Written on January 8, 2009 – 5:01 pm
Zee, Internet Marketer, Design Connoisseur & Web App Devotee
If you haven’t come across Boxee yet, you’re in for a treat. Boxee is a free, open-source software platform that lets users control their media from a computer-connected TV. Like other media applications, you can watch movies or web video, listen to music, browse photos and more, all with your remote control.
Today the Boxee team are at CES, but they have a number of newsworthy announcements worth sharing with you.
- Firstly, Boxee are announcing support for BBC iPlayer! This is a major integration considering it was only a few weeks back that Mac/Linux support were announced by the BBC. Sadly, it is only available to UK users however I have a good feeling the BBC will open up the service (supported by ads) in the very near future.
- That’s not all, they’ve also integrated Joost. Joost’s content library has grown impressively over recent months with TV Shows, Web Videos, music videos and movies - all now available via Boxee. This is an interesting turn of events considering Joost recently abandoned the desktop application for an in-browser experience.
- For the MTV heads out there, Boxee have added support for MTV’s latest release MTV Music allowing you to search by artist, song or just have a browse.
I have yet to try out the additional releases but if the integration is up to the standard of previous releases, this should be a slick iteration.
Finally, in respect to availability, Boxee have opened up the alpha release to Mac, Ubuntu and Apple TV - all you need to do is signup. Windows is also moving into private-alpha, which will still require an invite but apparently invites are being sent in the thousands so you shouldn’t need to wait long.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on December 19, 2008 – 3:29 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
End of the year lists are here to stay. Here are my two cents. I decided to share the five apps I got hooked on last year - blended with some The Next Web travel stories. Hope you dig the read and most of all, share your favorite five programs of 2008. Best wishes, dear readers!
1. Evernote - a second memory for everybody
I met Evernote director Alex Pachikov during the Altsearchengines meet-up in San Francisco, last April. He showed me the beta version of my memory. I can make snapshots, text notes, sound messages on my iPhone, sync them with my Mac and the Evernote server, and access them whenever I want. At first, I didn’t really use the service (also because I didn’t own an iPhone yet). But when I found myself on a beach in Italy for two weeks, I started collecting my new ideas - which popped up like flying fish in the flat Adriatic sea. Ever since those two weeks, I write my drafts for blog posts on the go, note down lessons learned from great books, and save inspiring pics. I’m also digitalizing the best parts of my old paper notebooks. Evernote rocks, it’s as simple as that.
// Evernote.com
2. Things - getting things done, really
During The Next Web Open Office Road Trip I spent the hours in the car reading Getting Things Done by David Allen. The new blogger lifestyle required a new way of working. Maybe the Allen way. While Arjen and Patrick blasted the car across the roads from Amsterdam to Brussels, Paris, Ghent, Geneva, and London, I realized that there was know way I could escape a GTD tool.
On another trip, this time Krakow, Next Web mobile editor Peter Evers advised me to use Things. This is a beta product which will be released in January 2009 for around forty dollars. But during 2008, you could use it for free. So why not give it shot? Well, it will cost you money in the end. The program is so simple and damn good that you can’t escape paying the forty dollars - plus eight dollars for the iPhone app (which syncs with your Mac through Wifi). Yep, I feel ripped off - but I’m also getting things done.
// Things on Cultured Code
3. Tweetdeck - organizing the total mess on Twitter
During the China 2.0 trip last November, Shel Israel, Mike Butcher (TechCrunch UK) and I found ourselves in many Chinese offices - listening to the presentations of the entrepreneurs who will take over the world. We tweeted it all - there was no way you could ignore the #china20 hashtag. I noticed Mike used Adobe Air app Tweetdeck in a rather effective way: sorting a group of friends, the China hashtag, his replies, and DM’s in four columns. Ever since then, I Twitter via Tweetdeck. On the iPhone, Twitterific is the way to go. But it’s not nearly as innovative as the awesome Tweetdeck.
// Tweetdeck.com
4. Boxee - throw your tube out the window
“Hi, I’m Avner from Boxee“. Another cool New York 2.0 guy pitches his product at the preliminary rooftop party of Web 2.0 Expo New York. But hey, this friendly chap actually has a great story. He turned a XBMC open source revolution into a commercially interesting product that will shape the future of online social media centers. Boxee integrates local and Internet content with social networking and overlays it with a good-looking remote-friendly interface. You can either watch a ripped DVD, content from CNN.com or BBC, or videos from popular video sites like YouTube, Blip.tv, and Revision3. All by flipping through the screens with a remote or arrows. This is the stuff major TV companies will copy. Tivo? You ain’t seen nothing yet!
// Boxee.tv
5. Yahoo Pipes - boring but oh so good
Yeah I know, I know. After all this glamorous cool, hip, and shiny start-ups, Yahoo Pipes is a bit like the boring corporate cousin at a Christmas party. But you know what? This cousin actually does some very useful work - organizing the life of a from-the-information-overload-suffering blogger. I won’t follow thirty major tech blogs. Screw that. It will limit my vision and I’ll probably get as sucked up in the bubble like the very persons who think Twitter is as mainstream as gasoline. Thus I pump all their RSS feeds into one pipe. They get pushed through a filter and only the articles which have mentions of a European country, language, city, or company will make the cut. Saves me a lot of time. And have I already told you how I use Pipes to build a community around The Next Web?
// Pipes.Yahoo.com
[Photo credit: Toni Blay]
Written on September 25, 2008 – 11:34 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
For a lot of young European people, online video sites are a substitute for television. 79.5 of the total French Internet audience watched on average 90 videos in January 2008. And YouTube has become one of Holland’s top 3 most visited sites, a recent study by Dutch research agency Multiscope shows. Many people are attracted to the unique content the sites offer. It can’t be the experience, which is still crap - blurry videos, small screens, and dumb comments. But California-based start-up boxee is about to change this with their super slick media player.
Social media center
Boxee is the first “social” media center. It integrates local and Internet content with social networking and overlays it with a good-looking remote-friendly interface. You can either watch a ripped DVD, content from CNN.com or BBC, or videos from popular video sites like YouTube, Blip.tv, and Revision3. All by flipping through the screens with a remote or arrows. This is one of the few services I immediately got hooked to after reviewing, spending a few hours watching videos on the couch, just like television.
Almost though, as I can also share my favorite videos, music, Flickr photos, or slideshows with my friends via existing social services as Twitter and Facebook. You and I can also track the activity of boxee friends - I hope there’s an opt-out for porn surfers.
Xbox open source project
Boxee is based on the XBMC open source project. This is a free and open source cross-platform media-player and entertainment hub. Initially created for the first-generation Xbox game-console, the team behind XBMC development have recently ported the XBMC software to also run natively under the Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems. The guys from boxee took this one step further and created this media center to which every coder can contribute.
Receive an alpha invite
As you can tell by this article, I’m pretty excited about boxee. It’s still in alpha and therefore made my Mac crash once, but other from that, it’s great. I don’t have to use the crappy Frontrow anymore and can use my Apple as the television of the future. You can too, as co-founder Avner Ronen gave The Next Web a stack of alpha invites. Get yours here!
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