Saturday was the second Video Hackday, once again organized by Susan and Oliver from Ziggeo. What I like a lot about the format is that it is a single day without an overnight. While that may seem like very little time it does make it much less daunting and Video Hackday attracted a very diverse group of participants (including many first timers) as a result. All the engineers there from sponsors including Clarifai, Twilio, Embed.ly and JW Player were super friendly and helpful. I gave a brie...

Susan, Oliver and the team at Ziggeo are organizing the second annual Video Hackday. You will learn the latest about video APIs from companies including Twilio, JW Player and of course Ziggeo. The first video hackday was a blast. I gave a talk on No Stack Startups and even managed to write a small hack myself. This year I will again be one of the judges for the hackathon. So if you are at all interested in video (and who isn’t?) you should definitely sign up and attend.

Video is everywhere these days and for good reason. Even a short video clip contains a lot more information than a still image. But playing back videos in a way that works across browsers and devices has been tricky. Just using the HTML5 video tag means you have no control over the controls on the video and event handling is a complete cross-browser mess. Both jwplayer and video.js don’t behave like standard HTML elements and are therefore hard to use in modern responsive layouts. If you have...

I love answering questions. On long car rides nothing makes me happier than when our kids ask me something difficult to explain. Makes the drive go by much more quickly. I blame this habit on my Dad who used to be a vocational school teacher in Germany. So here is an experiment. I am adding an AMA feature to Continuations. Below is a link which will let you record a video question (powered by Ziggeo). Every week I will pick one video question and record a video answer. Then I will post both h...

The age of video is upon us. As humans we have a finely evolved system for extracting lots of information from even very short sequences of moving images. And now we have the bandwidth, storage and devices to make video ubiquitous. The result is an explosion not just of video usage across all platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Snapchat) but also in format, content and delivery innovations: livestreams (eg Meerkat, Periscope, YouNow), over the top (eg HBO, VHX), remixing (eg Dubsmash, Coub...

I recently finished Dave Eggers’s “The Circle” which provided a good challenge to my baseline view that more transparency is good and that data protection is a futile effort. One of the systems in the novel is an easy to deploy camera that anyone can point at anything and provide a livestream. Called “SeeChange” the promoters argue that it will provide for reduced crime, increased safety and just additional information all around. The detractors are either smeared (with planted information) o...

Video has proven to be a very powerful way of connecting with people online. I think no site demonstrates this more than Kickstarter. For instance, Allison Weiss raising money to make a new record (one of the very early projects), shows just how compelling a video can be. Covestor exists in the much more staid world of investments. But it too has at its heart a people driven approach. Each model that you can follow on Covestor is managed by a person. A person who is investing their own money ...

Apparently some of the early television shows were essentially “filmed radio" (I know I have heard this quote a number of times, but of course right now I don’t seem to be able to find a link on google). In other words instead of developing a format native to the new medium, things got started with an essentially literal adaptation. The equivalent in online education is putting entire long lectures up on the web. Don’t get me wrong, I love some of the stuff that’s on Academic Earth, but the v...

I wrote about the fight for net neutrality earlier this week and got some comments that suggest I did not succeed with my hosting example. I was thinking of clarifying that in a comment. Then I read a column by Holman Jenkins in the WSJ (love reading the WSJ to challenge my own opinions) titled “Neutering the ‘Net." That column shows some of the same misunderstanding, so I am thinking a full post might be in order. Where we live, Verizion offers FIOS and in their ads and on their site they cl...

Union Square Ventures Coffee - Or How to Really Engage Your Audience Yesterday, I met with the team from TalkMarket. Instead of just demoing their site and providing screen shots of how a video is created using their tool, they actually had me create a video! Not only was this a lot of fun, but it really kept my attention. It was also the most compelling way to demonstrate TalkMarket’s basic proposition, which is that using their tools anyone can create a pitch video in minutes. So, if you ar...