KillerApp Sightings

Have you ever wondered whether your child's fascination with all things gross and creepy could be put to some good purpose? Now it can be. An interactive video series, Grossology Live, aims to teach kids -- mostly in the 8-to-14-year-old range -- about science by presenting them with material guaranteed to make them giggle, squeal and squirm. The series examines what the producers call "the 'impolite' science of the human body"; despite being goofily entertaining, it hews closely to the official science curricula for the targeted age groups.

Grossology Live is broadcast over the Internet to live audiences who interact with the teachers/entertainers via videoconferencing. The underlying technology comes from Glowpoint, a managed video network, and LifeSize, a manufacturer of high-definition videoconferencing equipment. At present, the shows are broadcast only to the Columbus Children's Hospital's Community Education Center in Columbus, Ohio, and the Adventure Science Center in Nashville, Tennessee.

The show is produced by the National Association of Health Education Centers and IDSolutions with funding from the National Science Foundation.

Posted by Editor at 1:16 PM | Permalink

Earlier this month, we reported that Joost, the ambitious P2P Internet TV service, had let its beta testers invite additional users. Immediately after its announcement, Joost was flooded with new users and then with complaints about the quality of the viewing experience.

We waited two more weeks -- long past the time Joost said its technical problems were fixed -- to try it out. The verdict: still not quite ready for prime time.

On the positive side, the user interface is simple and intuitive. The on-screen channel guide and controls, which can be made to vanish with a touch of the Esc key when you don't want to see them, are far easier to use than, say, my cable provider's VoD menu. Keyboard shortcuts are also available.

The sound is fine, even on low-end PC speakers, and the quality of the video is potentially fabulous. I found the small-window mode consistently good, and the full-screen mode occasionally outstanding -- much better than anything on my (standard-definition) TV.

But potential isn't actual, of course. On most channels, the full-screen picture simply isn't clear enough to watch. My guess is that this has to do with the resolution of the original files, rather than with anything related to Joost. Fortunately, it's possible to scale the picture by dragging the corner of the viewscreen, so you can watch any content on the largest screen that's comfortable to view, instead of being relegated to the 2-by-3-inch viewscreen.

A more serious problem is the stuttering of the audio/video stream, which is often annoying enough to deter anyone who isn't writing a review. I don't think the problem lies in my hardware (brand-new laptop, Intel Core Duo CPU with 1.66 GHz) or my connection (cable modem with 10 Mbps downstream, and I really am getting the 10 Mbps). Either Joost isn't scaling up its servers quickly enough or the P2P software still needs more tweaking. When you use P2P for downloads, interruptions don't matter; with streaming video, they matter very much.

The forum on Joost's site is full of advice about how to make the audio/video stream more smooth. Some of these tips and tricks may work -- I don't know. The point is that if Joost aims to be a substitute for TV, it has to be accessible to everyone, not just to the sort of people who enjoy updating the registries on their PCs.

The software is also a bit unstable. After the first time I put it into standby mode, I tried to turn it back on again and got nothing but beeps and error messages. (It wasn't me, honest! I didn't touch it!) I finally had to remove and re-install the software -- a procedure that produced still more error messages. But I persevered, and now the standby/restore function seems to be working properly.

Unless you read the FAQs thoroughly, you may not realize that even after you've stopped watching Joost you are still using enormous amounts of bandwidth, enough to get you a stern warning letter from your ISP, or worse. You actually have to close the icon out of your system tray in order to stop the bandwidth drain -- a fact that Joost will need to make clearer to users when it goes live.

Finally, content is somewhat less than compelling, unless you enjoy trivia contests about music videos. (150 channels and nothing to watch!) But once the technical issues are resolved and the number of users increases, I expect that we'll begin seeing more interesting content as well. UPDATE 5/22: Joost just brought in the Creative Artists Agency (CAA), the world’s leading talent and literary agency, to help it negotiate deals for "the most compelling and entertaining content." That ought to do the trick.

All in all, Joost is a welcome addition to the world of Internet video. And if all the stars align properly, it really could change the way we watch TV.

Posted by Editor at 11:20 AM | Permalink

Veodia thinks anyone should be able to broadcast live TV-quality video. Not just technical whizzes, not just rich folks with high-end equipment, not just amateurs willing to sign away rights to their content. Anyone. Logging on to Veodia, now in beta test, lets you broadcast over the Internet to thousands of computers, cell phones and TVs just by plugging a webcam or DV camcorder into your computer and pressing the "start" button. You can also archive the video for playback on computers, cell phones, iPods and Apple TVs. (Each beta user gets 3GB of storage for videos.)

The company is targeting two main audiences, professional bloggers (amazing that there are now enough of these to constitute a market!) and businesses. Detailed reporting capabilities let users track how many people are watching their videos.

Posted by Editor at 12:49 PM | Permalink

The first Killer App Expo and Conference was held in fiber-wired Fort Wayne, Indiana, the only Verizon FiOS community in the Midwest. Verizon's demonstrations of FiOS TV and gaming apps drew crowds throughout the show, especially on Community Night.

All photos by Ken Lasley unless otherwise noted.

The John & John show: John Wells and John Hughes from Global Online Solutions Network (GOSN) talk about their fiber-based video surveillance application, which they market to real estate developers.



Salesforce.com VP Dan Dal Degan explains the AppExchange, which allows application developers to build and sell on-demand software on the Salesforce.com platform.



Fort Wayne Mayor Graham Richard, who was instrumental in bringing FiOS to his city, gives a keynote address at the conference.



Tim Scott, sales and marketing director for PacketFront, discusses the open-access fiber system in Vasteras, Sweden, where as many as 80 service providers offer broadband services to consumers and businesses.

Photo by Steve Ross.

Scott Lomond, president of SightSpeed, receives an innovation award from Mayor Richard and conference chairman Scott DeGarmo. SightSpeed's main product is a desktop videoconferencing solution, but it also offers a number of other video-based applications.



George Chamoun, Senior Vice President of Synacor, explains Synacor's Web-based portal for broadband providers.

Photo by Steve Ross.

Posted by Editor at 10:52 AM | Permalink

One of the highlights of the Killer App Conference was a presentation on applications for property developers, given by Mike Whaling of Infinisys Electronic Architects. After the session, a number of audience members asked Mike for the list of the applications he spoke about, and he promised to share them with us. You can see the list, and view slides from the presentation, here.

Posted by Editor at 6:13 PM | Permalink

More quick jottings from the final day of the conference (and again, only a few droplets from the fire hose of information that was flowing there):

- Market researcher Mike Render says that fiber-to-the-home is growing faster in the U.S. -- at rates exceeding 100 percent per year -- than earlier forms of broadband at comparable moments in their history. Take rates (percentage of homes passed that are subscribing) are rising for providers other than Verizon, which is building FiOS faster than it can sell it. Homeowners with FTTH, as well as developers, estimate that it adds about $5,000 to the selling price of a house, and businesses are relocating in FTTH communities.

- Humanizing Technologies showed us an easy way to make gadgets (what everyone else calls widgets) for your mobile phone. Their app lets you send dynamic time, weather, stock quotes, horoscopes, or any other web-based information to your phone in about three clicks.

- VizSeek from Imaginestics, using a technology developed in Purdue University, is a video search application for manufacturers. Doodle a picture of the part you're looking for, and you can find it in any parts catalogue on the Web.

Posted by Editor at 12:37 AM | Permalink

The Killer App conference started up in full force today, with demos and presentations of dozens of broadband apps. Whether you're a consumer, a business executive, an educator, a health care provider, a developer, a network provider, a government official or a superhero (just keep reading), there was something here for you.

With four separate tracks and the Applications Theater -- not to mention site visits to two Fort Wayne broadband businesses -- we couldn't see everything. So what follows is just a tiny sampling of the riches on display today:

- StashSpace.com digitizes all those boxes of home-movie videotapes that have been sitting for years in their customers' closets. Then they give customers online tools to edit the videos and show them off to friends and family. (We've written about StashSpace before, when it was still called HomeMovie.com.)

- Network2 searches the Internet for episodic short-form content (translation: series of short videos) and brings the best of them all together in one place. If you're tired of LonelyGirl 15 and you can't figure out what else to watch on the Internet, Network2 will help you find video that's interesting, funny, informative, cool or socially relevant. Are you still wondering about those superheroes? Today's presentation was given by Network2's official superhero, Chris Brogan (at least that was his title du jour -- if you check in with him tomorrow, he may be the company's Grand High Slizmux by then).

Lars Krumme of StashSpace.com (l) and Chris Brogan of Network2 (r).
Photo credit: TechnologyEvangelist.com

- Yesterday, the New Urbanists told us that good urban planning meant designing towns where people could walk to work. Today, we found out about applications that let people work from home. A real live Fort Wayne telecommuter, Tom Miller, told us how fiber-to-the-home had made him more productive in his work as a customer-support field engineer. Other presenters demonstrated Blue Otter, a Mac-based collaboration program designed for the publishing industry, and SightSpeed, a videoconferencing program that's used by many kinds of telecommuters. We've written about SightSpeed before here.

- Here's how high schools in East Allen County, Indiana are using their fiber-based videoconferencing system:
* Teaching classes in German, Latin, creative writing, landscaping, child development, African-American studies, entrepreneurship, Web design, and sports and entertainment marketing. These are classes that couldn't be made generally available without the videoconferencing system to aggregate students from all five high schools.
* Offering students college-level classes from Indiana-Purdue Unversity at Fort Wayne.
* Taking students on virtual field trips to the Baseball Hall of Fame and puppetry workshops, introducing them to their elected officials, and letting them watch surgeries and autopsies.
* Holding professional development sessions for teachers.
* Holding case conferences at a school for the deaf.

Inventor Ray Kurzweil
Photo credit: TechnologyEvangelist.com

- Ray Kurzweil, today's leading inventor, who has launched nine different industries and made computers read, talk, and play music, gave an exciting but dizzying keynote address about the accelerating pace of change. Moore's Law ("The number of transistors on a chip doubles about every two years," according to Intel's official definition) is only one instance of this general acceleration of knowledge, Kurzweil said. In a graph illustrating the pace of change from the evolution of RNA through to the Internet, Kurzweil showed that this acceleration has been astonishingly steady for billions of years. The reason: Every change builds upon the last one.

Kurzweil's lesson: Don't assume that the pace of change over the last 50 years will be replicated over the next 50 years. It won't. It will be immeasurably greater.

The lesson for killer apps: There's no question that any bandwidth we can provide today will be fully utilized in a very short time. Kurzweil foresees that within a few years, computers will disappear as separate devices and will simply be integrated into all of our everyday objects (clothes, eyeglasses, etc.) Everything and everyone, he says, will be permanently connected into a broadband network.

Posted by Editor at 10:04 PM | Permalink