Filed under: World wide web, Video, Social Software

Wikimedia is partnering with the collaborative video service Kaltura to begin rolling out video to Wikimedia sites. Right now, the feature is available on the WikiEducator demo site, which is not affiliated with Wikimedia. But eventually we’ll start to see collaborative video hitting Wikipedia as well.

Kaltura videos can be created and edited by anyone, much like Wikipedia pages. You can also see previous versions of a video and a list of people who have worked on it. Users can also upload audio, slideshows, and other rich media. If you want to get your feet wet editing a video, check out the collaborative video sandbox.

Kaltura is making its code open source to support the goals of Wikimedia, and all audio and video will be encoded in the open source OGG Vorbis and OGG Theora formats.

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Filed under: Internet, E-mail, Social Software, Beta

Social web browser Flock is planning to launch 3 major new features in about two weeks. Like its predecessors, Flock 1.1 beta is built on Firefox code but it has a ton of features that make it easier to keep in touch with your social networking services like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube.

Flock 1.1 adds:

• Web Mail Integration - Not only can you easily check your Gmail and Yahoo! Mail with the click of a button in the newest version of Flock, but you can also share web pages, images, and articles just by clicking the email icon in the URL bar.
• Friend Activity - Flock now aggregates your friends’ activity from across all supported social networking services and displays it in chronological order. This could be the easiest way ever to find out which friends have updated their profiles, sent out tweets, or uploaded new media or blog posts.
• Picasa Integration - Flock has added support for Picasa Web Albums, allowing you to upload images from Flock, share images via email, or browse through images using the media bar. You can also send images to friends just by dragging an image from your media bar to a Facebook, Twitter, or other contact in the People Sidebar.

We got a chance to play with an early version of Flock 1.1 and we were pretty impressed with how well the new social features are integrated into the internet browser. The Friend Activity screen and web mail checker don’t check for updates quite as often as we’d like, but hopefully the Flock team will provide users with the capability to customize how frequently the browser checks for new email and friend activity in the future.

Flock is available as a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The new beta version should be out before the end of January.

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Filed under: Fun, World wide web, Utilities, Video, Open Source, Social Software, Podcasts

The open source, cross-platform video platform, Miro, recently released version 1.1. The new update offers two main improvements. First, Miro has significantly improved BitTorrent performance by giving the user more control and settings for BitTorrent downloads. Miro’s support of BitTorrent has always set itself apart from other media players with it’s BitTorrent support and we’re glad to see them enhancing this important feature.

Second, Miro 1.1 has made it easier to find the search results you’re looking for by instituting a combined search across all 5 of their search engines. Users who want to only search the engines one at a time can still do so by choosing the engines they’re most interested in seeing results from.

If you’re not a user of Miro yet, we encourage you to take a look its way. Miro is a media viewing software package that grants you to view almost any video file format, search for and view YouTube videos, and access video podcasts via BitTorrent. Additionally, Miro is an open source video platform that lacks any DRM and allows unrestricted viewing of their materials. Also, they Miro takes pride in it’s selection of HD content.

[via Miro’s blog]

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Filed under: Internet, Yahoo!, Social Software, Beta

The OpenID project got a large shot in the arm today as Yahoo! announced their support for the OpenID 2.0 single sign-on framework. As of this day, there are a total of about 120 million OpenID accounts spread across services such as myopenid, WordPress.com, AOL (covered here before), and others. Yahoo! triples that number this day by becoming an OpenID provider and adding approximately 250 new OpenID enabled accounts. Yahoo! users can expect to be able to use the services in private beta on January 30.

This means users will be able to log into more than 9,000 OpenID enabled sites with their Yahoo! username and password. For those of you who are unfamiliar with OpenID, it is a single sign on system for the internet. Meaning if you look to join and log-in to a new site, you can use one username and password across all these disperate websites. For more info about OpenID, see Wikipedia or the OpenID homepage.

This can be counted as a massive win for the OpenID project. We believe in the idea of OpenID, but it won’t be successful until the major players in the internet market hop on board. We hope to see the other massive companies such as Google and MSN hop on board and begin serving up some OpenID goodness.

[via TechCrunch]

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Filed under: Raising money, Public or private?

Tech Confidential had an interesting conversation Wednesday with Mark Pincus, the Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur who founded the Zynga Game Network. Zynga brings players together via Facebook and other social networks and boasts several popular titles, including a version of the trendy poker game Texas Hold ‘Em and a Scrabble knockoff called Scrabulous, each with about half a million people playing daily.

The startup recently won a $10 million Series A round, led by Union Square Ventures and including Avalon Ventures, Foundry Group and power angels Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, and Clarium Capital managing partner Peter Thiel. We asked Pincus about how Facebook Inc.’s opening up its application programming interface, or API, is changing today’s online applications, including games.

Continue reading at TechConfidential.com.

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Filed under: Rumors, Raising money, Shareholders, Public or private?

EchoStar (NASDAQ: DISH) shut at $28.64. Smith Barney says, “three ‘anti-M&A’ events have removed any take-out premium - Tax-free spin SATS, insider selling, and DISH participation in 700MHZ auction have removed M&A premium from DISH shares. We still think M&A is possible.”

DISH January option implied volatility of 43 is near its 26-week average according to Track Data, suggesting non-directional price risk.

M&A Update is provided by Stock Specialist Paul Foster of theflyonthewall.com.

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Filed under: Fun, Internet, Social Software, Beta

Mahalo, the human powered search engine, has announced a new add-on for Firefox that submits sites to many popular web services at once. How many times have you found a link that you want share with your friends and realize you’ve to submit it to more than one service such as del.icio.us, twitter, and so on?

Mahalo’s new add-on, called Mahalo Follow for Firefox solves this problem by submitting your link to services including Twitter, Jaiku, Ma.gnolia, del.icio.us, Google Bookmarks, and Tumblr. This seems to be an extremely useful tool.

To get started, head on over to Mahalo’s site and install the Firefox add-in, put in your credentials for your various services, and share away.

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Filed under: Business, Developer, Internet, Web services, Social Software

Facebook made an announcement earlier and promised a clean up tool that would make profiles visible again under the clutter of applications. Well, the tool is here now, most likely to the dismay of developers trying to monetize Facebook, but it does make profiles a lot “tidier.”

Now, you have option to move your application boxes to your extended profile - allowing you to essentially keep both a sane and insane version of your profile. Nicely enough, you can choose which applications you want to move to the extended profile, so you can keep your basic profile as stuffed or as trim as you like. And, you can always change your mind by scrolling to down and clicking “Edit Extended Profile” on your profile page.

After you’ve made your choices, people that come to your profile will first be greeted by the sane version with an option to see the insane version which you’ve got stuffed with all those extra goodies.

If only cleaning the home was this easy.

[via Mashable]

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Filed under: Business, Developer, Games, Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Both Hasbro and Mattel are asking Facebook to remove the Scrabulous application, a third party add-on, saying that it’s too similar to Scrabble, and therefore infringing their copyright.

Apparently, Hasbro has the rights to the game in the U.S. and Canada, while Mattel has the rights everywhere else. As such, Scrabulous is in a troubled spot - the AP reports that Hasbro has threatened to “close down the site [Scrabulous] and its associated distribution points” in the event that an agreement cannot be made. In a letter Hasbro is sending to those who protest their actions, the company says that Scrabulous is an “illegally copied online version of the world’s most popular word game,” and encourages people to switch to legal online venues to play Scrabble instead.

Even if, legally talking, Hasbro and Mattel are in the right and their copyright is indeed being infringed upon by an application that’s easier, faster, and more accessible than all other legal Scrabble incarnations, let’s hope that a good agreement is reached and everyone gets to go home happy.

[via Reuters]

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