When we talk about video content on the Web, it’s now customary to speak about control. Things like on-demand, skip forward, skip back, shuffle, etc., are pretty common. They’re expected, really.

So what BitGravity, a self-described content delivery network, is looking to do at the server side of media management, is give video producers more controls of their own, and all through its new Advanced Progressive API.

What kind of control? A few items include auto-bitrate adjustments, scene selection, and establishing start and stop clauses, just to name a few items.

BitGravity also talks about things like advertisement injection, virtual projections and so forth, all revolving around its engineering of an HD Flash- and H.264-based platform. An “Advanced Progressive” platform, at that. In short, this option allows the viewer to seek information hosted online much as one would when interacting with a physical media player, albeit without the need to complete a full download. As you might suspect, this gives the user a natural feeling experience without having to wait idle for a loader to reach the 100% mark. Less wait equals better time spent, for sure.

As an HD delivery service alone, BitGravity has provided a fairly impressive option to content owners. Its ability to make instant-play and live video available at such a high level has proven attractive for a number of clients already, including Revision3 and comedian Tom Green. So the release of the API today is bound to lure more names from the creative world.

Control, after all, is what nearly everyone within the media world desires. It allows producers to stay adaptive to market conditions, which in this day and age are no doubt fickle and fast to shift.

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Source:Mashable!

ZoomProspector, the Real Estate locating service for businesses, has emerged from private beta and opened its doors to the public. Now any business can use the service to find the optimum location to move or start their venture. Also, any city, council or state can enter the geographic and economic data related to their area in order to entice potential new businesses into moving to their region.

While there are some similarities to Zillow, another online real estate service, ZoomProspector focuses solely on the commercial real estate market. In many ways, ZoomProspector acts as a real estate agent for businesses and the communities that list their locations. One side enters the data and the other side searches for what they need and want by using ZoomProspector’s search engine. In a sense, ZoomProspector is a matchmaker for businesses and communities.

The biggest draw to ZoomProspector is the amount of data it possesses on locations thanks to over 150 map layers of information that can be applied by business owners. These layers each reveal something new and entirely different about a specific location such as commute times, airport proximity, education levels and other factors. While popular mapping services such as Microsoft Live Virtual Earth and Google Maps provide visually appealing images of locations, they offer less data. ZoomProspector and its 150 map layers give businesses more than enough data to help them make a decision about where they should setup shop.

This is a useful service for business decision makers and community developers that are interested in real estate transactions. Centralizing all of this data and offering a search tool along with customized maps of information provides users with useful knowledge that they can use when it comes to choosing a location to start or move their business. The features are easy to use and despite the magnitude of data contained at the site, the performance is acceptable.

According to ZoomProspector, “Approximately 750,000 businesses look for a new facility nationwide each year.” There is a definitely market for this service, and though ZoomProspector is currently free, I can easily see premium service plans implemented somewhere down the road.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:ZoomProspector Introduces Real Estate Search for Business Locations [Invites]iPhone Arrives in the UK and Germany TodaySpock Serving 400 Pageviews Per Second at LaunchBlyk Still Not Ready to Launch Free Mobile ServiceStreakr Exchanging Clothes for Beta TestersMore Details on Gphone EmergeEyevio - Sony Launching YouTube Rival on Friday

Residential real estate receives an enormous amount of attention from sites around the Web. Commercial, a bit less so. And according to Rofo, a service launched earlier this year as a beta and now officially unveiled, commercial space sized just right for the entrepreneurial, small business set is more treacherous still. Particularly in the fast-paced San Francisco Bay Area and cities beyond.

Established by two former commercial real estate brokers, Alan Bernier and Garrett Krueger, Rofo is said to catalogue some 6,000+ spaces in California’s central fixation for the startup world, all for the purposes of finding locations with square-footage that more or less encapsulates that very demographic of business. And not only does it publish listings, it cuts out the need for users to monitor posts with space needs notifications. Once items come across your account inbox, you can send property managers requests for showings, conduct Q&A sessions with users, and even publish reviews and directions for fellow users to consider when searching for space and ruminating needs.

Most everything is well drawn within Rofo’s various quarters. There’s nothing scattered or overwhelming about the place. And as far as expert- and user-generated tips and content, posts are concise and worth browsing, whether you’re involved with pre-lease or post-lease planning and habitation. Also, if for whatever reason you’d like to gauge the average price for a space in a particular city within the Rofo database, you can input your specifications into the Rofometer (embeddable on any webpage) to find out if you’re getting it too easy, too hard, or somewhere in the middle.

As a search utility alone Rofo is quite good, if unfortunately very selective in regional focus. But you can argue that being thorough in one area is better than stretching thin across a vast swath of land. And chances are Rofo will grow with time as usage demands it. As a comprehensive source for location spotting and the give-some-take-some that the advice forum provides, it’s even better.

Remember the days before the Internet when you would go to the library to browse old microfilm of newspapers and magazines for research? I don’t either, but in any event, Google’s latest initiative looks to bring all of that content online and make it searchable. The company is adding digital archives to Google News, allowing you to see full scans of original newspapers from the pre-Web era in addition to being able to search the text of them.

To use the new service, you can either go to the Google News Archive, or search Google News and switch to the “timeline” view. When a story is viewable in its original format, the search result will list “Google News Archive” next to the name of the source.

It’s not clear how much content has been indexed so far, but searches for huge events like “Kennedy Assassination” and “Pearl Harbor” don’t seem to yield any digital archives yet, so I’d assume the index is still fairly small. As an example of a search that does show some results, Google suggests “Americans walk on the moon” which brings up original articles from a number of newspapers on July 21st, 1969.

Google already makes historical content from The New York Times and The Washington Post available in search results, though the publishers generally charge you money to access it. For its new effort, Google has partnered with the likes of ProQuest and Heritage, two of the companies responsible for all of that microfilm you find at the library.

—Related Articles at Mashable - All That’s New on the Web:Google News Goes LocalGoogle To Launch Google WikiGoogle News Now Looks Beautiful On Your iPhoneBreasts on YouTube, Archive.org Sued, Ask Turns EvilGoogle Ditches Video Link, Replaces It With ProductsMySpace News: The Digg Killer?All New Mashup Matrix!

Source:Mashable!

The Echo Nest and its “Musical Brain” developer website was introduced at DEMOfall 08 today. This so-called Musical Brain is really an open API platform for developing rich new musical experiences. There are more than 30 tool sets available for developers on their DeveloperNest. Here are the three primary API platforms:

- Recommend: Powers recommendations for users by understanding songs, reviews and articles from a target music site.

- Analyze: Generates an XML musical score for uploaded songs analyzing details such as beats, time signature, song sections, timbre and other attributes.

- Feed: Aggregates information about every musical artist on your website including all audio, video, reviews, blog posts and more.

A Piece of their mind

The Application Showcase shares several examples of what can be created with the Echo Nest. There are some silly fun apps such as More Cowbell which allows you to upload a song and actually adjust the amount of cowbell you want to hear for that particular song (based on the famous Saturday Night Live sketch). You can then share the results with anyone.

Here are some others:

- The MyXdup app seems to have broader appeal. It uses the Echo Nest’s API to create an app that can combine two separate YouTube music videos and create a new one.

- The Echo Chamber is a personalized radio station application for imeem’s members. It analyzes your listening history to make suggestions for new music to hear.

- Recomme is a Twitter bot with musical memory. Send tweets to @Recomme and it’ll reply with links to music resources on the Web based on your request. If you follow @Recomme then you can send private direct messages to the smart bot that will reply with the information you want.

Conclusion

The tools from Echo Nest will definitely help create entirely new experiences for music fans online. Making the process easier and less expensive than traditional methods, we can expect a great deal more original Web apps that will enhance our music listening experience. I guess one could say this is a no-brainer?

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Source:Mashable!

Real estate prices are low, and to say that the real estate industry in the US is facing a crisis is an understatement. So, what do you do if you have an online real estate community with 5 million unique monthly visitors, like Zillow? You combine it with 282 newspapers from 11 companies to form the largest online real estate advertising network. Because, you know, sooner or later people are going to start buying houses again.

The terms of the deal are as follows: newspapers will be able to reach Zillow’s respectable user base, while Zillow advertisers will gain access to the users visiting real estate sections of the newspaper’s Web sites. The newspaper companies in the consortium include Hearst Newspapers; Lee Enterprises, Incorporated; Media General, Inc.; MediaNews Group, Inc.; Morris Communications Company, while newspapers include The San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, The Tampa Tribune, and many others.

Greg Schwartz, vice president of advertising sales at Zillow, said this about the agreement: “The Zillow Advertising Network gives local and national advertisers unprecedented access to the largest online audience of home buying and selling consumers available, including the loyal, engaged audiences visiting Zillow and our newspaper partners. This affluent and qualified audience of consumers making major home-related purchases is extremely valuable to advertisers and can now be targeted across a range of geographic considerations.“

—Related Articles at Mashable - All That’s New on the Web:Zillow Taps Newspapers for Real Estate ListingsZillow Gets First Official Real Estate Listings through ERAZillow Adds Listings from RealogyZillow Q4 Report Says: Housing Market Still Declining. Is it Good for Zillow?Zillow Growing Fast with RE/MAX ListingsOnline Real Estate Sites Work To Get A Listing StandardZillow Banned in Arizona

While Trulia began as an online resource for home buyers and others interested in the ever-changing real estate market, its recent developments have starte to drill down heavily into personalization capabilities. The latest features continue Trulia’s effort to offer services for the buyers and the professionals in the real estate market, and extend its platform tools in order to provide more value for these two ends of the space. There are three main aspects of Trulia’s latest upgrades: new personalization features, an enhanced mobile offering, and blogs for all users.

Further validating the trend made popular by Facebook, Trulia has adopted the news feed format for additional localized personalization features on its homepages. Visit Trulia’s main home page and you’ll see tailored news feed updates based on your geographic location. Upon launch, this news feed will be localized on a city level, but as Trulia aggregates more information to be included in this news feed and continues to build out this feature, it will move into specific neighborhood and zip code localization levels as well.

The useful aspect of Trulia’s news feed is that it will continually modify according to your search activity on the site. So if you happen to be looking at homes in two different cities, this will be reflected in the news feed updates that Trulia provides. Additionally, there are filtering options for the news feed, so even if you’re searching across eight different cities, you’ll be able to easily narrow down the results accordingly.

Trulia mobile has also been upgraded to include a new iPhone app, which takes advantage of its map and image-viewing capabilities and offers a new way in which to access the news feed features Trulia is also rolling out in this release. In addition to mobile phones, Trulia has also teamed up with Dash Navigation to provide mobile access through its GPS-enabled navigation device, giving you yet another way to both search for and drive to homes in a particular area.

The mobile upgrades, according to Trulia’s VP of Marketing Heather Fernandez, were in direct response to users’ consistent increase in activity and mobile access on the weekends, as they venture out into the real world for a look at homes in the area. To this end, increased mobile support across multiple devices is key to Trulia’s overall growth strategy.

Lastly, Trulia has added blogs, which is a direct appeal to those already using Trulia’s platform for self-promotion purposes. While any user can take advantage of Trulia blogs, I think it’s greatest potential is for real estate professionals that are leveraging Trulia’s network to access its user base and drive more sales. As Trulia blogs become more developed, they will have additional tools for automatic import and distribution from and to other blogging platforms.

And speaking of distribution, Trulia blogs will also be sent throughout Trulia’s new personalized news feed system, bringing all the recent updates to Trulia’s site full circle.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Trulia Releases Useful Data on Real Estate Q&A Forum ActivityTrulia Ad Network: Keeping More Cash from Real Estate SearchTrulia Adds Google StreetView to Home ListingsTrulia Raises $15M to Develop Self-Service Real Estate AdsTrulia Offers Private Label Real Estate Listings to Web PublishersTrulia: Niche Search Done Right [podcast]Trulia Launches Self-Service Marketing for Real Estate Professionals

CNBC is reporting that Microsoft and Facebook have signed a search and advertising deal. The partnership involves integrating Microsoft Live Search on Facebook, which will include the software giant’s search advertising. Microsoft Live Search will launch on Facebook sometime this fall, according to the report.

Currently, Microsoft serves contextual advertising on Facebook, and the company made a $240 million investment in the social network back in October. At the time, it was unclear whether or not search was part of the deal.

MySpace has a similar deal with Google, which includes a guaranteed $900 million in revenue to the News Corp-owned social network. That partnership has had lukewarm results so far for Google, who has indicated during its quarterly earnings announcements that it is struggling to effectively monetize social networking inventory.

These deals are par for the course for most big online media companies. For example, in addition to its MySpace deal, Google powers search on sites like AOL and The Washington Post, while Yahoo powers search at former Web 1.0 darling Lycos. While most people ultimately keep searching via their service of choice, the law of huge numbers means that at least a few people will do their Google, Yahoo, or Live searches via a partner site.

So far, the MySpace deal is just a simple implementation of Google search under MySpace branding. What will be interesting to see is if the social networks begin to do innovative things with social search by leveraging your friends list. Yahoo recently released Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS) to allow developers to do just that, with Me.dium signing on as an initial partner.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Microsoft Live Search to Become Default on HP ComputersFacebook Trapped By Microsoft Ad DealFacebook Ads, Powered by MicrosoftConfirmed: Microsoft Wins Facebook Stake with $240 Million InvestmentYahoo-Google Deal Looking Good; Common Sense Packs Up And LeavesBill Gates Lied? Microsoft May Offer to Buy Out Facebook.Google-Friendster Partnership Revealed

Source:Mashable!

So you’re a real-estate agent or a homeowner toughing a sales effort on your own, and you are interested in going above and beyond the requisite listing of photos, overview, and geo-tagging. Maybe you want to work in a little video slideshow for shoppers. If so, PropertyPreviews is a free service that automates the process of creating such clips without need for any software downloads. Just upload your images, include any relevant information, and the service will do the rest.

It can also send your video tour off to a number of real estate listing services and video sharing sites of your choosing, including Trulia, Zillow, and YouTube. Agents can place videos on their own websites if so desired.

Though PropertyPreviews general manager Jeff Harris touts the service as offering a sort of 24-hour open house, suffice it to say that you won’t be awed by its powers. Magic is minimal, but for a good number of users, it’s likely to do what it needs to regardless. It cost nil to the user, after all, so if anything, it provides just a bit of extra window dressing if desired.

A word of warning. While PropertyPreviews proudly displays generic samples on its front page, it does so with an unfortunate selection of music. What’s more, it appears that the service itself mandates the addition of an audio track. Silent playback isn’t an option. So choose wisely!

Digg CEO Jay Adelson told BusinessWeek that the company is not planning a 2008 IPO, holding acquisition talks, or looking for more money. Which is obviously bullshit. That is, unless Digg hire Allen & Company, an investment bank which specializes in media deals, to bolster its ultimate frisbee team.

Emerging briefly from the heaping pile, Adelson did admit that an acquisition would be easier for a company Digg’s size than going public. But mostly Adelson was just being cagey. Just like he was a couple of months ago when I saw him in New York. “Why all the Digg coverage? Isn’t Digg old news?” he asked me. Why all the complaints, Jay? Getting bored of running Digg?