It’s not uncommon for us here at Crenk to come across web applications that do the same thing, the only differences are that some might do it better or worse than another. In this case, the team has come across a very interesting music listening application called TubeRadio.
Once again for the music lover in all of us, this just astounds me. Now it does not have the capability to tap into your own stored music, but as powerful as this search engine is, this could very well replace my Pandora or Last.Fm efforts, even if only for a little while. TubeRadio calls itself the Youtube for music. After you see the video below, you’ll know what I mean.
So what do you think? They search is amazing and very thorough. I’m surprised at how music it can find, and even more so by how seamless the integration of listening and/or watching your music can be. During the video the speaker mentions it being like your personal MTV. Yeah, MTV, from when it used to actually play music.
My experience with TubeRadio has been a good one. I’ve found what I want to listen to, it streams everything smoothly with little problem. In my opinion the only thing really missing is the ability to tap into my own music, but I can overlook that for now since I’m lining up some great music of my own, and of other recommended playlists.
If you’re a music junkie like I am, chances are you have multiple mp3 players lying around, probably a ton of music on your computer, external drives, and/or stored off-site in cloud storage somewhere. Music for me defines who I am and is attached to a lot of my memories. While some people tie their memories to sights, sounds, and smells, I’ve always tied my memories to music. Which is why when something new makes it easier for me access my music and listen to what I want to when I need to, then I’m all for it.
There’s a web application that I’ve just been introduced to called JukeFly. The concept of Juke Fly is simple, if not multifaceted. For starters it’s a great way to search music. The interface allows you to find your music, but not just the audio, it will pull video from YouTube and a variety of other sources to give you a complete look at the music you’re looking for. It also pulls album covers, lyrics, group information, and other extras that make for an interesting experience. So as a search I was able to find a lot of what I was looking for, and see extras that I have never seen before like live performances, behind the scenes extras, and yes, even other people covering the music. I found this to be an interesting extra to just searching and playing music.
Add on top of that layer the ability to play YOUR music from just about anywhere as long as the main computer you’re pulling from is one and has an online connection. So if you’re traveling and accessing another computer, or if you don’t want to carry your music with you on your laptop, you can simply install the small installer that comes with JukeFly, go through the settings, and that’s it. It will read your music folders, pull the necessary data and you can listen to your music library from wherever you are.
There are some other options out there that offer music search and remote access, so perhaps this is not something entirely new, but I found the interface easy to use, and had a fun enough time finding some old music I had not heard in awhile. Have you used Juke Fly? Maybe you know of another alternative, let me know!
Social networks as they exist depend on the number of friends you start off with and thus you expand your network based on your existing network and grow from there. For many, not having an online presence makes it heard to start a social network when there is no online network to utilize to start. For many this can be frustrating and for many becomes the reason why they do not adopt the social scene. What if there was simply a network that didn’t rely on existing friendships and paired you with new people based on your profile to participate in unique shared experiences?
6Rounds is the answer and the unique network is sure to make a splash in the world of social engagement.
The network itself is designed to be a fully interactive experience incorporating the best of micro-messaging and video networks. There’s now a space for those not interested in hosting entire video shows, or who lack friends to build on a social profile on Facebook or Twitter.
6Rounds functions as a completely unique and diverse network that no user will get the same experience from their engagement. The network allows users to come together in a “live” setting where they will be challenged with “using a combination of webcams, real-time games, social activities and media engagements, we present a wide range of opportunities: from watching videos, playing real-time games, listening to music, Facebooking and Youtubing, to shopping together and beyond,” says the site.This sound a little like speed dating with the entertainment provided, and none of the relationship awkwardness attached. I can see how this would be appealing to both veteran and new entry supporters of social engagement.
The network is free and looks to combine the best of social networking, instant messaging, and video content to create an ever changing user experience.
How much is Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google involved in your common day activities? Did you ever ask yourself that? Where would you be if those didn’t exist?
Well there thousands of those existential questions that you may or may not asked yourself, and there’s no need to get real philosophical about this, but we sure can be certain that those technologies, web apps and more have an important presence in most of our days.
About those presences, here’s a very interesting video about the facts of several of these social tools, technologies and media: “Social Media Revolution”
Here are some of the facts that caught my attention:
Social media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the web
1 of 8 couples married in the US met via social media
If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s 4th largest
TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users, Facebook took less than 9 months to reach 100 millions
Ashton Kutcher has more Twitter followers than the entire population of Ireland, Norway and Panama
80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices
Wikipedia has over 13 million articles
80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees
Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
35% of books sales on Amazon are for Kindle
“Social media isn’t a fad; it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate”
We’ve all been sitting in the office, relaxing at home or on the bus and decided to check the old e-mails. Low and behold there’s one from your old buddy Jeff with a link to a YouTube video. What the hell, it’s not like your busy or anything. So you decide to give it a try. It turns out to be one of these one hit wonders that have their fifteen minutes of fame before being forgotten about and dissolved into the abyss.
Well now YouTube is going to form advertising partnerships with the makers of the videos. For example, David Devore filmed his son all loopy after been given sedative by the dentist. The video got over 28 Million views with the creator getting over $10,000 in ad revenue – that’s not exactly chump change for what you thought would be a funny video for friends and family to enjoy.
I think that this is actually a cool idea. It will keep people posting on YouTube and it may inspire creativity. But for the most part it’s an internet giant giving some of its haul back. YouTube didn’t really have to do this – they were perfectly comfortable where they were being the internets largest video provider. Maybe they’re softening the blow for a huge bombshell?!
If you use YouTube or just happen to have a pulse then you’ve probably heard of Fred (pictured). This is a popular mini-show on YouTube which features a troubled teenager named Fred talking about his teenage life and all the perils of it. For ages, the show held the No. 1 spot on Youtube. This was based on the amount of subscribers to the show which currently stands at 1.36 Million.
Now, Fred has been knocked down from number one after Nigahiga climbed to the top with over 1.9 million subscribers.
YouTube loves these miniseries as they are easy to monetize and to strike up deals with. Another popular miniseries that was on YouTube in the past was ‘Ask a Ninja’. This show again brought in tonnes of advertising revenue for YouTube and drove those who didn’t subscribe to the podcast to their website.
This recent change in the longstanding leader boards shows that the competition for online-only entertainment is heating up and may well begin to rival TV over the next few years.
Im not really too sure why Im writing about this on Crenk, apart from the fact that it was on a technology news site. This morning I posted a comment on a Techcrunch article about YouTube Founder Chad Hurley funding the USA Formula 1 team, and I was the first person to comment and thought it was funny to see the comments to follow. Here is a quick look. It just made me laugh.
Google have just announced that they have acquired a new technology company that will serve YouTube very well indeed.
That have just invested shares worth over $106 million dollars in On2 Technologies which are a video compression company. This new venture could change YouTube forever giving it faster download speeds and less buffering as a result.
This may also help to cut Google’s massive bandwidth bill of over $300 million per year that is necessary to keep YouTube up and running. By compressing the size of the videos (some of which are as big of 2GB since HD was introduced) this would make the site smaller and easier to manage while attracting more because of a better user experience.
“Because we spend a lot of time working to make the overall web experience better for users, we think that video compression technology should be a part of the web platform.
“To that end, we’re happy to announce today that we’ve signed a deal to acquire On2 Technologies, a leading creator of high-quality video compression technology.”
If you have some kind of mobile addiction and feel the necessity to constantly check your email with your mobile; I’m pretty sure that you usually get uncomfortable trying to use the small screen on your phone. Well this is not a revolutionary invention, but it keeps reminding me that Google is trying to keep things simpler: “Smart Links” automatically shortens long links and converts them into named links.
This is what you usually when you are reading an email with a long link:
And Smart Links converting it like this:
Of course these links, at least for now, will only work with Google related sites: Google Maps, Google Sites web pages and YouTube videos (but they are expecting to make it available soon for Google Docs as well).
There’s an important disclaimer about the use of this feature: only works with plain text emails.
Marina from Hot For Words has just released her new book. It provides a series of words and their origins, but at the same time is also provides just as many photos of her im guessing doing some modeling. Im not really too sure if this is a book or just a mix between a calendar and a down graded version of playboy.
Marina is quickly becoming one of the biggest stars on YouTube while also making a huge amount of appearances on television in the US. It is great to see her doing well and she plays on her look brilliantly. I really do hope she enjoys her success and can actually build on this popularity and provide something of substance, not just be a model with a different angle.
Screenjelly is perhaps the easiest screen recorder you'll ever use.
There are a lot of applications that claim to be the leader in capturing and recording your screen. Well I’m not making that claim with Screenjelly, but I will say it’s the easiest I’ve ever used.
Why?
Well unlike most other free screen capture applications, you don’t need to create a profile or sign up for an account. You also don’t need to download anything or log-in for access, you simply go to the site and start the process. The ease of use is a welcomed approach for new users who are not familiar with existing screen recording applications. There is little barrier into the service and users do not get mired down with having to check their emails to authorize emails and other such necessities when creating a new account.
Screenjelly also has a close relationship with Twitter, where you can easily share your recordings directly with your followers, and instantly get feedback. It’s pretty tempting if you’re looking at doing something quick. There are no screen share capabilities to pass it on to someone else, there’s not meeting function for chat function to share with other users, this is just purely setup to record what’s on your screen and the audio being sent via your microphone.
Those of you who like to watch music videos on YouTube may have become aware (and indeed disappointed) when Warner Brothers Music decided that renewing a deal with YouTube to have an official video channel for their songs last December wouldn’t be such a good idea. Each and every official video from bands such as the Red Hot Chilli Peppers was removed leaving only low-quality ones manually uploaded by fans – only to be quickly removed as well.
Now, discussions have reportedly started up again in attempt to thaw the mini Cold War that has developed between the two companies over the past six months of failed talks. Both companies failed to comment on the talks but YouTube will be eager to fully restore the videos as they already have contracts with other big companies such as Sony Music and EMI.
More intriguingly, CNET.com reported that other companies have stated that the conflict between YouTube and Warner Bros. was much more complex and deep. However, they refused to go into any serious detail as to what they meant.
If these claims are true, then it may be a while until we see WB videos up on YouTube again.
It’s not uncommon for us here at Crenk to come across web applications that do the same thing, the only differences are that some might do it better or worse than another. In this case, the team has come across a very interesting music listening application called TubeRadio.
We’ve all been sitting in the office, relaxing at home or on the bus and decided to check the old e-mails. Low and behold there’s one from your old buddy Jeff with a link to a YouTube video. What the hell, it’s not like your busy or anything. So you decide to give it a try. It turns out to be one of these one hit wonders that have their fifteen minutes of fame before being forgotten about and dissolved into the abyss.
If you have some kind of mobile addiction and feel the necessity to constantly check your email with your mobile; I’m pretty sure that you usually get uncomfortable trying to use the small screen on your phone. Well this is not a revolutionary invention, but it keeps reminding me that Google is trying to keep things simpler: “
Those of you who like to watch music videos on 
