This past weekend I got to travel down south for a pretty sweet event, Startup Riot MAKE. Startup Riot has been hosting a week-long expo/conference in Atlanta for the last 2 years as well as one in Seattle. This year they decided to add a hackathon into the mix to warm people of for the upcoming week of festivities. The hackathon is called MAKE, and thats exactly what these hackers intended to do. No BS, its time to make something awesome.
How I built Minute Grams: 3 Minute Tutorial
Update: March 13, 2014 – Please note that this blog post references the archiving functionality in our OpenTok 1.0 platform. This feature is no longer being supported. Learn more about archiving using our OpenTok 2.0 platform.
Minutegrams is a webapp to send video messages via email.
In this tutorial, let’s build a video recorder with the Tokbox API.
Step 1: Include tokbox javascript file
- Let’s start with our html document, and add jquery and tokbox javascript library.
- We need ‘rElement’ div to put our recorder in, and ‘pElement’ div to put player in.
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title></title>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.7.1.min.js"></script>
<script src="http://staging.tokbox.com/v0.91/js/TB.min.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<div id="rElement"></div>
<div id="pElement"></div>
</body>
</html>Step 2: Create a Tokbox recorder Manager object
LetsListen Amps Up the Social Listening Experience
Listening to Enrique Iglesias shouldn’t be a solo experience. With so much passion, Enrique’s songs demand that you stare into your friend’s eyes while lip-syncing “Hero”. The plus side of alone time with Enrique? You can test out your suave new dance moves.
Music lovers in the tech community appear to agree that listening to tunes online should be a social experience. And the proof is in the pudding. Over the course of the last year social listening services have popped up to meet that demand. We’d like to give a shout out to one service in particular that is our newest App of the Week.
Music Hack Day
Tequila sunrise making robot.
We hosted Music Hack Day (our 2nd time!) at our homey little office last weekend.
We had a blast, and looks like most people did too.
Hacker down.
Trojan Hack Hackathon
Congratulations to all the USC Trojan and UCLA Bruin Hackers who participated in the Trojan Hack!
Over the 24 hours from Friday (2/3/12) to Saturday, UCLA and USC students got into groups and hacked away on their ideas. No limits, best idea and implementation wins…
Presentation slides were frowned upon, so everyone had a working demo at the end. The demos were AMAZING!
The first place ($1000) went to HackHackWith.me
In 24 hours, they built a collaborative code editing web app. Now you might think it’s like collabedit, but it’s NOT! You can actually upload project files and libraries, code together, and then run your code!
Elance Adds Live Video to Remote Work Experience
The 4-Hour Workweek: the book that sent thousands of office workers running for remote-work freedom back in 2007. Newly cubicle-less folks turned to online services like Elance after going all “office-space” on their 10-year-old desktops. That may or may not be an exaggeration…
But it isn’t all cupcakes and roses for remote workers. Sure they’re not required to put on the monkey suit every morning, but there’s also no proverbial water cooler to hang around with colleagues. Just a few days ago GigaOM posted Self-knowledge: The secret ingredient for successful remote work. GigaOM cited one lonely freelancer who decided they preferred the hours in commute in exchange for the human interaction of office life.
OVEE offers Co-Viewing App with Live Video Communication
Old school co-viewing: What used to happen every Friday night when my sister and I watched endless hours of T.G.I.F. We’d sit in the same room, watch the latest episode of Full House and talk about how cute Uncle Jesse was. I assure you, it was as awesome as it sounds.
The definition of co-viewing has evolved in recent years as we consume more media content online. It now includes anything from comments on a YouTube video, to live text chat while watching videos in Chill. Recently you could watch an episode of Jersey Shore and throw pickles at Snooki with hundreds/thousands of other fans on MTV. OVEE, our newest App of the Week, is taking co-viewing to the next level by adding live video communication.
Motilo Steps Up the Etailer Game
Folks love shopping online as evidenced most recently by the fact that almost $32 billion has been spent online this holiday season (and we still have two shopping days left). LuluLemon, Nordstroms and Sur La Table, I accept thank you notes
With so many eCommerce sites available today, etailers have to find innovative ways to stand out from the crowd and offer truly memorable experiences; experiences that will not only motivate the customer to make the move from “add to cart” to “purchase”, but also keep them coming back for more.
Archiving inches closer with delete APIs
At TokBox we realize that not every recording is created equal.
Sometimes we record something, and for whatever reason it is not really something that we would like to keep around forever. Whether it is that embarrassing profession of true love, or that embarrassing dance tape you made in the bedroom, there are times when it is nice that things can be forgotten and even be removed from the internet.
Enter the delete API for archiving.
Stop wondering about who’s talking, and just know
Courtesy of loop_oh/flickr.com © Creative Commons
Hey there! If you are a developer with mad skills in UI design or just a user with natural talents in video chatting, by which I mean tirelessly talking and giggling all by yourself while staring at the screen, then I have exciting news for you. We’ve just launched an API that detects the active speakers in a video chat.
Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to move or zoom up the chat window of whoever’s actually speaking? At least it makes your “staring” exercise more fun than just looking at the dull, fixed boxes. Even better, it literally makes the conversations, well, more “FACE-to-face”!