Yahoo! Live or also known now as Y! Live made its debut to the public yesterday. Many people were late to the party and got there when the party was at maximum capacity. Everyone included myself were greeted by the image above. The most visited site on the net could not handle a few hundred people going to live.yahoo.com to watch some live streams. It seems that the Yahoo! Live team were not expecting this many people and it makes me wonder why they didn’t have some sort of private beta to help test this thing out before it was open to everyone. One thing that is safe to say is the service will run smoothly once they throw some servers at.
Having a major internet brand like Yahoo! jump into the live streaming business is going have a major impact on some of the live video sites. If Y! Live becomes slightly popular you could see other major companies such as Google and News Corp joining in and trying to play catch up. The easiest way to play catch up would be to buy a startup. So is it possible that in the future we could see such sites as Justin.tv, Ustream or even BlogTV being bought up. Guess we will just to wait and see what the future holds. I’m anxious to see what happens.
Popularity: 80%
Justin.tv has changed so much since it first began. Some changes have been good and some have been bad. The latest and greatest thing they have added is profiles. There are still a few bugs and kinks with the new social features but that is expected. Now viewers and broadcasters can make a profile for themselves.
So what are all the new social features? Well you have many of the myspace features. You are able to friend people, comment on their pages, send private messages, and also add channels to your favorites. Pretty normal stuff. Let me just say that the next feature I’m about to talk about is one that I’m not liking to much. On your profile page it now displays the last thing you wrote in chat and also the last channel you were watching. I would really like them to give us the option to not have this displayed. I don’t know why but having that on my profile is kinda weird.
So there are the new features they added. Feel free to friend me on yet another site. http://justin.tv/smojo/profile
Popularity: 30%
The AWS Startup Challenge is almost over and 7 startups are left. AWS is letting the people vote on which startup should win. The votes and results of this poll will be used by the judges when they decide who will be crowned the king of AWS startups. Justin.tv is currently in the lead of the poll which is no surprise. Even though I would love for JTV to win I personally think that having a poll influence the judges decision is a bad idea. Justin and crew have an unfair advantage because of the social aspects of the site. One of the startups that I’m interested in learning more about is Brainscape. It is just amazing what can be done with technology.
Brainscape, a product of the Neuroinformatics Research Group, is an engine for measuring the networks in the brain. Researchers are using Brainscape to discover new brain networks and measure the effects of new drugs in clinical trials. Soon, doctors will be using Brainscape to diagnose disease and aid in treatment. The team at the Neuroinformatics Research Group is building their tools entirely on Amazon Web Services to meet their computing and storage needs.
So what does the winner of this challenge get? Well the grand prize winner will receive $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in AWS credits, and an investment offer from Amazon. Looks like Justin will soon have more drinking money. I’m not sure on what the prizes are for 2nd and 3rd though but you can bet it will most likely be some AWS credits. The poll currently has Justin.tv in the lead with 39% of the vote and a tie for 2nd place with both Ooyala and Milemeter having 20% of the vote. Each company also has a little video showcasing what their startup is about and how they are using AWS. You still have time to vote. Voting ends on December 6th. So if you haven’t voted please do at
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/amazon_startupchallenge.jsp?
Popularity: 19%
