SOMEWHAT FRANK

Up In The Air? Me Too

Yesterday I went to see the film Up In The Air with my family for the holidays.You can watch the movie trailer here. Overall I enjoyed the film as it was entertaining and it carries some underlying messages that are worth paying attention to. It's no wonder the film was nominated for six Golden Globes. The movie made me think and so I could not help but write down a few thoughts as certain elements reminded me of myself, especially the references to heavy traveling. It only seems appropriate that I am writing this article while cruising through the air at 36,000 feet.

WE LIVE IN PUBLIC & How The Web Affects Society

We Live In Public Film Screening at SXSW from Frank Gruber on Vimeo.

Have you recently updated your Twitter or Facebook status, posted a photo on Flickr or posted a video on YouTube or Vimeo? I have. This kind of lifestreaming online behavior has become mainstream as the Web 2.0 movement empowered anyone to become an online content creator, trading privacy for a little taste of online fame and a connection with people. 

While I was down in Austin, Texas for South By Southwest (SXSW), I got a chance to see the film screening of WE LIVE IN PUBLIC which took home the Grand Jury Prize at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. The film focuses on the adventures of early dot-comer Josh Harris as he experiments to predict the effects of the Web on society. Ondi Timoner directed the film which documents what happens when the Web takes a stronger hold of our everyday life. The movie takes place mostly in New York and includes appearances by Jason Calacanis, Julia Allison and Meghan Asha (who appears on SOMEWHAT FRANK videos here and here). WE LIVE IN PUBLIC is a must see as we all become more tied to our devices and the Web.

Check out episode 73 on SOMEWHAT FRANK adventures in personal technology as I recorded a couple of short clips from the Q&A session with Director Ondi Timoner after the film and even got to meet her afterward. Also be sure to see the film WE LIVE IN PUBLIC when it is released as it really makes you think how we all live our lives and share so much online. Oh and you can follow Director Ondi Timoner on Twitter too.

Photo of Director Ondi Timoner and I by Jen Consalvo.

blippr Simple Social Recommendations

Looking for something new to read, watch or play? blippr, a startup created by Tag Team Interactive, offers a social utility which aims to facility social recommendations about books, games, movies, music, and (soon) TV from your friends. With blippr users can compile lists of things that they love and "blip" them which is similar to voting for an item (i.e. digg). blippr enables users to discover, recommend, and organize media and share it with their network of friends.

A blippr lifestream view enables users to see the rest of the recently added items thus offering up social recommendations. These recommendations can be be tagged, rated and commented on thus added to the conversation. Users can also purchase a recommended book, movie or video via likes to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Borders. blippr also leverages classic Web 2.0 features like tags, comments and ratings from the rest of the community.

Funny or Die: Will Ferrell's Video Startup

Looking for comedy on YouTube? If so, you might want to check out Funny or Die. The site launched a few months ago but has been attracting some attention as it offers up community-vetted viral comedy videos produced by some popular comedians. You may have already seen The Landlord (shown below) is short sketch that stars Will Ferrell. Interestingly, Gary Sanchez Productions co-owned by Adam McKay and Will Ferrell, took the idea of Michael Kvamme and created Funny or Die.

The idea behind the site is simple, Funny or Die enables its users to upload funny videos and then the community can vote on the videos and decide whether they are funny or die by being sent to the crypt. According to the site there are a few additional levels which are explained as follows:

    Immortal: This video shall live forever like Thor or The Fonz. 
    Walking Tall:  In great shape.
    Kinda Cute: Worth a chuckle or perhaps a guffaw.
    Uh-Oh: Not doing so good.
    The Crypt: This video flat lined.   

For an Immortal video and if you cannot get enough Will Ferrell you might want to also check out, Third Date (shown below) or Will Ferrell as George Bush. Jimmy Fallon also has joined in and produced a spoof of Internet famous lonelygirl15, called lonelyfallon32. Bill Murray will also be making an appearance soon.

Bottom-line: Funny or Die is a great place to upload and vote on funny videos and laugh a little bit.

Google vs. Microsoft, Hollywood Disrupted, OpenID Explained, BitTorrent Video Store and the Feed Reader Market

Photo of the week: With the 79th Academy Awards tonight I felt this photo title Over Hollywood Sign by Jorge Mir offered a good point of perspective.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 02.25.07

Hollywood Disrupted By Social Media?
An opinion piece in the LA Times, titled “The Movie Magic is Gone”, explains how Hollywood is losing its place as the epicenter of cultural products and how movies are losing their relevance as the "barometers of the American psyche". Personally, social media has definitely pulled me away from more and more television and movies the last couple of years.

BitTorrent.com Launches Video Store
BitTorrent Inc, the popular peer-to-peer file sharing software, has released the final details of their long awaited video store. The store itself will go live this Monday, and will offer movie rentals at $2.99 - $3.99, and “download to own” TV shows.

It’s G-Day: Google Launches Apps Premier
Google has Microsoft squarely in its cross-hairs as it launched Google Apps Premier, its subscription package of premium, hosted business applications in direct competition with Microsoft. It does not surprise me. Interestingly, this past week I also heard a radio advertisement for "Breakfast with Google," an event setup to showcase Google @ Work for government organizations.

How does OpenID work?
Good question, this video post offers some perspective on just how OpenID works as explained by Simon Willison. Also Digg announced this past week that they are going OpenID.

How Many Founders Does A Startup Need?
Brad Feld looked at number of founders in successful Internet businesses. The average is 2.09 founders and Brad discusses this number and gives his input.

Netvibes2Go, Pretty Good Actually
GigaOm takes a look at Netvibes mobile experience and reports back on it. Basically, Netvibes setup is easy: create a tab in Netvibes called “Mobile,” and drop in some of these modules.

The State of the Web-based RSS Reader Market
FeedBurner released a great look into the feed market and Read/Write Web took it a step-further by examining the web-based feed reader market. The article also pulls in some numbers from another feed-based business called Pheedo.

Next Net: 25 startups to watch
Business 2.0 has once again listed 25 startups to watch in 2007. Here are last years 25 hottest startups.

Riffs: Rant, Rave & Recommend

Have something witty to say about a particular item? Riffs, an ATTAP Technologies company, offers a feature-rich, social bookmarking, recommendation site for information-sharing details about movies, music, fashion and other sorts of interests. With Riffs you can recommend different items by starting a riff, registering and posting a witty comment about a particular item. Alternatively, you can just rant or rave about an existing item by leaving a comment or simply giving an item a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.” Users can also create and link to webpages associated with specific riffs.

Riffs launched with more than four million items to riff on, including albums, movies, restaurants, events, consumer electronics, games and books. You can add practically anything to Riffs and then you and the rest of the community can riff on it. The most popular riffs are presented on the homepage as well as within its corresponding category. Riffs offers loads of different features, which include RSS feeds for each individual riff and riff profile. Unfortunately, Riffs does not offer category level or popular riff RSS feeds.  Riffs also offers users to tag items as a way to organize items. A screen-shot of the “web 2.0” tag is shown below.

Riffs flexes its social networking muscles by enabling profile creation and the collection of contacts or friends therein. Friends can offer up recommended content to other Riff buddies. Additionally, Riff has implemented a music recommendation engine called iSuggest, which offers up automated music recommendations based on your recorded musical taste. iSuggest is a downloadable application that connects your Apple iTunes library to Riffs. It allows you to get music recommendations right where you listen to music and at the same time helps you keep your Riffs music preferences updated. Qloud and Mog are a couple of other services that sync with iTunes in a similar fashion.

Another interesting feature that caught my attention was the ability to import del.icio.us bookmarks into Riffs so that you and the community can further comment on them. I struggle to see how bookmarks play into the granular item riffs that are already in the system, but I guess Riffs is looking to offer content about just anything; so it makes sense. It is a good way to get people to adopt the system and start to use Riffs as a social bookmarking system.

Check out this online Riff demo about setting up your page. Riff has also provided a demo on how to perform the del.icio.us import.

Bottom-line: Riffs offers a simple repository for information about just about anything you can think of and in true web 2.0 fashion it’s powered by user created riffs or content items, recommendations, comments, rants, raves and other item details.

Mojiti: Add Comments, Captions & Subtitles To Online Videos

The web offers a place for global conversation as anyone can share opinions, thoughts and insight through blogs, online video or comments strings. Annotating the web has been a recent trend as sites like Fleck launched to allow users the ability to add notes to web sites. Wouldn't it be interesting to be able to annotate video on the web in the same way? Mojiti, a privately held US-based company operating out of China, makes it easy for users to add annotations to videos from a number of video sites on the web.

Mojiti works by allowing users to select a video and personalize it with annotations called Spots. There are currently seven different Spot types which include: Text Spots, Subtitle Spots, Speech Bubble Spots, Thought Bubble Spots, Circle Spots, Rectangle Spots, and Image Spots. Certian Spots allow users the ability to add text to the top of the video while others place images into the a video. Users can also create custom Spot Sets which display together in a video. Spots are associated with video time intervals and can be easily navigated through similar to navigating through music tracks in a music player. Once a new video is created Mojiti makes it easy to share by sending a link or embedding it into a web site. Check out embedded video below to see Mojiti in action.

To find out more information about Mojiti check out the Mojiti blog, Mojiti on MySpace or the Mojiti FAQ page.

Bottom-line: Mojiti is an innovative online video product that empowers users to include personalized commentary, opinions and insight in web videos thus further extending the conversations of the web.

CozmoTV Launches Personalized Video Site With Recommendations

CozmoTV, a subsidiary of Cozmo Media which has offices in San Francisco and Boston, recently launched an online video site that focuses on providing users with personalized video recommendations. Users can create custom channels for different types of content. Users can also rate individual videos to on a scale of 1 to 5 stars. These active inputs appear to be used to sculpt personalized video recommendations. According to the CozmoTV web site the idea spawned from the idea that:

“We both loved our TiVo®Boxes and thought that a great service would be to provide simplified search through a Website that would talk directly to your TiVo. (Sorry, TiVo, but we felt that your online scheduler kind of sucked.)”

I first learned of CozmoTV at the TechCrunch 8 Meetup in NYC when I talked with CozmoTV co-founder Alex Rowland. Since CozmoTV had not yet launched I was not able to see a product demo but he did compare CozmoTV to Pandora and TiVo.  I now see the validity in those comparisons though I also think CozmoTV's active inputs personalization model mirrors that of StumbleUpon Video which also recently launched. CozmoTV pulls its videos from YouTube but in doing comparison searches it appears to be only a subset of YouTube videos but as the number of online videos increases I could see this product becoming helpful in sorting through and finding new videos.

CozmoTV created incentives to go check it out and start rating video by offering up 80 Nintendo Wii gaming systems as prizes to the first 80 users who have a user confidence rating of 80 or more. I took some time to see how difficult that might be and I have to admit it is not a walk in the park. I watched and rated hours worth of video and was only able to get my rating up to 10.1%. At this rate, I may be better off looking for a Wii elsewhere but, that aside, I enjoyed creating my own channels and viewing the personalized recommendations.

For other perspectives on CozmoTV's recent launch check out: Rev2.org and Zatz Not Funny!. Also stay tuned to CozmoTV updates via the CozmoTV blog and good luck trying to win a Wii!

ClickStar: Movie Debuts In Your Home

ClickStar, a startup co-founded by actor Morgan Freeman and backed by many Hollywood icons, is set to launch the first ever first run movie distribution site on the web in a few weeks (December 15, 2006) with release of, 10 Items of Less. ClickStar users will be able to purchase a movie for about $20 and watch it on the computer or a TV set with the help of a add-on device. Additionally, ClickStar will enable users to play a movie while it is still downloading. Lori McCreary, ClickStar co-founder, had this to say recently in a USAToday CEO Forum:

"ClickStar is a broadband entertainment service where you can get every movie that you can get on any other broadband entertainment service, but more. We've got first-run movies while they're still in theaters, like 10 Items or Less. You also have artist-created channels, so we're working with some of Hollywood's best-known personalities that have a deep-seated interest in a particular subject. For instance, Danny DeVito is a huge fan of documentaries, so Danny will be the voice of (the channel) Jersey Docs."

With everyone and their brother jumping into the online video market ClickStar's key differentiator will be in the strength of its content. Personally, I would pay to see a first run movie in the comfort of my living room  the day it is released but some are skeptical of the opportunity. Additionally, I think there should be an option to buy to own, similar to purchasing a download to burn a DVD as $20 is about the price of a DVD these days.

Would you use ClickStar to download to watch a just released movie?

Bottom-line: If ClickStar can offer first run movie titles at the click of a button I am pretty confident that they will be successful. However, its pricing and ownership details still need to be tweaked to the liking of the general public as some companies offer users the ability to download to own the movie content to burn to a DVD the day of DVD release.

Related Articles:
ClickStar ready for movie download retake
Q&A With ClickStar's Lori McCreary
A Start-up Fueled By Star Power