Okay, look, I'm with John Gruber on this one: you companies abusing punctuation, please just stop. I'm talking to you, Hey!Watch. First off, you've got an exclamation point in there, and second of all, you're totally missing spaces. When the English sentences become one long word in roughly 2025, I'll be blaming you. Whocouldreadasentencelikethisanwyay? It's annoying.
That said, your service is still pretty cool. Upload a video to the site and you can convert it into pretty much any format you like (DiVX, MP4, TiVo, DVD, WMV, Flash, etc.) for any device you like (iPod, Zune, PSP, DS, Wii, etc.). Pretty snazzy, and they're adding more all the time. Another handy feature is that they put all of your converted videos into an XML feed, so you can subscribe with iTunes and have it automatically download the videos when they're done. I'm not sure whether it takes longer to upload, wait for the convert, and download it then to just run the conversion yourself, but I suppose it depends on your hardware and net connection. The free plan is pretty good, but for $5/month you can add more monthly encoding sessions, longer videos, and more features.
Just get rid of the wacky name, okay?
[via Lifehacker]
I've had occasion to log on to the Internet from a moving vehicle (not while driving, of course). It's frustrating to be on a six hour drive and unable to get any work done, especially when deadlines are imminent and Internet access is a must. On those occasions, I've turned to my trusty cell phone, which can work as a Bluetooth modem, but it comes at the cost of racking up the minutes.
Car rental company Avis is taking an alternate approach, including a device in some of their cars that will turn each vehicle into the equivalent of a Wi-Fi hotspot. On the hardware end, it consists of a bridge device that will use 3G phone signals to communicate with the Internet, which in the cars will be recognized as Wi-Fi.
The In-Car Router is designed by startup Autonet; it plugs into the car's cigarette lighter, and will reportedly provide a signal up to 100 feet away in around 95% of the country (so if you carpool effectively, you could even share the connection with your friends in the next car). One certainly hopes it won't entice drivers to try and browse while behind the wheel.
[via Slashdot]
Sneaky sneaky, Google. You thought you could just slip in multiple destinations for Google Maps and nobody would notice. You thought wrong, my friend—dead wrong. And just to show you how wrong, I'm going to plan out a crazy cross-country trip with your new feature there.
It's certainly a welcome addition to Google Maps which, prior to this, really only let you get directions to one place. Ever. Or well, in one window. Now you can add a seemingly infinite number of stops to your trip. Simply plot your standard trip, and then scroll the left-hand frame (containing your driving directions) down and hit the "Add Destination" link.
Find the fastest way to visit your local supermarket, drugstore, library, and pet salon! Plot a cross-country trip! For instance, my trip from Boston to Hartford to Arlington to Rochester, NY to Oakland, CA (with stops in Lincoln NE, Salt Lake City UT, Reno NV, and Sacramento CA). There's no end to the places you could go! Well, except maybe Hawaii. Or Europe.
[via Lifehacker]
As we mentioned the other day, YouTube added a QuickCapture feature that lets you record directly from their website. While this will no doubt result in the wild proliferation of of drunken shenanigans, those more careful and cautious videographers may be dismayed at the lack of any sort of editing capability.
That nice is being filled, but not by YouTube. Gotuit's Scenemaker offers YouTube integration both via its website and a toolbar. Paste in a YouTube URL, and Scenemaker loads up the video, offering you simple controls for cutting and splicing clips. It's not about to replace Final Cut Pro, or even iMovie, but it is a nice and easy way to edit YouTube videos without having to resort to witchcraft. You can also retag the video with your own keywords.
Videobloggers everywhere (and their watchers) thank you, Gotuit.
[via Lifehacker]
Earlier this year, VoIP provider Skype proclaimed that their SkypeOut service would be free for the remainder of 2006. SkypeOut, if you're not familiar, is the portion of the service which interfaces with the standard telephone network and makes it easy for you to call Mom without Mom having to worry about configuring her computer. Well, 2006 is nearly up, so what's the deal going to be for the next year?
Today Skype announced that SkypeOut would be available for $30 for a year, with unlimited calling in the US or Canada. Previously, SkypeOut operated only on a pay-per-minute scheme, charging a few cents for every minute that your call lasted. The charges per minute varied depending on whether they were domestic and international, but they were usually pretty cheap across the board. How does the new plan compare?
Well, it works out to $2.50 a month, which is a pretty nice deal if you do a lot of calling. Even better, if you sign up before the end of January, you'll be able to snag the year for half price ($14.95).
The old system of purchasing credit is still an option (at a rate of 2.1 cents/minute for US and Canada), which is nice, since I still have around €7 in my account. As my cell phone does free long distance, I'm not too tempted but it still seems like a good offer.
[via Ars Technica]
You love watching videos on YouTube, admit it. But when you want to put a video up on YouTube, it requires fiddling with software, codecs, uploading, all that fun stuff. Until now. YouTube has now introduced a Quick Capture feature on their website, which lets you use your video camera to capture footage and upload it directly to YouTube, all automatically.
I gave it a quick try with my MacBook's iSight and it seemed to work well enough. It even gives you options for both video and audio inputs. The interface is pretty simple, but there's really no support for any sort of editing, and the post-recording processing takes a while. What you record is what you get, so you'd better get it right on the first try, or else it's back to the beginning. Still, it's a simple setup for those looking to get videos of their dog doing stupid trick on the Internet pronto.
[via Lifehacker]
Another day, another movie download service. This time it's ClickStar, a venture designed to let you download movies for $20 and watch them on your computer or your television set (with an add-on piece of hardware). What's going to set this service apart from its many, many rivals?
Celebrity.
The face behind this service is none other than Hollywood actor Morgan Freeman. Freeman and his producing partner (and former computer scientist) Lori McCreary decided to launch ClickStar to preempt in the movie industry the kind of piracy the music industry had been facing. The company has been in talks with all sorts of major players, from Tom Hanks to News Corp. president Peter Chernin.
Is it likely to suceed? Freeman is an extremely charismatic figure who is well-beloved by both the general populace and the industry, and that doesn't hurt them (heck, the man has played God). However, ClickStar doesn't do anything new: $20 is too high for downloadable content, and with no access to the iPod, they lack an end-to-end solution. They do have integration with Windows Media Center, but that software has yet to take off either. And in appeasing the studios with DRM, they're bound to alienate consumers—at the moment, that's largely how the balance goes.
[via Washington Post]
Yeah, yeah, everybody's blustering on about 802.11n and its potential for 200Mbps speeds, but that's nothing compared to the gigabit Ethernet on most desktop machines nowadays. And the IEEE is prepared to blow that speed out of the water as they start work on a new, 100Gbps standard for Ethernet.
The goal is to get 100Gbps working for up to 328 feet of multimode fiber, and six miles of fiber optical cable. The implementation will most likely require parallel 10G Ethernet lines over multiple fibers, but this is a speed as of yet unreached by any networking standard. More bandwidth and speed is becoming more and more necessary as the content that people are downloading off the Internet gets more complex.
If HD video content, for example, is ever to be truly efficient, bandwidth speeds will have to be significantly increased. Of course, Wi-Fi still has Ethernet beat on sheer convenience, but its lack of range means it's still predominantly a "last ten feet" solution. For the foreseeable future, wired is still the way the Internet will be getting to your house.
[via Slashdot]
