Website Hype

Have you got Hulu beta yet? A joint venture of NBC Universal and News Corp, Hulu is a new online video on demand service that will also be offering video sharing. The potential of Hulu has been recognised by Tech Crunch, GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb and VentureBeat, who awarded it the Crunchie award for Best Video Startup at the 2007 Crunchies.

As well as movies, Hulu offers full-length episodes of NBC and FOX television programs, including shows from the Bravo, Fuel TV, FX, Sci Fi, Style, Sundance, and Oxygen channels.

Hulu is currently in limited beta testing, during which fifteen to thirty second advertisements are presented where the normal three minute ad break would be.

In a manner similar to an old Martini ad, Hulu claim that their content is available “anywhere, anytime”, (actually, with Martini it was “anytime, any place, anywhere”), but the content on Hulu is currently only available to users in the United States, so not exactly the anywhere, anytime that Hulu over ambitiously claim.

However Hulu does claim that it is working on making its content accessible worldwide. Let’s hope so. What may be holding this back is the process of clearing the rights for each show or film in each specific region, which will take forever and a day.

If you want to sign up to beta test this new site, you can put in your email address on their home page, and they will add you to the private beta waiting list, and send you an invitation with username and password when they are ready for you. This doesn’t happen instantaneously – I signed up and still haven’t heard anything.

Do entrepreneurs and investors looking for something new get much chance to meet up with skilled developers? That chance probably does not arise as often as it should. Except that now something is being done to create that very opportunity, by the Open Coffee Club – and you don’t even have to drink coffee, juice will be just fine. The Open Coffee Club creates the opportunity for business people, developers and ideas people to meet up informally face-to-face, and this opportunity happens regularly at a specific place, in a number of major cities worldwide. You don’t have to attend every time – not at all, it’s just that the opportunity is there if you happen to feel like it, or if you have something specific you want to discuss.

The Open Coffee Club, which allows people to chat, network and grow, was founded by Saul Klein, who is also VP of Skype, amongst other significant internet work. In a blog post back in February 2007, Saul suggested the idea of the club as an attempt to establish an open and regular meeting place where entrepreneurs could meet with investors, and anyone else who cared to come along, with the setting being totally informal. The key point was establishing a regular place and a regular time, rather than who actually comes along. Saul suggested this as an idea that could be replicated globally, and a list could be drawn up of all the places where people could meet.

And so it came to pass that the first Open Coffee Club meet up was held in London on March 1st 2007 at Starbucks inside Espirit, Regent Street in London, the idea rapidly being taken up by others with Open Coffee meet ups being organised in places as diverse as Dublin, Barcelona, Zagreb, Sacramento and Capetown.

So if you fancy getting together and discussing business and ideas with some like minded people … coffee anyone?

Are you mad about the movies? If so, then you will be pleased to hear that there is now a social networking site especially for you. With the tagline “Stop watching bad movies”, Flixster is the social networking site for movie buffs, and within just one year has grown into one of the largest movie sites on the web, with over fifteen million registered users, and has outstripped other movie sites such as Fandango.

Like most social networking sites, users can create their own profiles and invite friends, but here they can also rate movies and actors, and write their own movie reviews for other users to read. The site also offers information about movies, and generates overall movie rankings on the basis of the 500 million movie ratings that have been provided by the users.

Users can chat to one another, look up movie showtimes, catch up with the latest movie news and gossip, view images of their favorite actors, and also see clips from popular movies and TV shows.

Just one worrying thing though, if you Google “Flixter” in conjunction with McAfee site advisor, the site is listed with a red cross next to the listing, and you are advised to use caution. Why? Well, it seems that Flixter has been cited as sending out too many “spammy emails”.

As for overall cosmetics, I have to admit that the home page is a bit busy, ad-filled and unappealing – your eye doesn’t quite know where to look.

So, my overall impression is: good idea, but could do with a bit more careful website design in terms of eye-appeal. Still, the proof of the pudding is Flixter’s success.

Well, talking of that great phenomenon known as open source, as I was last week, it now seems that Maxis is joining the fray, by releasing the SimCity source code.

SimCity is a simulation and city-building personal computer game, designed by Maxis founder Will Wright, and it was first released in 1989, which makes it pretty longstanding. It is said that to do well at the game, you just have to think like a capitalist. The code was officially released on January 10th 2008, so now anyone can port it, run it, and modify the game. The code has been released under the GNU General Public Library (GPL) license, brought about by the fact that there are plans afoot to add the game to the OLPC XO Laptop, which at the moment runs entirely open source software.

Naturally EA, the game company that owns the rights to SimCity wants to protect its trademark, and so there have been a few changes to the original source code, and all references to SimCity have been replaced with “Micropolis”, which is appropriate really, given that this was the original working title for the game.

The Micropolis source code, which was originally written in C, has been recast into C++ classes, and integrated into Python. The code has been considerably cleaned up and bullet-proofed.

So now that the code is available, what are aficionados going to do with it? It is interesting to see that yet more top code is going open source, and it will be intriguing to see where the current trend leads.

It is interesting to see that the open source movement is playing a prominent role in current innovations on the web.

In case you were wondering, open source is a philosophy about how software should be written, whereby the source code is available to the users. Additional meaning is added to the term by The Open Source Definition, written by Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond, which states that one should not only be able to get the source code, but also have the right to use it. If other people don’t have the right to use it, then the license is considered to be a shared source license.

Anyone who wants to know more about the open source movement should take a look at Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which was first presented as a talk in 1997, and is now available in book form, along with other essays. It is generally regarded as a manifesto for the open source movement.

Another prominent figure in the open source movement is Richard Stallman, who in 1983, launched the GNU Project, which created the free operating system Linux.

There are currently many examples of open source software that are improving the web no end. Mozilla’s Firefox web browser is now one of the most popular browsers available, and is presenting a serious challenge to Internet Explorer. Open source is currently being embraced by the ubiquitous online social networking scene, where a set of common API’s for building social applications across the web are being established, such as Facebook’s open platform, and Google OpenSocial.

The open identity system OpenID 2.0 was launched in December, and an open ad network may be developed as an alternative to Google Adsense.

Overall, it looks as though the open source movement is here to stay, and has a lot to offer.