Video cameras acting as an express lane to YouTube are gaining in popularity. First there was the Flip, now comes the VHoldr.
(Credit:
Twenty20 Corp.)
The VHoldr is smaller and pricier than the nifty Flip Video camera, but it sets itself apart by enabling hands-free operation. The VHoldr is a ruggedized, weatherproof video camera that is palm-size, but intended to be worn and not held. It's meant to capture video on the go, say, while you're speeding down a snow-covered mountain, bouncing over mountain bike trails or engaging in any other extreme sport of which you'd like to see the video footage. There's no live element to it, but the video is easily uploadable to the Web (hopefully) after editing.
There's a single button that turns the camera on and begins recording, a lens that rotates 180 degrees, and a variety of mounts for the unit. Once video has been recorded, a USB cable sends the video to a PC, where VHoldr software will allow users to edit and upload footage directly to VHoldr.com, the video-hosting site for users, or YouTube.
Founder Marc Barros created the company in a schoolwide business-plan competition he entered with two others while undergraduate students at the University of Washington. After winning third place, their company, dubbed Twenty20 , made helmet camera attachments for camcorders out of their Seattle garage, which they sold to their fellow extreme sports enthusiasts.
The latest incarnation isn't available until December, but Barros was showing it off to investors and journalists at this week's TechCrunch 40 conference, a showcase for start-ups. The new version will sell for $350 and be available through 400 retailers.
For what has seemed like nearly an eternity, online game god Raph Koster has been mum about Areae, the company he formed after leaving his previous job as chief creative officer at EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies publisher, Sony Online Entertainment.
At conference after conference, Koster has spoken, representing Areae, but really never revealing even the slimmest of morsels, beyond an initial statement that the company was gong to "reinvent virtual worlds," about what the San Diego startup was up to.
On Tuesday, however, that finally changed when Areae unveiled some details about its product, Metaplace, at the TechCrunch 40 conference in San Francisco.
For those of us that weren't able to attend, we were left to sitting in front of a computer, hitting refresh on a browser, waiting for the Metaplace Web site to be updated to reflect the product's details.
In my case, that also meant IMing with my colleague, Rafe Needleman, who is at the conference, and who is sending me details as they emerge.
"We are re-inventing virtual worlds that stop working like AOL," Koster said, "and start working the way the Web does....You can build a massive multiplayer game in minutes there are style sheets to make building easier.
Koster said that Metaplace would allow users to employ Web 2.0 tools like tags, wikis and forums in the pursuit of quickly and easily making usable, fun virtual worlds.
"Virtual worlds have enormous potential," Koster said, "but they are obsolete, built on 20-year-old technology. We don't know what you'll do with [this], but that's the power of this new medium and that's why we're so excited."
And then he walked off the stage.
So, what we know is that Metaplace is likely some sort of virtual world construction set, that will allow people to build online games "from Tetris up to role-playing games," though without Koster telling us exactly what it is, we're still only guessing.
If that's what it is, it's not the first to come along. The Multiverse Network has already staked out a pretty impressive position in that field.
But with Koster behind the wheel, Areae is certainly going to have to be taken seriously.
On its Web site, which is now live, it says, "Build a virtual apartment and put it on your website. Work with friends to make a huge MMORPG. Share your puzzle game with friends. We have a vision: to let you build anything, and play everything, from anywhere. Eventually, anyway. We have to finish first."
It also says, "Metaplace is a next-generation virtual worlds platform designed to work the way the Web does. Instead of giant custom clients and huge downloads, Metaplace lets you play the same game on any platform that reads our open client standard. We supply a suite of tools so you can make worlds, and we host servers for you so that anyone can connect and play. And the client could be anywhere on the Web."
Now if only they would tell us what's really going on.
AOL is showing off today a new media sharing and storage service, BlueString. I snuck into the unfinished product after I got a preview, and it looks like it's going to be very straightforward and easy to use. There are several services that do what it does, but few that do it as easily.
BlueString's neat trick is that it manages to work well as both a sharing site--a good place for you to create slide shows of events that you then e-mail to your family or embed on your personal site--and a media storage service.
BlueString is a good media storage service, and it also makes it very easy to create slideshows for friends and family.
The storage back-end for BlueString is XDrive, an online storage and backup service that AOL acquired, and where AOL has clearly been testing BlueString ideas. BlueString's show creator function, for example, looks like a rebuild of a nearly identical feature in XDrive.
Getting media into BlueString is quite easy. The import dialog box allows you to select multiple files to import at once. If you're a user of AOL Pictures, files from there also automatically load into your workspace. These features are being showcased today at the TechCrunch 40 event in San Francisco. BlueString will also import from Flickr, which is great for people who miss the straightforward Yahoo Photos application recently killed in favor of the higher-concept Flickr service.
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