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August 27th, 2008 at 3:31 pm

YourScreen is a new service that is announcing its upcoming beta today, and it’s set out to enable you to turn a television into a start page of sorts. Designed for use within schools, companies, and at events, YourScreen is a custom option for displaying your content on televisions. So what type of content can you post on these televisions?

Built on Adobe AIR, YourScreen comes with some ready-made content, like weather and a stock ticker, with more plug-ins on the way. You can use these plug-ins in conjunction with your own content or simply stream the content you’d like to display. This could be a live video of a speaker or an interview, an image slide show of companies presenting at a particular event, or other pertinent information regarding your company that you’d like to convey to your employees. So far, YourScreen doesn’t seem to offer much in the way of differentiating features that you couldn’t already take advantage of with a closed-circuit television system.

But as YourScreen grows, its aim is to provide a Web-based platform for easily managing content that is displayed across this television system. So you will be able to use the YourScreen Web interface to determine what content is shown in which screen. There are also tools for helping you create content, so you won’t have to rely entirely on third-party services to create a slide show. For instance, YourScreen can turn your collection of still shots and videos into a stream that can be broadcast across multiple television screens.

In targeting schools, businesses and events, I think YourScreen would also do well to partner with, or add integrated support for a wide array of content imports and compatibility. Services like Mogulus and Kyte offer platforms for creating content that is likely to be ideal for broadcast on custom systems like YourScreen, and also offer a good amount of tools for making multimedia content on the fly. Catering to users that may start with next to nothing when streaming with YourScreen as well as those that have already begun creating content with other Web apps would be a broader strategy for appealing to multiple types of users when promoting the YourScreen service. If you’re interested in the upcoming beta, see here for more details.

Source:Mashable!

Looking forward to spicing up your Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 installation with social goodness? Me.dium, a self-described social software company, will be standing aside the likes of Facebook, Yahoo, and eBay for Microsoft’s newest browser launch today. Me.dium’s role is essentially to, among other things, deliver a “crowd-powered” discover-share mechanism first touted at Microsoft’s MIX08 conference earlier this year.

Indeed, Me.dium is no freshman to IE8 or the broader Web browser market. Mashable’s Kristen Nicole made mention of the company’s participation in the IE8 Beta 1 push, as well as the debut of a Firefox 3 download. At that time, a number of the features in Me.dium’s plugin were already being promoted. The What’s Hot Webslice, for instance, is a recommendation component that offers users a quick glimpse of things deemed interesting by the collective mob. And the so-called Discovery Accelerator, which finds content deemed interesting via keywords gleaned from virtually any webpage, takes the recommendation concept further still.

The more personally social aspects of Search software are the toolbar’s “follow” feature and integration with Facebook. Also, a portion dubbed visual search, made possible by IE8, builds on a move made by Me.dium early last month, done in light of Yahoo’s launch of its BOSS platform (short for Build Your Own Search Engine) that, along with the standard display of news, reviews, pictures and videos, shows a certain hierarchy in various links’ popularity, albeit one that is eminently susceptible to change in behavior of the search crowd.

Me.dium CEO Kimball Musk makes a fairly convincing argument to Me.dium’s utility in the browser environment, and IE8 Betas 1 and 2 by natural association. Altogether, its social search feature set allows for users to keep better apprised of the often fast-shifting Web environment, particularly with concern for breaking news and viral oddities. And bridging the crowd’s tendencies with friend-enhanced extensions really just helps better fill the proverbial picture. Granted, there is a leap or two (or more) that the user must take to fully involve him/herself in these processes, but as is the life of most any people-powered invention of good repute.

The way in which such inventions have lasting impact is really a matter of how the give-take arrangement between a service and those its serves is balanced. Me.dium appears a generously worthwhile effort in that respect.