Joost Apple Dashboard Widget
January 25, 2008
Joost has a couple of big Mac fans. If you don’t know many Mac fans you might think they’re all alike in their ardor for Apple and worship for Jobs … but that would be a wildly inaccurate assumption. By my calculations, there are at least three categories of Mac fans.
Category 1: The casual fan. IKerry Vance is probably in this camp: a lapsed Mac user who loved my Mac, and gave it up reluctantly years ago. She follow the news, ooh and ahh over the designs, and have at least one Mac gadget … like an iPod. You don’t find a lot of regular Mac users in this category, because…
Category 2: Most of the Mac users Kerry know are in this category. They LOVE their Macs, wouldn’t give them up under any circumstances, and might find a new job if they were forced to use a PC at work.
Category 3: And then you have the zealots. Like Kerry’s colleague Zoran (also known as Z). Z was one of the first in line to buy his iPhone, and waited in line (again) in the cold when the second-biggest Apple store opened in New York last month.
In addition to being a Mac fan, Z has some serious design skills (he’s a designer for Joost in his day job), which he used to make what we think is the first Apple Dashboard widget for Joost. You can browse shows by category, find what’s new and popular, and once you find what you want to watch, you launch the channel directly in Joost. Plus, it flips, it spins and it grooves.
Download it here and let us know what you think!
Source: Joost Blog
Joost Beta Client 1.0.4 just got released
January 25, 2008
For those interested, Joost just released version 1.0.4 of it client. It is primarilly a bug fix release.
You can download the 1.0.4 client here.
MySpace get BBC Video channel
January 24, 2008
MySpace recently added a new BBC video channels. For now only short videos are sported. Here is an example:
Walking With Beasts: Neanderthal vs Wooly Rhino
The videos are also embeddable:
Walking With Beasts: Neanderthal vs Wooly Rhino
Add to My Profile | More Videos
Joost just released the second develper preview
January 21, 2008
Jim Ley from Joost development team just announced that:
Hi, here’s a new developer release, no new features but we’ve fixed many little bugs in various places, and we may have a fix for the “empty explore” Bug. It isn’t enabled by default, but if you’re seeing this bug add the preference:
user_pref(”tvp.ui.spoonMasking”,false);
to your prefs file and then see if it works. We’re pretty sure the problem was related to masking issues with some graphics cards, but are yet to really reproduce.
Download preview release 2 for Windows
Download preview release 2 for MacTry it out and let us know anything you find.
OurStage Brings User Picked Content To Joost
January 18, 2008
Indie music and film site OurStage has announced a new content partnership with Joost that will see user picked content offered to Joost users.Under the deal, OurStage will offer four channels on Joost: Best of OurStage Shorts, Best of OurStage Comedy, OurStage Music Videos and OurStage Artist Access. The channels will give Joost users access to 10 OurStage Artists on each channel and exclusive content including music festival coverage & advice from established musicians & filmmakers.
OurStage launched in March 2007 and lets users rank and buy Inide songs and video. Artists upload their content, which users then judge - two snippets are heard/ watched and the user votes for which one he or she likes the best. The result are constantly updated in to top lists of songs. The top songs overall or by category are then listed on the site, and prizes are given to the top artists each month.
Source: techcrunch
Industry Veteran Matt Zelesko Joins Joost
January 17, 2008
NEW YORK - January 16, 2008 - Joost™, the world’s first broadcast-quality Internet television service, today announced that Matt Zelesko, has joined the company as senior vice president of engineering, responsible for all engineering operations. Zelesko will be based in New York, where he will build a second engineering hub for the company, in addition to managing the worldwide engineering team. Zelesko will also join the company’s management team.
“Matt brings an unparalleled combination of technological vision, management expertise and strategic thinking that is critical as Joost embarks on our next phase of growth,” said Mike Volpi, chief executive officer of Joost. “I’ve known Matt for many years, having worked together at Cisco, and I’m confident that he is the ideal person to lead Joost’s engineering organization.”
Having worked for technology companies in different phases, from early-stage start-ups to large, established corporations, Zelesko has extensive engineering and management experience. Prior to joining Joost, he was vice president of engineering for Comcast Interactive Media, where he was responsible for creating a platform for online video and a set of online properties including Fancast.
Zelesko worked in similar capacities for Voyence, Inc., network compliance, control and configuration management provider acquired by EMC; Ipsum Networks, a leading provider of Route Analysis and IP-layer network management solutions; and Cisco, where he was director of engineering for the Gigabit Technology Group. Zelesko has a B.S. from Cornell University and an M.S. from Stanford University.
Airport Airdisk nearly useless with Leopard 10.5.1
January 12, 2008
Oh god, I just bought an Airport Extreme 802.11n thinking it would be the best networking experience of my life. I just bricked up my Linksys (flashing power light) by trying to upgrade to openWRT and needed to replace it.
So I picked up an airport extreme at BB along with a nice 360GB USB drive to serve as an airdisk.
I connect the airport, configured the network side with not much problems (except for the silly reboot every time you make a small config change… god, is this thing running Windows 98 or something ;-))
Next I connected my new Seagate HD enclosure. OK, airport complain about it and tell me that the disk need to be repaired… what? Don’t tell me the disk I just bought is defective!
I connect the disk to my mac and it came up with not problems what so ever. OK, what is the problem then? I simply reformat it as HFS+ to please the airport and connect again.
OK, now it see the thing. I configured file sharing on it and “restarted” it for the 10th time (it must really be running on windows)
What? Now I have two new network names in my finder bar… Airport and some strange cpe<mac address> name. Apparently airport won’t put a nice name on the CIFS side of the house… can I fix this please? How?
I could leave with all of the above… but what really kill me is the SLOW, SLOW, SLOW network transfer rate of the airdisk. Trying to copy a small 16MB application take like 2 minutes! But if I zip it it will transfer in like 10 seconds! What the heck is this? Is the airport that slow when transferring large qty of small files? Large file transfer rate is blazingly fast but lot of small files just kill the thing.
The other very slow thing is erasing files from the airdisk. Almost a minute to erase the 16MB application.
I am really really really disappointed with the Apple product. It is the 1st time I feel I tried a bad product from Apple… But everyone need a 1st. I hope this is the last bad Apple product I ever encounter.
I really hope there is a fix for this. I even downgrade my Airport Extreme firmware to 7.1.1 from 7.2.1 so the Airdisk would stay connected properly. With 7.2.1 it would simply not connect to airdisk after a while.
Please give me some advise!
P.S.: I don’t know if it is any better with Tiger (10.4.x) since I migrated completely to Leopard…
SubJoost: Subtitles for Joost
January 11, 2008
Subjoost is a little widget that, on one hand, lets you see subtitles and, on the other hand, allows anybody to create or edit subtitles for Joost shows.
To get subtitles simply download the widget in Joost and enable it for choosing a subtitle. If you want to add or edit a subtitle you need a subjoost account (different from your Joost account).
Subjoost has been created by three programmers:
- Dragos Novac
- Andrei
- Bogdan
Great work guys. Joost users now simply have to add more subtitles to the bank for others to enjoy! Let get the community effort begin!
Matsushita’s Panasonic, Google to launch Internet TVs
January 8, 2008
TOKYO (Reuters) - Web giant Google Inc (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) is developing televisions that display Internet content such as photos and videos together with Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd’s (6752.T: Quote, Profile, Research) Panasonic unit.
The TVs, to be launched this spring, will allow users to directly browse and access videos from YouTube, a video-sharing Web site owned by Google, and view Picasa Web Albums, a free online photo-sharing service from Google, Panasonic said in a statement on Monday.
“Panasonic’s cooperation with YouTube and Google’s Picasa Web Albums exemplifies our commitment to leading the natural evolution of the Internet and extending it to the High Definition television,” Panasonic Consumer Electronics Company’s Vice President Merwan Mereby said in the statement.
The news sent the shares of Matsushita higher right after the market open, but they shed 1.8 percent to 2,150 yen by 0108 GMT to underperform a 0.7 percent fall in the benchmark Nikkei average .N225.
Late last year, Matsushita, the world’s top plasma TV maker, said it would take control of a liquid crystal display joint venture and may build a new factory, marking a major shift in its strategy for the flat panel TV market.
Matsushita has until now invested aggressively in plasma displays in the belief that it was the most cost-effective technology for flat TVs bigger than 37-inches, while procuring LCD panels to make TVs for the smaller sets.
Joost nominated by “The Crunchies”
January 8, 2008
If you spend as much time reading technology blogs and web sites as I do, surely you’ve heard about The Crunchies. If I had to make a comparison, I’d guess they’re kind of like the
We’ve been lucky enough to be nominated in two categories: Best New Startup and Best Video. Now there are only two days left to vote … and a total of 20 categories to vote on.
For those of you in the U.S., it’s a good year to get into the practice of voting.
