Video Archive

Last night I attended my first Austin Tech Happy Hour event in downtown Austin. I heard from the organizer that typically 250 people attend the monthly event — a level that is similar to events in my former home of NYC. Even with the sub-freezing temps and the threat of snow (!), I estimate that about 175 people showed up. And it was a great event – one that I will be attending regularly going forward.

I had one of two demo stations for the evening where I demo’ed CloudContacts (including our new Contact Updater) to about 25 people and also met one of the PR people from Porter Novelli who I have been exchanging emails with for a long time.

The company at the other demo station was GuruStorms. I captured a short video interview with founder Edward Cruz and one of the gurus listed inside GuruStorms. You can watch the interview below. Sarah Perez from RWW wrote a review of GuruStorms from their launch at DEMO 2009.

The concept of GuruStorms is one of trying to help you find answers to your challenges. You post a request on the GuruStorms site, offer a “bounty” and pay a fee (10% of bounty + $295), and then if the gurus accept the assignment, you begin working with the gurus. It’s a team approach – so you get a virtual workspace (I think they call this a whiteboard) where you as the client plus the network of gurus post questions and answers to help you get to the right solution to your challenge. All of the discussions take place behind a login and aren’t public as on most other help services.

Continue reading “Hire Gurus on GuruStorms (video)” »

Amazon is offering a free $5 in video credit if you click their special follow button. I say special because not only does the button do a typical follow function, it also sends the following tweet automatically, “I just got a $5 credit for instant movies and TV shows @amazonvideo. Click (url) to get yours. #get5″. Go here to get the credit.

If you search for the term get5 on Twitter,  you can see that a large number of Amazon customers are clicking the button to get their $5 video credit. Funny points go to Twitter user Mobile Jones who clicked the Amazon button and when I questioned him, he replied, “Yeah, but then I immediately revoked the connection to my acct. ;-)”

I think this type of deal works is a much stronger way to build a Twitter user base than buying a “promoted” ad on Twitter. The deal has already spread to all of the deal boards. What’s smart with Amazon’s offer is that it gets people who probably aren’t using Twitter on a regular basis to follow their Amazon Video account. This is different than buying an ad on Twitter for an account on Twitter when you are already on Twitter.

If you aren’t sure what movies to use the $5 Amazon video credit on, here’s a big list of movies and television shows for $2.99 or less.

During my time in San Francisco this week for the Dreamforce conference, I had the chance to meet with TaskForceApp founder Niccolo Pantucci. If you read CN regularly, you know I like productivity apps – those apps that save time or save money or both. What I liked about my conversation with Niccolo was our focus on utility and not on the next Twitter fart app.

TaskForce provides a utility to take emails and convert them to tasks with one click. The service currently works with Gmail but Niccolo notes that other email tools and mobile tools will be coming soon. I asked Niccolo about a desktop app (see video below) and he said to stay tuned. Once you install TaskForce inside Gmail, a set of buttons will appear which you click when you want to turn an email into a task.

The service is social so you can share tasks with your colleagues. If the person you share a task with also has Taskforce, they (and/or you) will be notified when a task is complete.
Continue reading “Interview with TaskForceApp Founder Niccolo Pantucci (video)” »

Last December I wrote about my experience using the Blockbuster Express video kiosk that was installed in a pharmacy near my apartment. Now I live in an area where you can’t seem to enter a store without seeing a Redbox video rental machine. I have seen a good number of Blockbuster Express machines here but it seems like there are at least 5-10x more Redbox machines at neighborhood stores.

As many of you are aware Blockbuster has filed for bankruptcy this week. I won’t get into the bankruptcy itself here as it’s better left to the financial blogs.

What I did find very interesting is how quickly Blockbuster Express contacted their customers via email to let us all know we can sleep safe knowing that Blockbuster Express is a solid company. The Blockbuster Express machines are actually NCR video machines with a Blockbuster Express logo.

Continue reading “Blockbuster Express Quick To Tell You They Ain’t Blockbuster” »

Amazon has announced a new promotion that will add $10 in free video on demand credit to your Amazon account. The credit is good towards a variety of popular HD television shows. To get the credit you need to follow AmazonVideo on Twitter. After you follow them, the credit code will be sent to you via direct message. The code is good through the end of June.

It looks like you should be able to grab three individual episodes for free using the credit. You can find the full terms of the promotion on the Amazon website. The terms page has a list of all of the shows you can use the credit towards which include:

• Heroes
• House
• Curious George
• The Real Housewives of New York City
• The Office
• 30 Rock
• Battlestar Galactica

Last year, Amazon offered free credit in their MP3 and video-on-demand stores. If you use the credit, leave a comment with the tv series you purchased.

Online video service Hulu has announced that today they are rolling out a new video player. The company has also provided an update on their usage of HTML 5. Hulu product VP, Eugene Wei, noted regarding HTML 5, “We continue to monitor developments on HTML5, but as of now it doesn’t yet meet all of our customers’ needs. Our player doesn’t just simply stream video, it must also secure the content, handle reporting for our advertisers, render the video using a high performance codec to ensure premium visual quality, communicate back with the server to determine how long to buffer and what bitrate to stream, and dozens of other things that aren’t necessarily visible to the end user. Not all video sites have these needs, but for our business these are all important and often contractual requirements.”

As for the new player, there are too many changes to go into here but suffice to say they are worth checking out on the Hulu blog. The new video player is written in Actionscript 3 and allows for adaptive bitstrate streaming. There are some new closed captioning improvements along with a visual seek bar which is VERY cool. The seek bar allows you to see a thumbnail of the content you want to move forward or backwards to. The video player is also 25% larger than the previous player.

Continue reading “Hulu Launching New Video Player, Ad Tailor and HTML 5 Update” »

This is the final post (I think!) regarding the MTA developer conference last week. The OpenPlans group has posted all of the videos from the event. You can just listen to the videos – there’s really no need to watch them. But if you are into transit, want to hear where NYC transit is moving and/or looking to build a mobile transit app, you should listen to the videos.

The panel discussion is interesting – especially the part about how the NY Times uses the available transit data.

In related news, if you are into transit and tech in Philadelphia, the PhillyTransit meetup will be held this Thursday evening.

Here’s the first video – the rest can be found on the OpenPlans YouTube channel.
Continue reading “Full Videos From the Transit Conference” »