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Veeker Makes Video Instant Messaging a Reality
Stitch_Surfs writes to tell us that the new video instant messaging tool "Veeker" went live today. Able to be embedded in any website, Veeker allows you to share mobile video with your friends. From the article: "In a nutshell, Veeker is instant video messaging. The most basic use case is to shoot 60 seconds of video from your mobile phone and upload this video to Veeker in the form of an MMS. Within about 60 seconds your video is on the Veeker portal where, depending upon whether you sent it to one of three addresses is visible only by you (me@veeker.com) visible to you and your contacts (v@veeker.com) or made available for viewing by anyone who visits Veeker and is inclined to check you out (world@veeker.com)."
This whole thing sounds confusing. Could someone send me a video showing how its done?
Have you read my journal today?
Don't the cellphone companies already have convenient ways for people to send video voicemails to each other? Not that their systems would do everything this new company is doing, but it would be a good way to judge demand... which apparently isn't very high. (Perhaps because cellphone networks don't have high enough bandwidth to make it sufficiently cheap yet).
... Video messaging rates are rediculous. Maybe if one could send the video via a non-phone SMS service, things might look hopeful.
Interesting concept however.
Record and upload doesn't sound "Instant" to me.
First off, the title to this story is a bit misleading. Video IM has been around for a long time. This is significant because it's mobile video IM. Second, who is actually going to use this? All it is is an automated way to host video content sent via MMS, something that is pretty trivial to do yourself anyway. How many people really want to record themselves on their cell phone and pay to send it to Veeker so they can... Call someone and tell them the URL to visit to see it? If I want to send video to someone, I can already MMS it to them directly. If I want to update the world on my status, there are ways to update various types of blogs via MMS as well. If I really, really need to be able to upload my little clips of cell phone video to an HTTP server, I'll use my own and write a script to do it for free.
I mean seriously, are we that bored?
--- Tao
For extremely large values of 'instant'.
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Is this the web 2.0 mandatory logo tattoo or something?
Damn, I need to audio instant message my friend about this on my phone. Seriously, can there be any such thing as video instant messaging?
I mean think of a goatse man world tour! The Eiffell Tower, Lincoln monument, Mt. Fuji, the Brandenburg gate.....
Monstar L
Wow, a video IM scheme with 60 seconds of latency! Sign me up!
"The plural of anecdote is not data" -- Bruce Schneier
And for unrealistically 'imaginary' values of 'real'.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
This hardly seems newsworthy, and the Slashdot writeup reads like an advertisement.
Boo.
"It was hell!" recalls former child.
What they describe is hardly instant.
So eh.. isn't it faster to MMS my friend directly instead of MMSing Veeker, then waiting for them to forward it to my friend?
Your spelling is ridiculous.
... those email addresses are gonna get a hell of a spam pile to wipe of their desk.
... a shameless plug. Shame.
This is my signature.
A: Google buys Veeker if Veeker is any good.
--
From the referenced Mobile Crunch article...
"However when your executive team of four founders has generated a combined half a billion dollars in aggregate exit valuation in their prior gigs the bar gets raised considerably."
Past performance doesn't guarantee future performance. Who cares about how well the founders have done. How well are they doing? Specifically, how well are they doing with Veeker?
Ultimately, the success comes down to usability and cost. If this is really easy to use and it is low cost or free, then it might stand a chance.
Also, just curious, but couldn't YouTube do this in, let's say, a few months? They've got Google on their side.
How to Download YouTube Videos
But what I'd like to see is a service that allows me to just send a video from my cell phone and have it automagically appear in a flash embedded web video I could link to on the internets. Anyone know anything of that manner?
adventure-today.com
Cause I wanna buy one of these phony articles.
for my daughter to waste money and I'll bet more dropped calls on already saturated cell towers!
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
Video messaging, rather than Instant Video Messsaging? Sound like buzz words win again.
Are going to HAVE to start doing this.
If they are going to rid their site of copyrighted material then their only option is to make it even easier to submit user created content. I'm sure cell phones are by far the main source of user generated videos in the world, so that seems like a sensible direction.
So because no one has turned on the videophone feature in their cell network yet, this company popped up. As soon as they do (and they will soon), this company is totally useless as far as I can tell.
Must be nerve wracking being 1 SIM card update away from bankruptcy.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Video instant messaging/video conferencing has been around for near a decade.
This service isn't all that practical.
Well, if you have a Bluetooth enabled phone, and it's not crippled by a shoddy cellular carrier (*cough* Verizon *cough*), you can always shoot the video, store it, and then upload it to your computer via BT and go that way onto the net.
I assume that the next generation of WiFi-enabled phones will be able to upload photos and video that way, working basically like network cameras do now (they either upload files to an FTP server somewhere, or they present themselves as an FTP server so another process can download the files). That's probably a little more practical than Bluetooth.
I could definitely see a phone where video and photos were cached locally on the phone's memory when you were just wandering around outside WiFi'ed areas, but when you got into a hotspot, then the phone would batch-upload everything, say to your Flickr site or Google Album.
I think cellphone videos are actually a neater idea than cellphone still-photos, because videos are more communicative in the same way that a telephone is, plus you don't need high resolution or very good lensing or zoom capability. It would be pretty neat to be able to take short "hey, everybody"-type videos and send them around, or video-blog, without getting reamed by the cellular company in charges.
I have a phone now that can technically take videos (Motorola Razr TMobile/GSM), but it has some sort of bizarre software issue that keeps it from shooting more than a few seconds worth of video at a time. (My girlfriend who has a European version can take ~30s clips, so I don't think it's hardware.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
File this one with the video phone--it sounds cool, but the average person is rarely going to use it. Moving pictures are simply not needed in 1-to-1 telecommunications. Too slow, too awkward, to clunky. 1 to 1 video will never go away, but mark my words, in one hundred years we will still have voice phones.
Remember we have had the technology for video phones for years now. Where are they?
Except for phone sex. This would probably improve phone sex. . . Or maybe not . . . I have to think about that part.
Slashdot makes free advertising a reality.
Sure signs of being desperate for hype and VC cash:
- your service is like any other service, but attempts to differentiate by marketing same old same old, by giving it new names (not videos, but video instant messages..)
- your trademark needs (lame) "origin of" explanation, and tries to inject new words in your dictionary to induce word of mouth: "VEEKS are Video Peeks"... Veeks?! Zunes... YouTube that Meebo Orkuts, to hell and back.
- trying to be overly hip, energetic and youngster-ish (err...), by showing photos of punks and emos enjoying a nice commercial service for free. It all makes sense, don't question it.
wow
great name
"can you hear me now?!?"
beats dimmer and less by a nose
Er...maybe I'm reading this wrong, but how the hell is this "video IM"? Instant messenging I think of as me and someone else simultaneously interacting....I type while he types, and we get each other's stuff in real time. This doesn't sound like that. This sounds like a pastebin; I upload my 60 secs and anybody can go look at it. Which I guess is ok....but it's certainly not as handy as actual IM functionality would be.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
i can email attached video from my phone. my wireless provider charges 5 cents/connect and as far as i can tell one email smtp connection is one connect, so i send video for a nickel. It goes up to http://glogger.eyetap.org/ which shares it. Just a project i'm hacking on for fun.
www.mywaves.com
Hmmm...there's a pretty complete list of IM's over at compareim.com, but it looks like they need to add this one.