Livestream, one of the leading video companies enabling live web broadcasts, is taking a big leap today into the hardware business by offering its own video production switcher. Years ago, creating a high quality live show outside the studio required an expensive TV production truck. Major network events, like the conventions and sporting events still need a truck or several. But, most webcasts… → Read More
Amazon continues to ramp up the content in its Amazon Prime film catalog to draw users to the premium service, with the latest licensing acquisition expanding its back catalog of sports and documentary content. From today, users of Amazon Prime Instant Video, its on-demand streamed film service, can watch instalments of ESPN’s 30 for 30 popular series of sports documentaries including The U, Pony… → Read More
Soft robots are made of silicone and use hydraulic controls to move across a surface or lift an object. Researchers at Harvard University have gotten these guys to walk around (albeit while tethered to a heavy control unit) and now they’ve gotten them to change color.
In an article in Science Magazine, the team describes how they’ve created a system that senses the surrounding color and then… → Read More
Ariel Braunstein and Scott Kabat know a thing or two about building (and selling) a user-friendly mobile video experience, but can they do the same for the world of digital education? We’re going to find out. Braunstein and Kabat are the co-founder and former marketing executive, respectively, of Pure Digital Technologies, the makers of the popular Flip Video line of hand-held camcorders, which… → Read More
It’s not quite fair that this commercial featuring Apple greats Burrell Smith, Andy Hertzfeld, George Crow, Bill Atkinson, and Mike Murray never aired, but it’s easy to see why. In it you meet some of the creators of the Mac who go on to offer some insight on the design process and end with the tagline “Incredibly Great.” Arguably, this sort of self-promotion is a little gauche, but it’s… → Read More
Many businesses begin with a simple, and then nagging, frustration. For Christian Yang and Neil Joglekar, it began with Entourage. Well, after Entourage. In college, as big fans of the show, they found themselves continually searching for clips of their favorite one-liners or the best scenes so that they could share them with friends. Naturally, after numerous fruitless searches, they quickly grew… → Read More
MediaCore, a company which launched a year ago with the mission of allowing any business to roll out its own private YouTube, is refocusing its efforts on the education market, and has raised an additional $1 million in funding to achieve those goals. The funding, which comes from private angel investors in the U.S. and U.K. including Alex Khein and Pierre Andurand, brings the startup’s total… → Read More
Mike Senna, a California-based roboticist, has built a real, working Wall-E that can move around, wave, and call out his own cute name in a rattly, digitized voice. Mike is the guy who built a real, working R2-D2 and his latest project is a real masterpiece of animatronics and robotic motion. → Read More
For some of you this will be news, for some, a reminder. But the long and short of it is that Netflix has been forced to change its approach to user privacy, specifically in regard to how long it stores rental history for those who have unsubscribed. Netflix was forced to do so by a class-action lawsuit, which alleged that the company was illegally retaining and disclosing the personal information… → Read More
The Kuratas Mecha robot is an art/aspirational nerd project by Suidobashi Heavy Industry. This full-sized Mech robot features a ride-in cockpit, “rocket” launchers, and a “smile controlled” BB Gatling gun. That’s right: when you smile, this thing unleashes thousands of tiny plastic BBs.
Unveiled at Wonder Fest 2012 in Tokyo, you can control the robot with either a set of master-slave joysticks… → Read More
As we were wandering through the Atlanta meet-up last week we stumbled upon a charming young man wearing a glove studded with circuit boards and embroidered with what looked like silver thread. Upon closer inspection, it turned out that it was a wild homegrown glove made by a pair of former design students. → Read More
Tout, the service that lets you post real-time status updates, and another spin-out from SRI, the research institute that birthed Apple’s Siri, is announcing today that it has closed $13.4 million in Series B funding. The investor line-up in this one is interesting, as it includes WWE – yes, that’s “World Wrestling Entertainment!” Others in the round included 819 Capital and individual investors… → Read More
NBCUniversal continues to ramp up international streaming deals as a way of getting its content in a non-pirated (read: revenue-generating) format out to the masses. Today, the media company is making a key move into China in a multi-year licensing deal with Youku, the country’s biggest online video player with 300 million monthly viewers, to provide a rolling selection of 100 feature films as… → Read More
It’s been months in the making, but here it is: the first episode of TechCrunch Makers, featuring Bre Pettis of Makerbot. We visited Bre’s downtown Brooklyn factory where he and the rest of team design, build, and ship hundreds of Makerbots a week. → Read More
Back in 2007, Bismarck and Belsasar Lepe and Sean Knapp left Google with aspirations to revolutionize in-video advertising. Ooyala didn’t quite revolutionize advertising, but it has found more than a little success in what has become a very crowded market. The company’s video player now delivers cross-device content to over 6,000 domains, reaching nearly 200 million viewers, and the company claims… → Read More
Another former executive from Apple’s iAd business has made a move to another mobile ad venture: Mike Owen, who had been a senior manager overseeing iAd’s New York office, is joining mobile video ad network AdColony as its chief revenue officer. The news comes amid two other executive appointments for AdColony – Ty Heath as CTO, and Abe Pralle as VP of technology, both joining from gaming… → Read More
Pulse, the popular free mobile news reader for iOS, Android and Windows Phone, just announced that it is adding more video to its platform. The company is launching over 30 new video channels on its platform and is partnering with the likes of ESPN, Fox Sports, the White House, The Daily Beast, College Humor, The Today Show, and National Geographic to bring their shows to its apps. Broadly, the… → Read More
If you’ve enjoyed the game Portal in the past, you understand the allure of being able to open wormholes in space. Filmmaker Jason Craft decided he wanted to recreate that experience with his goofy friends so he created a CG movie that is on par with anything you can see at the theatre these days. His short, Portal: Terminal Velocity, shows us what would happen if a bunch of dudes had a gun that… → Read More
A new system created at Keio University will help add lifelike motion capture and emotion-sensing to apps, games, and design programs by scanning your face and body for cues. The system works on any PC and can recreate all of your facial expressions on a life-like human avatar. The test model lets the team turn a sullen grad student into a cute girl with long pigtails. → Read More
This charming man, Todd Harrison, bought a used Apple II and some drives from Ebay and did what any self-respecting geek would do: he gave them the attention and respect they deserved, cleaning all the parts and getting it ready to run some BASIC again.
The machines were in pretty rough shape. He powered the CPU on and it seemed to fry a little and as he dug through the box he found packing… → Read More
Wibbitz, a company whose tagline once called it the “play button for the web” (it’s now just “text-to-video”) has closed a $2.3 million Series A round headed up by Horizons Ventures, the internet and technology investment fund belonging to Li Ka-shing. Also participating in the round were previous investors, Initial Capital and lool Ventures.
The service is somewhat similar to former… → Read More
Amazon is continuing to grow its collection of streaming video titles at Amazon Prime Instant Video, and is today announcing another new agreement with Paramount Pictures bringing “hundreds” of new movies to the service. This deal isn’t as large as March’s partnership with Discovery, which saw some 3,000 new titles added, but it does introduce what are arguably more big-name movies. Included in… → Read More
The lowly photo slideshow is not dead yet, or at least that’s the hope of the team at Tel Aviv-based EasyHi, which is debuting its new product Slide.ly today, backed by $1 million in seed funding. The company aims to pick up where Slide.com (acquired by Google in 2010) left off. It’s building a slideshow creation tool for the new age, using sources like Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Pickplz, and… → Read More
This video by Tenable Security is pretty wild. It shows a visualization of an office network. Using different colors and lines users can pin-point problem areas based on traffic and data being sent and received to each machine.
The system lets you call out various aspects of the network using marker shape, color, and network lines. For example, you can change symbol colors depending on… → Read More
It’s hard to find a live morning show or sports event coverage on TV these days that doesn’t feature tweets or Facebook comments from viewers. For most programs, though, getting those messages on air is actually more difficult than it seems and often involves custom software and expensive hardware. Vidpresso, which officially launches today, offers TV stations a far easier solution. All they need… → Read More
This morning, Google officially rolled out Google+ Hangouts On Air to all users worldwide, following the feature’s limited introduction back in September. At the time of its initial release, this live broadcasting feature allowed top Google+ users (like celebs) to stream live video feeds directly to their Google+ fan base. The service kicked off with a Google+ Hangouts stream from will.i.am, but… → Read More
Video chat is still something quite a few people don’t feel comfortable with. For U.S. teens, however, it is quickly becoming a pretty routine way of communicating with each other. According to a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 37% of teens now regularly use Skype, Google Talk or iChat to talk to each other.
There are significant differences between how many boys and… → Read More
Content companies have struggled to monetize on the Web, and there has been plenty of debate over the effectiveness of paywalls. What’s more, tech startups really can’t seem to rush fast enough into the hands of angel investors or venture capitalists. That’s why, as a digital content company that has been around for years and has yet to take a penny of outside investment, Lynda.com has such… → Read More
Vungle, a new company that wants to help mobile developers market their apps through video “trailers,” has just raised an enormous $2 million seed round from the who’s who of Silicon Valley. The round includes Google Ventures, AOL Ventures [Disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by AOL], Crosslink Capital, SV Angel, 500 Startups, SoftTech VC, as well as several notable angels like Maynard Webb, Scott… → Read More
Seven years in, Revision3 and its stable of web stars have more than survived the tough early days of building a video content business on the web. The San Francisco company is now bringing in a respectable 100 million video views per month, following a big 2011 — and it may be about to cash in. → Read More
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