Robert has been one of the earliest adopters of cell phone video, which offers the ability to stream live to the Internet, with the primary tradeoff being relatively poor video quality. He’s extensively tested all of the major emerging services in this area, including Kyte, Qik and Flixwagon, among others.
This is a post I didn’t want to write. Why? For the last six months I’ve been using Qik’s live video service off of my cell phone. I’m the top user there, with most views, most videos, and all that. I’ve used that service to take videos inside the first production Tesla, Annie Leibovitz as she showed us around her latest photos of famous people, Google press conferences, Ansel Adams’ son at the top of Glacier Point in Yosemite, Bono at the World Economic Forum, and more than 700 other videos as well.
Qik has done something remarkable: it put a TV studio in my pocket. I can get live video onto the Internet faster than I can make a phone call (Qik takes two clicks to start streaming, a phone call takes 12 clicks on my phone’s keypad). Even better, while doing a video you can watch live and you can send text chat messages to my phone while I am filming. While we were racing around Santa Monica in Elon Musk’s new Tesla (he’s the chairman of the board and was giving us a killer demo) we had hundreds of people watching my cell phone along with Jason Calacanis’ phone, which was shooting the same view from his Corvette alongside. As Elon was driving we had hundreds of people asking questions about the new Tesla. This was interactivity the world had never seen. Read the rest of this entry »
Kyte CEO Daniel Graf is taking another big step towards turning the cell phone into a video distribution platform. “This is a big day for Kyte,” he tells me, “our biggest release since we launched our beta last April.” Up till now, Kyte allowed people to create their own personal TV channels on the Web by uploading videos from their cell phones to various widgets and to Kyte.tv. Today, Kyte is adding live video streaming from both mobile phones and Webcams, which is broadcast through your personal Kyte channel and archived for later viewing. (Sign up here for the private beta. Watch out, Justin.tv and Ustream). It also raised an additional $6.1 million from Steamboat Ventures and Swedish mobile operator TeliaSonera to close out its Series B round for a total of $21.1 million.
But most importantly, Graf is zeroing in on making Kyte a platform for musicians, media companies, and mobile carriers. He sees Kyte being used more by established personalities and media companies to produce the initial content, and then being shared and distributed by the audience via the Kyte player. To that end, he just launched Kyte.com as a site for branded partners (including bloggers) to tap into the Kyte platform. All four major music labels are using Kyte to create branded players that can be widgetized and distributed all over the Web. (See ours below, which shows an interview with Graf that I filmed using his cell phone).
“It doesn’t say “Kyte” anywhere,” says Graf (except that it does, on the bottom left). “This is like a micro Website. It can be virally distributed. Fans feel really connected to it.” They can also contribute. The Kyte player has a “produce” button that lets fans upload their own videos right into the channel. Graf created the one above for TechCrunch (it is the second one ever made after 50 Cent’s). For the next few hours you can add your own video commentary using a Webcam (we will be monitoring this, so please keep it clean).
50 Cent has been testing Kyte for about three months, and already has more than four million views on his Kyte channel across 10,000 Websites. The Kyte player is front and center on his Website ThisIs50. He regularly puts up video snippets of himself and his crew shot on a cell phone. Last night, he premiered his video “The Mechanic” through the Kyte player, which fans can embed on their own pages. It is his way of keeping control of his brand online even if people grab the video and put on other sites. Kyte plans on turning on advertising inside its players in April and sharing those revenues with producers of Kyte channels.
Kyte is also giving its partners the ability to turn their Kyte player into a Facebook app in about fiveminutes. Here is 50 Cent’s and here is TechCrunch’s. It offers an API as well for partner Websites to create deeper integration with the Kyte player and service. It even has Twitter integration. Finally, Kyte is working on one-click mobile apps to mak eit even easier to upload video from your cellphone. One such app is already in private beta for Nokia Series 60 phones.
If there was one defining breakthrough in 2007 as opposed to the year before, it was live video. From Justin.tv through to the gauntlet of clones live video made its presence felt, even if it’s not dominate today.
Ustream.tv remains one of my favorite services. It doesn’t have the cool tech Kyte has, or perhaps the wider presence of Justin.tv, but it’s reliable, and it usually delivers. I regularly tune in to Chris Pirillo live, it’s an informative program where you learn stuff as well. Today (my time) I spent some time listening to The Drill Down, where I ended up getting exclusive news of the Digg girl and a possible record contract; it was a good example of where Podcasting meets live TV, a positive from the new wave of live content.
And then there was Jim Choma. I just happened to be on Ustream after the Drill Down podcast and saw him live, and that’s where the fun began. Jim runs sites including Zipperfish.com, he also hosts a live show on Ustream under the name of “The Walrus.” Jim likes a drink, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but we don’t normally stream the experience, complete with homophobia, swearing and nakedness. Once I Twittered the link his drinking session went from 30 viewers to over 100, and it went down hill from there, complete with a call in from me (the show is focused on live call ins) asking him how much he had to drink. Some short video I caught above and below. It was train wreck TV at its worst or perhaps best, but we were all compelled to watch it. If Jim had any career before it must surely join the deadpool now, or maybe not, after all drunk TV had some value tonight, at least from me and 100 others. Either way if the full Ustream clip gets released I’m betting this might well be the last great viral video of 2007.
Treemo is a site where you can upload all types of media (photos, videos, audio clips, and text) from your mobile phone or desktop computer and share them with either the general public or just your friends. Until now, the only way to get your Treemo-hosted content distributed elsewhere on the Internet was to use RSS feeds, but the company has just released a set of embeddable widgets and a Facebook application that should help to spread this content much more effectively.
Of the three types of widgets, the first provides a channel of the last 24 media items you have uploaded to Treemo (we’ve embedded an example below), the second highlights just one media item, and the third allows anybody with a cell phone to subscribe to your content and consequently receive notices via SMS when you upload new stuff. The Facebook application will display your most recent Treemo uploads in your mini-feed and embed a channel player into your profile as well.
In addition to this widgetization strategy, Treemo is developing an API that will allow developers to integrate Treemo functionality into their websites. A Chinese website called 3GDODO has already soft launched with the API as a pre-release partner, and the API should be available to the public in the first quarter of 2008. Another partner focusing on citizen journalism will also leverage the API to solicit the distribution of niche content.
Other smaller upgrades include new language support for Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, and German, as well as a new homepage that does more to highlight the contributions of your friends on Treemo.
Treemo’s mobile social media competitors include JuiceCaster, Zannel (recently reviewed here), and Kyte. Whereas JuiceCaster requires users to download a client to their phones, Treemo is based completely in mobile web browsers using XHTML and WAP. JuiceCaster announced just this week that it raised $6M more in Series C, bringing its total to $15.3M. This past October, Treemo raised $2.55M in its first round, which was led by JK&B Capital of Chicago.
Online video service Kyte has taken $15 million Series B in a round that included Telefonica, Nokia, DoCoMo, Swisscom, Holtzbrinck and DFJ. The new round brings total funding for Kyte to $17.25 million.
According to Kyte’s unofficial evangelist Robert Scoble, the announcement was streamed live on Kyte itself, which while demonstrating the product works perhaps compensates for the fact that no where on their site (at the time of writing) is there a written statement about the funding.
Kyte launched in April this year with a product that falls somewhere between Ustream and Twitter. Unlike many of its live streaming competitors Kyte offers a much richer two way experience, including support for text chat from within each video embed and the ability for users to drag drag photos, video and text into Kyte channels while interacting with others.
The investment will expose Kyte to a much broader audience with the raft of telco investors having hundreds of millions of users between them; Kyte could soon be coming to a mobile phone near you.
The rumors were correct. Loic Le Meur, a well known European entrepreneur that recently relocated to San Francisco, will unveil his new video startup, Seesmic, this morning into a closed beta.
The service is very much in “alpha” and they’ve only given away a few test accounts. They’ll start to give more over the next few days - just sign up on the Seesmic home page to get one. Look for a full launch
I’ve been testing the service over the weekend and, even though it is yet another video startup, I think Seesmic is both fun and addictive.
So I’ve had a week now to play around with Pownce, Kevin Rose’s (the founder of Digg, pictured left) newly launched Twitter killer.
Twitter, which launched a year ago, was obviously used as the initial inspiration for the Pownce. They both allow users to sign up, add friends, and broadcast quick notes to people. The main differences: Twitter is mobile-ready, allowing users to receive friend requests and new messages via text message. And Pownce gives users more flexibility in communicating by allowing messages just to friends. Pownce also allows different kinds of messages - file transfers, events, links and plain text messages (Twitter allows text and links only). There’s no reason, though, that users will use both. They’ll go with one or the other, or neither.
So is Pownce good enough to beat Twitter?
The early adopter crowd is going to be torn on this one. (Just about) everyone loves Kevin Rose, and anything he launches is going to get serious attention - on Digg, tech blogs and mainstream press. But a lot of people like Twitter, too, and that application has already reached the “network effect” stage of its business cycle. It continues to grow fast. And Evan Williams, the co-founder of Twitter (and Odeo and Blogger), is also well liked in Silicon Valley.
A breakdown of the basic features is in the chart to the right. Pownce also provides a few other bells and whistles not included in the chart. For example, it lets you forward a message to others (and also allows you to exclude those that have already received it). And they also give basic stats on messages, like how many people have received it. Pownce has an AIR desktop application, although there are similar apps for Twitter, too. Another thing to consider that’s not on the chart - Twitter has had, and continues to have, massive performance issues. It is slow or down way too often.
Services like Twitter and Pownce (and there are others, too - Jaiku, Kyte and many more) are highly viral and benefit from the network effect. People want to join the service that all of their friends already use, and so each new user adds value to the network as a whole. By that measure, Twitter is far ahead of Pownce.
Frankly, unless you really like the mobile aspect of Twitter, there isn’t a whole lot of difference between the two services. I expect Twitter will add most of the Pownce features in the short term anyway. And many of the unique features of Pownce - like file sharing, group messaging, etc., are handled pretty well already by…email. Gmail, for example, lets users send files of up to 20 MB. Pownce lets you send up to 10 MB files, unless you pay for a pro account (then the limit is 100 MB). And email is certainly very useful for private and group messaging.
People use Twitter to quickly tell the world (or at least the people who care) what they are up to and what they are looking at on the web. Like blogging, it’s a one-to-many application that works very well. Twitter does that perfectly, and does little else. Pownce does it, too, but all the other features are really just distractions.
Pownce also does something that I find highly annoying. By default, you receive an email message every time you get a new friend or receive any sort of message. My inbox quickly filled up with dozens of emails telling me I had a message. But to read the message I have to click on a link and go to the service. The only reason for that is to generate page views. It’s easy to turn the notifications off, but most new users will start to get a lot of email clogging their inbox. Not a good way to start things off.
Kyte.tv, which is at its core a media player for personal expression, lets users send a stream of personal information to their friends: drag photos, video and text into the channels and interact with people viewing your content. In our launch post on the service in late April, I described it as falling somewhere between Twitter and Ustream, although Kyte has additional features as well.
The company is based in San Francisco, and raised $2.25 million in an initial round of financing in July 2006. Over the last several weeks they’ve brought on more investors. Swisscom and Holtzbrinck Ventures were announced in May. This week they also announced that Nokia invested in this round.
Kyte Founder Daniel Graf says his company intersects the three fastest growing areas of the Internet right now - social networking, user generated content and mobile. The mobile angle is crucial - whoever corners that market first with a compelling social application stands to gain ground easily. The Nokia and Swisscom investments will certainly help them there.
Kyte continues to evolve the product as well. They just rolled out a Facebook application that gives Kyte users another way to show off their content to friends. And they’ve inked a deal with EMI’s Capitol Records to allow users to add music for free (and legally) to their creations. Users can create a video or photo show with their webcam, add music and publish it in an instant. Graf also says that they will soon offer a cobranded Kyte solution for Swisscom mobile customers.
The company is moving aggressively to evolve its product, and I like that. This is one of those applications, like Twitter, that could sort of float around for a while and then take off suddenly when a tipping point is reached. With solid venture backing from Silicon Valley and European first tier financial and corporate investors, they can attack two large markets at once. I’m bullish on them.
Keeping everyone aware of what you are up to every fleeting, uninteresting moment of your life is a hot area for startups right now. Newly launched Kyte seems to fall somewhere between Twitter and Ustream, two services that let users send a constant stream of data about themselves to interested friends (albeit in very different ways).
Kyte is at its core a media player. Users create an account and set up channels. They can then drag photos, video and text into the channels and interact with people viewing the content.
The service is extremely flexible in its approach to getting content into and out of the service. Users can access their account and add content from their (java enabled) mobile phone, the browser or via email. Viewers can interact with content on the Kyte website, their phone and other websites where users embed content via a widget player.
Kyte can be a place users put occasional content, or a live, Usstream-style live stream of their life. The company says “You could even create a “LifeStream”, a minute-by-minute live show that is published in real-time directly to your MySpace page, website, blog, or mobile phone.”
The company has raised a round of financing ($2.25 million, says Om Malik) from Atomico Investments, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Draper Richards and Ron Conway.
The post below is written by Robert Scoble, a top blogger and the founder FastCompanyTV.
So I’ve had a week now to play around with 
A breakdown of the basic features is in the chart to the right. Pownce also provides a few other bells and whistles not included in the chart. For example, it lets you forward a message to others (and also allows you to exclude those that have already received it). And they also give basic stats on messages, like how many people have received it. Pownce has an 
