There are many posts out the in the blogosphere talking about the superior service/application from kyte.tv, comparing them to Qik.com or Flixwagon.com. See the Techcrunch post from Robert Scoble: why-kytetv-will-kill-qik-and-flixwagon-in-cell-phone-video-space

That led me to this post. Here’s why I think Kyte will dominate over Qik and Flixwagon:

1. The distribution system that Kyte has built is much better than either Qik or Flixwagon. Translation: the embeddable player that Kyte.tv has is much better than Qik or Flixwagon, more on that in a second.
2. The chat room that Kyte has built is much better than Qik or Flixwagon and can be participated in from other cell phones, something that Qik and Flixwagon can’t do.
3. The ability to mix videos from your webcam, live videos streaming from your web cam, recorded videos from camcorders, or from places like YouTube, along with both recorded and streamed videos from your cell phone goes way beyond what Qik and Flixwagon have done today.
4. Kyte.tv can play videos on an iPhone today. Neither Qik or Flixwagon can do that.
5. Kyte.tv can play videos on a Nokia today. Both from your recordings and other people’s. Neither Qik or Flixwagon can do that.
6. Kyte.tv is partially funded and supported by Nokia. That might not sound like a big deal, but it is. Nokia is using Kyte’s service internally too, and I’m sure Nokia is giving Kyte better engineering support than it’s giving Qik or Flixwagon.
7. Kyte.tv is way ahead of Qik and Kyte in getting real mainstream celebrities like 50 cent on its service, which means its growth is way stronger.

and Oliver wrote about them, too:

The only thing we need are mobile phone internet flatrates and I hope that the carriers are seeing in the iPhone that a flatrate helps. I don’t believe the increased usage comes form the iPhone only, but for a large part from not having to think about being online or not. When you have to think in terms of MB used or something, you do start to think and you use stuff less.

All services have in common that you have to download an application to your phone to use either service. This is a big advantage in terms of control and usability of the app. But still you need to download an application in the first place. The iPhone might leed the way as people are used to buy (select) e.g. mp3’s from iTunes and have them transfered (downloaded) onto their device. We will see if Apple is leading the way, once more.

Wanted to add my 2 cents to this discussion and throw in an approach which is a little different than the one taken by the previously mentioned companies:

What do you think about the German start-up in Berlin called Viif (site mostly available in German only, sorry)? Their application enables every 3G cell phone (with video call capability) to record live video, which gets recorded from the Viif video server and than publish to your blog. The service is not allowing love video blogging for now but they could very easily make this into one without the need to download an application!
I don’t want to keep quiet about the little disadvantage you have: No 3G signal = no video call. A local application might be able to record on the internal memory of your phone and upload the content after your signal gets better (is back at full 3G).

Leave a comment if you know of other mobile video applications out there or want to chip in with your commentary! Thanks!

In my last post covering cloud computing i wrote about Drop.io - Online File Exchange Revisited. They offer a very easy way to quickly share documents, photos, files etc. with your friends (including enabeling upload for them or everyone into “your box”).

These services are now more and more evolving into backup, storage, sharing and sync services. Enabling you to sync your data between several computers, sharing some of our data with friends, your data gets backup on these services and all your data is accessible Online, too!

Two big companies offering these services are Apple and Microsoft:

MobileMe: Launching soon - syncing all your data between the (Apple) computers your own, including your shiny new iPhone 3G But wait your Windows PCs will work now with this service, too!

Live Mesh: Currently in a TechPreview phase and not opened up tot he public. Your can sync between Windows PCs and an MacOS and cell phone clients are in the works.

And we have a startup as a contender, too. They have developed a super easy application to enable all this for you. They work on MacOS and Windows: Dropbox

Do you have other services in this space you like to add to my list? Feel free to leave your comment. Thanks!

Google is now also in the game of mashup editors with their very own Google Mashup Editor. The editor is still in beta and access is limit to developers who have received an invite. You can request an invite via the mashup front page. Currently it’s not taking long (~few days) to get access to the editor and I am sure Google will fully open up access soon.

Google says about the editor:

Take some AJAX UI components, data from your users and Google services like Google Base and Google Maps or external feeds and mash them all together using our simple framework. We make it easy with the Google Mashup Editor. 

Google provides a lot of example “mashup code” to get you started and you can find more information at: Getting started doc. Check out the mashups published from other developers listed in the Mashups Gallery.

If you want to ask a question go to the Google Groups page, you can also vote for features there. Another good source to take a first look at how things work are the screencasts. If you want to get a full overview of the Mashup API and/or want to use it for a different mashup project of your own: JS API.

The editor is very easy to use and also has code coloring. Even a mashup with several pages is easily to handle in it. Go, make your own Mashup!

Other Mashup Editors you might find interesting to check out are briefly listed below. I plan to check them out in more detail and will make follow up posts to this one.

Yahoo! pipes: Yahoo! launched pipes several month back and it was an instant hit. Google might have been thinking: Something this clever should come from us! (And they came up with the Mashup Editor.) Yahoo says about pipes:

Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.

Microsoft Popfly: MS is trying to hit it big. Not only can you create Mashups, but also Game, Web pages and more!

It was difficult to check out some application listed on the site, as I had to log in to the service to get to the mashup I wanted to see.

But on the other hand you are getting a very powerful tool which enables you to even more than simple mashup. And you can use it for “simple” things like making a nice looking Flickr photo gallery, or dive in deeper and develop your own game etc.

Target group ranking from less experineced developer/experienced “web users” to experienced developers.

Intel Mash Maker: Intel takes a different approach when it comes to mashup editors. They provide a web browser plug-in which you have to install.
This enables Intel to have a lot of control over the capabilities of the editor but might also hurt the adoption of this tool as you have to go through the plug-in installation process. The target group is certainly the less experienced web developer.

If you know of other great editors, feel free to post them in the comments! And if you have first hand experience, let us know in the comments, too!