Brightcove Delivers for the Consumer

Brightcove have finally launched Brightcove Personal, a consumer edition of their website that competes with YouTube, Soapbox and the multitude of others. And it’s potentially a world beater.

I found it easy to use, very fast and of great quality. If that wasn’t enough, what’s coming soon could tip it over the edge. “Aftermix” is currently in beta and is essentially a set of video editing tools built right into the browser. You’ll be able to record directly onto the site via a webcam and then edit it right there and then.

Mashable suggests that with these new features Brightcove is pulling ahead of Youtube with the launch of it’s Aftermix service. For more details, go here.

The video comparison matrix, quality comparison page, and free eBook have all been updated. The guide:

• Quickly looks at the registration process
• Compares their ease of uploading your own content
• Looks at the quality of the output
• Rates the service
• A summary of the reviews of 28 of the top video sharing websites
• Is FREE!

“…easily the most useful thing we’ve seen online in a long time”

BigBrainBoy

Green News Quick Round-Up

There is interesting news that the sale of “normal” light bulbs is to be phased out in Australia, and replaced with energy saving flourescent ones.

The Times reports that John Lewis to use renewable energy from October, it will buy all its electricity and gas from renewable sources, covering its 26 stores and 183 Waitrose supermarkets.

A “Green” insurance product offered is to be offered by Kwik-Fit to drivers of hybrid and diesel. They intend to plant trees to offset carbon emissions produced by their policyholders.

UK courier company CitySprint are trialing biodiesel vans, with fuel supplied by the Environment Agency. The trials use “20 non-modified Citroen vans and the B22 biodiesel fuel”.

The UK government have unveiled a “sustainable procurement action plan”. It aims to spend the £150 billion that it spends every year on things like paper, toilet paper, bulbs and computers on environmentally sound products.

LetsRecycle reports that “Funding has been agreed for a £12 million plastic bottle recycling plant in East London…… The first plant in the UK to turn old water, soft drinks and cosmetics bottles back into packaging suitable for food and drinks products, it is being developed at a site provided by the London Development Agency in Dagenham.”

Finally, the Post Office Posted! magazine has a great interview with Prince Charles: “… as the Prince approaches 60 years old, he is suddenly becoming fashionable. And that’s not just down to clever public relations - it’s because many of the causes he has long championed have begun to chime with the pundits and the public. It’s as though everyone else has just woken up to what he’s been saying all along.”

Win An Invitation to Joost!

What used to be known as The Venice Project, but now called Joost, is leading the way for internet TV and here at Life Goggles we have four invitations to give away.

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How to Increase the Value of Your Home

There are a few easy ways to increase the value of your home. There are the obvious ways that you see on those TV shows, tidying, painting the walls, a new front door, gardening, scented candles and so on. However there is a much less obvious way.

Apparently, in order to increase the value of your home by around 6%, simply install some environmentally friendly features. According to price comparison website www.beatthatquote.com installing solar panels and/or a wind turbine(!) your home will be worth 6 percent more than a similar home that doesn’t have these features.

Mind you, installing solar panels is very expensive and payback is slow, over about 20 years. However for new build homes they are fast becoming a viable option.

Heroes Episode Guide - Chapter 5: Hiros

This episode didn’t disappoint. What an episode. Hiro and Ando split up, Hiro meets the flying Nathan and Ando meets Niki, Claire recovers while her father has the quarterback’s brain wiped, Peter goes to see Issac and finishes his painting, and Matt remembers nothing of his abduction, starts to use his powers to stay with his wife but when he tries to use them for good it all goes wrong. Here’s how the episode panned out for me:

Before the title sequence: look at Nathan go, that’s cool.

Words: never noticed how cleverly they do the title sequence and other words that come up on the screen. Tim Kring, who created it, writes comic books and you can tell. Always moves the stories on.

Same guy - are Mr Linderman and glasses guy the same person? Just thinking.

Issacs painting look like comic strips.

Is the glasses guy/Claire’s Dad actually okay? He let Matt go and he seems fine (until the end), didn’t shoot Nathan and genuinely seems concerned about his adopted daughter.

Nathan annoys me, he should believe Hiro, after all he can fly. And Mohinder should believe Peter, although he’s had no proof so maybe I would act in that way too.

Peter thinks Issac’s painting are like comics too - good man.

Niki still has no idea what’s happening. Most of the other heroes do, she seems to be unable to control hers, or maybe she controls it subconsciously.

Ah maybe the glasses is bad, although he doesn’t kill the quarterback, he gets the bald guy to “hollow him out”.

DL - Niki’s criminal husband who’s on the run - escaped police custody again - I bet he’s got powers too.

Another episode that doesn’t mention Sylar. I’ve forgotten he ‘kills’ Issac in five weeks time.

Please don’t let the episode end, I want to know what happens next.

As ever it left me wanting more. The series is brilliant and each ending always makes me want more. “Save the cheerleader. Save the world” seems to be the new catchline and I can’t wait.

Oh, Hiro’s English is improving quickly isn’t it? As ever, more details can be found here.

Song of the Day - Snow Patrol & Martha Wainwright

Set The Fire To The Third Bar. Brilliant.

You can also watch a cool (and sad in a few ways!) Doctor & Rose version, or the Final Fantasy version.

Tyler Cruz - A Friend of Evil

Tyler Cruz describes his blog as “The journal of a young web entrepreneur on his journey to wealth.” He sent me an email asking me to take a look at his blog (not paid for), and whilst I normally ignore these requests as I know him since his Sitepoint days I thought I’d do him a favour (hopefully!).

Yeah, I’ve heard of him but I doubt he’s heard of me, as we’ve never actually spoken. He seems to be doing well for himself these days, his blog is ranked 10,133 by Technorati, has a PR5 from Google, apparently gets 900-1,000 unique visitors per day and earns an average of $256 a day. His About page can tell you more, though he’s now earning a full time living online.

His blog is pretty interesting, whilst not focussing entirely on entrepreneurial topics, there is enough variation to keep things enjoyable. He has seven other websites from which he earns his money, from poker to cookery. His post about the Internet Poker Ban was fascinating.

He provides a great amount of detail on almost any of the subjects he writes about, his first press release for example. Showing his earnings is always motivating for others trying to earn income online and it’s interesting looking through the previous posts to see the progression. I loved this quote on the site: “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” - Thomas A. Edison.

I’ll be adding his entrepreneurial blog to my feed reader. If there was any criticism to be made, then it would be to make subscribing a little more obvious.

Why is he a friend of evil? Well, he knows John Chow, and everyone knows he is the root of all evil

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