Written on November 11, 2008 – 10:06 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Okay, Google has added Voice and Video Chat right into Gmail. Read all about it here, here and here or log into Gmail and see if Google has activated your account or just watch the video:
With no desktop app and having to install a plugin to get everything working, I can’t help but feel this won’t take off. We’re still waiting for Google to enable voice for gtalk on the desktop!
What do you think?
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Written on September 16, 2008 – 10:20 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Here’s your blogger live reporting from Web 2.0 Expo, New York City - ready to keep you up to date about the latest start-ups and tech news. It’s gonna be an interesting few days, with big shots like Adriana Huffington, Tim O’Reilly, Jay Adelson, and Clay Shirky sharing their views on the next web.
After spending a few hours in the awfully cold and boring Javits center, I’ve already met some interesting start-ups. Like Berlin-based 3D chat service Smeet. Founder Sebastian Funke pitched the service to me this morning. At first I was skeptical, I’ve seen so many 3D, avatar-crazy, Flash 9-based chatting services that they doesn’t manage to tickle my fancy anymore. Yet when Funke mentioned that Smeet is completely web-based and embeddable at different sites, I realized this one could actually be interesting.
Call me on my mobile
Users on Smeet can create their own multi mesh avatar (meaning your character is wearing a shirt AND jacket, they’re the only browser-based service offering that) and join a room for a good discussion or a useless chat with other users. They’re plenty of them, although being able to speak German is quite essential (Smeet has 200,000 users in its home country). Next to text-based chatting, users can also give a ring to their mobile phone - so that they can talk with users who are standing close to them in the virtual room.
There’s where the business model comes in, as the German service makes some money out of the calls users make. Another source of income is the virtual goods shop. Habbo Hotel proved this can be a solid way of making money.
Embed a room in your site
The development team of Smeet is now working on embeddable rooms, which Funke hopes to release next week in alpha mode. This could be really exciting, as you can drag your avatar to every Smeet-supported site and start a riot. You could even watch a YouTube movie together (see screenshot).
Funke presented an impressive list part of partners that will include rooms on their site. It consisted of major media companies like RTL, EMI, Universal, and Big Brother. He told me Smeet is looking for similar partners outside Germany, namely in the States and the larger European countries.
So in the end, just another chatting service turns out to be a company with a good userbase and healthy ambitions that will probably become reality one day.
Written on January 29, 2008 – 1:04 am
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
SeeToo which was founded in 2007, has just recently moved to public beta. SeeToo is a web-based application that allows people to invite others to watch home videos with them in real time. You can also chat while watching. In this manner, SeeToo allows you to share videos with people you want to share them with and not with the whole world. The video isn’t saved to any server and won’t be available on the Internet afterwards. Users can share video files of any size and don’t need to upload files anywhere.
Basically the process works like this: You download the SeeToo application to your PC. This application takes any video on your desktop, compresses it, and streams it right from your computer to the SeeToo Web page that is hosting the chat. You select a video file from your computer. You invite a friend by sending an automatically generated invitation over your preferred IM service or by sending the link in an email. When the invitee clicks on the link, the viewing experience begins. The great part is that the invitee does not need to install anything in order to start watching the video. The downside is that unlike in Meebo Rooms, where you can watch embeddable videos with a bunch of people, SeeToo only allows you to watch a video with one person at a time.
Though SeeToo provides a useful service, it faces fierce competition from Meebo as mentioned earlier and PalTalk which enables real time shared video viewing with a lot more people as well. I’d advise SeeToo to enable shared viewing with a a group of people as soon as possible if they want to offer a real challenge to their competitors and gain a larger share of the market.
The application is currently only available for Windows. A Mac version is scheduled for release next year.
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