When Showyou first launched last April, we noted that it was sort of like a Flipboard for video content. A new update out today kicks it up a notch by making things more visually appealing while adding more content and making it easier to find.
Version 2.0 of Showyou features a redesigned iPad UI that is really fantastic looking. The grid-like look existed before, but now it’s smoother and easier to manipulate. It feels like the way video browsing should be done on a tablet. Most recent videos are in the upper left and you move over and down to move through time. → Read More
Online video startup Vodpod is launching a new app today, Showyou, which is essentially a Flipboard for videos. Launched as a free iOS app for the iPad, iPhone and iPad touch; Showyou allows you to access all the videos your friends and contacts share on social neyworks.
Once you sign into the app with your Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts, Showyou will displau videos from your friends on Facebook, people you follow on Twitter and Tumblr, and from channels you subscribe to on YouTube and Vodpod on one screen, called the Showyou Grid. Videos are presented in a grid-like format, allowing you to easily view all of the content that is shared by your friends. → Read More
For many content publishers, managing video can be a tricky business, particularly when you’ve got clips spread across multiple services like YouTube and Blip.tv. Today video bookmarking startup VodPod is launching a new product called VodSpot that’s looking to help, by allowing publishers to create dynamically updated video portals that can aggregate your site’s video content, as well as pull in new content that you’ve bookmarked around the web.
We’ll be using the service to power our new TechCrunch Video site, which you can find at http://video.techcrunch.com or in the masthead above. The new site will feature a collection of recent video content from throughout the TechCrunch network, and we’re also opening it up to user submitted videos — if you have an interesting interview, demo, or other tech related video that you’d like to share with the TechCrunch community, here’s your chance. → Read More
VodPod comes out of “private alpha” into beta mode today. It’s a social networking video sharing site and right about now you’re thinking, ‘Why do we need another YouTube?” Well, if YouTube becomes increasingly commercial, as it appears it will be, then user-generated video will need a new home. VodPod is heavily designed around social networking. Have a thing for birds? Join the bird “pod” and you’ll have an instantaneous collection of birding videos. Like unicycling? Some kids from Australia have started a pod around that pastime too. Users can join multiple groups that cluster videos around various subjects that allows them to post and collect new videos that pertain to that topic. Although you don’t have to join a pod or even sign up with VodPod to search pod videos. Users can “lurk” within the pods anonymously without being socially networked. Videos added to a pod don’t have to be original VodPod material. They can come from other sharing sites like YouTube using the embed code. “Basically it allows you to build a video collection from videos you find on MySpace or YouTube or over 100 of these sites on the Internet, or you can put video of your own up on VodPod as the host, and then build a mixture of them.” said Mark Hall, one of the three founders of VodPod, in a phone briefing last Friday. Hall and his partners are big fans of Last.fm and wanted to create a similar experience where users can build networks of friends with similar tastes and watch what they watch. Although, users can’t necessarily watch everything their friends watch because it is possible to mark certain videos as private, making it impossible for others to know that you have watched them. VodPod development began over the summer in San Francisco where the company has been privately funded. Philip Rosedale, founder and CEO of Linden Labs and Second Life, and Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic, which owns WordPress, are both outside advisers to the company. → Read More
