Most online video platforms such as Youtube, MySpace and Metacafe use Flash video streaming (.flv) rather than simple links to files we can download. There are various reasons for that with the main one being the common business model most of those services relay on: advertising. In other words - we get to watch the content for free but we need to do that online and on the site. While this may be serving well the interests of the service provider it might not always be how we want things to go: some of us want to archive our own copies of the videos we love. Others may want to transfer a certain movie from one website to another. Well, this is the time to let you know that you don't have to be "on Youtube" to watch a Youtube movie. Instead, you can download the video stream to your computer, keep it there as a "normal" video file and watch it whenever you like. Nothing is illegal or fishy about it, it is simply another way of consuming the data. Just like you do when you save an html page to your computer and read it later.
So, for your convenience, CultCase has selected some of the best online video conversion services available today. They are all free of charge and do not even require registration. We tested all of them by converting and downloading the same 1:42 min Youtube video seen above of an (awesome) cover version for the Beatles' Hey Jude. There were no significant differences between the services in terms of both time-to-deliver and video quality. All of the files looked reasonable considering the quality of the source and took approximately 1-2 minutes to delivery. If you try any of them with your favorite videos please do let us know how it went.
1. Zamzar
URL: http://zamzar.com/url/
Zamzar is a free online file conversion dedicated to transforming songs, videos, images and documents into different formats. With this service the focus is on high-quality file conversion for as many file formats as possible. The basic free service lets you converting files up to 100MB each. In case you are an online video conversion freak and "want more Zamzar" you can signup for basic, pro or business account and get to convert larger files (up to 1Giga!), a personal inbox for online file storage and faster file conversions (pricing and signup here). Nice and clean interface design. Fun to use.
2. Mux
URL: http://beta.mux.am
With a somewhat over-texted design but still simple and easy to use interface Mux is a new beta service allowing you to convert media files from major player websites such as youtube, dailymotion and google and download to your computer. Here you can also share it privately with friends & family or send it to your mobile phone.
3. Vixy
URL: http://vixy.net
This online flv converter lets you convert Flash video files and download them in avi, mov mp4, pm3 or 3gp container formats encoded with mpeg4 codecs. The site claims to be doing that faster and less lossy than a typical transcoder. The service is based on an OpenSource engine named FLV to MPEG4 Conveter. In case you are a serious geek and knows your way around you can even download the project source code via their svn subversion.
4. VideoCodeZone
URL: http://www.videocodezone.com/conversion.php
Convert Flash video files from Youtube, MySpace, Google Videos, IFilm, Break, Dailymotion and Metacafe to popular formats and download them to your computer. Copy and paste the URL of the video, select the output format and click Convert/Download. To convert local Flash video files select the file and click Convert/Download.
5. MediaConverter
URL: http://www.mediaconverter.org
Multi-file type converter and splitter supporting video, sound, ringtones, images and documents: not just of popular audio / video files such as mp3, wmv, 3gp, flv, swf, mov, avi, mpg, mp4, divx, ipod, psp and ogg but also picture formats like jpg, psd, doc, pdf, rtf, txt, odg and even abandoned formats as WordPerfect (...?). Check File mode, click Browse, choose the file and hope for auto-detection to work. If auto-detection fails, select input format and output format, submit the form. To convert a file from the Internet check URL mode, enter the file URL, select input and output format and go.
6. ConvertDirect
URL: http://www.convertdirect.com
Online flv converter for Flash video files such as those used by Youtube. Supported output formats include avi, 3gp, mp3, mp4, wmv, mpeg, mov and psp. You can watch your vids on PC, iPod, Zune, PSP and various mobile phones.
7. MovAVI
URL: http://online.movavi.com
Other than requiring no software to install (that's true about everyone on this list) the guys from MovAVI are also proud of the fact there are no ads on their site to interrupt you while you are enjoying their free service. Add up to 5 files limited to 10 min each and 100 Mb total size. Enter your email address and MovAVI will notify you when your files are ready. There is also a cool feature allowing you to merge your files videos into one large movie.
8. Flvix
URL: http://www.flvix.com
Youtube Google Video dedicated online flv converter. Flvix comes from the folks who do Pingoblog, a cool ping service for bloggers. Very simple yet efficient interface. Converts Youtube and Google videos and serves them for download in avi, mov, mp4, 3gp and mp3 formats for PC, Mobile phones, iPod and PSP.
9. All2Convert
URL: http://www.all2convert.com
Online video converter. Copy video link, paste it in the URL video box, choose video format and press Convert. Wait for your converted video link to show up and download. Supports 3gp mobile phone format as well as iPhone and Zune videos, iPod, PSP and popular PC formats as dvd, mov, mp4, vob, rm and wmv.
10. ConvertTube
URL: http://converttube.com
Youtube dedicated online flv converter. Allows you to convert Flash video files as used by YouTube to popular PC, iPod, PSP, iPhone and mobile phone formats such as wmv, mov, mp4, mp3 and 3gp. Same as Vixy, this service also claims to be doing its job faster and less lossy than a typical video transcoder.
Get Your Own Copy: Top 10 Online Video Conversion Services
Top Ten Signs Your Country May Be Going Fascist
Protests are restricted? Leaders profit from war? Citizens closely monitored? Country might be tuning into a fascist entity? Check the above vid by Dayjob Orchestra for the Top Ten Signs Your Country May Be Going Fascist, submitted by cgt2099 picked up in the Anti War group at Mixx.
vConvert: online video streams to local video files
Ever wanted to save a YouTube video on your computer or upload a file you saw on one online video platform to another? vConvert is an online service allows you to convert online video streams as those broadcasted on YouTube and similar to local video files on your computer using popular formats such as mov, mp4, mp3 and 3gp used mostly by mobile phones.
The vConvert server converts FLV to the selected format faster and less lossy than a typical transcoder. Just submit a url wait and download your clip.
http://vconvert.net
Image courtesy No Turn Left
Technorati's citizen media charts
A few of major events seen on the Internet this August - e.g. the Skype P2P network malfunction and the Google Analytics data blackout - were fine examples of how traditional search engines, namely Google, are far from being able to get their hands on the real-time pulse of the web. Searching Google during the time these problems occurred did not do any help. Yet, following-up on some leading blogs did. But how do you track millions of active blogs? certainly no personal blogroll can do the job well.
Currently tracking 101.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media Technorati is the undisputed authority on what is happening on the World Live Web, right now. Technorati "search, surface, and organize blogs and the other forms of independent, user-generated content (photos, videos, voting, etc.) increasingly referred to as citizen media".
Daily history charts of any keyword activity from Technorati can be easily embedded into any website or blog as seen below. Interested? Check Technorati's blogwidgets section for more.
Posts that contain Sudoku per day for the last 180 days
Get your own chart!
Posts that contain Puzzles per day for the last 180 days
Get your own chart!
Posts that contain Logic puzzle per day for the last 180 days
Get your own chart!
Posts that contain Pic-a-Pix per day for the last 180 days
Get your own chart!
Posts that contain Conceptis per day for the last 180 days
Get your own chart!
Bubble Bath
According to Wikipedia Bubble Bath also known as a foam bath can be obtained by "adding a product containing foaming surfactants to water and temporarily aerating it by agitation often merely by the fall of water from a faucet". It also says "children find foam baths particularly amusing, so they are an inducement to get them into the bathtub".
I tried putting some foam in one of Carmel's bathes a few months ago and she didn't seem to like it at all. I think the foam got here scarred. Recently, however, things have changed dramatically. We now like foam baths very much and take them anytime anywhere possible. Including kitchen sink.
Syndicated flash games from Miniclip
The following flash games from Miniclip is a great example of modern content syndication. It can be installed on any website or blog within the speed of a blog post.
The Sample Lab: Tryvertising space
Opened July 25 in Tokyo's Iceberg Building in Harajuku and spotted on Springwise - an innovative social network of 8,000 spotters who scan the globe for smart new business ideas - The Sample Lab is a new exclusive Tryvertising space inviting consumers to sample and test new and innovative products.
After paying a modest JPY 300 (approx. $2.5 US) registration fee plus JPY 1,000 annual membership fee and showing a dedicated QR code stored on their mobile phones members of The Sample Lab can gain their entrance, providing they are over 15 years of age.
Tryvertising is definitely getting hotter.
Free 3-column blogger templates
I've been looking for a decent blogger templates resource for some time now. I simply had to get myself out of this 2-column prison almost every template for the this new Google blogger had. For some reason I didn't came up on Thrbrtemplates on blogspot.com until this morning. I guess I was just not enough into it but now I did so here it is. I used the minima-blue-3col-w960 XML template with a few minor adjustments.
A few Blogger Themes and Templates can be found in the left sidebar. You can grab these templates and install them on your blog through your edit html panel. All templates, other than the one used for the WorkShop design, css and markup, are provided to "use and abuse, beautify and mutilate". There aren't any Terms of Use on this site though it mentions it "would be nice" if you keep their template header information 'as is'.
I also kept this screenshot of the 2-column one (below). Hashem Ykom Dama...
Solel's world’s largest single solar commitment
People always tell me I have my head overloaded with information technology and communications. That should be the place to say that first of all note that these are two different subjects. Things could have been much worse if I only had my head busy with have my head overloaded with information technology or with communications, so its not like I always think about a single "theme".
Furthermore, the above is absolutely inaccurate. I am deeply interested about other things as well. Solar Thermal Energy for example. In the 80's there was this small yet successful Israeli company called "Luz". they were making hi-tech glass when no one really knew what it even was. Then in the early nineties it was more-or-less shut down and reborn as Solel Solar Systems Ltd. ("Leading the World in Solar Thermal Energy") which over the last 14 years invested their resources in improving the yearly electrical output of parabolic trough solar fields and in reducing their installation, operations and maintenance costs.
According to the Israeli financial paper Globes, Solel will sell 553 megawatts of electricity to California’s PG & E Corp. (Pacific Gas and Electric Company) from a solar power plant that the company will build in the Mojave Desert at an investment of some $2 billion. PG & E's nine-square mile Mojave Solar Park is due to begin operating in 2011. PG&E said that the power, enough for 400,000 homes, will go to customers in northern and central California.
According to Globes the Mojave Solar Park project is now the world’s largest single solar commitment ever made.
BTW, sun is not the only thing Israelis make electricity from. We also help reducing humanity's carbon Footprint by making electricity from Biogas from Cow Dung (that's a Hebrew reference) very close to where I live.
White labeling social networks
Many things have changed in the last few years about almost everything that has to do with advertising and public media attention. Yet, the world is still driven by products, companies and services even though not always commercial ones. Therefore branding remains an essential element of every successful venture. White labeling social networks, making the platform provider as invisible as possible to the network’s users, allow better, more accurate, branding for the network identity.
Techcrunch.com, probably the world's leading tech blog, has published this article two days ago about how to build a social network from scratch. This article samples nine companies providing white labeling infrastructure: Ning, KickApps, CrowdVine, GoingOn, CollectiveX, Me.com, PeopleAggregator, Haystack, and ONEsite and includes this amazing chart summarizing their offerings. Other than Techcrunch, credit for initial research into these companies goes to Jeremiah Owyang who compiled a comprehensive list of white label social networking services.
Just a few days ago we had this news about White Label Social Network Ning Raises A Huge $44 Million Round. I guess White Label social networks are getting hotter every day now. Read more here: 9 Ways to Build Your Own Social Network
Will dynamic ad push free mobile gaming?
Can dynamic advertising and marketing push make mobile gaming free and by that reaching all of us? TheMarker, a leading financial Israeli newspaper, reports today that the Israeli start-up company innerActive has just completed a capital raise of $1.5M from "private investors". It was just two weeks ago, on July 12, 2007, that Israel's largest mobile operator Cellcom has announced the completion of its first ad-funded mobile games service powered by new technology from innerActive.
The new Cellcom service showed results of 44% Click-Through-Rate (CTR) and 19% Acquisition Rate for Mobile Advertising Campaigns, indicating a breakthrough in marketing via mobile phones. I guess this has pretty much done the job with those "private investors".
As I wasn't participating this pilot (even though I am a Cellcom user!) here is how it actually worked according to an official press release from innerActive:
As integrate to Cellcom’s system innerActive's solution "dynamically inserted ads and marketing content for product placement within the games". Yet, as opposed to traditional mas-media advertising models innerActive's mobile in-game ads were "targeted and segmented in real-time according to each user’s profile, behavior and responses". In addition, "mobile coupons and other incentives were offered for conversion and cross-over to other media channels like websites and point of sells".
In marketing terms the new model used in the trial has proved to be effective and feasible to all the players. On average, according to the results of this trial, a trend of 10 times higher game downloads per user was observed, comparing to the pre-pilot download results. Adi Cohen, VP Marketing of Cellcom said:
"We succeeded to promote thousands of new users, that are not heavy gamers, to consumed and enjoyed games. The advertising-marketing stimulus trial confirms its effectiveness to all parties that took part in this project. This mobile advertising is working and shows far-reaching consequences for the mobile industry.”
Who Comments on Blogs, and Why?
Stephen J. Dubner from freakonomics.com published this discussion trigger post about the million dollar question that bothers most bloggers: who comments on blogs and why?
On the freakonomics.com blog, according to Dubner, 40 or 50 comments on a certain post are considered "quite a bit" even though this is a very popular blog with "many thousands of readers" so the number of nature of the comment stream depend on the nature of blog or at least the post.
With an overall number of 117 comments it certainly looks like asking the right question can be one of the best ways to get a nice number of comments. Following are two of my favorite responses to Dubner's trigger question: on 15 Mar 2007 at 8:52 am # JakeSutton
...I comment regularly on the blogs of people I actually know, but very rarely on the blogs of strangers or on what might be called “public figure blogs”. I think a lot of it actually comes down to basic human shyness. Nobody wants to speak up for fear of sticking their foot in their mouth. ;^)
on 16 Mar 2007 at 7:22 am # yorkd
... Some time ago, Brian C. Warnock posted a question to a Perl discussion group, got no replies and wondered why — the lack of response to his query become known as “Warnock’s Dilema”. Wikipedia has somewhat similiar “stub problem” — incomplete threads, lacking incremental knowledge from commenters. Lower status bloggers are faced with a sortof Fermi’s Blogger Paradox — why have we not been visited? Why hasn’t anyone addressed our question(s)? Is there life out there that understands my queries?
the.co.ils Zone
Have you been looking for better access to the people behind the Israeli internet industry? Check out the.co.ils Zone - new a social network for internet operations allowing direct contact with Start-up companies Venture Capital groups and other companies and people.
Announced just yesterday, the.co.ils Zone is interesting and somewhat different by allowing its members easy distribution of information and promotion of interests without considering it as spam. On this network you can write a post about your company, product and services, add yourself to the relevant groups, contact Start-ups, VC's, Companies and others, upload pictures and of course run your own blog.
Created on the Ning platform, an online service for creating and sharing of Social Networks, the.co.ils Zone is a new venture by Yaron Orenstein and Yami Glick from the Israeli blog thecoils.com.
Check out my new space on this platform.
21Publish: become a blog host
Blogging and social networking are major issues nowadays, keeping the lights on in many business development departments, marketing strategy rooms and non-profit organization headquarters. They are more or less what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has been in the last three years or so. For that reason, 21Publish is a very interesting Web2.0 venture.
While most other blog services mainly offer blogs for individuals not for groups, with 21Publish you can become a blog host yourself. This platform will aggregates the individual and independent blogs of any number of people with a shared interest: any club, college, media company or enterprise can use the system and offer blogs to their members, users, students or friends. I am not sure how many more of those there are out there but this one is certainly an interesting service.
21Publish is specifically designed to be used as a community publishing network. Administration panel allows central control over the network. The look of the Blog Community can reflect its own brand, hand on its own domain and be using its own design. It can work as a fully functional, stand-alone website or be seamlessly integrated into an existing one. Here are a few featured communities linked from the 21Publish website:
A list of handy features (see all of them here) gives users the means to customize their blog communities according to their needs in terms of community features, design, user functions, and privacy. Key features are:
- BlogPortal as community homepage
- Central console to manage multi-user platform
- Suitable for thousands of users with independent yet inter-connected blogs
- Multiple Options for user registration process
- RSS Integration of existing Blogs operated through other providers
- Runs under yourdomain.com or fully integrated into your existing site
- Selection of templates or your own CSS editing
For the good and the bad of it, 21Publish is a hosted application. It means there's no software to install, no maintenance and no updates required at your end. You can set up and run your own personal BlogPortal and invite others to join in. But this also means you don't have 100% control over the system. For a group of good friends sharing a common interest this would not be of any problem. For some companies and chief technical officers I know it probably would.21Publish is a classic 2-layer system: the first layer is your BlogPortal or community homepage where users can register and login, find new blog entries or community news. The second layer consists of all the individual blogs of community members.
Price?
Free for small communities of up to 100 users (blogs) providing 2MB of webspace for each, 21Publish's business model also allows on-demand upgrade options and enterprise solutions with pricing depends on three factors:
- The number of users (bloggers)
- How much web space allowed for each user
- Allowing 21Publish to be the ones who place advertising on user blogs or not
Internet Relay Chat: from chatscan past to iPhone future
Just as http, ftp and other commonly known and used Internet protocols IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is an Internet protocol allowing people to virtually meat each other in theme based channels and exchange text and other type of messages in a synchronized manner. This form of synchronous (real-time) conferencing is mainly designed for group (many-to-many) communication in discussion forums called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication and data transfers via private message. See Wikipedia for more.
In the late nineties I have found myself very busy researching the IRC network with my younger brother Lior and a very good friend named Moshe Carmeli. Within the frame of an ambitious project we were trying to promote, we took extreme efforts to convince local venture capital companies that IRC needs to and can be indexed in a real time manner to allow people identifying and accessing live conversations based on their personal interests. Our point was that being an open platform the IRC network host much more users than any other single commercial chat application. To prove this point we used special custom made tools and counted millions of chatters on the network. It was a fantastic experience as if we were discovering a new hidden continent, loaded with gold and oil.
A bit of a bitter taste
As the millennium turned, just a few months before the "Internet bobble" had blown up we got tipped about a project named chatscan by eNow which was being developed by some other group of former Israeli entrepreneurs who practically have the exact same idea. The difference was that - as opposed to us - they had a working model and already got an amazing sum of money form a very respectable investment group so after almost three years and lots of ups and downs we decided to pull of. The adventure left us with a bit of a bitter taste but as we kind of made our point "Communiverse" was left behind and each of us moved forward to his own destiny.
I almost forgot about IRC for a few years now until this morning when i read this. I have already heard that since the iPhone was launched people are on a crazy lookout for web applications to run on their new toy. Almost 10 years have passed since communiverse and chatscan, the Internet went a long way but there is still now way to find IRC chatrooms on a real time content based method. Yet, it was just yesterday when people have actually started logging in to IRC channels using their iPhone devices!
Gearlive.com, a popular tech blog, explains the process of how IRC channels can be accsed using iPhones with this short presentation. I bet if this would work IRC is about to take a huge step forward as millions of new users are about to join. Note that using the method you also need a Mac workstation.
del.icio.us
The most popular service of its kind and one of the most interesting web2.0 applications, the website del.icio.us (pronounced as "delicious") is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks.
Founded by Joshua Schachter in late 2003, and now part of Yahoo!, del.icio.us allows users to manage and share web bookmarks from a centralized source. With emphasis on community power, del.icio.us improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet.
Other than just being a fantastic service, an important aspect of del.icio.us sums up to the fact you can always import / export / backup your del.icio.us bookmarks in various formats so you are not even committed to using it as your main bookmark tool. You can see all bookmarks of del.icio.us team here. The del.icio.us guys also have a blog and a community.
More of the story of del.icio.us, as told by Joshua and interpreted by other people can be seen under the following links:
- An interview from December 2004, a few months after del.icio.us began.
- Another interview from January 2006, soon after del.icio.us became part of Yahoo!.
- Notes from a talk in February 2006 about building del.icio.us.
- A profile from September 2006 as the Technology Review's young innovator of the year
Dr. T. V. Raman's complete audio desktop
Have you ever tried using your Windows voice-to-text speech engine? If so I bet you got depressed as I did. I bet you went to sleep that day thinking how far we still are from those sci-fi movies showing people chatting with his home computers, normally having the voice of a hot sexy female. I bet you did.
Anyways, if the idea of having a complete voice interaction with your data fits well into your dreams, you might want to check out Emacspeak - a new technology dramatically changing how blind and visually impaired users around the world can interact with the personal computer and the Internet.
Conceived by Dr. T. V. Raman, (see picture from raman's Public Gallery on Picasa webalbums) who obtained his first guide-dog, Aster Labrador, from Guiding Eyes in January 1990 - Emacspeak is a speech interface that allows visually impaired users to interact independently and efficiently with the computer. Using "Audio formatting" - a technique pioneered by AsTeR - and full support for W3C's Aural CSS (ACSS) - Emacspeak produces rich aural presentations of electronic information. By blending different aspects of the Internet such as Web-surfing and messaging, Emacspeak speech-enables local and remote information via a consistent and well-integrated user interface.
A suite of task-oriented tools provides efficient speech-enabled access to the audio desktop and evolving semantic WWW. According to T. V. Raman, when combined with Linux running on low-cost PC hardware, Emacspeak/Linux provides a reliable, stable speech-friendly solution that opens up the Internet to visually impaired users around the world.
See the online manual, productivity tips, speech-enabled applications list and the various online resources for Emacspeak locatable through Google for additional details.
T. V. Raman is one of the most well known computer scientists who came from India. According to Wikipedia, T. V. Raman has worked on speech interaction and markup technologies in the context of the World Wide Web at Digital's Cambridge Research Lab (CRL), Adobe Systems and IBM Research and he presently works at Google Research.
His research interests are primarily auditory user interfaces and structured electronic documents. His PhD thesis entitled Audio System For Technical Readings was awarded the ACM Dissertation Award in 1994. Raman went on to apply the ideas on audio formatting introduced in AsTeR to the more general domain of computer interfaces Emacspeak. On Monday, April 12, 1999, Emacspeak became part of the Smithsonian's Permanent Research Collection on Information Technology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
Way to go Dr. Raman. I wish I was half as brave, strong and innovative as you are. I am also going to try installing your amazing system on the Linux machine I plan as version 2 of our HTPC. It's gonna take time, but I am going to give it a try.
CCCP: Combined Community Codec Pack
A few of my friends keep on asking me about where they can get a good free and easy to install package of video codecs so they can play the various types of digital video formats going on on the web nowadays.
Apart from having a somewhat "different than usual" yet charming graphic design The CCCP (Combined Community Codec Pack) is a DirectShow filter pack specifically built for playing anime but it actually contains most video codecs most users need. It has been assembled by some of the most knowledgeable people in online anime distribution, and one of the primary design goals is to play as much as possible with as little as possible. The CCCP attempts to be as unintrusive on your system as possible. I used it and I can say its true.
Installation Instructions
- Download the package for Windows users here or go to the homepage at http://cccp-project.net
- If you know for certain that you do not have any other codec packs currently installed Install the CCCP. Be sure the Reset all settings option (at the end of the installation) is checked. If you are interested in changing the default settings, read the FAQ's and other documentation below.
- Watch anime and be happy. Or if it still doesn't work, read the Troubleshooting Guide. THEN watch anime and be happy.
a web development company with a proper website
Its been a while since I have seen a web development company with a proper website. clearleft.com is a very good example of how this should be done. Clean and modern graphic design. screen adjusted. DOCTYPE is XHTML 1.0 Strict 100% error free. well done clearsoft.
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