MyWaves Archive

Mobile photo and video are game changers for individuals and news organizations. As more mobile devices (and carriers) are supported, this market is going to skyrocket. Here are 10 apps that are in the mobile photo and video space. Some are well known and some might be new to you, in any event, give them all a try! And as always add your own faves in the comments.

Flixwagon

The Flixwagon app allows you to stream video live online. Their player is the best currently and Flixwagon recently worked with MTV on their Choose or Lose campaign by having reporters all over the country streaming in live video using a mobile handset. Currently Flixwagon works mainly with Nokia handsets but also has some support via a Java client. Flixwagon is also partnering with a variety of conferences to get live streaming from conference attendees. They most recently had many mobile devices at SXSW. (our Flixwagon coverage)

Qik

Qik (pronounced Quick) is probably the most buzzed live video app currently on the market. Videoblogger Robert Scoble and SEO Jason Calacanis are heavy users of the app. If you have a Nokia mobile that is supported, you can stream live video onto the Web using the Qik app. Created videos are also stored for later viewing. Justin.tv is a Qik partner. (our Qik coverage)

Kyte

Why do I like Kyte? Simple, it works with my mobile. I can shoot a video, and then email it into Kyte and it appears in moments. When I upload the same video to YouTube it always gives me an error. While on my device it’s not live, it’s as close to live as possible. There is a live version of the app as well, again for Nokia devices. Kyte can also create shows based on photos as well. Nokia is actually an investor in Kyte. (our Kyte coverage)

JuiceCaster

JuiceCaster allows you to easily upload videos and pictures from your mobile to your JuiceCaster account along with a player for your blog and embed options into Facebook and MySpace. Most of the video I checked out was very, very grainy (a dog looked like a sheep) but the photos look better. JuiceCaster also allows you watch videos on your mobile.

Movino

Movino can help you setup live mobile video streaming onto your blog or Web site. It appears to support 3G and WiFi and a variety of handsets. If you use the Java client, there is no sound. What makes Movino different is that it’s all open source so you can grab the code and edit where needed. Movino was originally developed as a course project at Abo Akademi University. The developers note that the course has completed and future development may be limited.

mywaves

mywaves is a video content site. You can select from thousands of videos and send them directly to your mobile for later viewing. You can setup an auto channel which will send the videos to your mobile when they match your criteria. In their gallery it seems most people want videos sent to them of women in bikinis and lingerie.

GoTV

Want to watch TV on your mobile? GoTV offers about 10 channels of a variety of TV genres. The company is based in California and most of the content is originally produced.

ITookThisOnMyPhone

This service with the very long name lets you create online photo galleries based on the pictures you take on your mobile. Using the ITookThisOnMyPhone app, images are automatically uploaded to the site and after permissions are applied, the images are available for viewing. The service currently works on Blackberry and Windows Mobile.

Phoja

Phoja helps you find answers to your questions using photos. If you take a photo of something that you need help identifying (say a shirt someone is wearing, you want to know the designer), the Phoja community will help identify the product in the photo. They define the service as a “social photo discussion” and there’s a Digg ratings model which pushes popular photos to the frontpage.

Radar

You take a photo, upload it to Radar, it’s sent immediately to your friends and family and they can comment on it and the comments are sent back to you. It looks like photos are sent to your friends computers not their mobile devices. They have also partnered with Big Brother so you can watch video from inside the Big Brother house.

MTV has announced a partnership this morning with Mywaves to deliver content from the MTV networks on basically any mobile device. The site is ad supported and will initially feature content from VH1, Spike, and GameTrailers with more MTV networks adding content over time.

It looks like VH1′s "On This Day in Music" will be the first clip available on the mobile site. This gives marketers an even more broad ad buy with MTV. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed. Also not mentioned is whether users of this new service will also be hit with marketing messages for the main Mywaves service.

Check out our discussion of the long tail of video including more information on Mywaves.

mywaves, always one step ahead of the impeding mobile and video revolution, is announcing their latest feature, SND2MOBL, tomorrow morning. SND2MOBL will enable mywaves users to send videos directly to people's cell phones. This is great for marketers or for the self-promotion of someone's video content. Videos can be taken from a social network profile or from one's website to be sent out to mobile phones.

Below is an excerpt from mywaves' press release:

"mywaves’ SND2MBL is available for free at mywaves.com. Content owners, brands or webmasters need only register to receive the SND2MBL code they embed on their websites, which will mobilize the video they’re featuring. Beyond delivering clips to consumers on an opt-in basis, SND2MBL customers who frequently update their video can offer their viewers the choice of subscribing to a mobile channel, and mywaves will send a txt alert to let them know there is something new to watch."

Mywaves launched their initial service a few months ago, bringing video content to more people by enabling access via their mobile phones. The ability to create customized channels choosing from the 20,000 + channels mywaves offers was only the tip of the iceberg. Their SND2MOBL feature takes the mobility of videos to a new level, approaching the kind of customization and distribution features that level the playing field for the mainstream users, instead of limiting them to larger media groups such as YouTube.

Now anyone can provide the distribution and access options that they'd like to see with a mobile solution. This new feature really allows for the reversal of some of the recent trends we've seen in the mobile Internet realm, where several companies are enabling the ability to contribute to a web-based program from their cell phone. SND2MOBL makes the communication between the online and mobile worlds more interactive by leveraging an online presence to distribute users' video content.

This article was written by Kristen Nicole, who writes for 606tech.com.

How do we digest the Longtail of online video? The amount of video-sharing that has occured in the past year has been nothing short of phenomenal. There's YouTube and MySpace. That we all know. So now what?

Our very behavior has changed, and our demands have increased. We now want programming on-demand, on a variety of devices. We want more customization for the programs we watch. We want better ways to search for, share and discover new videos. We plain and simply want more options.

There are a few sites, some new and others established, who are readily taking on the task of sifting through all of this online video data, and breaking it down into smaller pieces for us to digest. It's very important, given that the growing long tail of user-generated content, multiple uploads of the same video on various hosting sites, and the difficulty in tagging and searching for visual content. Unlike text, which can easily be searched for using algorithms, videos are in a different context that cannot be so easily indexed. A social component is quite necessary for the searchable catalog of online video, and all of these sites have addressed this very issue.

Muuvu is a newcomer, having created a niche social search engine that encourages the discovery of new music through user-ranked videos embedded on their site. Based in Australia, Julian Bakalov, founding director of Muuvu, raises the important fact that large media companies not only disagree when it comes to distribution rights in other companies, but lack the ability to stay nimble and attend to the public demand. "big companies take their time when it comes to progress. I just tried to view an episode of Lost online at ABC.com and got the message that it is not available for viewing in [Australia]. By the time media companies have agreed on the terms, millions will already have downloaded their content illegally," says Bakalov in a recent interview.

Muuvu is an aggregator for a very specific type of video that users can form a community around. In this way, Muuvu is taking a piece of the pie and cutting out all the fat that would otherwise slow down the search for that music video you're looking for. The community is self-regulated, so it's a rather democratic process by which the social and search aspects of Muuvu operate.

MyWaves is another video aggregator of sorts. They enable you to create your own television/video programming so that your channels are fully customized. They pull video data from various RSS feeds around the web, and the end result is over 20,000 channels from which you can pick and choose the programming you'd like to watch, and choose when you'd like to watch it. They make all of those channels mobile by giving you access to MyWaves through your cell phone. The social aspects of their service make for an easy way to share and reccomend programming, and even create private channels for which to share videos and upload priveldges with a select few.

PureVideo is a search engine that is dedicated to finding online videos. They rigirously scour the web, crawling for those videos we love to watch. They are then segmented into channels to become easily digestable for us to look through. PureVideo co-founders Greg Morrow and Erik Hawkins recal how they came up with the idea for their service; "Several years ago, we toyed with the concept of a TV Guide for the Web. Realizing that online video would explode, we figured someone had to come up with a simple way of finding the best stuff online." And finding the best stuff online is exactly what you can do with PureVideo. They specialize in searching for the visual manifestations we all crave.

This article was written by Kristen Nicole, who writes for 606tech.com.