader audience. ASP.NET makes displaying multiple languages pretty straight forward with built-in globalization features using resource files.
Once again, nice job Mojiiti! I translated some French for you
I’ve been waiting for a web-app like this one for a while Launched in September 2006, Mojiti is a tool for annotating video. In its most basic form, you can use it to add subtitles or captions, but it’s actually way cooler than that. It allows a community to contribute hypermedia (i.e. links, images, other videos, feeds, comments) within the context of the video.
For example, in a show/podcast like Webnation that displays a bunch of URLs, you can create hyperlinks inside the video for people to click on. The community can also contribute contextual data inside the video (e.g. what is happening in each segment), and produce an index. From that index, you can jump to that timecode inside the video.
Whereas Joost is IMHO turning out to just be traditional TV on the web, the Mojiti-model is truly leading the way towards “Interactive TV” (excuse the buzz-word). The moment I can watch a newscast, and click on anything they say/show/do to see more information, then we’ll be making progress
To try it out, I annotated the first few minutes of the ‘Webnation’ premiere. You can also check out their tutorial here or a cool demo here.
I was scanning the image directory where Facebook keeps all the “gifts” they release, and there were a few that haven’t made it into production yet. One of them, was this icon of Mark Zuckerberg with the text “2004-2007″. Facebook started in 2004 so I can only assume that this might be on the servers in anticipation of Zuckerberg (Facebook’s founder) leaving the company in the very near future.
There have been rumours swirling about Zuckerberg selling Facebook for years, but this might be the first “credible” sign that the man we have grown to love (and have gotten used to seeing in our upper-left corner) is hanging up his poking finger.
But before you leave, Mark Zuckerberg, could you please confirm my friend request?
