The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Want to know the fastest growing company in Silicon Valley? Can you guess? Facebook? Nope. Microsoft? Nope. Google? Nope even them. The fastest growing company in the valley is one that you might never even have heard of: Pure Digital Technologies, the maker of the tiny Flip video cameras. These little machines have taken the tech world by storm and their company has grown almost 45,000 per cent because of it. Tiny video cameras that sell for about $150, they offer one touch recording and uploading to the web. They also connect to your computer with a simple USB plug-in, getting rid of all the cords and expensive software. But until now, they were their own market, basically appealing to people who wanted fast uploads of lower quality video. The other camera makers left them alone. Now the Flip is moving for the market share of other camera companies with the introduction of the Flip Mino HD. Aimed at those people who still want the point and shoot ease of the rest of the Flip line but with higher quality video available, other camera companies are getting nervous. They arenÕt alone in the video world with last weekÕs other roll-out: GoogleÕs introduction of video chat. Starting about three years ago with massive inboxes, much bigger than anyone elseÕs, Google captured a large part of the online e-mail market. Then they added the text chat feature. Like MSN or any other instant messenger program, gchat allowed you to make instant contact with people who also had this feature and were on your contact list. Want to send someone an e-mail but notice they are online? Why wait? Get in touch with them instantly. Last week Google added the ability to do video chats. Instead of e-mailing or even text chatting, get in touch with people instantly with a video call. IÕve tried it out this week and itÕs slick, easy to use, and features high-quality video which you can even expand to full screen size. The next step is for Google to allow you to record your message in video and send it out to people who arenÕt online. That way when they check their e-mail, they will get the short video message you recorded for them earlier. Online video is hot and only getting hotter. ItÕs unbelievable to think that YouTube is only a few years old and was started by two guys who wanted to share the footage they had shot of a wedding with their friends who lived in different places, but could find no easy way online to do so. Services like Hulu, blip.tv and others have also jumped into this part of the web, making online video completely common place. Video now shows up everywhere. The smartest move that YouTube has made is allowing people to embed their videos into other websites. This has allowed video use online to grow massively on almost any site. The next move of course is with TV. Television is the 800-pound gorilla sitting in the middle of our lives and our entertainment. The average person in North American watches almost 21 hours of television per week, so to make any serious dent into homes and habits, online video sites need to crack our attention spans and steal some of the time away from it. Several sites have made arrangements in the last few weeks to show both full length-movies and regular shows on their sites. This makes the networks happy as they get their content out there. It makes the advertisers happy as they get their message out to an audience who is not captive in front of the TV screen any more. It makes consumers happy who now have the opportunity to watch their programs when and where they want. Video has changed things. We are not-so slowly moving in that direction in many, many ways. We have easy editing software. We have video cameras built into our laptops and our cell phones. We can video chat just like The Jetsons imagined and we can share our videos online easily and potentially have a massive audience. How long will typing skills be important? ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.
