There are a number of microblogging engines in existence today that work the build-your-own angle of the market. The corporate and closed Yammer and the open source Laconi.ca are two such enablers.

Well, today one more joins the fold. Its name is Twingr. It comes by way of Miami and the Startups.com network and its aim is to give anyone the ability to create free custom Twitter-like forums without having to do much legwork.

Easy to Use

Suffice it to say that the promise of an easy-to-use system is realized at Twingr quite strongly:

- It sports a simple layout that anyone familiar with the 140-character messaging architecture will recognize and immediately warm up to.

- Its community-building component allows you to tap into your Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo accounts to send invites to contacts you know. You have the option to manually send messages to email addresses without having to log into one of the above mentioned services if you prefer to avoid that method.

- The settings menu provides users with switches to fine tune member-to-member messaging access. By default, the main options are as open as possible, except for follower request approvals.

Insofar as microblogging goes, there is little or nothing about Twingr that won’t appeal to registrants. Save for select circumstances for users of WordPress and 37signals webware, who have things like Prologue and Newsroom to interact with relatively small groups of people, a community on Twingr to complement your website or fanclub or whathaveyou can be the very style of forum you’re looking for. Startups.com Marketing VP Pepe Amorin says that the plan for the new venture is really to “let the flower blossom.”

And it’s free…

Again, there’s no cost of admission, at least not yet. It’s in public alpha mode for the time being. Yet even at launch stage it looks like it’s off to a good start. If I am to compare it to alternatives in the field, it has more in common with Yammer than Laconi.ca. But the fact that that it is free of cost regardless of engagement will have the attention of microblog fans who wish to limit the public thread to personal invitees only.

A few final words to cap our review: Pardon the electropop in the demo video below. Yes, it’s just as informative to watch when muted.

Source:Mashable!

HD Video isn’t just coming to every television screen, it’s making its way online as well. From well known video sites like YouTube to unknown upstarts like Vuze, many online video services are embracing the new standard.

Here’s a list of 20 great sources where you can find High Definition videos. Making the switch is easy; the only thing that’s blurred is the line between online and offline entertainment.

Tell us more about where you find HD videos in the comments.

Online HD Video Streaming

Apple - The Mac daddy site sports an excellent HD Video section with plenty of movie trailers, music videos and more. For the best experience, you’ll need to install/upgrade your QuickTime player.

Microsoft - Not to be outdone yet again by Apple, the boys from Redmond have added support for HD Video to their Windows Media player. Their WMV HD showcase has plenty of IMAX clips in HD as well as some movie trailers.

SmoothHD - This is a joint effort from Microsoft and Akamai for delivering HD content over HTTP with the help of SilverLight as part of the Open Video Player initiative.

Hulu - The hot video service has an extensive HD gallery of movies to behold. There are full-length feature films you can experience in HD for free. For example, here’s a trailer for Quantum of Solice.

Vimeo - Now supports HD in 1280×780 and lets you upload videos and convert them to HD.

Adobe - Has jumped into the HD Video arena as well by adding HD support to their Flash player technology. Here’s their HD Gallery.

Vuze - Provides a downloadable player that lets you view stunning HD Video content. The site is reminiscent of Hulu and YouTube with its search capabilities.

DailyMotion - The French video service supports the HD format.

YouTube - Well, there isn’t any special area for YouTube HD Video content because it only plays high quality video if it’s available and if you have a fast Internet connection. If you want to force YouTube to always play the high quality video whenever it’s available, change your option under account setting to do so:

MotionBox - Allows you to upload your home movies and convert them to HD Video. Go here for more information on the service.

NASA - If you’re into HD space exploration then this is the place to go. Many blasts from the past.

NY Times - The popular newspaper has recently launched an HD Video Portal based on Brightcove’s player.

Broadcast TV Channels in HD

CBS - Maintains a wide selection of HD Videos you can watch in their entirety, such as CSI: NY, The Amazing Race and many more.

ABC - Follows suit with their rival by streaming many of their shows online in HD. Requires you to install a small movie plugin for your browser.

NBC - NBC also streams their shows online in HD. Keep in mind that not all of their video content is in HD format. Look for the HD symbol next to the show name to verify. Also, you can download many shows in HD from their NBC Direct service for free.

HD TV Resources

Boxee.TV - Software that lets you connect video sites to your HDTV so you can enjoy HD video on your big screen. For example, you can stream hulu.com to your AppleTV.

vudu - Set-top Box that allows you to watch a slew of HD and HDX video instantly from an online selection.

AppleTV - Apple also provides a set-top box that lets you play HD movies, TV Shows and more.

XBox 360 - Microsoft has a set-top box that plays HD Video content such as movies and TV shows. You can find plenty of HD content at their xBox Live Marketplace.

Tivo HD - The new line of Tivo boxes support HD and Internet access, which means you can stream HD video from online services such as YouTube and NetFlix. You can also share your HD converted home movies with friends and family members.

Image courtesy of iStockPhoto, Bim

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My first work in Web TV dates back long before Web 2.0, at the infrastructure level, as I come out of the Internet telecom space – or the industry that makes the Web do what it does as we know it. It’s a cool part of the business. The Internet is ultimately a sophisticated communications infrastructure designed to modify or replace other, older platforms, like landline and mobile phones or TV. It also holds a lot of the secrets to what’s ahead on the Web.

For example, a good year (or more) before video exploded online, things on the back end were pointing to just that. Information moves online in packets, and video is the heaviest. In order to deliver all those YouTube clips, and now, webisodes and favorite shows, speed and good compression are needed. Until recent years, the Web just wasn’t there. Just the same, it was also easy to predict that webisodic and professional Web video would ultimately be king while most were just starting to go bananas over user driven stuff on YouTube and MySpace.

While it’s closer than ever now, we’re still a long way away from the reality of TV on the Web – and the revenue promised to follow it. Yes, a lot of people are watching TV online now, and many more will in the future. Product placement and sponsorship offer revenue opportunity that extends beyond traditional ads. But, none of this is without challenges and limitations. The majority of Web users overall are not watching TV online, and while money is being made through product placements and sponsorships, it’s not without hassle. The market is still very early, and it’ll be either a blessing or a curse, depending on how you go about it.

Here are a few ways I believe to win:

Forget Webisodes…for Now. I’m not a fan of webisodic content from a business standpoint right now, for a few reasons. First, it can be expensive, particularly if you want real quality. Other formats can be done a lot cheaper with less. Second, while there have been some early successes, like Kate Modern, the majority of online video users just cut their teeth a year or two ago on three minute cat clips. Given this, I believe users will adopt better to formats similar to Wine Library TV and WallStrip right now more than anything that requires significant attention.

Understand the Money. The buzz of the moment is the millions that’ll be spent in Web video sponsorships, etc. But don’t be fooled – it doesn’t mean it’s going to land in the hands of small producers or platforms. In fact, historically, it’s been the opposite online with exception to a few players. Saturn is sponsoring a show – but it’s with CBS. Model.Live was brought to us by Express – by way of Conde Nast. There are many other obstacles beyond this. Think through how you plan to get involved, because there are ways to make money – or lose your shirt.

It’s No Longer Just an Internet Game. Think Web 2.0 is just about the Internet crowd these days? Think again. The best in early Web video is coming out of Hollywood at the moment for the most part, with exception to a few Internet successes. They’ve got the connections, experience, equipment and talent to make big things happen – and big things attract big brands, platforms and advertisers. Expand your viewpoint of the market if you can – it’ll pay off in the end.

In the future, expect the bar to get higher, for networks and major entertainment properties to continue to play larger roles and more big names to move into the market. Producers, writers and talent in Hollywood can often fund their own projects, and their marquee names can attract brands. I wouldn’t be surprised to see investment capital shift into these hands. How can Internet executives get a foothold? By doing what my company, 9, did: keep feet in both industries and leverage your Internet experience.

Patricia Handschiegel is an aspiring serial entrepreneur and founder of Stylediary.net (sold 2007) and The 9 Group, a digital consulting and content/production company that leverages entertainment and internet experience. She blogs about the intersection of traditional and web TV for TV Week and is currently producing and developing TV projects in both markets.

Imagery provided by iStock/joshblake

UPDATE: We have 500 Nostradamical invites for Mashable readers. Visit the site and use the code MASHABLE to get access.

Nostradamical, a UK startup that’s currently in private beta, is ironically a little late with its Ruby on Rails-powered, “crowdsourcing”-inspired predictions site.  And predicting its success depends on the site’s ability to plug into other audiences rapidly.

The short, lazy description: it’s “Digg for predictions.”  The long one, courtesy of the Nostradamical site:

- Use collective intelligence to predict future world events.

- Create your own events. Tag and publish your predictions.

- Create lists that group together predictions under one theme (e.g. My Oscar Predictions).

- Rise through 7 levels of status and gain fame as an ‘Oracle’ of the future. Promote your blog or website.

The essence of that: make a prediction, and watch good predictions rise up as other people vote on their likelihood.  Vote correctly and you earn cred.  

Wisdom of What Now?

Incidentally, this is fundamentally not the way the Wisdom of Crowds works. That theory says that the most accurate prediction is made when users vote independently, without having seen the votes of others.  A Digg-like system, as mentioned many times on Mashable before, creates a herd-like mentality where your opinion is influenced by the people who came before you.  

And Yet, Salvageable

Yes, it’s not novel and it’s not technically a Wisdom of Crowds app as the About page claims.  It has a silly name, too.  But, the Nostradamical team sure as heck knows how to build a Web app, and that’s half the battle.  Everything works, it looks good, and it’s fun to play around with.

The secret, I think, will be to plug into other ecosystems to gain a user-base…blog partnerships ala PollDaddy (a polling company that got a great deal of traction by working with blogs like Mashable), Twitter syndication, Facebook apps, an API and the rest.

The Likely Outcome

Alas, most startups don’t get enough runway to achieve that critical mass and figure out the revenue model later.  No, if Nostradamical is to survive, it’ll likely do so by foregoing the consumer market (or at least treating it as a loss leader) and end up building prediction markets for internal use at companies.

Don’t believe me? Go check up on this 2007 list of 20+ Prediction Markets…where are they now?

Source:Mashable!

A new study comparing broadcast TV viewership with the level of social interaction that takes place around specific TV shows on the Web demonstrates that the two are not tightly correlated – if not completely unrelated. Networked Insights, a market intelligence company, compared the Nielsen ratings with its own formula for measuring social interactions around TV shows – things like embedding a video, joining a group, or linking to the show from a social networking site.

Comparing these two metrics, the two lists were markedly different, with 5 shows appearing in the Networked Insights Top 10 that did not make the Nielsen Ratings:

Personally, I watch a grand total of 0 of these shows (minus Sunday Night Football), so I’ll let Networked Insights explain some of the findings:

(1) Two and a Half Men has a strong hold on the top spot among online audiences, but is a distant fifth in the Nielsen ratings. Strong online engagement is due to Two and a Half Men’s “quote following” — a high level of interaction around specific quotes from the show

(2) Networked Insights’ second highest rated show, Criminal Minds, does not appear on the Nielsen top 10 list, likely due to the psychological nature of the show, and complex criminal storylines

(3)Likewise, the second highest rated show on Nielsen’s list, Desperate Housewives, has very low engagement among the online audience due to the lack of passion and pain in the shows content

Anecdotally, I would say that these findings are consistent with much of what I’ve seen online. Frankly, I’m surprised Family Guy isn’t even higher on the Network Insight’s list, given the incredibly strong video sharing and quoting that seems to go on around the show. Earlier this year, we also saw the return of Jericho to TV after CBS canceled it, apparently due to a tremendous uproar from online fans.

Ultimately, findings like these provide even more justification for the TV networks to make their content available online, as certain shows clearly enjoy better traction with the Web audience than they do in the living room.

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Slowly but surely, the entertainment industry is grasping the fact that the Internet is the most important promotional tool they’ll ever have. Shows like South Park and Jackass already have websites on which fans can see full episodes for free; now, something similar is planned for Saturday Night Live.

According to Broadcasting & Cable, SNL executive producer Lorne Michaels and NBC are planning to develop an on-demand Web site that will feature clips from the popular show. Nothing is certain at this early stage, but it seems that they’re planning to offer clips taken from the show instead of full episodes, as well as previously unaired bloopers and rehearsal clips.

What prompted NBC to try this approach was the immense (surprise, surprise) success of SNL episodes on Hulu. However, B&C reports that monetizing this project is one of the biggest obstacles for NBC. I’d say that controlling the content yourself instead of having people share it somewhere else on their own is a good enough reward.

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People often speak of old and new media as a dichotomy, with stodgy network television channels and traditional newspapers on the one hand, and hip, technologically sophisticated youth on the other. But recently, old media –- in particular, large television outlets -– have been catching on. A recent post on Mashable noted that CNN is using Twitter to interact with viewers. I commented that Fox News Channel is also using Twitter and Facebook. Many traditional newspapers, national and local, are also using Twitter and other social software to various degrees.

Because I use my Comcast Cable DVR to watch shows on delay about 75% of the time, I found myself this morning viewing a national news show and realizing that I couldn’t interact with the hosts via Twitter, because I was an hour too late. Show hosts asking viewers to “Twitter your comments” is clearly the modern version of “calling in with your questions for our guest.” The key question I asked myself was, as more television media master their new media brands, will we find ourselves more likely to tune into their shows in real time?

The financial consequence of not using DVRs, or downloading the shows from a third-party website, or other new options, is that more people watching the real-time version means more viewer share, which in turn means more advertising revenue. People are more likely to engage the show in real time and therefore more likely to see traditional commercials. I don’t know if the gurus at television networks or advertising firms they work with are thinking about it this way yet, but it seems like a truism to me.

So what might be a strategy going forward? As an avid watcher of television, particularly political news, complex dramas, and reality shows, I could imagine many scenarios in which incentives are created to watch shows in real time – viewers pose questions for the guest, guide alternative dramatic scenes, or decide what challenge the players have to perform. How cool would it be to watch Donald Trump, Sr. using Twitter on a BlackBerry in the middle of the live Apprentice finale? And the advertising underbelly is that you are statistically more likely to purchase paper towels, basketball sneakers, or a dream vacation cruise.

With the increasingly “long tail” of niche television channels, magazines, and similar outlets only becoming more prevalent, it might behoove the “blockbuster” organizations like NBC to become the leaders in “old new media” to win some of that viewer share back. This summer, the startup social network and search site Searchles inked a deal with the venerable Washington Post to create social networks among people with common reading interests. Why not similarly network all the people who voted for Clay Aiken, are fans of Gossip Girl, or hate The View?

Mark Drapeau is an Associate Research Fellow at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy in Washington, DC. These views are his own and not the official policy or position of any part of the U.S. Federal Government.

(Image via Flickr/ dailyinvention)

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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.

The BBC announced today that it would start offering its TV shows on its iPlayer service for longer than the seven days it originally offered them.  According to the organization, its “series stacking” initiative is one that should see more people watch its shows.

Prior to this announcement, BBC only allowed shows to air for seven days before it took them down.  But after realizing that most customers didn’t approve of such a policy, it reversed its stance and said that videos would be left on the site ‘indefinitely’ to allow users to catch up to their favorite shows.

Perhaps more importantly, the BBC announcement also included a point that would see the entire season of shows be made available and not just a select number.  According to the BBC, that more than anything this should see customers find more reason to use iPlayer.

But the BBC announcement runs in direct contrast to what’s currently offered on services like Hulu or Fancast, which only offer a select number of episodes from shows for a finite amount of time.

The BBC’s decision to do this runs directly against the services currently being offered on Hulu.  For its part, Hulu offers shows like The Office for a limited amount of time and only does so at about four to six episodes at a time.  That said, shows are made available (usually) right after they’re aired live.

Regardless, it creates an important dynamic in the space and could put the onus on US sites to do the same sort of thing.  After all, don’t users want to have constant access to as many shows as possible?

The BBC has made the right move in this regard.  It has finally realized that allowing people to watch shows and do what they want with available videos is the key to its success on the iPlayer.  And if it proves to be a success — and it probably will — look for Hulu and others to follow suit.

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Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: LeadVine

20-word Description: LeadVine is where you post sales leads or information you are searching for and have the community act as your sales force.

CEO’s Pitch: LeadVine is a new kind of social network where the community is the sales force.

LeadVine has two goals:

A. Simplify how companies find new customers by posting sales leads and referral bonuses on LeadVine. Obtaining new customers is a difficult and expensive process. LeadVine helps companies find new sales leads in an efficient way.

B. Have the community earn easy money for finding and sharing sales leads. Everyday people come across information that is useless to them but valuable to someone else. Use LeadVine to find companies willing to pay you $1,000s for valuable information you come across.

Mashable’s Take: Social networks have shown what Web-based interconnectivity unhindered by geography can do for personal association as well as professional. LinkedIn, for instance, has shown itself to hold ample value for its users - and vice versa. LeadVine, a new service launching this Thursday, August 14, walks a business-centric line as well. But rather than try to compete with a stalwart like LinkedIn directly, it tries to build on the market already established by facilitating connections for sales purposes or other business. Advisory and consultancy outfits, for instance.

Looking at the list of requests published to LeadVine in advance of its public debut this week, one might see some highlights that sport “finder’s fees” and think it peculiarly easy to interact with users. LeadVine’s promotion of users’ ability to “earn easy money” only makes the visitor’s double-take more pronounced. There’s considerable value being spoken of in some cases, a number of which are too grand and too playful it seems, especially given the site’s preview status.

Even so, LeadVine is at its core quite promising. Its design is meant to enable a three-step process: post sales leads; seek community assistance in finding those leads; conduct said business and add to sales. No mystery. Just the corporate world at work. Only with LeadVine, it is a bit more cloud-based than before.

Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials

Source:Mashable!

Disqus is getting a whole lot more attractive to publishers today with the rollout of several new features designed to make the third-party commenting system function much more like one native to popular blogging platforms.

While Disqus has attracted more than 30,000 websites to its system, its biggest drawback to-date has been the fact that its commenting system functioned essentially like a widget, meaning comments were not stored locally. This meant that publishers who installed the service could not migrate their old comments, needed to login to Disqus for moderation, and lost the SEO benefits of having comment content on their site.

To begin to address these issues, Disqus is launching a new WordPress plugin and enhanced developer API. With the plugin, comments can now be synced with a local database, and publishers can import their old comments into Disqus. Additionally, comments can now be moderated from within the WordPress Admin, as they are with the standard WordPress commenting system.

With comments now being stored server side, it means they are indexable by search engines, in turn negating the SEO problem created in previous iterations of Disqus. As for the API, the idea is to allow developers to create their own custom integrations, allowing the comment system to serve audiences beyond those on blogs.

So do all these enhancements make Disqus worth switching to if you haven’t yet jumped on the bandwagon? Before today, the big selling point was that the service increases engagement, because people are more likely to leave comments when they have ownership of them (i.e. - with a Disqus account, all your comments from across the Web are stored at disqus.com/yourname). Looking to take this idea a step further, another big enhancement being released today by Disqus involves making profile pages much more blog-like, as you can see in the screenshot below:

Up next for Disqus: a much requested integration with Friendfeed, so comments left on the social aggregator will be streamed back to the originating blog, similar to the feature the service already offers through Plaxo.

Disqus clearly realizes that comments are owned by the bloggers producing the content and the people engaging with it. They’re also showing the beauty of hosted applications - solving big problems for bloggers that get implemented in real-time without any effort on our part. Today’s enhancements solidify these ideas, and should lead more big publishers to seriously consider the platform.

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Source:Mashable!

All this talk about Mobile TV has gotten out of hand lately.  First, people claim that it’s the future and the next thing you know, you can’t get rid of it.  And to make matters worse, the iPhone has complicated matters even more and according to some, has forced companies to start thinking of ways to bring mobile TV to your life in a big way.

“iPhone’s success raised the bar of consumer expectations regarding mobile multimedia,” said John du Pre Gauntt, senior analyst at eMarketer. “Handset manufacturers worldwide are in the midst of revamping their product lines against this new benchmark.”

And although I’m still suspect about the future of Mobile TV and personally feel that it’s nothing more than a waste of time and money, others tend to disagree.  In fact, many companies think it could be at the epicenter of the rise in mobile advertising over the next few years.

But when the reality of the situation hits them squarely on the face, I’m sure they’ll come around to the thought that mobile TV advertising has no future because the space is littered with products that suffer from poor video quality and even worse programming, creating an experience that fails to capture the quality and usability of watching a YouTube video on an iPhone or even watching a video online.

As Gaunt explains, “Until consumers are presented with a clear-cut, simple and inexpensive value model for accessing mobile video and TV content, it will be hard to segment audiences at either an industry or geographic level.”

In turn, the value of Mobile TV advertising is put into question and it becomes quite obvious that the future of advertising on a cell phone –- if you believe Mobile TV stands at the center of that equation -– is very much in doubt.

As eMarketer points out, mobile video advertising will continue to gain ground over the next few years and eventually reach into the billions.  But the chances of Mobile TV truly becoming the centerpiece of that rise in revenue are quite slim.

“It is difficult to create forecasts for mobile video and mobile TV advertising due to the fact that the market is still fragmented and undeveloped,” says Gauntt.

There’s no debating the fact that mobile advertising is the next major frontier for companies and they’re all trying to jump on the bandwagon as soon as possible.  But Mobile TV will not be a part of that equation because it fails on too many levels and simply doesn’t provide the user with an experience that’s worthy of using it.

How many times must a Mobile TV show eat up a cell phone’s battery or fail to even present watchable video before we all come to the realization that it’s just not that great.

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