Wixi, the social filesharing network that debuted at TechCrunch40, has finally been released to the public. The site offers a media-centric virtual desktop that allows users to play their media files from any computer that supports Flash, and also serves as a service for file sharing between friends. Any users that sign up by October 1 will get unlimited storage for life, while members joining after that date will need to pay $5 a month for the privilege (though they will still be able to get a free account with a 3GB limit). → Read More
The internet ought to have made it dead simple to share files long ago. But for some reason, I still scratch my head every time I want to send a batch of photos or a collection of documents to a non-technical friend without resorting to email (which is not a dead simple solution in my book). That’s why I get excited when I see companies like Stixy attempting to make file sharing not only as easy as it should be, but more pleasurable and intuitive along the way. Stixy’s underlying concept is simple, and one that we have seen elsewhere in different forms: provide a desktop-like space in the browser where you can upload and share files. We recently gave out a batch of invitations to another new service, Wixi, that does this very thing. Stixy provides a “free-form” area to drop your files, but it’s also very much like PikiWiki in the sense that it doesn’t settle for simple desktop icons. The files and other items placed in a Stixy workspace are more expressive. For example, photo files are displayed as small versions of themselves and sticky notes can be stuck anywhere. Therefore, Stixy is less like a traditional operating system desktop and more like a bulletin board. The ability to access and interact with elements in a Stixy workplace (whether they be files or other widgets) is not yet very extensive. Currently, you can add only four element types to a workplace: sticky notes, photos, documents, and to-do notes. Both types of notes are pretty simple widgets and documents are displayed as simple icons. But there is a lot of potential for Stixy to expand the collection of widgets (and perhaps eventually create an open platform for widget development) as well as to improve the current widgets so they are more interactive. It would be great to be able to preview Word documents and PDFs in the bulletin board environment instead of downloading a local copy or opening them in another window. The same thing goes for video and audio files. Despite the usefulness of the free-form workspace for files, it would also be great to see a more traditional file system view built into Stixy as an option for when I want to sort quickly through a bunch of files stored in the system. Currently, you wouldn’t want to add more than a couple dozen elements to → Read More
Media-centric social network Wixi, which launched at TechCrunch40 a couple of weeks ago, is giving away 5,000 invitations to its private beta to TechCrunch readers. To claim yours, go here and enter “havefun” as the Wixi access pass. Once you sign up, you’ll be able to invite six of your friends. After these 5,000 invitations run out, users will be put on a waiting list for future batches of invitations. Wixi users get 3GB of free storage that they can use to share photos, videos, and music with their friends and family. While the service is browser-based, Wixi designed the interface to feel like a desktop environment with drag-n-drop functionality. Files hosted on Wixi can be accessed through the Wixi website or displayed on users’ websites using an embeddable Flash Player (an example of which is shown at the bottom of this post). The company is currently self-funded and plans to open up to the public in December. http://beta.wixi.com/wixiplayer.swf?embedplay=1000001a300013a09 → Read More
We’re live blogging each session, adding to the summary of each company direct from the floor of TechCrunch 40. Click Refresh to view. XRT3D XTR3D develops software that lets users interact with computers and gaming consoles using 3D human motions. Their real-time software analyzes 3D human motions using only one simple web cam. It will allow users to play games and interact in virtual worlds using natural human motions instead of keyboards, mouses and joysticks. They refer to their technology as a “3D Human Machine Interface” mouse movements in the air via a web cam…pretty damn cool. Demo includes moving around Google Earth by hand movements. As can be used for virtual worlds, games. Demo includes boxing, works well. Definitely one of the best product/ presentations of the conference. More at CrunchGear here. BroadClip BroadClip’s MediaCatcher for Facebook offers a way to search and listen to DRM-free music that is optimized to deliver music to portable media players such as iPods and cell phones. All users have to do is “clip” streaming music and they can transfer the recording to their portable media player in a legal way similar to other “time-shifting” technologies like TiVo, VCRs and tape recorders.Bizarre Star Wars demo…WTF? one line was this is very bad…he’s right, a shame thoough, I like the idea, even if the copyright side is a big question mark…they claim it’s legal yet the RIAA was demanding that webcasters put stream rip blocking software into place as part of the royalty negotiations…Broadclip is a easy to use stream ripping service.No one on stage…some sort of streamed presentation, not sure if they are even in the building. Sorry to be negative, but it’s not a good effect. mEgo mEgo lets users create personalized avatars that carry their online network aggregation profiles and can be integrated into users’ blogs, social networks, websites, and IM clients. The online profiles display user-picked content like profile details, videos, photos, feeds, and widgets. A couple of giggling chicks…Jason Calacanis notes that it’s great to have someone on the stage presenting. Tag team with the presentation which works well. Interactive widget, sample is shown in Facebook. Lots of features, provides social aggregation including pulling in RSS, Twitter etc.. can be any size as is vector based. Site will be live as at 4pm Wixi Wixi is a media focused social network where users interact with each other by privately → Read More
