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According to the Guinness book of world records, Roundhay Garden Scene, released in 1888, is the oldest surviving film in existence. It was recorded at 12 fps.
Videos have come a long way since those days, evolving from that rough art to the high definition and 3d videos of the present. Video is now used as one of the most important forms of communication, on TV, but increasingly on the web, too. As video evolved, some people began working towards making it interactive and much more connected to the web. Among those people were the folks at Mozilla whose effort led to the development of popcorn.js, a HTML5 media framework written in javascript for anyone who wants to create interactive media on the web.
Then in 2012, they released the Popcorn Maker which is supposed to let you create videos that behaves like the web itself. It’s a video editor built on top of popcorn.js that let you remix and enhance your web videos to include live data from the web. Is this app the future of media? Lets find out.
The web has made it possible to be able to share anything we want to show off to close friends and people we may not even know. The problem is, it’s not so easy to share large files with everyone, and social networks and email aren’t designed for sharing much more than smallish pictures and documents. There’s Dropbox, but then you have to manage files and folders, and keep everything on your computer still.
I have tried out a variety of apps that can let you send big files, but they all seem to have a “catch” to them. For the past few days, I have been able to play around with Dropify, a new sharing service, and the one thing that I appreciate about it is the ease at which I could get a file on there and share it with the world. It made sending files a breeze. If you need to send large files, you need to read further.
So I made the jump and decided to go back to school for a second time, after I told myself I would never do more school when I graduated college. This time though, it is so different than when I went to college and when I got my Master’s. For one, I have a family and, two, I am also working full time. I knew I had to stay disciplined and get organized so that I could get through school and still enjoy my family and job.
I came across a web app called StudyBlue a couple of weeks ago and decided to give it a try to see how I could possibly incorporate it into my life. They take the concept of the physical binder and turn it into a digital one, at least that is the best way that I can kind of explain it in a nutshell. One of the things you find is when you are a student is that you get so many papers to keep track of that, if you are not organized, you can easily lose a few.
Let me show you how StudyBlue tries to help solve this problem.
There are so many good books to read, movies to watch, and music to listen to. I don’t know about you, but I always find myself without enough time in the day to be able to sit down and just dive into a good book. Then, there are those times when I hear a good song on the radio and I try to remember it so I can buy it later, but that never works. I am not sure if it’s because I am getting older (I am really not that old), but I cannot seem to remember things unless I write them down.
I have been using a web app called Done Note Done to jot down some of the books, music, and movies that I want to check out. It has been a good way for me to keep track of all the things that I want to get to later – with a dash of social networking thrown in. Granted, you can use your favorite task manager for this as well, but this app may just get me to read and watch more movies. Let’s take a deeper look into Done Not Done.
Ever wanted to let your family, friends, colleagues, or anyone else join you in an event that they can’t make it to? Or perhaps you want to start a liveblog for the next Apple keynote event. Either way, you need a way to stream video, text, and pictures in real-time. Suddenly YouTube just doesn’t quite cut it.
There’s several web apps out there for live video streaming, but the new Livestream is the one you should check out. With a free account, you can stream unlimited video, text, and images, and with a paid account, your visitors can see the livestream without even logging in. Plus, it’s simple to use. Let’s take a look.
Music discovery on the web has evolved over the years, with popular services like Pandora and Grooveshark leading the way. Although they’re a tough act to follow, some new players take the challenge head on, with surprising success. Originally a Chrome extension, Exfm’s full web service is now a notable contender for a music discovery site, with over 300,000 users and counting. Learn how Exfm can be your next music hangout on the web.
With advancements in technology, we are starting to see reading material convert over to the web and digital format more and more. Take books and magazines for example, for the first time this past year, Amazon outsold ebooks over actual physical ones. That right there goes to show you that publishers and consumers are starting to embrace the digital market and see the need for it.
Over the past several months, I have started to see some cool web apps that let you create content online and share them with the world. For example, the one that I am looking at today, called Glossi, lets you create your own online magazine. After getting to use it for a little while, I found that this can be used for both professionals as well as amateurs alike.
One of the things that I love about the web is that everything is so instantaneous. It has literally changed the way that we get our news and information. I hardly ever watch the news anymore because I can pull up just about any major news site and get real time stories at my fingertips. There is no need to wait for the nightly newscast any more.
With this, developers have continually tried to come up with ways to develop apps for us to use so that we can get our daily news fix. We first had the RSS reader and now we are starting to move toward what is considered “social news.” Twitter, more so than Facebook, has opened this door for news to become more interactive for us, the reader.
Over the last week or so, I have been able to play around with a new web app called Hopflow that seems to take a page from both Twitter and Facebook in creating their own news consumption site. Can this possibly become a go-to news reader on the web? Let’s take a look at it more in depth. (more…)
Are you bored with long and boring meetings with very formal presentations in your office and do you want to turn it into a fun filled and entertaining session. Or do you wish to create an animated video but are terrified at the cost involved in it, or are you someone looking for a job and would like to create a video resume to stand out from the crowd?
Then dive in to Powtoon, a webapp that lets you do all this in a cheap and easy way.
There are some fantastic web apps made for Google Chrome, thanks to the Chrome team’s dedication to showing off the power of web apps in their browser. We recently took a look at the new Chrome Legos, and 100,000 Stars is another great Chrome app that’s recently come out, fresh from the minds of the Google Data Arts Team.
It’s an interactive visualization of the stars in our “neighborhood” of the universe, and it’s an incredibly humbling and beautiful experience. You don’t have to use Chrome to run it, either — I had some success with the latest version of Firefox, and any browser that supports WebGL should be able to run it.
