Vint 'Father of the Internet' Cerf Re: Online Video

Check out the great interview with Vint Cerf on BeetTV. He has not only won every techie award in the universe, but he's been steering strategy at Google since 2005. He has interesting things to say about the future of online video, which he predicts will involve more downloading and less streaming.

The Conference on Creativity & Technology

Highlight video of our recent trip to the CRE8 Conference in Orlando this spring.

Microsoft Silverlight Presentation by Brian Goldfarb part 1

(Install Silverlight to view this video.)

The video above is part one of a keynote speech given by Brian Goldfarb of Microsoft at the 2008 CRE8 Conference. I attended the conference in Orlando and you can review my earlier posts from the show.

A cultural change is afoot at Microsoft, where the oft-neglected designer is finally getting a long-craved-for hug from the Borg. This time it really seems like they are serious about respecting user experience and good human-computer interface design best practices. For instance, Microsoft is part of the OpenAjax Alliance and they have even launched a full-on designer community.

Check out his presentation to learn about Microsoft's new approach to the entire "ecosystem of developers" which involves "collaboration between teams of partners". Microsoft is not only trying to provide tools to do tasks, but they are also addressing the need for workflow solutions. How do teams work closely together, freely exchanging ideas, files and deliverables? With the new products, a designer can open up a project that has been coded by a developer and vice versa.

Goldfarb leads teams dedicated to building upon Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), their unified application framework. Among other things, it allows developers to apply basic windows functionality (like spell check) into multimedia applications.

He spoke broadly about general changes in Microsoft culture and practice. He mentioned that their server is now standards-based, and the "browser is getting better, I promise".

He shared a variety of example Silverlight sites from their Gallery, including Break.com, HSN,and the mind-bending "Deep Zoom" technology on the Hard Rock Cafe site.

At the time of this presentation, Microsoft was seeing over one million downloads a day of the Silverlight plug-in.

The new products support HD video, adaptive streaming solutions, XAML, and DRM-ready features. Read my post about a recent all-day Silverlight training event I attended at Microsoft to learn more about all this stuff.

Goldfarb stressed that they are building demand. Now they need creative people to develop the supply. To that end, they are offering 10 gigs of free hosting! The video above takes advantage of this. They are encouraging the developer network by providing a free place to get started.

Silverlight is driving plugin adoption by offering content developers a free hosting and streaming service: "Microsoft® Silverlight™ Streaming by Windows Live™ is a companion service for Silverlight that makes it easier for developers and designers to deliver and scale rich media as part of their Silverlight applications. The service offers web designers and developers a free and convenient solution for hosting and streaming cross-platform, cross-browser media experiences and rich interactive applications that run on Windows™ and Mac."

Video Publishing Platform Wars

comScore Video Metrix, the king of media statistics, tells us that more than 10 billion videos are viewed per month in the United States. In March 2008, there were more than 11 billion!

As has been written about numerous times on this blog, there are dozens of companies trying to corner pieces of this market. One of the biggest is Brightcove, who recently revamped their services and site. They describe themselves this way, "Brightcove empowers content owners—from independent producers to major broadcast networks—to reach their audiences directly through the Internet. At the same time, we help web publishers enrich their sites with syndicated video programming, and we give marketers more ways to communicate and engage with their consumers."

Recently a Seattle-area start-up has begun to challenge the mighty Brightcove. Delve Networks, formerly called Pluggd, published a direct challenge on their blog this week. They are going after Brightcove's corner of the video market and appear to be doing quite well.

The online battle for video platform domination rages on! It'll be fun to watch.

Microsoft Digital Advertising News

YuMe, a company dedicated to delivering ads across all platforms, has recently made a big deal with Microsoft to provide services and sales for digital video distribution. The video above is an interview with the Yume founder by Scobleizer.

In similar news, Microsoft just bought Navic Networks, a company that delivers advertising to digital television platforms. Read about the deal at The Seattle PI.

To learn more about the impending switch-over to digital television, read my earlier post T-Commerce, Digital TV and the Digitization of Content.

10 Free Web-based Alternatives to Photoshop

Want to edit (or warp) your images? Want to avoid spending $1,000 on Photoshop? The fun and informative LifeClever blog has a great post about free online image editors. LifeClever offers design advice, productivity tips and life hacks for designers and non-designers.

PDFs with Video

15 years ago Adobe had the foresight to launch a format that was cross-platform, cross-browser and behaved the same on different computers and printers. Today the PDF document format is a major standard for those of us who consume and distribute content on digital platforms.

This month they added support for video! This is great news for digital content creators and distributors. Although it is simple for us to post video on YouTube or a million other services, the fact that we can now create context for our video is exciting. Sure, we can embed video into our websites. But, more and more, destinations on the web are becoming irrelevant. In the early days of the web we were attempting to attract eyeballs to a particular URL. Today, even though portals are a solid business model, we are increasingly seeing the content travel to the viewer rather than the other way around. Now we can package video content up nice and neat and deliver it to our audience.

Learn more at the Adobe site. There is also a good story on The Murcury News where they describe it this way, "along with adding video to documents, Acrobat 9 is intended to let users create professional-looking "portfolios" - combining text and graphics with video, 3-D representations and other applications - and store them as a .pdf file that will appear the same to anyone who views or prints it."

My Spring Travels

Every year my family heads to Port Townsend, WA to sleep in the old officers quarters at Fort Worden State Park. Below is video evidence that I actually do exist when not blogging or working.

SMX Search Marketing Convention in Seattle

I attended SMX (The Search Marketing Expo) in Seattle today. Yahoo, Microsoft and Google were all trapped inside together, hiding from the massive spring downpour outside.

The Seattle Times had some good coverage of the event. Search (and the monetization of search) continues to be a hot topic and Seattle seems to be one of the epicenters.