mobile: December 2007 Archives

I was just reading at Go2Web2.0 about Samsung & YouTube's NewYears project. YouTube users are invited to answer one of the following questions in a short video (less than 1 minute long):  

1. Make a video that reveals the one word that is your personal theme for 2008
2. Reenact the best of worst thing that happened to you in 2007
3. What cool things have you done with your mobile phone this year?
4. In 2008 what kind of cool mobile phone should Samsung develop for you?

Users can also browse the videos using Google map and pick videos by location.

I can easily answer question #4 and say that Samsung (and other leading handset manufactures) should embed the Flixwagon live mobile broadcasting service in all of the devices. That way, users will have the application preinstalled and ready to use when they get a new device :)

A treat was found in my inbox! A Vodafone commercial that looks like it was specially made for Flixwagon!

[Thanks Eran F!]

To make sure that we provide you the best video quality ever while broadcasting live from the mobile, we sent Sarig Reichert, a.k.a. Rigi, to test drive the Flixwagon service in a ski slope.

These are the results:

As you probably know, the end of the year at the blogsphere is the time when bloggers summarize the year and make predictions for the upcoming year. Personally, I am going to leave the summarizing and forecasting tasks to my colleagues. The only thing that I will say in this context is answer a question I was asked by a fellow blogger friend. He asked me what was one of the most meaningful moments in my industry/business/market?

I think that finding out that one of the leading players in the web video sharing arena points out the need to have more friendly tools to capture life moments and broadcast them easily to the web video community live is a meaningful moment for us; in other words, there is a huge demand for what Flixwagon, the company I just joined, offers.

And in case you still don't know what I am talking about [and that is totally ok :)] I am referring to what YouTube co-founder Steve Chen said in an interview to Om Malik and Liz Gannes @ NewTeeVee Conference about a month ago:

Liz Gannes: "What's Youtube in 3 years?"
Steve Chen: I think that we're gonna see probably some stuff with a lot easier... I still think it's a problem with how to capture most of the videos on youtube and how to get them on to the site so we're gonna see just content creation tools getting better but getting easier. So I think that some of the new cell phones being able to just capture the videos and directly sending them without having to go home to your desktop plug it in the USB and then find the file and upload it. I think that's gonna get a lot better. I think there are still a lot of situations in the past were people said "oh shocks I wish I had my digital camera here to capture this" and now it's probably, with cell phones, it's I wish I had my cell phone out to capturing. So maybe something else there to be able to just almost capture everything that is happening and then anytime that something is interesting you can --
Liz Gannes: "live video capture?"
Steve Chen: "A third eye..."

[via NewTeeVee Live]

Happy Holidays everyone!

At Flixwagon, we decided to arm a group of teenage boy scouts with a Flixwagon supporting device and let them broadcast live pieces of their lives. The results were very amusing and are brought here...  Enjoy :)

I just read about MTV's “Choose or Lose” voting initiative:

"MTV will be launching a “Street Team” comprised of 51 young, amateur journalists from each state and Washington D.C. to cover the 2008 election, emphasizing issues important to younger demographics.

Members of the Street Team will begin appearing in January on a new mobile site as well as the existing MTV Mobile, ThinkMTV (a social network), and other websites as well. You’ll note that MTV is even taking advantage of its revamped efforts to reach the youth through its mobile initiatives as well.

The content will be a conglomerate of blog entries, videos, photos, podcasts, and animation. [...] the members have also been equipped with laptops, video cameras, mobile phones, and Adobe software."

[via Mashable]

For us at Flixwagon this is a dream come true... When we started thinking of who will benefit from Flixwagon's ability to broadcast live from the mobile (or our 'end users'), one of the natural candidates was the Citizen Journalism domain. Web 2.0 has already turned most of us into reporters, journalists and opinion leaders armed with blogs who have a certain amount of readership and mobile cams at hand. Let me add the following to the current state: the ability to publish to your favorite social websites and leverage their viral nature + the immediacy of a live broadcast from the mobile and we get a whole new definition for "citizen journalism".