supernovae

At a SuperNova mixer yesterday, I met with Jyri Engestrom, founder of the often-compared-to-Twitter nanoblogging service, Jaiku. He told me that the service has a new feature that just went into public beta: Channels. These are like standard personal Jaiku feeds, but shared by groups. Here's the Webware channel. As of this writing, it's pretty spare (being that I just set it up and nobody knew about it until this moment), but you can also check out the Buzz out Loud channel, which has a bit more going on.

Jaiku's group nanoblogs are very much like … Read more

BlogTV is a new livestreaming service that's been making a splash at the Supernova conference here in San Francisco. It's the latest in several live broadcasting services that have popped up, including uStream.TV, Veodia, Mogulus, and Stickam. Like some of its competitors, BlogTV is combining live video and chat in one window, along with a way to embed the entire module on your blog or Web site. It also lets content creators team up with two Webcams at once, a solution that opens up the service for co-hosts, live interviews, or multilocation coverage.

BlogTV isn't just limited to live streams, though; users can record bits of their live broadcast and publish them in an archive. Like YouTube and other video services, users can then comment and rate clips, as well as mark them as favorites. There's also the option to subscribe to an author's channel to keep tabs on future content or see when he or she is broadcasting live. Content is split up into nine different "channels," and users have the options to sort through live and archived clips for each.

BlogTV's embeddable player isn't quite up to snuff compared with some of the other livestreaming players I've seen. While it does show you how many people are watching a program, the integrated chat is a one-way experience. You can see what others are typing, but you can't type back or see who is in the chat room. To participate, you need to venture off-site to the broadcast's page. That being said, BlogTV's chat experience is really well-done. Channel owners can give certain users operations privileges (akin to IRC), kick users, and users can chat privately with one another. There's also all sorts of emoticons and quick options to share with or invite friends to the broadcast.

BlogTV is currently relegated to your computer, although the team behind it is working on a mobile version. I'm expecting something along the lines of Kyte.TV and Veodia, although if there's one thing we've found in testing these services, mobile Webcasting can get a little tricky.

I've embedded a sample BlogTV livecasting module after the jump. Since I don't want to bore you with a CNET office cam (not to say me typing isn't exhilarating), I'm embedding a live broadcast of the Supernova conference from Nir Ofir, one of the founders of BlogTV.… Read more

There's a simple reason that large flat-screen TVs have gained in popularity, and it's not just the cool factor. Even before their prices of plasmas and LCDs began to come down, longtime home theater enthusiasts simply got tired of their impractical projectors, which couldn't be used in the daytime without blacking out the room.

The "Supernova Screen," however, might bring be reason enough for some to switch back. Made by Danish company DNP, the screen uses a special filter to absorb light that would otherwise wash it out. At the same time, according to Electronista, … Read more