Facebook adds live streaming to Pages, via partner apps
Posted Tuesday, December 20, 2011 at 7:03 am by Jason Cartwright
If you look after a Page for your business on Facebook, you can now use it to live stream to the world. Currently there are two live streaming providers available to add to your page, Livestream and uStream, but there’s definitely room for this list to grow in the future.
The process is actually quite easy, click the provider of choice, select the page you wish to add the application to, then sign in. You can simply go with the default look or customise it with your branding, there’s also support for multiple shows and even creating a new show from within Facebook.
Wether you choose Livestream or uStream as your provider is irrelevant, if you are sold on the benefits of using Facebook for customer engagement, you should add this to your page.
More information @ Facebook Pages
Will Skydrive’s unlimited photo storage kill Flickr ?
Posted Sunday, September 11, 2011 at 9:09 pm by Jason Cartwright
Liveside reported a couple of days ago that they “recently learnt that Microsoft will soon offer unlimited photos and Office documents storage on SkyDrive Wave 5. This move could have widespread ramification for a number of businesses, especially if they get Live Sync integrated.
Everyone from Dropbox to Flickr would be dramatically impacted if Microsoft makes this aggressive move. For the past couple of years I’ve paid for a Pro Flickr account, but if SkyDrive makes that free, I’ll jump ship in a second. Windows Live Wave 5 will also see a revamp of Hotmail, after a recent Hotmail event invite suggested we should ‘forget everything we know about Hotmail’.
With the Build conference this week discussing Windows 8, it’s likely Microsoft will discuss online service integration at a much deeper level to the OS, than what’s currently on offer. New of unlimited document and photo storage will spread quickly amongst those connected, but normal users are unlikely to take advantage of it unless made dead-simple and integrated into the Windows.
The desktop suite of products under the Windows Live Essentials banner is sadly still unknown by many. The theory was that by removing apps like Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Messenger, etc from Windows, it would allow for faster updates outside of the 3 year OS cycle. In reality, things have changed and the updates of applications could easily be done through Windows Update.
Getting back to the unlimited storage in Wave 5, it does have a limitation, it is just for docs and photos, everything else will need to fit into 25GB. Right now there is 5GB of storage for Live Sync, so should Sync and SkyDrive be integration (like they always should have been), you would expect that should grow to 30GB. The limitation is clearly a move to prevent users from storing and sharing large video files, which is fair enough.
If the storage of documents and photos online does become a reality, expect a big shakeup in the industry and some services to die. It’s hard to compete with free.. ask Netscape.
More info @ LiveSide.
Congratulations Apple, you’ve discovered live streaming
Posted Wednesday, September 1, 2010 at 7:20 pm by Jason Cartwright
Tomorrow morning will be an early start with Apple’s latest PR event, this time relating to iPods. Each time this year Apple announce updates to their line-up of their insanely successful iPods. Fierce speculation online points to not only an iPod touch in the iPhone 4 style, but also an update and rebranding of Apple TV.
Living outside the US, means that a typical Apple event involves watching countless live blogs competing for the best coverage. Sure there’s times where some audio or even video streams leak out, but typically its something Apple has mandated is NOT allowed.
Well after years of insanity, Apple have finally announced they will stream tomorrow’s event live online. Apple have always filmed the events and posted them online afterwards, but by that point all relevant news has already spread across the internets.
Apple® will broadcast its September 1 event online using Apple’s industry-leading HTTP Live Streaming, which is based on open standards. Viewing requires either a Mac® running Safari® on Mac OS® X version 10.6 Snow Leopard®, an iPhone® or iPod touch® running iOS 3.0 or higher, or an iPad™. The live broadcast will begin at 10:00 a.m. PDT on September 1, 2010 at www.apple.com
I’d like to take this opportunity to welcome Apple to the 21st century. Other companies like Google and Microsoft have streamed their big events live for years. That said we all know Apple fans are like no other, so despite forward planning it’ll be interesting to see if Apple’s servers melt or can sustain the punishment.
So is this the death of the Apple event liveblog ? Absolutely not. There’s still score for interpretation of the announcements that arrive tomorrow, so MacWorld, GDGT, Engadget and TWiT and plenty more will still be running live coverage.
All the action starts at 3AM AEST, so if your a keen tech enthusiast set your alarm, if not, be sure to check techAU tomorrow for a summary.
More @ Apple
Apple WWDC 2009 keynote coverage – 08/06/2009
Posted Monday, June 8, 2009 at 10:13 pm by Jason Cartwright
Tomorrow morning 3am AEST Apple’s developer conference begins with a Phil Schiller keynote. There’s a lot of speculation around as with any Apple event. Probably this time more than ever. It’s 2 years since the original iPhone announcement, 1 year since the iPhone 3G announcement and 1 year since the announcement of Apple’s newest operating system – Snow Leopard (OSX.6). There’s also many rumours about a tablet announcement, but I don’t think so, happy to be wrong on that one.
The Australian times for the keynote are as follows:
Melbourne/Sydney/Brisbane/Canberra 3:00 AM
Adelaide/Darwin time – 2:30 AM
Perth time – 1:00 AM
There’ll be plenty of people covering the event and there’s sure to be some sneaky people who get a live audio feed from the event. The race will be on to find those people.
Sources of content I’ll be watching are..
- Twitter (via TweetDeck), watching = “Apple OR WWDC”, “iPhone”, “Snow Leopard”.
- TWiT Live – http://live.twit.tv
- Tech Blogs live blogging – [engadget], [gizmodo], [gdgt]
- Mactalk [link]
I’ll be checking http://ustream.tv, http://stickam.com, http://justin.tv, for live feeds. Experience has shown that sites are bound to go down during live events, particularly Apple’s, that’s why backups are a great idea.
Did I mention having multiple monitors is great this time of year ? 
For all my coverage watch http://twitter.com/techAU
