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Video Recording on my iPhone… or very nearly (thank you 12seconds)

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Disclaimer: We know, love and work with the people from 12seconds.  Impartiality is severely dented, if not discarded outright.

Today 12seconds.tv did a few cool things:

  1. They’ve re-designed their website – cool new look and feel, with a strong focus on video consumption
  2. They’ve concluded their invite-only Alpha phase and opened up in a public Beta where anyone can register and use the site
  3. They’ve had their iPhone application approved and launched in the iTunes App Store (for $0.99)

I’m happy for their progress from Alpha to Beta, and I think the re-design looks great.  But I’m most excited about the iPhone app.  You all know (both of you) 😉 that I’m an iPhone user, and one of my few frustrations with the device has always been the lack of a video recorder.  Apple steadfastly refuses to release one, and there’s no third-party video recording application available (unless you choose to jailbreak your phone). This annoys me.

12seconds did not manage to sneak a video recorder through Apple’s QA team.  But they did create about the best possible workaround.  App users will take 3 photos (or choose 3 from their picture library), record twelve seconds of audio, and then post their creation to their 12seconds account (unregistered folks can create an account on the fly, in their phone.)  Somewhere in the cloud, the pics and audio are combined and then spit out as a twelve second video slideshow.  Users can email a link to their video directly from their phone  Each video has it’s own unique URL on 12seconds.tv, and can be emailed, embedded (as HTML) or downloaded onto your hard drive.  Here’s a demo video on how to use the app.

iphone app for 12seconds.tv from Sol Lipman on Vimeo.

One thing I really like about this app is the story telling aspect.  The series of pictures with audio narration really give you that James Earl Jones feeling of comfort.  Also, if you flub the audio and need to re-record, you can do so as many times as you like.  With traditional video, if you blow it, it’s blown.  The moment has passed. Here’s one video I recorded with a trial version of the app.

Cold Cuts – Chinese Food Style on 12seconds.tv

The app is a first draft.  It works, and it’s intuitive, but there are some features I’d like to see added, including wanting better flexibility in choosing photos and saving drafts.  But on the whole I think the app is very usable.  There’s just room to improve.

Kudos to the 12seconds team on a great launch and a cool app.  This is the best solution to the video-recording conundrum that Apple’s created that I’ve seen yet.

Related Posts:

MG Siegler at VentureBeat

Greg Kumparak at MobileCrunch

Rodney Rumford at FaceReviews

This post is also published on 1TO10REVIEWS.

Blippr tackles micro reviews – micro keeps getting bigger

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On a scale of 1 to 10, I think Blippr is pretty cool.

Blippr is a review service; you write short-form reviews of all kinds of things (books, movies, etc.)  In an oxymoronic set of circumstances that only the Internet can enable, “micro” services are becoming huge.  Twitter started a couple of years ago, and has become a popular (in the Valley, not in Kansas) “micro-blogging” service.  In 140 characters or less you give your followers a status update.  Some people use this for life-casting (i.e. I’m going to get a burrito) and others for starting conversations (i.e. what are the chances that Vista will stop sucking?).  In my opinion, the latter is a much more interesting use for the service.

Twitter is about “micro-blogging” because they have a strict limitation on your content – all posts must be 140 characters or less.  That’s as opposed to say WordPress, which is unlimited blogging (gurgitate to your heart’s content).   12seconds (which we’re involved in directly and which we posted about last month) also imposes a user constraint (twelve seconds, in case that wasn’t obvious.)  Blippr follows suit with a constraint of their own, 160 characters or less.

Erick Schonfeld at Techcrunch wrote an article about Blippr a couple of weeks ago, which offers a fine summary of the product.  I just signed up for an account myself – want to be friends?  So far I’ve reviewed a couple of movies, Dark Knight and 300.  Blippr encourages reviews for all kinds of products, including movies, music, games, books, and more.  The restraints force you to be choosy with your words and even your characters.  (Might want to start liking the ampersand.)

I see lots of opportunities in this product to link out to other products and services, whether amazon book and music purchases, netflix movie rentals, booksfree book rentals, social networks likes Shelfari, Facebook, and more… the list is more or less never-ending.  Some of those deals could include affiliate deals that might even generate revenue, which is always a nice little bonus in an internet company.

I like the UI in Blippr.  When you type out a review, a blue bar below the text window indicates how much space you have left.  Where Twitter uses a numeric counter (which turns red and features a minus sign when you pass 140), I think the visualization of the blue bar is effective and more interesting to watch.

Blippr’s also done a great job of integrating other services; it’s quite easy to link your blips to your Twitter stream, to your FriendFeed, and to a myriad of other services.

There are a number of things I think BLippr could improve upon – doubtless they’ve considered these already, but I’ll voice them anyway.  I think it would be cool if you could embed blips, make a widget out of all my blips, specific genres of blips, etc.  It’d be nice to have the option to embed them directly on my blog, on a profile page, etc.

Also, SMS integration makes a lot of sense.  According to tehir Get Satisfaction page, that’s coming soon.  I can see a great deal of utility to that feature, especially in regards to a spontaneous interaction with something or other (i.e. I just walked out of Indiana Jones 4, and I’m so offended by the refrigerator scene that I want to tell the world RIGHT NOW!)  I get it, they don’t have the money / resources / infrastructure / developers etc.  yet.  But they need to add SMS soon.

I also think this is an appropriate complement to Yelp, and other restaurant / business review services.  I’d like to see them expand their focus (or create a sister service) that is dedicated to that market.   And lastly, outside access seems really important to me.  How can I dip into the Blippr-o-sphere on my mobile handset when I’m in line at the movie theater and the movie I wanted to see is sold out?  Or I am at Green Apple Books (Clement and 6th in San Francisco, check ’em out) and I want someone’s opinion on a book.  A short, to-the-point opinion.

Overall, I think this service shows more promise than most “web 2.0” (god I hate that term) companies.  I’m interested to see where it goes.  To the right I’ve embedded a screenshot of my (considerably) shorter review of Blippr, using Blippr.  Neat.

This is also posted at 1to10reviews.

12seconds.tv launches in alpha

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Let me disclaim in no uncertain terms that this site was started by some very close friends, and I am personally involved as well.  I mean for this post to be informational.  I want both of my readers to know about 12seconds.

As you will see from their blog post, 12seconds.tv is launching their public alpha today.

12seconds is the brainchild of some friends in Santa Cruz who love the web, love technology, love twitter, love their iPhones, and can’t help but start company after company.  This is serial entrepreneurship at its best.  The basic idea behind 12seconds is video status, being able to record and share little moments from your life.  Use a webcam or cell phone you can record videos up to twelve seconds long.  That’s it.

You can link your videos to your Twitter account, so anyone who follows you there can receive will receive videos through your Twitter feed.  Friends can also visit your 12seconds page directly, or subscribe to your 12secondsRSS feed. You do NOT have to be a member of the site in order to watch other people’s videos. Request an invitation to join the site here.

This idea is a cool one, especially if you have a cell phone that records video. It’s easy to imagine being out at a bar with friends, out on the street where you see something funny, or at a Bar Mitzvah during the Haftorah service and wanting to publish the moment and share it with friends. What if you’re on vacation at the grand canyon and standing over that crazy skywalk platform? What a cool moment to share with friends and loved ones.  Here’s a link to my 12seconds channel.  Here’s Jeremy’s channel.

This is also posted at: http://1to10reviews.com