Flickr CC: The Rocketeer

You think you can’t make your videos and photos look astonishing? Yes, You can.

Sweden is not only a playground for savvy online music innovators, but a place that also hearts for online creativity, making advanced online video and image editing super simple to use. In Flash. In the cloud. Bye bye heavy downloads and installations.

Jaycut, online video editor, and Pixlr, online image editor, are two Swedish startups bringing cutting egde video and image editing easily accessible to everyone with a browser and Internet connection. One is surprised how fast these editors load in the browser considering their feature rich libraries. Especially Pixlr has been dedicating to offer the fastest loading image editor. I have been testing, and it sure beats its online competitors FotoFlexer, Photoshop.com, Picnik, acquired by Google in March, and Sumo Paint. For those small image quick fixes, Pixlr also offers Pixlr Express, a light version of the editor.

Both Jaycut and Pixlr are B2B white label solutions, yet offering their respective editors free to individuals. Being super focused on delivering the best editing experience, they were early on to acknowledge the importance of fans and a user community for feedback. Pixlr has a very active user community with 60% recurring visitors, which also has helped translate the service to 23 different languages and create user tutorials. Working closely with its users, Pixlr’s has released many appreciated features such as image grabbers for various browsers and a recent neat social sharing feature immo.io.

Video editing and collaboration regardless place or device

With JayCut’s online video editor one can create a movie or a slideshow by adding text, sound effects and smooth transitions. Its newly relaunched community has also focused on the one click social sharing features. Besides from storing, collaborating, and sharing, all content is easily published to YouTube, blogs, or downloaded to iPhone (available in H.264/Mpeg-4, Avi and Flv formats). After having announced its support for Moblin-based ultra-portable devices like netbooks and mobile internet devices (MIDs) last fall, it has also just released an open API to work on.

The one thing I’m currently missing on both JayCut and Pixlr, is the ability to access and upload my content from other services, for example like Animoto does with SmugMug. Pixlr, although, allows image upload directly from URL, making editing my Flickr pictures easy.

Editing as a tool to increase user engagement

Online video is a powerful tool for creating user engagement, and not just in terms of consuming video content. As JayCut’s editor is being used in various brand campaigns (e.g. by Procter & Gamble), it has been able to gather statistics regarding user engagement. On average, a user spends 5 minutes on creating and editing a video. That is a very high number compared to the time spent on regular banner ads, campaign or landing pages. Of course, there’s no magic sauce to create user engagement, but encouraging people’s creativity and allowing them to interact with one’s brand can be very fruitful in building brand awareness and relationships.

So, if you just wish to plug and play, yet have an itch to express your creativity, go and polish up your holidays pictures on Pixlr, upload together with your videos to Jaycut, give your story its own voice – and share it with the rest of the world.

Warning: Don’t try this on your iPad

Paula is online strategist and startup evangelist. She blogs at paulamarttila.com and here at Bub.blicio.us.
Follow her on Twitter: @paulamarttila
Drop her email at paula.marttila[at]gmail[dot]com

Video-creation service Animoto has teamed up with SmugMug, the destination for storing and sharing photos and videos. With this teaming up of Animoto and SmugMug, users are able to access their stored SmugMug content in order to create videos on Animoto. As videos on Animoto are created with photos put creatively to music, such a partnership is dually beneficial for both parties.

Animoto emerged a couple years back as a strong candidate for becoming a leader in its space. The technology behind Animoto works well for its purpose as a consumer-sided product. With this, Animoto’s finished products are clean and polished.

From a business standpoint, Animoto has begun to encourage an integrated medium for multiple media types, including music. Providing an accompanying market for musicians to promote their work as the “sountrack” for people’s video creations puts Animoto in an interesting position, one it can take advantage of moving forward.

What’s been particularly useful for Animoto since its launch is the integration of third party content sites with its own service. This makes video-creation easier for users, as they can pull from content they’ve already uploaded on another site. Removing such obstacles within a given service increases its chances of seeing a high rate of adoption.

To this end, Animoto has forged a few other partnerships with companies including iStockPhoto. Animoto has also created applications to run on social networks such as Facebook for additional interaction with its existing and potential user base. With multiple points of access and the support of multiple media-sharing sites, Animoto has placed itself in a strong position for the future.

For participating partners, Animoto provides another tool to be extended to consumers. This provides an additional perk to existing users member to partner services, continuously freshening their ability to re-xeperience their uploaded content.

What I’m particularly keen on watching is how Animoto continues to move with trends, including mobile trends. Especially as Animoto seeks out partnerships for the growth and distribution of its own product, there are a great number of opportunities for such in the mobile realm.