Kyte has just released its new Mobile Producer app into the App Store [iTunes link]. While it doesn’t require you have an iPhone 3GS, if you want to take advantage of its best feature, video, then you must have one. And if you do, I think you’ll be pretty pleased with how well it works.
The app, which is $4.99, is very simple. You boot it up, log in (or create a new account), and you’re taken to a screen where you put in a title for your “show” (what you’re about to broadcast). Below that are links to add video, a photo, and/or a link. If you choose to add a video you can easily take a new video, or use one you’ve already shot with your iPhone 3GS. The video capture functionality is fast and works just as well as the iPhone’s own video capturing app.
Always nice for a reporter to bump into a developer who builds mobile applications for startups and gives you a live preview and details of yet-to-be-announced stuff. No worries, he has permission to talk about the apps (he thinks). The man I’m talking about is Julián Moreno from development house Droiders, and he and his team have been hacking away at some fine apps for the Android platform: Kyte, Rummble, TransDroid and an ebook reader for the Google Books database.
In an age when anyone with a video-capable cell phone can have their own TV channel on the Web, it is still the celebrities and rock stars who are getting all the views (just as on Twitter they get the most followers). Kyte CEO Daniel Graf knows this fact all too well. Of the 215,000 video channels on Kyte, nearly all are created by consumers, but only about 1,000 account for more than 90 percent of the mobile videos streamed via the service. And those 1,000 channels are invariably the work of professionals or the cell-phone videos of famous people such as musicians Lady Gaga (iTunes link) and Soulja Boy (iTunes link)
In April, Kyte streamed 50 million videos across the Web, mobile devices, and social networks. Just to put those 50 million video streams into perspective, that is half the number of videos streamed in March, 2009 by AOL, the tenth ranked video site in the U.S. (Hulu, which is No, 3, streamed 380 million videos).
Today, Kyte is launching iPhone apps for partners including MTV, the NBA, Spin Magazine, the rock band No Doubt, and the Los Angeles radio station KCRW, which is using the app to highlight videos of bands playing live in its studios.
Live video startup Ustream is making a big push into mobile. Today it is launching a mobile business division, as well as a new set of mobile video broadcasting apps (which can be found here, after login). Right now, the apps work on a wide variety of Nokia phones, including the N95, and on the iPhone, but only jailbroken ones. Alas, the company is still waiting for approval from Apple to release the app through iTunes. Meanwhile, its view-only iPhone app for watching live video streams is approaching one million downloads.
The broadcasting app, however, is what we are excited about. It includes integrated chat, audience polling, and GPS mapping. The polling lets broadcasters ask their audience what they want to see or what actions they should take in a live broadcast situation. Another key feature: mobile video broadcasters can send out a message via Twitter or Facebook to their audience to tell them when they are about to start streaming live. (See video below). Under the hood, Ustream has developed its own low-latency streaming technology which reduces the amount of transcoding that needs to be done on the server as well as the amount of buffering that needs to be done on the phone.
Given the incredible popularity of the iPhone, many entertainers (and the studios backing them) are eager to establish a presence on Apple’s App Store, but don’t necessarily want to invest in the resources needed to independently develop their own iPhone applications. Today Kyte has launched its iPhone Apps Framework – a turn-key solution that allows Kyte partners to create applications that can include video, live chat, and monetization options with a minimal amount of development costs. Alongside the launch of the new platform, Kyte is announcing five artists from IGA records who have already released their iPhone applications, including the following free apps [all iTunes links]: The All American Rejects, Keri Hilson, Lady Gaga, The Pussycat Dolls, and Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em.
Besides Twitter feeds, RSS, and chat, Kyte also offers a listing of each artist’s most recent videos taken using Kyte.tv’s mobile phone video apps. And, perhaps most importantly for the artists, each app features a list of links to songs in the music section of Apple’s iTunes store.
Kyte isn’t the first company to launch a platform for branded iPhone applications. Other options include Infomedia’s Mobile Syndication Solutions, through which MC Hammer built his app.
Mobile video service Kyte is trying hard these days to please its biggest (paying) customers: music labels and their artists, primarily. Performers such as 50 Cent and John Legend use Kyte to record behind-the-scenes moments on their cell phones and then share them over the web immediately with their fans. To help its customers manage their mobile video channels just as they would any other Web property, Kyte will introduce a new dashboard and management console on Tuesday at a conference in Las Vegas.
The Kyte Dashboard is a bit like Google Analytics for cell-phone video. It is filled with charts showing the number of views for each show, ad impressions, bandwidth usage, most watched shows, and the sites where the embeddable videos are watched the most.
So far, Kyte has been focusing on getting mobile content (videos shot on a cell phone) onto the Web. For each publisher of mobile video, many of them rock stars and rappers, Kyte creates a branded video player they can put on their Websites.
Now, with more media consumption happening right on many mobile handsets, Kyte is going the other way around and letting bands and brands turn their Kyte player into a mobile Website complete with banner advertising, chat, fan comments, ratings, and sharing features.
Hot on the heels of its competitor Qik, mobile video service Flixwagon has released an application for the iPhone 3G that allows users to stream live video from their cell phones. Qik released a similar application for the iPhone 3G yesterday. Unfortunately, like the Qik app, this will only work on jailbroken (hacked) iPhones, which severely limits the potential user base.
Here are the instructions if you’d like to install it:
-On Cydia, make sure you refresh all ‘Sources’ under the ‘Changes’ tab, and then Install Flixwagon from “Sections/Multimedia”.
-On installer 4: make sure you refresh ‘Sources’, and then install Flixwagon via “Categories/Multimedia”. The app is also available via Community resources like iSpazio.
Apple’s ban on applications using the iPhone’s camera is just one of the seemingly arbitrary restrictions the company is placing on developers. What makes the restriction especially annoying is the fact that the camera is actually designed to capture video. Some users speculate that the lack of a sanctioned video app may be because of Apple’s concerns with the iPhone’s already lackluster battery life, while others believe that the phone’s developers don’t have it very high on their priority list. Update: A developer I’ve spoken to says that the camera buffer is simply a part of the phone developers are not given access to yet, but that this likely has more to do with creating a sandboxed environment than Apple explicitly forbidding video apps.
Either way, the fact that Apple is rejecting applications that have significant demand and no malicious qualities has frustrated users and developers alike. Apple’s lack of communication and hazy Terms of Service may cause the App Store to stagnate, as developers become wary of creating something truly innovative only to have it rejected.
Notably absent from the race to get streaming video to the iPhone is Kyte, a direct competitor to Qik and Flixwagon. Kyte may be trying to avoid any disagreements with Apple, as it already it has an Apple approved application available in the App Store (which can only handle images, not video).
Nokia doesn’t want to miss the next wave of mobile technologies so it is doubling down on its venture investment activities. The cell phone giant is putting another $150 million to work in Nokia Growth Partners, a fund in which it is the only limited partner. This brings the total capital in the fund to $250 million (Nokia initiated the fund with $100 million in 2004). That is in addition to a $100 million fund of funds also run by Nokia Growth Partners on behalf of Nokia, which is used to sprinkle cash around to other VC firms.
So far the fund has done best investing in mobile chip companies, some of which have been acquired by ATI (BitBoys for $44 million), Broadcom (Global Locate for $143 million), and Dolby (Coding Technologies for $250 million). But it is also an investor in mobile video service Kyte. Generally, it is a alter-stage growth fund that looks for companies with a product ready to ramp up.
The new cash comes at a time when the mobile Web is generating excitement again in Silicon Valley. Most of that excitement right now surrounds the iPhone. Throwing around a little cash to encourage startups to develop cutting-edge apps for Nokia phones is not a bad strategy. The fund will also invest more heavily in China and India, where mobile growth far outstrips the U.S.
Over the course of the last year we’ve seen an explosion of startups looking to take streaming video to the mobile phone. Smartphones with high-speed data plans and video cameras are becoming increasingly commonplace, and many users are eager to turn their phones into handheld recording studios, even at the cost of video quality.
Well-known blogger Robert Scoble, who once said that he would “only use HD camcorders”, has become one of the new services’ most vocal supporters. Last month he predicted that Kyte would eventually overtake the competition, based on its interface and devices that support playback.
What he neglected to analyze was the audio and video quality of each service, which are obviously key components of media streaming. So we’ve decided to put them to the test. We’ve recruited Sarah Austin of Pop17.com, who has helped us record the same interview four times (once with each service). The questions may get a little repetitive, but at least the videos are easy on the eyes.
We’ve done everything we can to make the tests as consistent as possible. Each video was shot using the respective app’s highest quality setting on the same Nokia N95 smartphone. And we’ve used the same location, lighting, and Wi-Fi access point for each test.
Qik
Qik began testing in November 2007 with support for a limited number of Nokia smartphones. In March the site annouced a partnership with popular lifecasting site Justin.TV. The number of phones supported remains limited, but the site has recently announced support for the Windows Mobile platform (though only on a select number of phones so far), and the release of a version for jailbroken (hacked) iPhones. Qik has raised about $4 million in funding.
Video:
Audio:
Player:
Kyte
Kyte opened its media distribution channels in April 2007, but it wasn’t until almost a year later that it launched its streaming video service. Kyte has managed to recruit a number of big-name celebrities like 50 Cent, who prominently features the player on his homepage. Of the services tested, Kyte has by far the most funding, having raised a total of over $23 million.
Video:
Audio:
Player:
Flixwagon
Israel-based Flixwagonlaunched in a limited private alpha in January, and opened its doors to the public earlier this month. Like Qik, the company has also released a version for the iPhone, but it too is for hacked phones only. Flixwagon only has around $1 million in funding, and is reportedly seeking a second round.
Video:
Audio:
Player:
Livecast Livecast (formerly known as ComView) supports Windows Mobile 5/6 and Symbian S60 phones. We began this experiment with the intention of comparing four services, but unfortunately, we couldn’t get Livecast to work. We successfully got the video to upload to the site, but Livecast’s video player is little more than an embedded .mov or .wmv file that never played. We managed to download a video file that worked locally, but that sort of defeats the point, doesn’t it?
Conclusions
We’re going to ignore Livecast for this comparison, because we couldn’t get its player to work at all.
In terms of video quality, Qik and Kyte are clearly a step above FlixWagon, with Kyte barely edging out Qik for the top position. FlixWagon seems to be using more compression on its videos, giving some shots a pixelated look that is especially obvious when there’s movement on camera. Kyte also seems to do this too to a lesser extent, but it’s nowhere near as bad.
Audio is another close call, but we think that Kyte takes the top spot here, too. Qik’s audio comes through clearly, though the volume is a little faint, while Kyte seems to have the ideal mix of loudness and clarity. FlixWagon comes in last – its audio has a very tinny quality that leads to an irritating staticy sound.
Preference in the embeddable players will largely come down to a matter of taste. Qik’s player has the best styling, but it lacks the embedded chat features that are found on Kyte (Qik has a chat button in the player, but it doesn’t seem to do anything). Again, FlixWagon falls short in this area – it’s overly simplistic player is neither stylish nor feature-rich.
What none of these services can offer is native, Apple-approved support for the iPhone, which is easily the most user-friendly smartphone on the market. The first app that can do this (if it’s even possible), will likely become the standard in mobile broadcasting.
It’s not official quite yet, but the iPhone App Store is live and you can download version 2.0 of the iPhone software – which is all you need to run the 552 applications currently available.
We’ve been gathering videos and overviews of many of the applications and have held them until now. We received demo vidoes for dozens of applications, ranging from basic games to complex GPS-enabled social networking applications. Below are some of our favorites.
Among the apps that we didn’t include below (primarily because of their simplicity) are Recorder (a voice recorder), Movies (movie showtimes), and iMaze (a basic maze game).
Social Networking On The iPhone:
The iPhone, with cult-like users and location aware technology, is the perfect social networking device. Earlier this year we speculated that someone would emerge with a killer social networking app for the iPhone. It turns out that there are lots of contenders.
Loopt
Loopt – We’ve been tracking Loopt’s efforts around their iPhone application for months now. In April we posted early screen shots of the app without saying who had built it. Think of Loopt as a simple social network to find local businesses, message friends and send status updates with where you are (using the iPhones location technology). And a key difference with Loopt and many of the other networks below: you can meet new people who are nearby, if they choose to share that information. If everyone used this, you could see who’s single in a bar before you approach them (and flirt with them by phone first), and know the first name and job of everyone at that cocktail hour at the tech conference. We’re big fans of Loopt, and will have more news on them later today. For now, download the free application here.
Limbo
Limbo – Limbo is another geo-aware social network that behaves like a mashup of Twitter, Loopt, and Whrrl. One of the app’s most compelling features is its grid-like diagram that visually groups your friends according to what they’re doing (for example, all of your friends that are Out Drinking will be lumped together, even if they aren’t necessarily drinking in the same place). The app accomplishes this feat by forcing users to select from a predefined hierarchal list of activities (while this might sound restrictive, the list is pretty comprehensive). This categorization allows users to see what they’re friends are up to without having to sift through each of their messages.
On the geo-positioning front, Limbo allows users to interact users who are within a close radius (about a quarter mile), in a manner that is similar to Loopt. You can download the app here for free.
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 More
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.
Kyte has just released its new Mobile Producer app into the App Store [iTunes link]. While it doesn’t require you have an iPhone 3GS, if you want to take advantage of its best feature, video, then you must have one. And if you do, I think you’ll be pretty pleased with how well it works.
The post below is written by 
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 
