After our recent coverage in the San Jose Mercury news and eWeek , earlier this week in conjunction with the Google rollout of their private beta testers for the new Google Wave platform, it’s apparent that collaboration is no longer just a trend but is rather being adapted by the big players of the industry, Google and others alike.
CEO & Founder Rony Zarom was quoted in the Mercury News: “Real-time collaboration on the Web “is a natural evolution” for how people use the Internet. “It started as e-mail being the major platform for communication, moved on to instant messaging, and you can see social networking taking those broad approaches as the major communication platform. I think the next trend is basically collaboration,” Zarom said. “I think more and more companies see that as the next trend on the Internet.”
Over the past few months we’ve seen various social media companies trying forge partnerships to offer more collaborative environments and features to their services. Examples of such included the introduction of live chat box on Facebook, and since Ustream & Hulu have introduced live chatting functionalities merged with the facebook-twitter platforms.
The recent NY Video Meet-up (@NYV2 ) that took place at NYU’s Tishman Hall on Sept. 30th, featuring CEO & Founder of Brightcove: Jeremy Allaire gave an overview of what Allaire described as video online integration becoming an industry standard and how he has seen online video evolve since pioneering the development of the Flash platform when he was CTO at Macromedia. The presentation discussed in what directions web video development is heading, what are foreseeable hurdles, how mobile platforms will play a role amongst other things and the event was of course live streamed- would you expect anything else at a NY Tech Video Meet-up?
Questions raised during the Q&A touched upon the issues of the future development of the flash platform (upon which Watchitoo is based), media interactivity and collaboration, the video application in various industries especially in publishing, advertising, and music business. Watch the Allaire Interview on Livestream.
What will be the included in the realm of interactivity: communication & collaboration? As video consumption on personal broadcasting sites like Youtube or major network websites such as CBS, NBC syndicating TV programming with pre-rolled ads, increases exponentially, consumer behavior is quickly shifting. We are no longer just consumers, we are frequently producers and the market clearly demands it- overly apparent by the rapid growth of real-time twitter journalism in the past few months.
Watchitoo already provides instant messaging, video chats, live streaming, video consumption and social networking all in one platform but there’s room for many additional functions. What more can be added one might ask? The truth is many things, especially in a synchronized web environment. Allusions to the Wave have referenced abilities to do document sharing, group editing and provide eventual conferencing solutions, when there’s a collaborative service the options are endless.
~Hila Raz
