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

Post and video by Miiko Mentz

Today concludes our video coverage of Web 2.0 Expo with a final interview with IBM. Of course IBM is certainly not the first company you think of when you think Web 2.0, but like last year’s Web 2.0 Expo, the show was filled with many startups and sprinkled with a few big players. This year’s big companies were IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce.com and a few others. And much of the buzz was around ‘doing more with less’ through collaboration and cloud computing.

Cloud computing is all the rage these days and IBM is trying to get in on the action. At the end of last month, IBM announced an initiative dubbed “Open Cloud Manifesto” that calls for open standards to promote cloud computing. There’s a host of companies backing the manifesto, but oddly, the pioneers and leaders in cloud computing are absent.

According to Reuters, Amazon is reviewing the plan, Google has decided not to support it and Salesforce.com hasn’t publicly spoken on the matter yet. Also, Microsoft has publicly criticized IBM’s efforts.

On a lighter note, Bubblicious Reporter Jolie O’Dell spoke with Kathy M. Mandelstein, marketing director at IBM Software Group, IBM Rational Software and WW Programs, Events and Web, about cloud computing, LotusLive, and Rational AppScan. IBM’s overall theme at Web 2.0 Expo was “Smart Work” and helping people and businesses to work smarter through collaboration and collective intelligence. Hear what Mandelstein had to say:

In addition to IBM, the Bubblicious team talked with a few other companies offering social computing applications and services. If you missed any of our interviews from earlier this week, check them out: ooVoo, MindTouch, Topix, chi.mp, and our Web 2.0 Expo highlight reel.

by Michelle Lentz

I need your suggestions.

I keep a lot of my older data on two external drives: a Seagate 250 GB hard drive holds all my photos from 2002 forward, music, video, and other personal files. A 1 TB Western Digital holds all my business-related items.

Some of this stuff is scattered between my two laptops as well, but mostly not due to space considerations.

This has always worked well for me – until yesterday.

I plugged in my Seagate to grab my holiday playlists only to discover that there is no data on my Seagate. It’s telling me I need to reformat my drive – that it’s a blank disc. What? I’ve tried it on several different computers at this point, both PC and Mac. I’ve accepted that my data is somehow, magically gone.

Now, my music is backed up on my iPod and my photos since 2005 are on Flickr. But everything else? Not so much. This has convinced me, more than anything else, the benefits of also having an off-site backup. You know, in the Cloud.

I know there are a bunch of companies out there, such as Drop.io. I have around 200 GB of data, and that will only increase. What do you recommend for price, capacity, and ease of use? Leave your thoughts in the comments. I hope to have found something by next week, and believe me, I’ll take your suggestions to heart.

Thanks, and happy Thanksgiving!

Photo Credits:
- Lost Data
– King Cloud

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Contact Michelle with your news, apps, and events via email at michelle[at]writetech.net, Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology.

by Michelle Lentz

I speak at a lot of events. Consequently, there is a pile of business cards on my desk. Literally a pile. I dig through it now and then because I remember a contact I made, but by the time I’m back home, I’m too behind to put a lot of effort into the cards I’ve collected. I even have a business card scanner I never use because I hate the software. So I’m intrigued by Cloud Contacts, a new startup from Allen Stern (of Centernetworks).

It’s a startup with a business model. Even in their current beta state, it costs money. That’s smart, right off the starting block. It also solves a problem that I have, and I’m obviously not the only one. Cloud Contacts takes that pile of business cards and converts them into useful information.

Here’s what happens:
You grab that pile of cards and send them into Cloud Contacts. You can pay for the shipping yourself, or have them send you a mailer for $2.50.  For $30, you can have up to 100 business cards converted into contacts and stored “in the cloud.” It gets better. You can access these new contacts from anywhere, and they are easily imported into most address books. Additionally, it appears that Cloud Contacts will find social networking information for your new contacs, which is something I never have time to do.

Cloud Contacts offers several packages based on the number of business cards you need converted, up through $500. I have a huge conference coming up in November, so I may give this service a shot. What are your thoughts on this? Would you rather use a card scanner? Do you have other methods for inputting and following up on business card contacts?

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Contact Michelle with your news, apps, and events via email, Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology. You can also catch Michelle presenting on Twitter at the upcoming DevLearn ’08 in San Jose.

by Michelle Lentz

GoGrid has launched a viral campaign to inform and illustrate cloud computing. Now, I’m pretty sure I have my finger on the general concept of cloud computing, but really, how much do I need to know? Michael Sheehan, Technology Evangelist of GoGrid, explained it to me this way:

“The point about “the cloud” is that you shouldn’t have to worry about where the servers are (meaning where the provider of the cloud service is). You could have multiple data centers around the world, but to the buyer of the service, it is just that, a service. And to the end-user, it shouldn’t matter (much like you don’t really care where your Gmail account server is…you probably hit multiple data centers around the world depending on where you are accessing it).”

I found the GMail example really hit home. I think there are a lot of people out there who care a lot about where the data centers are located and such, but the average user? Not so much.  So, back to that viral campaign. GoGrid has several rather funny videos out there, accessible via the fun nohardware.com or via YouTube. I’m just going to post one, as video and I are often at odds, but here are links to the others:

Cloud Computing in Plain English (an homage of sorts to Common Craft), which made me laugh several times

NoHardware.com – video 1, with guns a blazing.

NoHardware.com – video 2, equally as fun and, yes, REAL. That one is posted below.

The point being, of course, is to stop worrying about whether your server is bulletproof and just get comfy in the Cloud.

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Contact Michelle with your news, apps, and events via email, Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology. You can also catch Michelle presenting on Twitter at the upcoming DevLearn ’08 in San Jose.