Webware

Kevin Rose, of Digg and Revision 3 fame, just launched an invite-only alpha of his latest project, Pownce. Pownce lets you share files, links, and other info with your friends. It's not an original concept. Yet Pownce makes an extremely good first impression. (Earlier, we had invites to give out--but we're sorry, they're all gone now.)

Pownce's useful and fun desktop app.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Pownce strongly reminds me of Tubes (review) and Izimi (review), and little less so of AllPeers (stories) and Pando (quick hit). It's also reminiscent of the file-transfer feature of various instant-messaging clients.

There's also a heavy dose of Twitter (stories) in Pownce. Every time you send a file or note, it's added to your running feed of activities that anyone can view; likewise, it's easy to see the public feeds of other users and the private items posted by your friends.

You can send items to individuals on your list, to everyone, or to groups you set up (for example, you can have a family group, a group for a project at work, and so on).

At the moment, Pownce lets you send plain text notes, URLs, files, and event invitations (and it tracks RSVPs). I would not be surprised to see audio or video recording functions built into the product, which would make Pownce an interesting alternative to Twittergram.

Pownce works through a Web page, and there's also a slick Adobe AIR (formerly Apollo) desktop app.

It's easy to discount Pownce as a me-too concept. In fact, it's several. But it's extremely well put-together--capable yet easy to get into and use. And useful. And fun. Try it if you can.

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I'm in the Connected Innovators session of the SuperNova conference. This is where thirteen start-ups are going to pitch to the audience. I hear that one of these companies is a fake, and that conference organizer Kevin Werbach is going to announce that fact after the last presentation. I'm going to liveblog the presentations as they happen. Let's see if we can spot the faux one.

These are the 13 companies. More as they come on stage.

Adap.tv. I just covered these guys yesterday. It's a video-advertising company. Not fake.

AdaptiveBlue is a semantic Web company. It makes a very interesting and useful plug-in, "BlueOrganizer," that makes browser pages personalized with special shortcuts based on the content. A new service, "SmartLinks," lets site publishers and bloggers insert smart links in their own content. I've talked to the CEO several times.

Aggregate Knowledge. This company launched at Demo six months ago, so not fake (too easy). It makes a service that site managers can use to insert relevant, customized links on pages. Useful for online retail and also for news sites.

CastTV makes video search. Just met with them a few minutes ago. Looks very promising, but I don't have access to the site yet so can't evaluate. Not fake, but not live either, so fake-ish.

Critical Metrics. This one is new to me. It's a site where people recommend music. Like we need another music discovery system. But the site is live and quite functional, so not fake, even if it is.

Jangl. A very interesting company that assigns phone numbers to relationships, not people. We've covered Jangl before. News: Company is launching Facebook integration very shortly.

Pando Networks makes a personal file transfer system. Good for sending your videos to your mum. We have covered Pando before. Real. CEO is talking about a new technology that uses BitTorrent-like distributed transfer technology to make sending popular files much less expensive.

SodaHead. New to me. Maybe the fakester? I don't think so. It's a "social voting" service (since when is voting not social?). It lets you create polls and insert them as widgets on your own site. Looks pretty useful, actually. You know how much Webware loves voting. SodaHead does a bit more, by allowing users who vote to see other polls that they might also like to participate in.

Spock. Previously covered. A very interesting people search engine that competes with Wink.

Wize is a reviews aggregator (review). It parses Web content that evaluates products, and assigns a numerical score to the reviews it reads, so it can present to the user a single score for products that may have been reviewed hundreds of times. Real, but this quote from the CEO makes it sound fake: "Commerce is where the money is."

ZapMeals. A service that delivers home-cooked meals from people and restaurants with excess capacity. Almost plausible. But fake. The Powerpoint (on the site) is worth checking out, though--it's a textbook example of a Web 2.0 pitch. Your business 101 exercise: find the flaws.

ZenZui makes a cool iPhone-like user interface for mobile phones. We covered ZenZui in March.

Zing makes technology behind Wi-Fi-enabled music players. Not new. Latest news is that the company powers Sirius Radio's Stiletto player.

And that's it. Nice lineup of start-ups. I would have liked to see more new companies. It would have made the spot-the-fakester challenge more fun. Here's the SuperNova voting page.

Sharing files from your PC is nothing new. BitTorrent is all about sharing media files with the world, as Napster was before it. And file sharing products like Pando, eSnips, Titanize, Box.Net, YouBackItUp, and many others make it possible to share other files, or even entire directories and hard drives.

So when the team from Izimi pitched me on their new PC-based file publishing system as "the future of Internet publishing," I didn't really share their wonder.

I did try to find the spark of this product over the weekend. What I found was a tool that lets you turn your PC into a read-only file server accessible from any Internet-connected computer. To be very clear: This is cool. You can share any file: photos, videos, Word documents. If you have a lot of files to share, this could save you from the hassle of uploading everything to a sharing service. You could, instead, just point people to your files on your computer. Everything you share gets its own static Web address.

My Izimi page. Are these files online or not? Izimi doesn't tell you.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

I like the concept, but there are problems. For example: No access control. Once you publish a file, anyone can read it as long as your PC is turned on and running the Izimi client. Want to share wedding videos with your family and friends? Great. But if you use Izimi to do so, you also give the whole world the capability to download the movies from your PC and soak up your outbound bandwidth. Actually, there is access control: Terminate the Izimi process on your computer. Then access to your content dries up immediately.

Izimi.com is also a social network for its users, which makes finding content easy. (Too easy; see previous paragraph.) The Izimi Web site keeps a directory of all the files shared using the service. Unfortunately, the service doesn't tell you who is online, so when you click on a file you might get it or you might not; there's no way to tell beforehand.

I have other issues with Izimi's implementation. It takes too many steps to post a file, for instance. If you're posting multiple files, it's tedious. And the Izimi software is a file server only. It won't serve Web sites you design on your computer (except the most basic), and it won't make a media file streamable if it's not inherently. In other words, some files will start playing immediately (MP3s started up right away for me), but some need to be downloaded first (like AVIs). In the case of video files, which can be huge, that puts a real damper on things.

The founders acknowledged my privacy concerns and are planning to build in access controls. I'm waiting. In the meantime, if I want to share files, I'll send out private links through Titanize, or publish my media on a hosting service (like Videoegg) where I don't have to worry about my own system's limited outbound bandwidth ruining the browsing experience for my viewers.

Izimi is launching today.

See also: Tubes.

From January 29 to 31, the AlwaysOn OnMedia NYC conference filled up the luxe Mandarin Oriental Hotel in midtown Manhattan with "disruptors," but not the kind that would be running around trashing the penthouse suite (at least that wasn't my impression of the crowd). These were, rather, the companies that "blogazine" AlwaysOn chose as its "AO Media 100," the year's featured start-ups that are shaking things up along the fault line between traditional media and the Internet. Most of the panels and presentation series, as well as the AO Media award winners themselves, were primarily for enterprise or advertising clients. But a handful, which we'll be showcasing here on Webware over the next two days, could potentially be quite relevant to your everyday lives--if they aren't already. For example, one set of presentations took a look at consumer-generated content--you know, the stuff everyone's been talking about as the centerpiece of this whole "2.0" thing.

The lineup was a bit incongruous, as three of the presentations were consumer-oriented video start-ups, and the other two were services geared toward the advertising community. Consequently, it was difficult at first to gauge a "feel" for the series other than the fact that it's clear that much of the advertising community is curious about the potential for user-generated content to help them rack up more profits. But in retrospect, things actually did fall together a bit more coherently. The consumer services--Pando, ClipSync, and MotionBox--share a common theme in that they're all start-ups with an eye on making online video fit more cleanly into peoples' offline lives. Essentially, they're companies that emphasize that user-generated video on the Internet is not a fad, but rather something that's become deeply etched into 21st-century culture. And the two advertisers--Vidavee and PayPerPost--are trying to capitalize on amateur video's ubiquity by using it as a route to advertising revenue.

Pando. Launched in 2006, Pando is a downloadable application that, according to CEO Robert Levitan, was designed to "help people share media directly with other people." In other words, this free downloadable application facilitates "super high quality, really really large file transfer" in a way that's faster and more efficient than the file-transfer features in e-mail and instant-messaging clients. Levitan especially marketed it as a tool for the hot web-video market: send your home videos to your family, for example. The revenue model is based on in-application banners, embedded video ads, and a set of premium packages that were recently launched.

ClipSync. Founder Itzik Cohen traces the idea for ClipSync back to his days as a professional basketball player in Israel, where he learned about the value of sharing an experience, whether it be from the bleachers of a sporting event or in an online discussion group. Like Pando, ClipSync is all about sharing videos, but ClipSync's model makes it possible for you to watch online video from a number of sharing sites in synch with friends around the world, and talk about it with an accompanying chat feature. "Entertainment is a social phenomenon," Cohen explained. "It's all about sharing moving experiences." So now, um, I guess you can watch that YouTube clip of the scuba-diving cat while simultaneously laughing at it with your friends across the globe.

MotionBox. Out of all the start-ups in this presentation series, this was the one that was most clearly a product of the meme that user-generated online video isn't just for amateur filmmakers or bored kids trying to get famous. It's an online editing and sharing service that founder Chris O'Brien says is "focused on personal video?the video that all of us shoot in our daily lives." So, MotionBox is for the casual users who want to make their home videos something more coherent, but don't know if they want to tackle FinalCut Express or even iMovie. And it's a real reminder that new technology has made home-video gurus out of all of us.

Vidavee. This was the first of the two media-industry-oriented companies, and certainly the better-received of the pair. CEO Mark Brenner was off to an ambitious start in his presentation, citing that Google had enabled the organization of the Web, Microsoft had enabled the organization of the desktop, and Vidavee was out to enable and organize video. Vidavee is a company that utilizes a combination of "consumer-friendly" ad placement and deep-tagging to help content providers figure out exactly what their consumers want, video-wise. One of Vidavee's dozen clients is liberal blog The Huffington Post, which uses the deep-tagging features to see exactly what parts of the videos viewers were choosing to share. So, while Vidavee doesn't specialize in user-generated ads, the consumer force is certainly integral to its model. And the whole Time "Person of the Year" thing could make that appealing to content distributors.

PayPerPost. Suffice it to say that this is a controversial company. CEO Ted Murphy assured that his company's strategy of matching bloggers up with companies that wanted people to rave about their products was "better for advertisers and better for bloggers," but it's raised some major ethical questions. (You know, payola.) To demonstrate, Murphy showed a video that had been created for a Hewlett-Packard digital camera through PayPerPost: a grainy, YouTube-ish clip of two mischievous-looking kids smashing a (non-HP) digital camera with a hammer. It was cute, and funny, and would probably make a more than decent TV commercial. And it's too bad, because PayPerPost's high-profile "blogger bribery" model is likely making it difficult for the potentially lucrative market of user-generated advertisements to get off the ground.

Tubes, a new app going public Tuesday, is a peer-to-peer file-sharing and -synchronization system that can make it very easy to distribute files among multiple users and computers.

It's the application I've been looking for to solve this real-world problem: Every other year, my wife's family gets together for Christmas. This past December, her four siblings and their families gathered in her parents' house in Baltimore (the family doesn't believe in hotels, so it was cozy). There were eight digital cameras in operation. After the holidays, we all scattered back home, and the great photo archive of our time in Baltimore fragmented.

A series of Tubes

(Credit: CNET Networks)

With the Tubes app installed on all our computers, we could simply all drag our photos into our shared Baltimore Christmas folder, and we'd all have access to all of them.

I tried it, and it works as advertised. Once set up, you can create as many "tubes" as you want and share them among your own PCs or with friends, family, and so on. Any files you drop into given tubes are replicated to the other machines. People you invite can be given read/write access or just be set up as readers. Those who have write access can add and change files, and those changes will be synced back to all subscribers.

The Tubes synchronization engine works in the background when a PC is online. When a PC is offline, its users still have access to all the files in its tubes and can continue to work with files in them and make changes. When they go back online, the files are synced again. If there are conflicts, Tubes copies all versions of a file.

In addition to my test case of sharing group photos, Tubes could also be very useful for geographically distributed workgroups and as a repository for files created by consultants for their customers.

It's cool because it works. It's easy to use. It appears quite robust. The replication engine means that when subscribers want to open a file, they don't have to download it--it's presumably already copied on to their machine. And Tubes even makes a cute pneumatic tube sound when you drop a file in it.

Tubes files work just like Windows directories.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

But there are snags. For one, it's Windows only, which is a real bummer if anyone you know is on a Mac or Linux box (this makes Tubes a nonstarter in my test case, since two people in my wife's family are Mac heads). And while the app itself is smallish, it requires the latest .Net framework, which is so much of a beast to install that I could not in good conscience point my less PC-savvy friends to the application.

Also, Tubes makes copies of all the files you drop in it, so if you're going to put a bunch of photos in a tube, you'll need to remember that the versions in your My Pictures folders are not the ones in the tube. This is a good security measure and good for communal work spaces, but it might be confusing for some users. (To share folders directly, you can use FolderShare or BeInSync.)

Finally, there's no chat associated with a tube, which seems to be a missing feature. It'd be nice if people could leave notes in a tube when they made file additions or changes.

Once there's a Mac version, Tubes could become a powerful collaboration and sharing platform. There are also other shared and online storage products worth looking at if Tubes sounds interesting to you: see BoxCloud, Box.net, Omnidrive, Pando, and Sharpcast.

Short of paying for hosting services or using P2P tools such as Pando, there aren't many ways to upload and share large video files. Viddler, which launched its public beta earlier this month, is a video hosting service with some new tools to enhance both the sharing and viewing experience. Videos can be uploaded to Viddler in batches as opposed to one at a time, a really nice feature. Unlike YouTube and Google Video, which have 100MB limits, individual video uploads are capped at 500MB. During the uploading process, you're shown two separate progress bars; one for the currently uploading video, and another for total uploading status.

The uploader is simple, yet powerful

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Once your videos are uploaded, you can begin the tagging process. Viddler has done something very cool in letting you tag individual parts of the video using what they call timed tags. The same goes for comments, allowing you to leave comments pertinent to specific moments of a video clip. Clicking on a timed tag or comment will immediately skip to that part of the video. For video bloggers, Viddler lets you record straight off your Web cam. Embedding videos with Viddler is easy. There's several ways to get a video onto your MySpace profile page--or wherever else you normally embed videos. You can also easily e-mail them from within the site. The community potential here is huge.

The other thing I like about Viddler is its navigation. Its Explore page in particular gives you half a dozen ways to browse videos, but it's not nearly as overwhelming as YouTube can be. Videos are quick to load, and the quality is comparable to that of other Flash video providers. I would like to see one of these services offer a variable quality by connection, but it appears we're not there yet.

Adding comments is as easy as clicking

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Viddler is a really impressive service. If anything, it improves on YouTube's browsing and uploading experience in almost every way. People feeling hindered by time and size limitations on competing services should give Viddler a chance, as their 500MB cap is very generous, and the uploader is both powerful and easy to use. The community features and commenting system are also very developed for a young Web service. Video bloggers can also enjoy cutting a step out of their production process and not having to use any actual software for their recording. Recommended.

Pando earlier this year launched it service that lets consumers send 1GB attachments with email. Basically, the download gets send across peer-to-peer networks. Now the company has released plug-ins that let you add the attachments without leaving your email application.

"In the first version, you installed the software. Then you opened the application and typed in an email address. We had a standalone product," said CEO Robert Levitan. "Now you can go to Yahoo email or Outlook or Gmail, hit attach and go."

Although consumers tend to be initially skeptical of the software, it works, and it's gaining in popularity. After all, everyone hates bounce backs. 1.8 million consumers have downloaded the company's software so far. About 40 terabytes of data travel over its service a day.

"We're doing five million downloads a month," he said. "Video is most of it."

Pando makes its money on ads: an ad pops up as the recipient is getting his or her payload. Early next year, the company will come out with a premium version with a fairly low subscription fee, he said.

Levitan might be familiar to some of you. He founded iVillage and Flooz, two Internet companies from those crazy days in the late 90s.