For some, the company Color has been a cautionary tale to raising money in Silicon Valley. The company itself is hearing nothing of the sort and seems to be quite happy with the direction in which it’s going.

After raising north of $41M and launching two unsuccessful iOS apps, it looks like the company is getting a bit of help from a pretty big source, Verizon.

The company announced today that Verizon will soon start embedding its latest app, Color for Facebook. The app allows you to share moments from your life in small video clips that alert all of your friends on Facebook in case they want to catch it live.

Doing live video is obviously data-intensive, which is why a partnership with a carrier makes complete sense for Color. Will it take off? Who knows at this point.

The really interesting part of all of this is the fact that Color is working on its own file format:

One day in the near future, you will be able to capture every moment and share it LIVE in beautiful HD quality and you’ll have the recorded video to keep. From that video, you’ll be able to pick out exact frames you want share as photos. We can begin thinking about all those amazing moments we want to keep and share. We can leave behind the complexity of how we’ll do it.

The company currently employs over 50 people, with plans on growing even more. Surely, all of those folks aren’t working on an app.

The value of many companies usually comes in its patents and intellectual property, and it seems like that’s Color’s latest “pivot”. If it can honestly create this new file format, inspired by the RED camera, that packages up HD video and photos while deploying a live stream, then the $41M investment won’t seem like much in the long run. Sure, it’s not a sexy story like Instagram’s, but it could be massive.

Sure, the Color “file format” is a stretch, but it beats launching yet another app.

I’m a big fan of the Mac OS X app Flutter and have been using it to skip tracks in Spotify and iTunes since it launched. When I visited Y Combinator Demo Day, I tagged Bot Square, the company behind Flutter, as a team to keep an eye on.

Bot Square promised that it wouldn’t just stick to the simple pause and play gesture for music apps and has added the ability to interact with video apps as well. With that in mind, Flutter has launched gesture support for both VLC and QuickTime:

The company still lists the app in “Alpha” mode, which means that it’s still very early on for Flutter. The company has big plans to help your webcam become the “Kinect” for computers.

Right now, you can only hold your hand up to the camera to play or pause a song or video, but you can expect more gestures in the near future as Flutter works out the bugs.

➤ Flutter for Mac

Instacast has updated its podcast viewing and listening app for iOS, and it is getting a huge boost from the iOS 5 updates that came along with the new iCloud backup solution.

The company behind Instacast, Vemedio, announced the update on its blog today.

The company had this to say about the new iCloud syncing capabilities with Instacast version 1.4:

I am pleased to announce that now with version 1.4 Instacast is fully integrated with iCloud. This means, you can now finally synchronize your podcasts and playback information with multiple devices or have a backup in case your iPhone destroys itself suddenly. All you have to do is have an iCloud account and turn on “iCloud Sync” in the Instacast settings.

If you listen to podcasts often, this type of syncing is exactly what you’ve been waiting for. Your podcast subscriptions, markers of the episode you’ve seen or listened to, and starred items are synchronized automatically with Instacast, no matter what iOS device you’re on. You could start watching “This Week in Tech” on your iPhone, and then continue later on your iPad, at exactly the point where you left off.

Before this update, Instacast didn’t feel like a native app to the iOS. Apple has changed all of that with allowing playback information on lock screens, better notifications, and of course iCloud. Improved video playback is also a big update for Instacast.

Here’s a video from Vemedio, showcasing Instacast:

Introduction to Instacast from Vemedio on Vimeo.

Instacast is available on the App Store for $1.99, and if you listen to or watch podcasts, this is the best app we’ve seen for it.