A quick post after having received an invite from TechCrunch to try out the Wix-experience beta.

I was a little skeptical, but for what its purpose is I am content and even a little excited. It provides some nifty widget creation options, and allows for a number of customizations.

Currently I have just scraped the surface. Though I can already conclude that its User Interface is friendly and simple for those non-geeks who just want to spice up their own profiles.

I have yet to try out integrating the widgets into public services offered. But they offer a wide range of custom embedding for myspace, facebook etc.

I finally got around to testing my first of Aviary‘s web-based applications, codenamed Phoenix. I really like what I see. Built intuitively with an interface similar to Photoshop or GIMP, Phoenix is a niftly flash based Image Editor.

I was impressed by their teaser back in July, and must admit this first tool alone was somewhat worth the wait.

The tools in Phoenix work well. Although  my Photoshop shortcus are rather useless I enjoyed playing around with my above picture online. The blur filter did not work exactly as I wanted it to. But I think that with a little more getting used to I could use Phoenix for main basic Image editing needs.

Now I will have to soon try out Adobe’s own online solution.

For years I have been listening to internet radio stations across the globe to fit my personal listening preferances, and escape all the commercials on my local FM radio. I bumped into Last.fm a couple of months ago and I have not turned back since.

Last.fm – the social music revolution (Last.fm About Us). You type in an arist or genre you like and Last.fm will play you music you should like. Based on your previous playlist, as well as playlists of people who have listened to the same song as you it finds your tracks. Last.fm is nicely intergrated into iTunes and other mediaplayers and will register the music you play there and feed that information into Last.fm – Scrobbling.

Screenshot of player window.

As I read of Wi-Fi radio slowly making its way into the consumer world, I do hope that Last.fm will jump on that bandwagon and find some way for me to listen to Last.fm on the fly. (A cellphone/mobile java-app would work – especially when wi-fi telephones become more affordable.)
Partially what I would be looking for, although a heavy workaround: Streaming Last.fm to Reciva internet radios (Logik IR100)

Joost is another online TV solution. It combines both software and content, with a dosage of advertising.

In April I gave Joost beta my first try. I tried it on a relativly fast PC’s with more than enough bandwidth. But I was constantly disappointed with the CPU usage and bandwidth the program required. Their content then was rather limited, still promising. Not personally owning a machine that managed to use Joost I forgot about it for a couple of months. Now for a couple of weeks I have had access to an Intel Mac and re-downloaded Joost to see a real boost in content and functionality.

The Mac remote works nicely with Joost and really gives the Joost feeling. Being able to provide the wide and impressive content obviously costs, and the ads in between every song or show proves this.
I could quickly now sit hours in front of the Joost-set. With the remote functionality it enhances the TV-feel, and allows you to relax. However I am still figuring out how to customize the content I believe that we will see a lot more of Joost to come.

At a first glance I found Joost’s featured selection more entertaining than Miro’s. With Joost you can’t download anything, but this is not a problem as long as the content remains searchable and accessible. Joost’s main downside for me atm is some of the lengthy advertising, I am find with splashscreens and short ads. But when I start to doubt whether this is an ad or a rogue channel this pulls down the Joost experience. Another Joost negative is the quality, although much better since April, they still have a way to go considering what you see is all transferred more or less “live”.

The “internet tv” and video player Miro, previously known as Democracy has caught my attention lately.

I tried Democracy for the first time more than a year ago. My first impression was OK. Considering the fact that I can’t afford to keep up with the latest hardware updates, I tried it on a little older Mac. This proved the program rather CPU intensive. The concept behind Democracy was a good one however. Being able to subscribe to channels in a podcast type of manner has evidently become a winner.
Being able to “store” the channel material is an advantage over more “live services” such as Joost, since you can pause any time you want. You skip the ads and if you do have low bandwidth you can download the whole episode/show before viewing.

That same success is what Miro has has expanded on. You can obtain HD material which is becoming more in demand.
Miro also offers a BitTorrent service. (Because of rather limited bandwidth I seldom use BitTorrent, but gave it a try with Miro.) The first torrent in Miro worked impressively. Though afterwards I had to pause a download to be able to use my bandwidth for necessities and when I resumed it started downloading from the beginning. In other words it restarted instead of resuming. A quick search online on Miro’s forum proved that others had this problem, and it was not yet resolved.
My main challenge to Miro is help the users find the content, in an even greater manner. I find myself using the content I find in the applications more than outside subscriptions’. Therefore my guess is that if the content is more accessible people will stick to the application. Another Joost-joy I am missing is being able to control Miro via remote.

For Miro’s slightly biased comparison of Miro vs. Joost check out their comparison.

Another of NRK’s employees’ “inventions” is the multi-camera server recorder.
Normally when capturing video material you can just capture one camera’s stream to the computer/hard disk at a time. So previously when I wanted to capture two cameras live I had to route each camera to a different computer, and then synchronize with TC (timecode). It works, but is a hassle and well for every camera you need a computer with TC and video capture capabilities. (This setup is part of the racks and network we have available at the University, nothing easy to take with you.)

(Video-mixer – for mixing the show live. From POTW 02 2007)

With this invenstion, instead of backing up each video-camera’s content to its own tape, they backup all of the cameras (up to eight – from what I understand) directly to their servers. This way they can see “on-the-fly” whether the backups are being saved as they should. This solution saves them a lot of time and even a whole position while out “in the field” (transportable?). Previously they always needed a person responsible to check that all camera’s were being correctly recorded to the tape decks, the VB position. See the original post at NRKbeta.

Basicly creative use of hard-disk video recorders/servers (EVS?).

This software uses algorithms to resize images intelligently. It allows extraction of unimportant picture information either guessed or user specified.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This PDF describes Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing. Original movie.

(Via CDM)

TechCrunch reports that a project called Aviary has an ambitious goal of providing graphical online application to create multimedia artwork.

The online application range from Photoshop and Illustrator resembling applications 2d and vector graphics as well as a 3d application for editing and rendering. Some of their creative applications are code-named Phoenix, Raven and Hummingbird.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The complete list of their birds/tools here. Information will most likely be updated on their website: creationonthefly.com.

SE51 have an interface that lets users test drive OS X (Mercury) online. To boot the online machine click here. My guess is that there is a lot of scripting there so be warned it may not like every browser or operating system. (It took about 4 minutes to boot the first time, so have patience.)

(Via LifeHacker – which also links to an “online” Ubuntu)

Recently Google added some more translation functionality to Google Translate. It lets you translate a single word, and gives possible meanings that word might have.

I also recently discovered that you can Get Translation Browser Buttons which I will give a try soon.

(Via LifeHacker)