The Under the Radar conference kicked off this morning with one of my favorite panels: three video and voice companies that are trying to take services we're already using and make them better.
First up was Eyejot, which we've covered several times. The core service revolves around video e-mail, although it has recently moved into other areas like Eyejot This, which lets you annotate Web pages with video clips from your Webcam (and even share them via Twitter). There's also a platform that lets site owners add video notes and mail to their service.
There are two levels of service, one free with limited storage and time-expired messages, and premium plans that add additional storage and archiving. Eyejot's CEO David Gellar says the company has enjoyed a "double digit uptake" of users who upgrade to the pro.
Gellar also noted that a mobile client for the service is not in works (at the moment). Gellar calls the mobile field a "moving target" because of hardware and network differentiations between the U.S. carriers.
Ribbit, a telephony platform that's meant to be integrated into Web applications, showed off its wares. Its application for Salesforce.com is launching next month and will cost $25/mo per user. VP of Technology Crick Waters demonstrated the upcoming interface and noted that more than 53,000 calls have been made on developer network. The coolest feature is a familiar looking telephone keypad that can be integrated into Web apps and services.
Ribbit's consumer application called Amphibian, which blends your Web presence with your mobile phone, is launching in the next few months. We profiled it back when it was announced at DemoFALL.
Ribbit's Salesforce.com app will let you call your contacts right from Salesforce. It's launching next month. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Vello, "the conference that calls you," solves a wonderfully irritating problem with conference-calling services. Instead of having people deal with special call in numbers and PIN codes, it only requires meeting creators to plug in phone numbers (from Outlook or your Web contact list) and the service will create the conference call and phone all the members. It also has a single number people need to call (1-888-Vello) that will connect you to the right conference based on your phone number.
Mark Dzwonczyk, president and COO of Vello, showed off the service live by calling nearly everyone in the room who had given their numbers up at the cocktail party the night before. The one rub is that minutes on Vello cost nearly three times the price of normal conference calls for the host. Dzwonczyk says that the company will adjust to market prices, but for now are going for large businesses that are going for simplicity.
Be sure to keep an eye on Webware throughout the day. We'll have continuing conference coverage as the day progresses.
Update: Fixed Vello's URL and and info on Eyejot's mobile efforts. For more see the comments. (thanks David)
I'm a fan of Eyejot, one of several online products that makes it very easy to send a video message. Eyejot uses Flash and your Webcam to skip the annoying video upload stage: you just just look at your camera, press record, and you're making a video. Eyejot messages come as e-mails with links to the recordings. Today the company extends on that model with a new Eyejot This feature that will, optionally, send a message to your Twitter account.
Eyejot This embeds your videos on top of the Web pages you're commenting on.
Eyejot This is really designed to let you create video commentaries on Web pages, and it's accessed by a bookmarklet you install in your browser. When you click on it and record video, the result is a link to the Web page you were on when you clicked it, with your small video in a frame above the page. Here's an example.
You can also use Eyejot This to send your recordings by e-mail, but e-mail recipients don't get the same cool video-on-Web-page format that Twitter readers get.
See also: Twiddeo, a mashup of V.Social and Twitter that works from a mobile phone (cool) but not from a Webcam (boo), and Seesmic, a soon-to-be-released video utility that will also create Twitter messages.
Azooca is a new video mail service that launched earlier this month. It joins the ranks of other video mail services like Springdoo, EyeJot, and Gabmail to let users send and receive video messages. Azooca steps it up a notch by giving its users a full-fledged e-mail in-box, along with 250MB to store attachments and incoming video messages.
Recording videos is managed entirely within the e-mail composition window, and users get three simple controls to record, play, and stop the recording. Users can also preview their video messages before sending, or save them as a draft. Video clips are limited to just one minute, although Azooca creator Brian Zheng tells me they'll be increasing that limit, along with the in-box size, in about two months.
Azooca is a free video mail provider that also lets you keep track of all your sent and outgoing video messages.
(Credit: CNET Networks)At first glance, I felt like giving Azooca a little bit of flack for its 250MB cap on the in-box, although just a few years ago major e-mail companies were only able to offer e-mail in-boxes in the double digits of megabyte storage capacity. Still, compared to today's big guys like Gmail's 3 gigabytes and Yahoo's unlimited capacity, it's just hard for me to imagine running out of storage with Web mail.
In testing, I found a rather irritating snag. Messages sent showed up in the spam folders in Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail. While this isn't really Azooca's fault, your messages could go unseen by potential recipients. I can't fully recommend Azooca for this reason, although I think it's a noble effort. I also wouldn't use it instead of a service like Gabmail, which doesn't try to take me away from my current Web mail provider.
Demo 07 is over. Erica Ogg and I scoped out almost all of the 68 introductions at the show, and it was hard to pick out the best. But we did it anyway. Here are our favorite products from Demo:
Vuvox: Gorgeous multimedia presentation creation tool, designed for the MySpace and MTV crowd. Best demo of a Web app I've ever seen.
Jaman: Indie film site. What makes this service so good? Is it the HD quality, or the community? Nope. It's the content. The team is jetting to all the good film festivals and buying up the streaming rights to the good movies.
Adobe Apollo: Very important cross-platform software platform that will get Internet applications out of the browser. Apollo apps should start showing up this year.
Zink: Prints without ink. Printers can be small enough to fit on a camera. The founders don't want you to say "thermal paper," but that's what it is. Just in color. Or put another way, "Polaroid 2.0."
Eyejot: Supersimple video voice mail. No client required. Both Erica and I are actually using this new service.
Launching at Demo 07 tomorrow: Eyejot, a simple and free video e-mail service that doesn't require a download. I tried the service last week and found it to be slick and very simple. It uses Flash to do what installed software video e-mail products do. The downside is that it's a separate service, so if you want to send a vid-mail, you've got to go to the Eyejot Web site to do so. Integration into e-mail clients is coming, CEO David Geller told me.
The Eyejot message window.
(Credit: CNET Networks)People receive Eyejot messages in their ordinary e-mail, as pointers to the video messages that are hosted on the Eyejot site. You also can go to Eyejot.com and view your video in-box there. Video quality is not stellar--if you bob your head your image will pixelate badly--but it's good for quick, informal messages.
Eyejot is a Web service, so of course there's a widget for it. You can embed a video greeting on your site and allow visitors to reply to you directly from the widget, which is slightly reminiscent of what Stickam offers. In my testing, the video greeting service was not yet working reliably, so I have not included my widget here.
In the free version of the service, the messages expire eventually, are advertising-supported, and are limited to 30 seconds each. If you pay for the "pro" version (about $5 a month), messages are retained indefinitely. You also can record longer messages, and transcode the messages to audio-only and 3GP formats for playing on mobile devices.
There are other video services that record to the Web directly from a Webcam (for example, Viddler), but I like Eyejot because it's conceptually simple and very easy to use. I'd like it better if it also allowed live two-way videocalls, though.
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