www.dpingram.com

Can’t remember how I came to it, but here is an interesting article on Techcrunch US with some advice for Beta software product releases. Michael Arrington preceeded this with a short post asking ‘what annoys you most about betas?” and this article is based upon the real feedback he got.

Key points covered are:
- You only get one chance to make a first impression
- Not every feature release is news
- DOnt release half-baked stuff, it must work
- Pre-launch labels don’t mitigate a bad product
- Early adopters use firefox and safari (not just IE)
- Landing page or not? the jury is out. BUT dont try to gather info you wont use
- Do engage with bloggers in a medium they understand - write a blog
- Never publically attack your critics - you will have some, but get a thick skin
- Be trustful

izimi.com is about to launch a neat way to self-publish any sort of media content, without the need to upload it anywhere and without the need for your audience to download any client software…

With Izimi you can self-publish any to anyone anywhere on the internet (all they need is a web browser). This means you can show your friends your photos and videos, in full high quality original form. You can serve any content (eg images, video, etc) straight into any website, forum, blog, or in an email. You can even serve an entire website from your own machine. You dont need any tech skills and you dont need to understand FTP or other upload techniques. Its as simple as click and save (in this case its click and publish).

How its different to social networking and user generated content sites like MySpace, YouTube, Bebo etc - because there are NO restrictions on the type, size, quality, and quantity of media that you can publish.

How its different to P2P file sharing - because P2P requires both all people to have the downloaded client on their machines. So, you cant see the stuff I publish unless you have downloaded and installed the P2P client.

How its different to Pando and Dropsend - because they still require your content to be uploaded to a server, and they then hold it for a period so your friends can connect to retrieve it.

How its different to Photobucket, Flickr etc - because like the SN sites they place restrictions on storage, file types, file size, etc. Izimi places no restrictions.

Story broken on Mike Butchers excellent blog (www.vecosys.com)

Also featured on John Wood’s blog here

Disclosure: I am the product director at Izimi, so of course I am a great fan

TAGS: Izimi, MySpace, P2P, social media, social networking, user generated content, YouTube

Brightcove, the video publishing platform and YouTube-style destination site, has raised another round of funding - $59.5 million - from Maverick Capital, AllianceBernstein, Brookside Capital, The New York Times, Transcosmos and others. Brightcove had previously raised $21 million across two rounds.

See OS on Mashable

There was a mysterious outage on MySpace [yesterday]. It lasted just 2.5 hours, and the site itself performed mostly as it should. All that happened was this: Anyone trying to add a Flash widget to the site, or show an image via an inserted link, or otherwise embeds any sort of code, couldn’t do it. Existing widgets worked fine, but none could be added. And if a MySpace user edited their page, any existing embedded code produced an error.

See OA on Techcrunch for full story

Piczo, the social networking company that tries to distinguish itself as the safer place for teens, has raised $11 million in a third round of funding.

Piczo is one of handful of sites gunning for “second place” behind MySpace, the overwhelming leader with 65 million unique users a month. Facebook is around 17 million. Piczo boasts 10.5 million monthly unique visitors worldwide, mainly in Europe and the U.S. Bebo and Hi5 are around that. Like other networking sites, Piczo offers video, photo-sharing, and other communication tools. However, it doesn’t allow people to search profiles, creating more of a sense of security for young people. It’s also invite-only.

The round was led by U.S. Venture Partners (USVP) and Mangrove Capital Partners. Piczo’s existing investors, Sierra Ventures and Catamount Ventures, also participated in the third round of funding.

The company has now raised $18 million since 2005

According to a report by Deloitte Touche Tomatsu, social networking websites such as MySpace could start charging some of their users in 2007.

According to Deloitte’s team, as social networking sites attract an older audience, the latter may be ready to pay to insure that their privacy is respected (regarding personal videos, pictures and such).

Websites could thus charge a premium subscription, which would give users extra security and interface options.

However, making users pay access to social networking websites could also hinder the websites’ growth, as experimented by Friends Reunited, which hasn’t been performing as well as its rivals.

Bebo announced that Joanna Shields, Managing Director of Strategic Partnerships for Google EMEA, joined the company as President, International.

Bebo, which is backed by Benchmark Capital, has seen an enormous growth in user numbers since it launched in July 2005. It now has over 30 million registered members and is the third most popular social network in the US*. The 2006 Year-End Google Zeitgeist named Bebo as the number one search term, ahead of “MySpace” and the “World Cup.”

Where does Apple get off? After huge praise and attention for the launch of its iPhone last week a bunch of Aussie developers have developed a iPhone skin for Windows Mobile 5. Praise indeed.

How does Apple react? It writes heavy handed legal letters to the websites hoisting the skins to pull them down, then it writes letters to journos telling them they are not permitted to report the story.

What is this, North Korea? You’d think that with the unstoppable wave of UGC, SN, social media and citizen journos Apple would show a little more wisdom. All this will serve to do is build resentment towards Apple, whereas, had it been handled differently it could have served their PR machine so well.

It reminds me of the YouTube Cicarelli videos…

iPhone skin story

News item at The Inquirer is here

Here is the ‘offending’ forum (including the paraphrased legal letter)

Some discussion on Paul OBrien’s personal blog

Here’s a great spoof on the official letter from one forum reader….

Dear MoDaCo users

It has come to the attention of iApple iComputer iInc. that there have been discussions on this forum regarding the new Apple iPhone.

We would like to remind you that any discussion about this is strictly forbidden, and we will be taking legal action and seizing all your properties.

Any sentences and/or posts regarding this product are strictly the property of iApple iComputer iInc., and we DEMAND that you immediately remove the entire MoDaCo site and replace it with a redirection to the Apple store.

In addition, any consuming of an apple or apple-like fruit while reading this forum will be considered an illegal act. You are not to place apple peels or ’skins’ anywhere near your Windows devices.

thankyou

Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, the duo that brought the world Skype and Kazaa, have chosen a name for their new online-video start-up (previously called The Venice Project): Joost.

Company executives had referred to the new company for months by the codename “The Venice Project.” They chose Joost because they like the ring of it, according to a spokeswoman. The word doesn’t have any meaning.

The plan, according to Joost CEO Fredrik de Wahl, is to offer studios, cable stations and anyone else who wants to distribute high-quality video over the Internet, a fast, efficient and cheap distribution method. To do this, the company will rely on the peer-to-peer technology that helped Friis and Zennstrom build Skype and Kazaa.

Most importantly, Joost has yet to strike any marquee partnerships with top film or TV producers. Without them, their challenge is a tough one: convincing studio executives and the like to turn over their content to Joost when the company has yet to attract a big audience.

BitTorrent, the San Francisco-based distributor of a competing peer-to-peer company is also vying to license technology to Internet video companies. Another threat could come from the growing number of sites that offer top cable and movie channels without permission. One such company, TVU Networks, made a splash last summer by offering soccer fans the ability to watch World Cup matches on their PC. For a while, TVU Networks was offering HBO, CNN, the Disney Channel and NBAtv before many of the companies forced it to pull their shows down.

What Joost has going for it is that the software replicates the TV-viewing experience better than many of the other companies trying to wed TV to the PC. And this is a time when Hollywood is experimenting with the Internet. During the past year, Warner Bros. cut distribution deals with Guba, a little-known video-sharing site, and BitTorrent, a company that many consider to be synonymous with digital piracy.

Joost’s nifty technology may be enough to sway the entertainment industry to place a bet on proven winners in Friis and Zennstrom.

A menu allows users to switch channels with a click of a link. Users will also have TiVo-like control of the content and access to any show offered regardless of time of day. They can also move forward or backward within a show.

The Luxembourg-based company will support itself with advertising, specifically Internet ads that behave just TV commercials.

“These are the kind of ads that the TV industry and viewers understand,” de Wahl said.

OS by Greg Sandoval, CNET News.com, is here

Some Joost screenshots are here

AT&T and Microsoft are sinking over $4bn each into IPTV in an attempt to own the big play. IPTV effectively replaces what cable can do, plus more, over the internet.

Major TV companies are releasing entire episodes of popular series as free video podcasts on iTunes, which makes you wonder if the future of television isn’t something closer to podcasts than broadcast - that is, the ability to subscribe only to specific shows whilst forgetting about the whole concept of a channel. Isnt a channel essentially a hang over from the broadcast mechanism.