The future of video is... Animoto!

We've played around with video for a while here at 49lights. We've tried quite a few different video editors for our very simple material and after what I've seen I must say that Animoto is very, very impressive!

What's Animoto?
Animoto is a very simple online tool for creating videos from images. You select which images to use, select (or upload) music and hit "render". Animoto then analyze your media and creates a video. Pretty nifty effects suiting the music are used on your images as well as syncronized to the music. The outcome is a pretty nice video that you easily can download, embed or upload to Youtube.

I'd say that this is what I expect from future video editing. Select videos, images and music and get a nice little video. Add some interview parts or something, clip the things together and you've produced a somewhat "professional" video. It's obvious that tools like this will reduce the gap between professional video and amateur video.

Add some stock video footage to the show and at least news shows will have a couple of hundred thousand competitors. (Large parts of news shows are just expounded views on a Reuters telegram).

What really makes a difference when comparing Animoto to many other online tools for creating video footage or advanced slideshows is that they have extreamly good looking effects on Animoto.

Shoppinggatan goes Animoto!

Animoto is as you know a great tool for easy video creation that actually looks good.
We just tried it for a short presentation of Shoppinggatan, and here's the result:

It's not a Volvo, but it's a hydrogen fueled car...

It's just an RC car, but it's hydrogen fueled. That's cool enough for me to post it on my blog. Will cars be hydrogen fueled by 2050?

Cool graphics create traffic...

This is yet another proof of the old saying "if you can make something look cool, it'll bring traffic to your site". This is a visualization of live data from a site named Scouta.com. I haven't visited the site, but I think it's a social network in Australia.

Though this has been done many times, people can't help but watching such videos. I for example found it over at most viewed on Viddler.com. So if you want to create traffic and to make your site a bit more well known, a pretty graph or a nice video of some data is a safe bet.

Internet is... interesting

Surfing around I happened to go to Viddler.com and they suggested I should watch the video above. So I did, and as you can see it's a women doing a mini chicken dance at a coffe shop, and it turned out that she's also broadcasting herself live on the Internet (ijustine.tv). Nothing really new with live web cams, but I've heard a lot about people airing their full life lately. I understand what's driving them to do so, which of course is the hope for fame, money and also some kind of narcissism, like your everyday very personal blog on steroids.

However, whereas a personal blog might be really interesting, watching someone work isn't. Well, obviously it is, but not to me. With a written blog the author can write down the quintessence of his or her thoughts, or even just that day's most interesting events. This obviously isn't happening when you go live 24/7, so who's watching it?

Some would say that just as the live video of someone typing is a bit meaningless and not as interesting as a written blog, the blog would be just as much worse than a magazine article, a novel or a book.
Services as twitter has shown that high frequency and short messages is somewhat favoured by some to in-depth articles when communication. The 24/7 web cam would be the extreme of this trend, since you have an infinite frequency (periodicity of 0) of messages with almost no content at all.

What might be even more interesting is that this as well is another side of the democratic Internet. [Prepare for something already written 1000 times before]
People can now reach the same fame, or product marketing, as only huge companies where able to create before the Internet.

Will "democratic" and not capital dictated fame last or is this just a beautiful and interesting phase of the Internet?

[Parentheses: The "plot" in some of Justine's videos happens to circle around IPhone. Either she was very excited about IPhone, or it's a lighter version of "Lindsay Lohan driving drunk while using her IPhone"-phenomena. Not that I think it's wrong to get an audience to your blog or personal TV-network, even if the methods sometimes are a little bit too obvious ;-)]

Simpsons - The Movie

No comment needed - But I can't wait

BumpTop 3d - Ok, this is cool and it's the future

I don't like lists. I don't like my desktop background (~200 pdf-files that I don't want to organize). So what do I like? BumpTop 3d! A cool 3d-interface for documents that utilises physics in order to get a good interface. It sounds pretty weird, but watch this video, it looks amazing and really easy to do things with your files. I only miss the file-preview, but I guess that'll come later.

I think BumpTop is a lot more interesting than the Microsoft Surface thingy, since that technology didn't have anything that surpriced me.

Microsoft Surface Parody vs IPhone Parody

I know I'm not the first blog around the world to discover this, but I must say that this parody of the Microsoft Surface thingy is pretty right on the spot. Why did they have to do it so huge? It's really cool technology, but compared to IPhone it's nothing.

What I want is a 6 inch multisensitive touchscreen with wlan, nothing more, nothing less.


Microsoft Surface product thingy Parody



IPhone parody

Maia Hirasawa vs the Mopeds

I haven't heard the mopeds for a while, but while surfing and listening to some music videos I heard some new nice, happy, naive pop: Maia Hirasawa with "And I found this boy".
It sounds an awful lot like the mopeds, a group that I used to listen to a few years ago. Listen to them both (awful sound quality in the mopeds vid), pretty fun...


Maia Hirasawa - And I found this boy


The Mopeds - Lizard