Written on September 6, 2008 – 2:01 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
THe OLPC laptop, developed for people from third-world countries, isn’t very popular in the blogosphere. Despite it’s noble goal, bloggers hate the facts that the development goes so slow and that its price is still higher than $100. Apart from some funny news - people paying €500 for a graffiti version -, there’s hardly any positive news surrounding the green laptop.
Well, there is now. Paris-based video service Dailymotion has decided to take on another problem of the OLPC. The $100 laptop is unfortunately not compatible with the Adobe Flash player that Dailymotion and other video sharing sites rely on. So the enormous video site has decided to start a project which will make a large amount of videos accessible for people browsing on the OLPC computer.
The project consists of a special group where users can upload videos that are in fact compatible with the toylike-looking laptop. These videos are encoded in free standards, provided by the Xiph.Org Foundation: Ogg (container), Vorbis (audio) and Theora (compression).
Although Flash-compatibility would be the ultimate solution - like they say on ReadWriteWeb: “that’s just how it goes” - I like the fact Dailymotion is actually doing something to turn the OLPC laptop in a success. Because a project with such an ambitious and world-improving goal can use some respect. So that, in a while, (flash-based) videos of people kicking around with the laptop (believe it or not, there’s actually a man who did such a pathetic thing) will become absolutely intolerable and unheard of.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on July 6, 2008 – 12:55 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Flash-publishing tool Sprout has a new competitor, and a it’s pretty tough one. Israeli-based Wix doesn’t just makes widgets, but also complete sites. People who are web-savvy enough to maintain a Flickr and YouTube account, but find it too complicated to build a fancy flash site, should definitely read this post.
Co-Founders Giora Kaplan, Avishai Abrahami, and Nadav Abrahami launched their service in open beta at the end of last June, saying that it’s “a big step forward in our journey to change the way web content is created”. I’m not sure whether this is a little bit too enthusiastic, yet I do think Wix can help starting web publishers to shape their online identity.
Thanks to a drag ‘n drop interface, users can create three sorts of Wix publications: the WixSite (1), a Flash-based website that uses an XML file to make it Google-friendly. ExtraSpace (2), a flash widget that allows you to spice up your MySpace page. The third option is WixComment, a fancy widget that functions like an embeddable bio on social network pages. There are several templates available, categorized under Business, Art, Personal, Music, Designers, and MySpace.
To give you an example of how Wix can be used: my grandparents have just celebrated 50 years of marriage and also bought a computer. I can browse to Wix, open the Personal category, select the family tree option and start building a really good-looking genealogy tool for them. Best of all, it will cost me absolutely nothing - except some time.
Written on May 19, 2008 – 10:17 am
Steven Carrol, Next Web WebTipr France
Hank Williams started a little shit storm in the hacking community recently claiming death to the content distribution networks with the launch of Flash Player 10.
It led to an interesting discussion among hackers and forced Adobe out of bed to respond. See live video is hot right now, but so are those bandwidth charges which are very limiting on profits.
Flash Player 10 coupled with Flash Media Server will be offering new features which will essentially allow some form of p2p streaming capability (though the details have not yet been released), thus possibly enabling live p2p streaming and according to Adobe “applications like chat and games are great examples of likely uses of this technology”.
Why pay charges if you can avoid them? RED5 an open source alternative to the 1K USD Flash Media Server, may well be interested in reverse engineering this new functionality, as will no doubt the 8 hackers at Justin.tv who claim to be one of the largest players in the live video biz and who have developed their own Python Media Server - “a custom built live streaming video server cluster. The network can support thousands of live broadcasts and over 100,000 simultaneous viewers and is 100% owned and operated by Justin.tv”.
Plus Justin.tv are currently leading the way in reducing bandwidth charges. “For most in the industry, live video streaming tends to be expensive - with costs ranging between 15-30 cents per user hour of live streamed video. The Justin.tv video network streams live video at 1/4 cent per user hour - by far the most cost effective live streaming ever built.”
So it looks like Flash Player 10 might help the ‘cutting edge providers’ of live streaming services to reduce those high bandwidth charges even further and maintain an edge over the mighty Yahoo who probably don’t care quite so much about bandwidth as those who actually need profits in order to survive this battle.
adobe flash, Adobe Flash Player, dailymotion, OLPC, One Laptop per Child, Theora, Vorbis, Xiph.Org Foundation
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