In the wake of Facebook’s $1 billion deal for Instagram, the spotlight has fallen on a new crop of video-sharing apps moving up the charts like Viddy and SocialCam. The photo and video category as a whole has been the fastest-growing in apps time spent per active user between October and March, up 89% to 231 minutes. Other rapidly rising categories include music (72%), productivity (66%), social networking (54%), and entertainment (40%), according to new data from app analytics and advertising firm Flurry. “Trained by the sharing behavior of Facebook, and enabled by a confluence of underlying technology like built-in HD video cameras, hardy on-device processors, increased network bandwidth, cloud storage and user-friendly applications like Viddy and SocialCam, social video apps are taking off,” wrote Peter Farago, VP marketing, Flurry, in a blog post today. While these apps have gained greater attention lately, he points out that time spent with photo and video apps has been building for some time -- with growth up 166% since July 2011, and 141% since March 2011. That year-over-year growth rate is twice the 71% increase in time spent watching YouTube on the desktop Web. Actual minutes spent viewing video online is still well ahead of apps, at 425 total minutes versus 231 in March. But the gap is closing. A year ago, Internet video consumption on YouTube outpaced that on iOS and Android apps by more than a 4-to-1 ratio. “During 2012, however, is where things get interesting. As online video consumption dropped by 10%, mobile app video consumption increased by another 52%,” noted Farago. While it can’t be assumed that mobile video apps are cannibalizing YouTube, Flurry views the shift as a sign of disruption. “Think of it this way: With every mobile video you share of friends, family, vacations, parties and weddings, you are likely loading another bullet in the chamber for Web 3.0. For YouTube, it appears they need to run -- outrun -- your gun,” states Farago. Of course, if HTML5 development shifts mobile media consumption back in favor of the mobile Web, YouTube will have the last laugh. The Flurry data also highlighted the growing competition that games face from other app categories, especially photo and video titles, in terms of time spent. In addition to Viddy and SocialCam, it pointed to “apps with momentum” including Path, Skout, Evenote and Spotify. It’s not quite time to write off games, considering that they still dominate the top 10 app charts in iTunes and Google Play. Yesterday “Angry Birds” creator Rovio reported 2011 revenue of $106 million. If that figure tumbles in 2012, or growth slows, that would surely be a sign that game apps are no longer flying high. The Flurry findings were based on a sample of 8 million active mobile app users across all app categories. The company's analytics software is used in 180,000 apps for some 67,000 companies across iOS, Android, HTML5, Windows Phone and BlackBerry.
Google has developed a technique that mimics professional camera movement and applied it to videos recorded by handheld devices, such as smartphones. While professionals use tripods and dollies, panning a swiftly running cheetah at the San Diego Zoo and getting a clear picture could become quite frustrating on an Android or an iOS phone. The technology supports an algorithm that automatically determines the best camera path and recasts the video as if it were filmed using stabilization equipment. It's part of the research at Google looking at methods to make casual videos appear more professional. The research is being integrated into YouTube to support videographers. In a research paper -- Auto-Directed Video Stabilization with Robust L1 Optimal Camera Paths – Google researchers describe the process of dividing the original, shaky camera path into segments to create a smooth video. The optimization finds the best of all possible partitions, using what researchers call a computationally stable algorithm. More recently, the research has been working to resolve a related problem common in videos shot from mobile phones. Camera sensors in phones contain an electronic rolling shutter. When taking a picture the image is not captured instantaneously, but rather one row of pixels at a time, with a small delay when going from one to the next. Consequently, if the camera moves during the capture it causes image distortions that are especially noticeable in videos where the camera shake is independent across frames. Google researchers are working to smooth out the shakiness of the video. Microsoft Research also continues to work with video, but for the patent company headquartered in Redmond, Wash., the work points to mobile gaming. Not the type of gaming where the keyboard becomes the weapon that slingshots at "Angry Birds," but mobile motion that turn the phone into a sword. With phone in hand, the users block the attacks of the counterpart in the game. Phone-to-phone mobile motion games must have the ability to calculate accurate distance and range from each other. Then range, speed, and accuracy are calculated. The process works similar to Kinect, a fixed infrastructure motion capture system that supports game motion in real-time.
If I were called upon to update a fusty brand for these wackadoodle modern times of ours, I wouldn't know where to begin. Sears, Cream of Wheat, Town & Country - these are proud, venerable brands and, as such, somewhat out of place in the whittled-down world of 140 characters. There are exceptions - Levi Strauss, founded in 1873, still feels contemporary - but for the most part, old companies have a tough time working with and around the reality of their oldness. So I empathize with the poor souls charged with dragging Eight O'Clock Coffee, a brand that's as fresh and relevant as disco, into the Internet age. But even acknowledging the impossible nature of the assignment, Eight O'Clock Coffee's first foray into video virality is a disaster. It shouldn't have ended up that way. The very notion of competitive eating is funny as hell - er, unless you're afflicted with Celiac disease - and Takeru Kobayashi is the Muhammad Ali of that particular athletic/gustatory ecosystem. So pairing Kobayashi with the great Jim Breuer, whose Half Baked is the Ben Hur of stoner comedies (to extend this tortured analogy, that would make Up In Smoke the Citizen Kane and The Big Lebowski the 2001: A Space Odyssey)… well, you'd think any creatively inclined being could milk humor out of that odd coupling. You'd think. Instead, the campaign attempts to be Funny! For! The! Internet! The video takes us into Eight O'Clock Coffee's cupping room - where, according to the clip's token straight man, the company's blends are sampled and assessed for "flavor profile." As she speaks, Breuer and Kobayashi act bored. Then Kobayashi starts drinking everything in sight and Breuer hopscotches between concern, befuddlement, amazement, overexaggerated fake amazement, ain't-this-lame-but-I'm-in-on-the-joke meta-sarcasm and, finally, admiring support. He breaks into an Italian accent at one point, which would make a lot more sense if Eight O'Clock Coffee had been founded by Enrico Fermi rather than A&P. The clip is thus a one-beat joke drawn out over five endless minutes. See, Kobayashi is a compulsive speed-eater - so he can't NOT drink the coffee! And he keeps drinking and drinking and drinking, moving to the coffee pots after the chalices have been emptied! Then he tries to eat the unground coffee beans! And here's the kicker: There's an Eight O'Clock Coffee-branded hot-dog cart awaiting him in the hallway! Which makes Kobayashi beam with the radiance of a thousand burning suns! Funny! That's the entirety of the bit. There are no production values of which to speak and no quotable lines. None. As a result, I don't really know how to meet my word count for this review. Perhaps I could share a recipe, or some intimate personal trivia? [Recipe: Take somebody else's recipe and double the salt and butter. Trivia: My third-favorite color is navy blue.] Thus we have a Video Critique first: a situation in which the videomakers should hope to God their clip doesn't go viral. The more people who see this thing, the more people who will walk away with the impression that Eight O'Clock Coffee isn't just a grandma brand, but a grandma brand with a nonfunctional sense of humor. In the end, "The Cupping Room" provokes no reactions or emotions beyond pity. I feel bad for Breuer and Kobayashi. I feel bad for Eight O'Clock Coffee, in as much as anyone can feel bad for a non-sentient corporate entity [insert "corporations are people!" political jab here]. It's as much a what-not-to-do primer as anything I've ever seen.