Mixercast

After many major iterations, including the name change from Nanocast to Mixercast, it’s time for our application to finally see the light of the Public Beta crowd. Words have been officially spread and today, Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher wrote an article how Jennifer Cooper, the current CEO at Mixercast (erstwhile Nanocast) is able to finally bring out MixerCast out of its Stealth-Mode.

MixerCast will be finally released to the Public in its beta form on Monday, April 16, 2007. I don’t have the final confirmation but I am sure MixerCast will also be at the Web 2.0 Expo 2007 - Launch Pad happening from April 15-18, 2007 at San Francisco, California. It will come complete with video, music and photos which are licensed from major content providers. MixerCast will allow users to bring in contents from anywhere (RSS, URL, Direct Import) and mashup, then publish them anyway they want, anywhere they choose.

Personally, I felt Jennifer Cooper was like a bolt full of energy at all time, even during the cold 8:00 am Californian winter morning. Jen was with Yahoo! as executive director of business development for about 5 years. Jen moved to the US from Europe along with her parents about 30 years ago and did her Computer Science and Business. She was with Oracle in 1994. She started a startup in Video Streaming called VStream along with Navin Chaddha and Anoop Gupta which was later bought by Microsoft to be named the “Windows Media Player”. She later run her own company for 2 years and sold it.

Jen along with Tom came to Comventures with an idea that was strikingly similar to what Nanocast have already started. It was the right time when Nanocast was still CEO-less. This was also at a time when FilmLoop went out of business, bought back by its major investor Comventures. Comventures eventually explained to Jen that Nanocast was already doing something she is pitching and thus she was happy to come into the bigger picture, which also fulfilled the much needed chair of CEO at that time.

The terminology of Remix is already very common with the Indian crowd but it is a bit of a foreign term for the Americans. I can remember debating on the very term if that would be a negative initiative for the US market. MixerCast allows an online user to collect, aggregate or share their own video, audio, photos, text and what not - into our repository (or just refer to the media for that matter). It will then allow them to be either publish elsewhere right away or mashed-up to a totally different proportion of media and publish it anywhere - your blog, MySpace, Xanga, FaceBook, Typepad, LiveJournal, Friendster. It can take assets or references (URL, RSS) from Flickr, YouTube, PhotoBucket or upload your own created contents, or better yet, record then and there on Mixercast using the WebCam record feature (powered by Flash Media Server for this module).

At the core of the MixerCast is Editor - one of the most powerful Flash Application we have ever attempted - intelligent, optimized and every ounce of Flash’s capabilities un-earthed and un-leased. All the tricks that can be adjourned have been summoned to make the Editor an uber tool for online photo, video, audio editing and manipulation. Though few caveats still remains, it is too surreal for a public beta tool.

That’s all for the introduction to Mixercast, more to follow in future.

References