Two months ago we got the bad news that DIVX will be shutting down their video portal Stage6 for multiple reasons. Stage6 was so popular and successful but the costs were so high that in the end DIVX just had to pull the plug.
Now we read some new news that a Stage6 clone is in the making and going to be ready on the 29th of April 2008, at first the clone was named “DivXit” and had the domain name divxit.net, but now when I tried accessing that address it took me to another domain vreel.net.
So now the Stage6 clone is named Vreel and will launch on the 6th of May 2008 rather than 29th of April 2008. Why the quick change of name and delay in date of launch, well in their Q&A Session they say:
“Our lead programmer had a family emergency, which required him to take a leave of absence. Over this time, we continued to develop on the design and layout of Vreel, and we believe that this extra time will benefit the end user in the long run. We promise it’ll be worth the wait.”
For more Q&A Click Here.
So lets wait and see maybe tomorrow there will be another name and address I just hope its not a prank in the end.
[Via gHacks]
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April 25th, 2008
I don’t want to ride the wave like others crying out load and saying this is the worst day in my life, but it is sad, it is sad because Stage6 in my opinion was the only REAL logical future pathway towards high quality videos online, REAL high quality, I know there are other web services now that do provide this service, but again in my opinion it is not with the same ease like Stage6 because stage6 uses a format we all knew for a long time which is DivX.
Now they are claiming that they tried to convert it to a private company or to sell it but those plans couldn’t be implemented:
So why are we shutting the service down? Well, the short answer is that the continued operation of Stage6 is a very expensive enterprise that requires an enormous amount of attention and resources that we are not in a position to continue to provide. There are a lot of other details involved, but at the end of the day it’s really as simple as that.
Now, why didn’t we think of that before we decided to create Stage6 in the first place, you may ask? That’s a good question. When we first created Stage6, there was a clear need for a service that would offer a true high quality video experience online because other video destinations on the Internet simply weren’t providing that to users. A gap existed, and Stage6 arrived to fill it.
In simple words, the costs are just too much to handle, especially when other services are there providing high quality video streaming. I guess the people who got screwed the most are those sites which were built totally depending on Stage6 videos embedded on their pages, those are going to face big problems and they will need to switch to other services. The funny/sad/crazy thing is that Stage6 is giving only 3 day notice to access the videos on the site!!
Most people are moving now towards Google Video and Veoh, I think Youtube have already announced that they are going to launch a new service for high quality videos, I guess people might jump to that also. But again the kind of ease and quality that Stage6 has I still cant see it anywhere else, who knows maybe a new service might come up and cleverly fill this gap which will be created by the shutdown of Stage6.
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February 26th, 2008
Upload your videos to the major 9 video sharing networks automatically, you can also track those videos and get all different kind of statistics such as views stats and share stats and others more. You can also send those stats to multiple emails.
And if you upload your video to VidMetrix using their uploader you will be able to track where your video gets embedded, what kind of traffic it gets on those embedded sites, and for how long was your video played.
The 9 video sharing networks you can automatically upload your videos to are: AOL Uncut, Daily Motion, Google Video, Metacafe, Myspace, Revver, Veoh, YouTube, Yahoo Video
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December 5th, 2007
Google Docs, Zoho Writer and now Adobe Buzzword. Since the start of the rise of online document editors, I always asked myself, why those websites do not use flash instead of Ajax and I still don’t really get it. I always thought "FLASH" would be better and faster. I know that "Live Documents" will also use the FLASH technology.
Adobe Buzzword although came a bit late to the game, but there are couple or more things that makes it better than the others. Obviously being in FLASH is the first that comes to mind, it really makes it super fast. Buzzword is far more simpler and easy on the eye’s too. It works on any operating system, your computer just needs to have Adobe Flash installed, which is available in most computers by default anyway.
To read a full review click More…
As soon as you finish your registration you are quickly switched to the main page. In the main page you can basically either create a new document, open a saved document in Buzzword or open a document from your harddisk.
The beauty of Buzzword, being in flash, the menus are smooth and fast. And nicely organized, and on your first look you would get the wrong impression that BUZZWORD lacks features and options.
But you will be very mistaken to think so, just click on any of the icons and it will slide revealing various features. The picture below shows some of them.
We shouldn’t forget the pull down menus too, which also hold a number of different kind of options.
The "History" feature keeps track of different changes that you make on a document so you can switch between them easily.
In Buzzword you can also insert Pictures and Comments.
Document sharing, you can make a document private or share it with others in a very simple way, setting a role for the person you are sharing the document with. There are three roles. Co-Author where he can do anything with the document, Reviewer where he can read and comment on the document, and Reader where he is only allowed to read the document.
There are other great features also, such as Zooming, using a slidebar you can zoom the document in and out which automatically resize everything in it. You can also insert special characters, and Offcourse, the automatic word count is useful when you are limited to number of words.
Now that is all great stuff in BUZZWORD, but there are couple of things that I found negative in it, nothing is perfect in this world. Anyway, the first thing that bothered me is the limited number of fonts available, which are only seven fonts.
The second thing is what happens sometimes when you upload a picture, it took me three tries to upload an image, a message keeps coming up stating that "Buzzword could not contact the server to complete our action". I tried doing this using IE, Firefox, FLOCK which is Firefox anyway, and I tried it from my Toshiba G30 Notebook and My Desktop PC. Sometimes the image is uploaded from the first time, but the error window do appear quite often.
For a full help guide for Buzzword Click Here.
In the end I would like to say that Adobe Buzzword is a good, easy and fast Word Processor. Couple of enhancements here and there and it will defiantly become THE web REAL Word Processor.
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December 4th, 2007
