KillerApp Sightings

The tag line for GabMail reads "Free, incredibly simple video email," and that about says it all. You don't have to download anything, install anything, register anything, pay anything or even log on. You do have to have a webcam and a broadband connection. As long as you can see yourself in the window on the screen, you're good to go -- just push one button to record and another one to stop recording. If you're happy with the result, send it off. Your recipient gets an e-mail with a link in it; clicking on the link plays the video mail.

Now, here's a nice twist: a feature called GabJam creates a video e-mail thread that can live on indefinitely (though individual messages have limited lives). Clicking on the link in a GabJam e-mail leads not to a single video message but to the entire thread. You could maintain an ongoing video conversation with a group of people and click on the link periodically to see what's been added to the conversation -- or add to it yourself at any time.

GabMail, which is still in beta test, is produced by a company called GabSight, whose Web site promises a new product in November. Will it be real-time online video chat? Stay tuned - November is almost here.

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We've written about editing your home movies online, but professional video producers also have uses for web-based post production. Relief agency Save the Children recently sent a consultant to Sierra Leone to investigate access to health care there and to create a video diary of her findings. Save the Children logged the video footage online using a product called FORscene, available from British company Forbidden Technologies, and then invited broadcasters to review the video footage over the Web and select the shots they wanted - without having to send out tapes. Result: Five major TV news shows covered the story, much sooner than they otherwise could have.

In another project, Granada Media shot 380 hours of footage in Crete for a reality TV show called 'Trust Me I'm a Holiday Rep.' Using the same FORscene software, 12 loggers were able to work collaboratively to get all the footage compiled in two weeks and make preliminary shot selections - a process that would have taken far longer without a Web-based system.

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Photo credit: University of Cincinnati. Dr. Timothy Broderick and his team perform a robotic telesurgery simulation at Simi Valley, California.

Some day, surgeons may routinely operate on patients who aren't there. The patient may be somewhere inaccessible, like a battlefield or a space station, or in a hospital without the right kind of specialized surgical team. Robotic-assisted surgery is already commonplace -- tens of thousands of procedures have already been performed using equipment made by Intuitive Surgical -- but the surgeon is usually seated a few feet away from the patient. Remote telesurgery requires not only robotic surgical equipment but a reliable network.

Last year, surgeons in Ohio and Colorado successfully operated on six pigs in California, using equipment from Intuitive Surgical and the public Internet. Some of the same surgeons are now working with the U.S. Army to test telesurgery using an unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, as a communications device. This high-altitude platform creates a low-latency (close to real-time) network, which makes it easier for surgeons to operate at a distance.

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Planning a trip to Bali? Utah? How about Peru? You can prepare for any of them by watching videos at Travelistic, a new site that aims to be the "YouTube of travel." (You're no one these days if you aren't the YouTube of something.) Travelistic has videos made by professional producers, tourist boards and ordinary guys with videocams, along with the usual social networking tools of tags, ratings, comments, favorites, maps -- and, as you can see below, it's easy to embed the videos into your blog.

An especially nice feature is the Mapify tool, which lets you embed an interactive Google Map into your Web site or blog.

Here's a video from world traveler Habukubu (click to play):

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First there were podcasts. Now there are ZuCasts. If you have a broadband-enabled cell phone, you can subscribe to ZuCasts of photos, music and videos downloaded automatically to your phone. A few of your choices: The popular videoblog Rocketboom; Austin Quick Minute, a daily guide to Austin's musicians and bands; and tornado pictures from the photo site Webshots. You could also sign up to get the latest music and news from your favorite band.

ZuCasts arrive in the background, and don't interfere with telephone calls. They are provided as a free service from ShoZu, which also provides a cell phone-based social networking service.

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Whether you're showing off your child's soccer skills to proud grandparents or negotiating a major-league deal for your basketball-star client, you need game videos -- and somewhere to post them. ArchivaSports lets you store and edit footage of games and share the videos with scouts, coaches, players and relatives, without having to copy and mail tapes. The company also packages DVD sets of a team's entire season and creates Web pages for schools with news, statistics and video clips about their teams.

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...and win $5,000. "What does Congress do all day?" asks the Sunlight Network, an organization that promotes transparency in government. In connection with its Punch Clock campaign -- an effort to induce members of Congress to post their public schedules online, which 34 congressional candidates have now pledged to do -- Sunlight Network is sponsoring a video contest. Using audio and video clips and editing tools provided at http://www.congressin30seconds.com, you can create a 30-second video about what you think Congress does all day. The contest runs until October 26.

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People have been hunting since time immemorial, yet, according to deer hunter Tom Brooks, "the elusive whitetail has many secrets yet to be revealed." To help hunters, wildlife managers and animal enthusiasts learn more about what deer actually do all day, Brooks set up cameras in a 1,500-acre ranch in Texas and streams real-time footage of whitetail deer over the Internet to subscribers. Cameras are mounted on towers, in fields and on the deer themselves. The deer-mounted cameras let you "see and hear what a buck sees and hears."

The Deer Channel records much of the material from the ten video feeds and is cataloguing it for analysis. Several universities are planning to use the archived footage and live streams for research and teaching purposes.

You can see a sample clip here.

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So you've always wanted to operate a backhoe ... now's your chance. The Construction Automation and Robotics Lab at North Carolina State University has hooked up an excavation backhoe to the high-speed Internet2 network and is using it for training. The trainee operates the equipment with a joystick, audio, and video, and gets feedback from an “artificial coach.”

Internet2's high bandwidth makes the trainee feel that he's actually operating the vehicle -- the backhoe responds smoothly and instantaneously to commands, and the high-definition stereo images provide depth perception.

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Wish there were a way to profit from those videos of you and your roommates juggling french fries? Now there is. When you upload a video to Revver, a short ad is attached to the end of it. Whenever anyone clicks on the ad, you get paid. Revver also takes a cut of the advertising revenue, and so does the person who made the video, if that wasn't you.

Even if you place "Revverized" videos onto your website, your MySpace page, or your blog, or send them to a friend via email or instant message, Revver keeps track of them and keeps on collecting ad revenue.

You may get enough to keep you in french fries for a while -- or you may do a whole lot better, like these Diet-Coke-and-Mentos artists, whose Revver video has been viewed more than three million times.

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NowPublic.com aims to be the YouTube of news, with more than 30,000 citizen journalists in 130 countries adding their own comments, photos, videos and audio files to news stories pulled from mainstream-media sites and blogs. For fast-breaking stories, NowPublic becomes a valuable journalistic resource -- during Hurricane Katrina, for example, it had more reporters in the area than most news organizations have on their entire staffs. The rest of the time, it's a way for readers and bloggers to call attention to news items they find important, alarming, wonderful or simply weird.

NowPublic features all the usual social networking tools like tags and ratings. Yesterday, it added a new tool called Highlight -- a Firefox extension that makes it easy to republish snippets of news from media sites along with headlines and comments. Highlight generates tags automatically and can be configured to post the story simultaneously to the subscriber's blog.

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Doctors say that in every stroke, time equals brain. Patients have far less chance of permanent brain damage if they get clot-busting drugs within three hours of a stroke. But not every stroke victim should be given these drugs, and getting the patient to a doctor who can make the right decision often takes longer than the three-hour window.

In upstate New York, patients are often flown to Buffalo's Millard Fillmore Hospital, which has a world-class stroke center. Now the hospital's neurologists are consulting via videoconferencing with emergency room physicians in Olean General Hospital, a small rural hospital. A PC with a high-resolution camera in the emergency room lets the Millard Fillmore physicians view CT scan results, speak directly with the patient and the ER physician, and even watch the patient examination. This lets them diagnose the stroke and decide quickly whether the patient should be given clot-busting drugs.

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Since the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004, governments have been working to put better tsunami-warning systems into place. While today's warning systems are complex and expensive to install and maintain, tomorrow's systems may be simple and inexpensive. Austrian product engineering firm ninsight is prototyping a peer-to-peer application that runs on PCs.

ninsight's Tsunami Harddisk Detector monitors the vibration of the PC's disk drive and compares it to the vibrations of other PCs that have the software installed. Because seismic shocks travel about 25 times faster than water waves, an earthquake can shake your PC's disk drive long before the tsunami reaches shore. A small number of networked computers is enough for the application to locate the epicenter of a seismic shock, measure its intensity and estimate the risk of a tsunami.

The Tsunami HDD was distributed free of charge earlier this year and won a prize at the Prix Ars Electronica. The developer conducted a massive public beta test in September and is now working on a new version of the software, based on the results of the test.

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Have a question about ferret care? Can't remember how to tie your tie? Clear, simple how-to videos on these subjects and many others are now available at VideoJug, a new site that describes itself as "the complete visual guide to all human life." There's even one on how to make a how-to film.

Still in beta, VideoJug will eventually contain not only thousands of how-to videos, but also in-depth guides to more complex subjects, like planning a wedding. Users are invited to suggest ideas for films, upload their own how-to videos (they are reviewed by the VideoJug staff before being posted) and comment on the site's professional content.

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The World Musical Instrument Collection of Wesleyan University's music department boasts several hundred instruments ranging from the berimbau to the gaohu -- so many that Wesleyan has now created a Virtual Instrument Museum to showcase them all.

The online database includes images of the instruments, audio files of the music they make, video showing the instruments in action, and a map showing where the instruments come from. You can search by instrument type, geographic region, material of construction, and through an alphabetical index.

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Simple problems require simple solutions, and now there's a simple solution for resizing photos or other images -- a new application called ResizR.

Simply browse to the image file on your computer that needs to be resized. Move the slider bar to the desired width, click the "ResizR" button, and presto change-o, the image is modified. You can also use ResizR to rotate the image.

The time it takes to process these changes varies with the size of the image and the speed of your Internet connection.

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