Beet.TV on Flash Video and Smilebox

Smilebox was one of the first Web 2.0 sites using Flash, and they’ve since branched out quite a bit. Andy Plesser has a writeup of Smilebox and highlights an interview Robert Scoble did with Andrew Wright, the CEO of Smilebox.

Smilebox started out doing pretty basic greeting cards but used Flash to make them expressive. Since that time, they’ve gone more “Web 2.0″ and have added video, slideshows and scrapbook functionality. What’s interesting about the way they integrate video is that they offer a special desktop technology that compresses the videos locally. As a result, you can take videos directly from your digital video camera onto a Smilebox asset. It’s an interesting model (On2 has more info on their press release) and it’s a good mix of using the power of the desktop to enhance the web.

Smilebox is also a Seattle company, so what’s not to love!?

[tags]Smilebox, PodTech, Flash, On2[/tags]

Related posts:

  1. Smilebox – Flash at Demo 2006
  2. MySpace Launches Video Sharing Service and it Uses Flash
  3. Gotuit – Flash Video Portal
  4. Microsoft goes for Flash Video…..sort of
  5. Flash Video Coming to Mobile Phones
  • Miller

    Here’s an open source project that lets you push youtube videos and files from your local drive to iTunes and AppleTV.

    It seems that Apple TV does not perform well on some SD TVs which should be fixed, because not everyone has bought a HD TV at home.

    Best apple tv converter
    http://www.apple-tv-converter.net

  • http://www.findbestwork.com/ Worker

    I can’t understand – if you want to download video to the server files will be locally compressed? Well, nice feature. Do you know how they did it?

  • Phillip Kerman

    Cool, but I’m hesitant to install an exe just to “get started”. Worse yet, I’d advise the target audience (say, my mom) against installing stuff like that. I’m not saying it’s nefarious, but wouldn’t it be cool if I could take a look without taking a risk.

  • http://weblogs.macromedia.com/md Mike Downey

    Smilebox is very cool. And check out who their investors are:
    http://www.smilebox.com/about/investors.jsp?partner=smilebox&campaign=none&page=about_index&origin=HomePage

    - Jon Gay (creator of Flash)
    - Rob Burgess (former CEO of Macromedia)
    ;-)

  • http://www.napi10.com napi10

    Well, nice feature. Do you know how they did it?