Here is the scenario: you and your partner are located across the country and working to produce a series of videos for your company. You both need access to the assets involved, and grow tired of using Dropbox or Google Apps to act as an intermediary to store your files, which are too big to attach to your emails practically.
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Enter Cozimo, a site that is designed for this specific purpose. They have been around for a several years with a hosted service that was setup for smaller video creators. This week they announced their Enterprise edition, which doesn't use their cloud to host your content, but offers all the same kind of services.
A big feature of Cozimo is being able to hold online review sessions that multiple people can participate in and make markups on particular video frames in real-time. A wide variety of video formats are supported, including MP4, AVI, WMV, FLV and Quicktime MOV. You can upload all kinds of files to your own repository, including text, PDFs and pictures too.
The original version was based on Flash, which was fine for its day. But now any video creator worth his or her black outfits carries around an iPad to show off their content, and so Cozimo has rewritten the Enterprise version to include support for HTML5. Unlike the original, you use your own storage and their software to manage the collaboration. Everything is available with just a Web browser and no other special software needed.
The software has subscriptions starting at $5,000/yr. One plus for the Enterprise version is that there are no restrictions on file sizes: the original version limits you to files less than 60 MB. The hosted version has a free service for a single workgroup that is limited to 10 MB of storage, which won't get you much video, and there are more capable and expensive plans that also include branding with your corporate logo.
When Tim Berners-Lee first invented the Web back in 1989, he was more concerned about hyperlinks than hypermedia. Those of us old-timers remember that for those early years, the Web was 100% text, with the most exciting thing on the page being those underlined links in blue. It wasn't until several years later that the first graphics were introduced, and since then we have continued to demand more from our websites, with audio and video content and real-time interactions now more the norm than the exception.
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(That is what the Web looked like back in 1992: all text, all the time.)
But today's Web isn't about just posting all kinds of content, but being able to interact with it in real time: to buy stuff, to seek out specific answers to our questions, to share with what our peers are working on, to be fully engaged with all of our senses. That is a lot more than just requesting a page of text from a Web server.
Tokbox Inc., which enables group video chat apps on a website,
Radish Systems, which sells ChoiceView, an iPhone/iPad app that enables real-time interactions and data transfer with call center agents,
Twilio Inc., sells its Cloud Communicator which enables voice and texting interaction with a website using a variety of programming languages and tools,
5 Min Media, is a leading how-to video repository and syndicator that is now part of AOL.
All of these vendors have various programming interfaces, widgets and tools to make it easier to share audio and video content on a website: the goal is to make your site more engaging and keep a visitor browsing and have a site stand out from others that are more static.
The bad news is that we are still in the early days of how a particular browser supports this content: if we are going to post something in Flash, for example, that cuts out all the iPad users out there. If we embed a video player, that means we tie ourselves closer to the source site that serves up that content. If we make use of a widget that works on our current Web server, it might fail when we upgrade to a newer version.
Come join me and my panel next Tuesday as we'll talk about these issues and see some really innovative sites built using these tools.
As important as memorizing vocabulary, conjugating verbs, and declining nouns are, nothing beats speaking practice when it comes to learning a foreign language. The German company Babbel helps make that a lot less intimidating for online learners today with integration of a speech recognition tool into its language learning system.
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The feature allows learners to practice and fine-tune their pronunciation skills as they learn a foreign language. The browser-based speech analysis gives real-time feedback for the user, gauging how close their pronunciation is to that of a native speaker. "We're encouraging learners to speak and improve their pronunciation with a technical tool before they have to face real-life situations", says Babbel's Managing Director Markus Witte.
The speech recognition tool is integrated into a new learning exercise in the Babbel courses. Learners hear a word, are prompted to repeat it, and are scored 1-100 based on the quality of their pronunciation
The feature will be available immediately in all Babbel courses. No installation - other than upgrading to Adobe Flash Player 10.1 - is required.
Babbel's founding team have a strong background in audio engineering as Witte, along with Lorenz Heine, Toine Diepstraten and Thomas Holl were colleagues at Native Instruments, a leading manufacturer of audio software.
The speech recognition tool is one of many innovations that Babbel has brought to foreign language learning, including mobile apps and individualized training programs. Babbel's competitors include Livemocha and Rosetta Stone.
What would you do if you knew exactly who was coming to your site and were able to tailor your site accordingly? With Demandbase's B2B-focused Real-Time ID service, businesses can now identify information about a visitor's company, including industry, size, location and revenue before they even render their sites. In addition, they can also identify if that visitor is already a customer. Thanks to this, businesses can now, for example, tailor their marketing messages and advertising on their home pages for every visitor, and show them just those messages and white papers that are relevant to their businesses.
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Demandbase's solution is based on the company's extensive database of company IP addresses. While regular reverse IP lookup services often only reply with the address of a company's ISP, Demandbase has created its own proprietary database that goes beyond this and provides far more detailed information. The company has also partnered with various data providers like Dun & Bradstreet, Jigsaw, Edgar Online, Harte-Hanks, Hoovers and LexisNexis that allow it to display relevant company data.
The idea here is that by being able to identify your visitors even before you render a page for them, you can cater your website to these visitors and increase your chance of converting these visitors into paying customers. This technology also comes in handy when it comes to registration forms. Instead of asking visitors for their company information when they want to download a white paper, for example, Demandbase already has this information.
Integrates with Existing Tools
Demandbase provides its customers with an API, so they can integrate this information with their existing customer management and business intelligence solutions. The company claims that it can correctly identify 83% of U.S. business traffic and that its real-time solution can identify a customer within 5 milliseconds. The company currently identifies about 200 million Web visits to B2B websites each month.
New Today: LivePerson Integration
Starting today, Demandbase is also bringing its technology to LivePerson, the popular live chat solution for businesses websites. Thanks to this, a company that implements Demandbase's solution can now, for example, ensure that chats on their website are routed to the right specialists, and instead of having to gather basic information from these customers in the chat, the agents can immediately provide relevant information to their customers.
Over 97% of all searches on real-time search engine and infrastructure provider OneRiot are now driven by the company's partners who use OneRiot's API to serve real-time search results. Today, OneRiot is announcing the next version of its API, which - among other things - gives content owners the ability to create real-time search engines for their domains and sites. The new API will also allow developers to integrate OneRiot's real-time ads with the search results. OneRiot is also introducing a new ad format for Twitter apps. These ads are limited to 140 characters and include shortened URLs.
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The first site to use OneRiot's new domain search is the Guardian. The newspaper's new "Zeitgeist" tool - which gives readers a visual overview of trending topics and articles from the Guardian - is powered by the new version of the OneRiot API.
Twitter-Style Ads and Vertical Searches
In addition to this update, OneRiot now also offers developers new tools to filter search results for vertical searches such as news, videos and images, as well as for niche searches that only return results about topics like gadgets, politics and music.
Given that virtually all of OneRiot's growth and traffic dependents on keeping its partners happy, these updates are an important step for OneRiot. In this same context, it's also an important move for OneRiot to offer Twitter-optimized results. The company already offers a wide variety of advertising solutions, but for Twitter developers, being able to just plug these new ads into their products will surely prove to be very helpful.
As Internet users, we are becoming increasingly dependent on our social networks for a number of daily activities. We communicate with friends and family, share photos, invite and get invited to events and generally interact with the world around us. The social network is becoming the heart and soul of our Internet experience and Gigya will announce a range of new features this Thursday to help websites take full advantage of the roll of social media in today's online environment.
We spoke with David Yovanno, CEO of Gigya, this morning about the different ways people are using the Internet, how this has changed from the old model and how Gigya can help.
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"It used to be, users search the Internet on their own," Yovanno told us. "Today, they look at what their friends are doing. Only something like 5% of the time you spend online is you actually searching for something."
The big change he's seen recently, he told us, is the concept of the feed as the center of our online interaction. We spend more time letting information passively approach us, by way of our friends, than actively searching for it. At the same time, by the very nature of the "feed", we share information for our friends to see, who see it as part of their feed.
"Consumers have transitioned or added on top of email the idea of a feed," he told us.
Yovanno said that Gigya has been working with Microsoft recently on its social strategy and he expects to see Microsoft's take on a feed interface in the near future.
Gigya recently changed its direction to focus primarily on social media and interaction, so it's betting on the fact that the feed will become ever more important in driving traffic.
Social Media Is The New Search
In a recent article, Marshall Kirpatrick showed us how, for the first time, social networking sites had surpassed search engines in driving traffic. Yovanno explained that many website are noting this trend and switching strategies.
"Social media is representing a larger and larger mix of traffic compared to search," Yovanno said. "Sites are starting to wake up to the fact that they need to make some of those same level of investments in social as they did for search."
Whereas search engine optimization was the primary focus of sites in search of traffic, many are now realizing that social interaction is quickly becoming a driving force.
What Gigya provides to this end is a way to not only let users login to a website using a number of different social media identities, from Twitter to LinkedIn to Facebook Connect, but also to create content that will be seen on those sites' feeds without ever leaving the website they're on.
A simple example of this can be seen on this article. If you log in using Facebook Connect to leave a comment, after you enter the comment and click "Send" a little window will pop up allowing you to share your comment in your Facebook feed.
Gigya 4 - The New Features
Thursday's roll-out of Gigya 4 includes three primary new feature sets - increased connectivity, enhanced user interaction and analytics.
Gigya allows users to sign into a website using a number of different social identities, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo! and OpenID in more than 20 different languages. One they're logged in, Gigya also provides a number of on-site widgets to allow for interaction and sharing, from inviting friends from other social media sites to chatting to sharing content in an off-site stream. Then, after everything is said and done, Gigya's new social optimization platform provides you with analytics on how users are interacting with your content, other users, and their social networks.
"Our business, at the core, is a technology of connectivity," Yovanno explained. "We create an abstract layer on top of Facebook Connect, LinkedIn's open platform, Twitter ... and we give a website a single API to write to."
The provision of a so-called "super API" is clutch to the emerging social network atmosphere we find ourselves in today.
Yovanno pointed out that there are a number of networks available and, even though Facebook is the leading social network, it entirely depends on the audience for what network will be the most popular when users are given a choice. The more choices a website offers, the more likely a user will chose to log in using their social identity and therefor be able to share information about the site on their feed.
The "super API", then, is key to providing as many login options as possible without having to constantly keep up with changing requirements from an ever-growing number of social networks.
Perhaps we were a bit premature in saying that Facebook was going to become your "one true login", as services like Gigya will make sure that you'll be able to continue using any number of social network identities to sign in and share. In the end, we find it more likely that the number of logins will continue to grow and Gigya's gamble will ultimately pay off.
The startup has been making headlines throughout 2009 and is wrapping up the year with a bang. This morning, they announced a partnership with MySpace. The resulting utility is part pulse check, part search engine, and all fun. It also serves as an automatically refreshing reminder that this social network is far from dead yet, especially where entertainment properties are concerned.
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The new product is based on Collecta's site search platform and MySpace's real-time API. For search results on everything from weather to celebrities to trending keywords, it returns a filterable, streaming gallery of a collection of comments, photos, links and videos posted to MySpace by users.
Based on IM protocols, Collecta's search platform pushes out content in real time as it's published. Each result also includes the poster's "mood," which also serves as a built-in mechanism for sentiment analysis.
"Collecta brings the size and richness of the MySpace community to light," said MySpace COO Mike Jones.
"Its instantaneous results provide insight into our users' moods and activities. It's great to see how quickly Collecta has used the MySpace Real-Time Stream API to deliver new value to people on the web."
Collecta CEO Gerry Campbell also called MySpace one of the most vibrant web properties, saying, "MySpace users are actively sharing an amazing volume of pictures and media, as well as expressing their thoughts on a very emotional and raw level. Our search platform cuts right into the center of all this activity. It reveals a slice of humanity that you couldn't see otherwise. Even a search for a basic term like 'happy' is incredibly fascinating."
In addition to showing results for search terms, the new product also shows a brief overview of three top trends currently on MySpace.
Collecta's general search function currently aggregates data from a slew of news and social sites and will soon incorporate publicly available data from MySpace, as well.
MySpace's partnership shows an interesting use of Collecta's site search, but it's far from the only application. The platform can be used to show activity, trends and perspectives on just about any website.
We've been keeping an eye on super-simple feed reader Lazyfeed for about six months now. Cofounder and CEO Ethan Gahng wrote us today to let us know about some exciting changes users will see tomorrow morning when the startup launches Lazyfeed Squared, the second version of the product.
"In our previous version," he said, "users had to click on updated topics to see what's inside. That is not lazy. And it wasn't fun enough. With the new version, it's not just the topics that update - each topic has its own live updates which show the latest headlines along with images."
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In days of yore, users would type in a tag or single-word search term, and LazyFeed would return videos, photos and blog posts tagged with that term. Users were then prompted to add that term as a topic, which essentially meant the search was saved. The UI looked like a typical feed reader:
In September, the site announced support for both RSSCloud and PubSubHubBub protocols, making the product even quicker, in some cases as fast as an IM client.
Lazyfeed Squared retains the real-time capabilities of the previous version, but it's a more passive experience, like watching television.
"It delivers updates (updated content) of updates(updated topics)," said Gahng. "You don't even need to flick a finger to see what's up with your topics. You can just add stuff and watch live content flow in."
Lazyfeed has also eliminated the need to sign up to use the service. "This will make it much easier to recommend Lazyfeed to your friends," said Gahng. "We think this will greatly make Lazyfeed more approachable for first-time users."
"Very thorough. Exceeded my expectations. Nice work."
-Henry "Hank" Nothhaft, Jr.
Entrepreneur-in-Residence at SRI
"The report is excellent -- a great synthesis of why the real time web is different, what changes, what doesn't and what the industry needs in order to press forward."
- John Borthwick
CEO, Betaworks
Those are just a few of the things that people have said about our newly released research report The Real-Time Web and its Future so far. Want to know what's included in the report? Check out the Table of Contents and the full text of the Introduction below.
That's the Table of Contents and below is the full text of the introduction to the report. We hope you'll purchase this report via this link - and check out our package deals for purchasing the ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management as well!
What is The Real-Time Web? Beyond Twitter and Facebook
Dave Winer defines the real-time Web in four words: "It Happens Without Waiting."1 That's true, and appropriately vague. The phrase "real-time Web" means different things for different people and it's too early in the game to have anything but a loose, inclusive definition.
Many of the different forms the real-time Web takes do have some common benefits, user experience elements, lessons learned, pitfalls and possibilities. This is what we explore in this report.
It's definitely a whole lot more than just Twitter and Facebook, though these are the best known instances of what's referred to as the real-time Web. Someday Facebook may open up its user data and play a larger role in the real-time Web than just the introduction to the stream model that it plays today. Someday Twitter may grow, discover how to retain users and effectively encourage more than the small number of people who today create the vast majority of content on that service. Today engineers estimate that Twitter sees about 1 thousand messages published per second and between 5 and 10 million links shared per day, before de-duplication. That sounds like a lot, but the real-time Web as a whole is already much, much larger than Twitter.
For infrastructure provider Kaazing, the real-time Web is using HTML5 Web Sockets technology to push live financial information to the Web browsers of banking customers that had always been limited to desktop applications for security reasons.
For consumer web app Pip.io, the real-time Web is creating an XMPP-powered chat-like experience for users to communicate with friends around objects like a Google Map or a streaming Netflix video playing in the Pip.io web OS.
For semantic recommendation company Evri, the real-time Web is the ebbing and flowing of traffic data on Wikipedia. That data points to hot topics that Evri needs to build topic pages to serve their publisher customers.
For search engine OneRiot, the real-time Web is made up of the links people share on Twitter ...as well as Digg, Delicious and the click-streams of more than a million users who have opted-in to exposing what they see online through the OneRiot toolbar.
For Q&A service Aardvark, the real-time Web is the people inside the social circle of a user who happens to be available online at a given moment and interested in the topic of a user's question.
There are hundreds of thousands of blogs that now deliver updated content to any other application that subscribes to a PubSubHubbub or RSSCloud feed, immediately after that content is published. NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen says the real-time Web creates a sense of flow for users that's comparable to the way television holds our attention.
Google's Brett Slatkin, developer of the PubSubHubbub real-time protocol, says the real-time Web is a foundation for efficient computing and use cases we can't yet even imagine.
In writing this report we interviewed 50 people who work on technologies that power or leverage what they consider to be the real-time Web. Those people have had a very diverse array of experiences, but articulate a common story. It's a story of increased computational efficiency - and software that struggles to keep users from feeling overwhelmed. It's a story of radically new possibilities but strategies based on adding value in conjunction with more traditional, slower moving online resources.
We hope you enjoy reading this overview of the emerging real-time Web. We believe this phenomenon is one that will play a major role in the Web and world of the future.
The page-based model of destination sites, created by centralized expertise and navigated through authority-based search and clicking link by link is being transcended. We think this survey of current strategies and experiences to date will prove very useful in helping you effectively participate in and help build the future of the real-time Web.
We're excited to announce that our latest premium research report will be available for download on Monday! Titled The Real-Time Web and Its Future, the report is a broad and deep look at the emerging world of real-time technology on the web. Based on 50 interviews with companies, engineers and executives building or leveraging real-time technology - the subtitle of this report could very well be "Real-Time, Beyond Twitter and Facebook."
Social networks, infrastructure providers, media companies, non-profits and financial services companies were all interviewed and will all find this report useful to quickly develop a sophisticated understanding of this important trend on the web. Large portions of the web will be operating in real-time and this report will provide you with an important competitive advantage. You can pre-order the report at a $100 discount here; check out the Table of Contents (PDF) and a sample chapter (PDF) below.
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There is so much work being done around push delivery of messages - messages between people, between websites and people and between machines and machines - that it's impossible to capture the whole market.
What we've done is develop in-depth case studies of 10 companies that are illustrative of general trends or have wildly innovative strategies. We've profiled twenty four key people to watch in order to understand the future of real time. We've done overviews of three of the biggest sectors in this market - search, stream readers and filtering/text analysis. And we offer five visualizations to help you understand the issues and strategies.
This report captures the wisdom of thousands of hours of work with real-time technology by people breaking new ground - then it was distilled down through hundreds of hours of interviews, research and writing by ReadWriteWeb staff and hundreds of Real-Time Summit attendee conversations. Now you can purchase the report and get an in-depth understanding of this emerging trend in just a few hours of reading and for a bargain price of $200 by pre-order, or $300 next week.
Pre-order today and you'll receive a link to download the 60+ page PDF on Monday, November 30th.
For your perusing pleasure we offer today the Table of Contents and one full sample chapter for download. Or, check out this excerpt from that sample chapter below.
Ted Roden Brings the Real-Time Web to the NY Times and EnjoysThings
By day, Ted Roden works at the very top floor of the New York Times building, in the R&D department. The Times has a great team of engineers; they do cutting edge work in APIs, data visualization and computer assisted reporting. Roden does work with real-time data at his day job, but he gets full creative freedom when working a side-project called EnjoysThings.
The primary contributions Ted Roden makes to understanding the real-time web include articulating:
the material benefits of going real time
the importance of user experience
the changing landscape in analytics and advertising
We had a conversation with Roden about what happened after he added a real-time feed to EnjoysThings; he articulates well some of the biggest advantages of a real-time infrastructure.
EnjoysThings is a visual bookmarking site, like Delicious for images and other media. Even text snippets bookmarked are highlighted visually. User experience is a key consideration in all the site's developments and the service is a lot of fun to use.
This summer Roden added a premium subscription option to the site, called Joy accounts. Joy accounts cost $20 per year for access to all the current and forthcoming premium features, or users can pay $5 for a single premium feature like disabling ads on the site or being able to view NSFW content.
One of the features Joy account holders get is access to a real-time view of new content
shared. That real-time stream can be viewed in any browser but may be best served up via a Firefox sidebar. A real-time feed as up-sold value add? That's remarkable and Roden says the response has been positive.
The sidebar is simple but compelling. New content is pushed live into the side of the
browser as soon as it's shared on the site, including images. At first Roden said he used AJAX set to poll his site every few seconds. Then he switched to a Comet implementation. He says he's using the open source infrastructure Tornado, from Facebook, for his real-time prototypes at the Times.
EnjoysThings is still very small but the implications of adding real-time to this site could
likely be incurred by sites of any size.
1. INCREASED TIME ON SITE
"People leave it open all day long," Roden said of the sidebar. "Time-on-site has seen a
huge increase. It's like when the new content comes in on the Facebook Live Feed, if you know it's about to pop in 5 seconds you'll stick around."
There are a number of different factors that are making time-on-site an increasingly
important metric on the web, compared to pageviews. Increased consumption of video
is the best known, but as real-time streams of aggregated content become increasingly
common, increased time-on-site will be an important measurement of how successful an implementation is.
2. DECREASED SERVER COSTS
After implementing real-time infrastructure, Roden reports that "my site runs a lot more
smoothly, I'll probably move the whole site to that technology because deep down it's
much easier on the database for me."
"I used to get hit by Stumbleupon and [the site] would start to crawl. Then I changed to some of this real time stuff and I've reduced the number of servers. Instead of the users sitting on the page and refreshing, I push it out to them. My EC2 bill has gone way down." Roden's experience compliments the story that Google's Brad Fitzpatrick told us about using PubSubHubbub push feeds to deliver shared items in Google Reader to FriendFeed. Changing from polling to real-time push cut traffic between the two sites by 85%. Likewise, magazine-style feed reader Feedly says that the part of its service that now consumes PubSubHubbub from Google Reader has seen a 72% reduction in bandwidth.
...(continued) To read the rest of this sample chapter, see the PDF download above. Please see also the Table of Contents and pre-order now to get a great discount on the forthcoming report!
Here is the scenario: you and your partner are located across the country and working to produce a series of videos for your company. You both need access to the assets involved, and grow tired of using Dropbox or Google Apps to act as an intermediary to store your files, which are too big to attach to your emails practically. 
When Tim Berners-Lee first invented the Web back in 1989, he was more concerned about hyperlinks than hypermedia. Those of us old-timers remember that for those early years, the Web was 100% text, with the most exciting thing on the page being those underlined links in blue. It wasn't until several years later that the first graphics were introduced, and since then we have continued to demand more from our websites, with audio and video content and real-time interactions now more the norm than the exception. 
As important as memorizing vocabulary, conjugating verbs, and declining nouns are, nothing beats speaking practice when it comes to learning a foreign language. The German company 
What would you do if you knew exactly who was coming to your site and were able to tailor your site accordingly? With 
Over 97% of all searches on real-time search engine and infrastructure provider 
The first site to use OneRiot's new domain search is 
As Internet users, we are becoming increasingly dependent on our social networks for a number of daily activities. We communicate with friends and family, share photos, invite and get invited to events and generally interact with the world around us. The social network is becoming the heart and soul of our Internet experience and 
We've been 
We've been keeping an eye on super-simple feed reader 
"Recommended."
We're excited to announce that our latest premium research report will be available for download on Monday! Titled 