You've got to love Web kitsch. The YouTube tube socks probably still take the cake in my mind, but slide show creation tool Animoto's latest offering isn't too shabby either.
Twenty dollars gets your rave-worthy slide shows burned onto DVDs and sent to friends and family members. To go hand in hand with that, the service has also bolstered resolutions two-fold, bumping up the respectable 432x240 videos to 864x480 while simultaneously increasing the frame rate from 15 to 24 fps--the same as a movie projector.
The larger sizes come at a price though. The extra resolutions cost an extra $5, but can be applied to previously created shows. That extra resolution is most noticeable on big-screen TVs and computer displays. The company is making these larger videos available in one of two formats--an ISO file that can be burned straight to DVDs to be playable in set-top boxes (using a program like Nero), as well as a QuickTime MOV file that can be squirreled away on your hard drive or sent to friends using large file transfer and hosting services.
The folks at Animoto have put together a really useful head-to-head demo here, where you can see the standard versus premium videos right next to one another. Below is a still capture from the same shot.
Related: YouTube sucks: 4 sites that do video better
Five bucks makes your videos about twice as sharp as before, which is useful for big-screen TVs and wide-screen computer monitors.
(Credit: Animoto Productions)
Today PollDaddy is launching a new line of pro services for users looking to get a little more from their polls than the average Joe. There are two new tiers, which run at $20 and $99 a month respectively. Pro users get to remove the PollDaddy branding, effectively turning the service into a white-labeled solution. They can also get support over the phone, as well as a sizable increase on response caps up to 1,000 and 10,000 responses, which for free account holders is limited to just 100.
The real hook, however, is the new set of reporting tools that let you see where your voters are coming from and can detect fraudulent votes by IP address and cookie manipulation. For anyone who's looking to use a service like this for something important, you're going to want this capability as it can deter gaming and help keep your operation legit. As an added security measure, you can also now opt to keep responses confidential.
In addition to the new pro accounts, free users are getting a slight bump in their service as well. Free accounts now get three times as many answers than before (now 100 up from 30). There are also new formats to view tracked data, including XML and CSV exporting along with an RSS feed you can subscribe to so you can watch the data as it comes in.
While we've never done a hands-on with the service here on Webware (despite them being a Webware 100 award winner), the premise is fairly simple. Users can create Web polls that can be embedded on any blog or Web site. Everything is set up to be extremely easy to use, to the point where you really don't need to know any HTML or coding to put together fairly complex, multipart polls and surveys. The service originally started out as a widget to put on your blog or social-networking profile, but with the launch of their pro accounts, it's clear they're trying to take things to the next step and offer something with a higher degree of control.
See where your poll respondents are coming from and break them down by percentage. You can also now export the date into a multitude of formats like XML and CSV files to export and use in other applications.
(Credit: Polldaddy )
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