Seattle-based company Hark wants you to listen to the clips of some of the most famous and popular movies of all time. Sites have done this for years, usually by way of downloadable WAV or MP3 files, but mostly illegally. The difference with Hark is that the company has buy-in from some of the biggest production studios in the world. Now you can listen to some of these movie clips legally.

The clip library

Hark has a library of over 2 million quote clips to listen to, ranging from 1 second to a few minutes. Some of your favorite movies, such as Top Gun, have a few of the best quotes represented on the site. The great part is that Paramount, the movie studio behind Top Gun, uploaded these clips itself.

Other partners include Warner Bros, Lions Gate, Paramount, and CBS TV.

The company claims to have the largest collection of sound bites on the web, and has everything from movie and TV quotes, to political speeches and famous in-game calls by sportcasters. You can of course upload your own clips to the site.

Social clips

Hark lets you share clips to Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Tumblr with share buttons. Also, each player can be embedded onto a website or a blog post.

For example, the embedded player below has a compilation of the 100 best movie quotes of all time, put together from one of Hark’s users. You should give it a listen and see how many of the movies you have seen and remember!

Top 100 Quotes in Movies

There is most certainly a community that loves quotes of any sort, and to be able to listen to them rather than just read them is a plus. The site is kind of busy on the homepage, but does give you a big search box and compilations of popular movies and TV shows to get you started.

Once you start listening to quotes, the site can be extremely addictive. The more quotes you listen to, the more quotes you remember liking, and being able to share them socially is fun.

Hark says that it has just crossed the one billion listen mark for clips on its site, and it is just getting started with features and partnerships. The company business model seems to revolve around ads and targeted purchase links to Amazon for the respective movie or TV show you’re checking out, as well as ringtones of your favorite quotes.

It’s now four years since YouTube opened its API, making it infinitely easier for people the world over to integrate video into their websites. A simple copy and paste of the YouTube iFrame embed code, and basic blogs can be transformed into video repositories. The same applies to other video-hosting websites such as Vimeo and Daily Motion too, which have also opened their APIs.

But why only embed one video, from one video host into one player? Yokto (http://www.Yokto.tv) is a free tool that lets you collect and embed video from multiple sources and embed them all in a single player on your website.

The platform has just soft launched into beta, and it’s currently working to optimize the platform, but on our initial tinkerings, it’s a very simple, useful and effective tool to use. And here’s how it works.

Step 1. Create your player

The registration process for Yokto is quick and easy. And once you’re in, you click ‘Create my player’:

Step 2. Add media

Once you’ve created your player, you can search for videos and presentations to add to it from YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, PhotoBucket, BrightCove, UStream, Slideshare…and you can even upload your own video directly.

Click on the media you wish to add, and it shows up in the right-hand pane and you can watch the clip to ensure it’s the right one. Then, hit ‘Add Video’, and it’s saved to that particular player.

Step 3. Organize media, create playlists

This step involves you creating a playlist to add your videos to. Click the ‘Add Playlist’ button, give it a name and then it’s a simple drag-and-drop process:

Step 4. Manage your player

This penultimate step is where you indicate how your video compilation will look. You have the choice of the following display options: Video wall (right), Lower tabbed player, Lower video wall, Video wall, Flip player, Theatre format, Tabbed list (right) and Player with video wall:

You can also adjust the player’s width, select the default ‘main’ video for the embed, set it to autoplay (if you want) and then it’s just a case of hitting ‘Get embed code’. Here’s a soccer-themed video I cobbled together, and I’ve opted for the ‘Lower video wall’ display option:

The basic version of Yokto is free, and this should be fine for most people’s needs, though there are Yokto Pro and Enterprise versions too, which provide additional features, such as integration with Amazon S3 and CloudFront, access to intelligent video URLs, custom player designs, player API access and more.

The Yokto player switches automatically between Flash and HTML5, meaning videos should work seamlessly across most modern devices. And it also has built-in social sharing tools too.

I found the tool very easy and intuitive to use, and it could have multiple use-cases. England international rugby player Jonny Wilkinson has already used the service for his official website.

One minor point worth noting relates to the navigation – there was no immediately obvious way to progress through the stages in creating the final player. For example, there was no ‘Next’ button, and in the end I had to click the links along the top to advance to the next stage.

This will be easily remedied though and, given that it’s still only in beta mode, I assume this will be fixed at some point.

To give you a little background on Yokto, it was born in late 2010, out of Powershift Media Ltd, a private technology company based in Leamington Spa, England. Yokto has 7 people working on the platform, including CEO Ross Alderson, and Oojal Jhutti, who is ‘Chief Technology Evangelist’.

When it comes to sharing media, videos, music and documents have been very easy to share. Services like YouTube, Vimeo, Google Docs and Soundcloud all provide widgets which can be placed on a blog and then attributed to the source.

However, when it comes to images, anyone is able to download and share a copy, passing it off as their own and stripping the original creator of his/her copyright claims. A new tool called Picuous aims to change this, providing a service that enabled users to upload and share their pictures, whilst keeping some control over the rights of their work.

The service works by providing an embeddable HTML5 widget that displays your images but also offers viewers the option to share, like and embed your images, without leeching your bandwidth, copy and pasting them or downloading a copy of their own. For the owner, the widget will track where the images have been embedded and will provide analytics on who has viewed them.

Users can drag-and-drop images into the Picuous website, which will then automatically process the images and provide unqiue embed codes and sharing options. It supports galleries, looking very similar to the Posterous image viewer at times. There is also the option to sell images on the website, via the widget, should the user wish.

Picuous is still in beta, meaning at the moment it is free to all users. When the service officially launched, the service will limit free users to a number of specific images, removing limits when a user pays for the service.