Yes, I admit to laughing along with this one, found via Engadget. Enjoy:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Verizon iPhone Announcement | ||||
|
||||
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
Category Archives: Video
Skype Buys Qik To Add Real-Time Video Recording, Sharing
The rumors started flying this morning… and continued for quite some time… and then were finally confirmed by a Skype blog post:
Qik has been around since 2006 and first came on my radar a few years back when Robert Scoble was using it heavily (he hasn’t recently). At the time, though, I still had an iPhone 3G and wasn’t able to use the streaming video (it worked only with the 3GS and now of course the 4) so I didn’t do much myself with Qik. I was, however, very impressed with what Steve Garfield was doing with it. In particular, I remember him bringing it to some Obama events in the Boston area in the run-up to the last US Presidential election and streaming them live from his phone.
The power of live streaming from a mobile device struck me then (and still does now) as quite a powerful content creation tool.
The acquisition of Qik by Skype is somewhat curious because of course Skype already has its own video technology, but the key seems to be in this part of their blog post:
… the acquisition of Qik will help to accelerate our leadership in video by adding recording, sharing and storing capabilities to our product portfolio.
Through this acquisition, we’ll also be able to take advantage of the engineering expertise that is behind Qik’s Smart Streaming technology, which optimizes video transmission over wireless networks.
Beyond the simple video calls we can make today, we’ll now add the recording and storing capabilities. Plus, Qik’s linkage out to many different social networks could help Skype connect out from within its walled garden to the many other social networks out there.
On many levels it’s quite a shrewd move and I look forward to seeing what comes of the integration.
For those interested, here’s the video of Skype CEO Tony Bates:
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
Video: My CNN UK Interview about Skype Supernodes
The reaction to my last post explaining how Skype’s supernodes work has been both amazing and amusing. Largely the reaction points out to me that Skype really needs to do a better job explaining their architecture… but in their absence, others of us will do so.
Anyway, one of the more fun outcomes was that I was asked to appear on a CNN UK show “Quest on Business” with host Richard Quest. Unfortunately the show was not streamed live nor was it available for viewing online later. Quite a FAIL on CNN’s part, in my opinion, because the segment certainly would have been linked to by some of us. In any event, my friend James Enck in the UK captured the segment by the super high tech method of pointing his cell phone at the TV and recording the video. 🙂
The irony, of course, is that we recorded the show entirely using Skype 😉
For those who wish to view the segment, here it is:
It was fun to do and hopefully helped some more folks out there understand a bit more about Skype. (And thanks, James, for capturing it.)
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
Kudos to Mitel on starting to post customer case study videos
Kudos to my friends up at Mitel for posting a customer profile to YouTube, this one of Starwood Hotels & Resorts:
Sure, it’s a very professionally-produced video that focuses on marketing messages… and yes, many other companies are already doing this… but having spent six years at Mitel (2001-2007) and having been a strong advocate of the company moving into social media, I just admit that I’m personally pleased to see them doing this.
Looking forward to seeing more…
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
Now We Know What Happens When The Skype Group Video Free Trial Expires…
When Skype released Group Video Calling with Skype for Mac 5.0 Beta (see my earlier written review and video review), one of the major questions was:
What will happen to group video calling when the free trial ends?
Skype representatives didn’t provide a clear answer at the time.
Now we know the answer…
You get another free trial.
And judging from the email sent by Skype, I’m guessing this means “you will keep getting free trials until we figure out precisely what business model works and/or that the technology is all set”:
We’ll see how long this continues…
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
Video: AstriCon Keynote Demonstrating Asterisk Scalable Communications Framework (SCF)
Want to learn more about the Asterisk Scalable Communications Framework (SCF)? While I wrote about Asterisk SCF last week, Digium has now posted the video of the keynote session. It starts with Digium CEO Danny Windham and then at about the 5:45 mark Kevin Fleming takes the stage. At about 10 minutes Kevin starts bringing some community members on stage to tell some stories… all building up to the actual SCF announcement about 33 minutes in 🙂
Regardless of the long buildup, it’s worth watching if you want to understand where Asterisk is going… the demo is pretty cool, too!
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
VIDEO: Review of Skype 5.0 Beta for MacOS X, including Group Video
Want to SEE the new Skype 5.0 Beta for MacOS X in action? Over on the Voxeo blog for my Emerging Tech Talk video podcast, I posted a video review of the Skype 5.0 Beta for MacOS X. You can see the new UI and see the Group Video calling capabilities:
I’m using the Skype 5.0 Beta for Mac on my personal iMac, where screen real estate isn’t a problem at all and so far it’s interesting… it definitely takes a good bit of time to get used to. Over on my work MacBook Pro, I’m still using Skype 2.8.x until I’m really sure I want to make the switch. 🙂
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
UPDATE: Apple’s FaceTime for Mac – and shutting the video off
Silly me… I had forgotten Apple’s über-minimalist design philosophy. Moments after hitting “Publish” on my hands-on review of FaceTime for the Mac, my friend Stuart Henshall pointed out that the “problem” I listed of not being able to shut off the video was NOT a problem. The answer is simple:
JUST QUIT THE FACETIME APPLICATION!
But, said I… how do I receive calls if the app isn’t open?
Well, as Stuart pointed out to me, followed by multiple comments to the blog, in the background Apple is using their Push Notification framework to listen for incoming calls. And sure enough… after quitting the application I still was able to receive calls fine. When a call comes in the FaceTime application opens up and asks you if you want to accept the call. Simple. Easy.
And yes, “apsd-ft” is sitting there running as a background process:
In fact it seems that the only way to truly sign out of FaceTime is to go into the Preferences of the FaceTime app.
Leave it to Apple to change the way we are used to working (with other video apps) and go for what is a simpler method. Open FaceTime when you want to make a call. Close it when you are done. If a call comes in, it will “just work” and open up the app.
Flickr photo courtesy of striatic.
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
Using Apple FaceTime to connect from a Mac to a… TRAIN?
Received a FaceTime call on my Mac from a +44 number (U.K.) and the first time it didn’t connect… but a little bit later the call came through… and it turned out to be James Body on a train somewhere in the UK!
Apparently James had a 3G MIFI near the window and had his iPhone connected to that via WiFi. James’ audio came across quite well and the video was clear… if choppy from time to time. James said he was experiencing latency around 5 seconds or so.
Still, it was rather cool that it worked as well as it did!
Fun times…
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
Hands-On with Apple’s new FaceTime for Mac (Screenshots)
At Apple’s “big event” today, one of the announcements I found most interesting was that Apple’s proprietary FaceTime video protocol would now be available for Mac computers. To date it has only been available for the iPhone 4 and iPod Touch. Naturally, I had to give it a try! 😉 I’ll show the usage here and then mention some problems I found with this “beta”.
USING FACETIME FOR MAC
Installing FaceTime for Mac was a straightforward download, doubleclick and go through the installer. Once you launch the app, you have to verify the email address you want to use to receive calls. After that, your screen loads to show your video and the contacts in your Mac OS X Address book:
Jim Courtney and I usually try out new toystools like this and sure, enough, he was online and called me.
The first time, though, he used an email address that I did not have associated with my Mac. It nicely automagically called me on my mobile (which was also in Jim’s Address Book record for me) and we had a MacBook-to-iPhone call.
It worked fine and we had a great call. It was actually quite handy in that I could position the iPhone wherever I wanted it to give a decent view.
Next up I gave Jim a call from my iMac using his email address. The call went through to Jim and we were soon talking Mac-to-Mac. Audio and video quality were both quite excellent.
Given Apple’s intense focus on design, it was no surprise that with FaceTime for the Mac after you accepted the call and stopped moving the mouse, the call controls just slid out of sight leaving the focus on the communication you had with the other party. Two views:
Naturally if you move your mouse back over the video window the controls come back in view. One of the controls let you go full-screen, which was quite the experience on a 27-inch iMac 🙂 You also have a control on your window that lets you rotate the view from portrait to landscape. The result looked like this:
And no, Jim’s video was not as crisp when blown up to the full-screen size on my iMac. It was fine for viewing and for our call, though.
After we hung up, I played a bit more with the app and found that in the preferences you can associate multiple email addresses with your Apple account:
The preferences are, as you can see, rather limited.
PROBLEMS
Overall, FaceTime for the Mac seemed to work rather well. I did though, note these issues:
- HOW DO YOU SHUT THE VIDEO OFF? – You read that right… there doesn’t seem to be any way to shut the video OFF. When you launch FaceTime, it takes over your camera and then continues to show you video of yourself in the FaceTime window. There are two issues here:
- Using the camera does impact CPU performance. Not a huge deal on my iMac where I don’t run a huge number of apps, but a MAJOR issue on my already way-over-taxed MacBook Pro that I use for everything.
- I can’t use the camera for anything else. I use Skype all the time for video. I record screencasts and video using the camera. It seems like I have to shut FaceTime off in order to use the camera in another app… but then of course that means that people can’t call me using FaceTime.
Particularly for the second issue, this seems like a major FAIL to me. I asked about this on Twitter and loved this response from David Bryan:
- WHAT ABOUT WINDOWS? – Immediately after the announcement I had Windows-only friends asking “hey, what about us?” Yes, what about them? It’s the same kind of fractured platform strategy like Skype has had. Unlike Skype, Apple is one of the providers of an operating system, so they obviously want to provide as many incentives for people to come over into the Mac world. Still, it would be nice to have Windows interoperability.
- STANDARDS? – Which leads naturally to the last point… where is the open FaceTime specification? We know FaceTime is built on a number of open standards… but where is the specification that would allow other video endpoints to support FaceTime calls? Is it Apple’s goal to lock us in entirely to their products? C’mon Apple, lets get the spec out there so that other companies can support FaceTime and we can grow the video ecosystem!
Problems aside, it’s great to see FaceTime connections being possible to Macs. So far it’s worked quite well (outside of that turning off the video issue 🙂 )
What do you think? Have you tried out FaceTime for the Mac yet?
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or subscribing to my email newsletter.