Ash K. Gilpin

There are several sites on the web that allow you to convert your audio and video files into different formats. But Marseille, France-based Hey!Watch appears to be a much more robust product than anything I’ve seen previously, and they’ve added developer tools to help build their functionality directly into other web services. The service is in private beta, but there is some information on the home page for you to read and you can request an invitation to join.

With Hey!Watch, users can import files to the service in a number of ways, including uploading from a hard drive or simply putting in the URL of a video from YouTube or other popular online video services. But they also allow users to upload videos via a RSS feed, so new enclosures from future shows will automatically be uploaded as well. The company has also created bookmarklets and a Firefox plugin to import a video from a currently viewed website to the service with a single click.

Once you’ve uploaded your files, they can be converted to all of the usual formats and then downloaded. And they’ve also used RSS intelligently here as well - they’ve created a RSS feed for all of a user’s converted files, so they can simply be gathered from a feed reader without going back to the Hey!Watch site each time.

Most products / services like this have only been available as software downloads for the program to run on your desktop.  Having such tools available online is pretty cool stuff.

Wengo a subsidiary of 9 Telecom, France’s second largest telecom, has a well designed chat widget for bloggers. It’s called Wengo Visio and is like MeeboMe but with video chat. Visio runs in Flash through a bit of embedded JavaScript and CSS, with SIP as the communications protocol. Check here for some bloggers that have it implemented.

When you have your widget installed, you can make yourself available to chat by logging in through an admin menu. While online, readers can solicit you for chatting by typing a little message in text box that shows up on the owners side. The owner can then initiate the chat if they choose. Chatting is currently one-to-one via mic and optional web cam, which makes it less overwhelming than the flood of texting that can happen with MeeboMe. Although, the group video chat of PalTalk and ability for readers to listen in could make for an ad hoc “Gillmor Gang” style meeting of the minds right on your blog.

But Wengo Visio isn’t intended to be a standalone program, rather it is an effort to expose Wengo’s other products, Wengo Talents community and Wego Phone to a wider audience. Wengo Phone is their own chat client that lets you text chat, call other VOIM users, call landlines, call cell phones, set up audio conferences, and make video calls. It also runs on Win, Mac, and Linux, with Google Talk, Yahoo, ICQ, and GAIM compatability. Similar to Skype-out, they only charge for calls to landlines and cell phones, but have a free trial with € 0.50 of credits until January 4th. So far, over 72 million minutes have been shared over Wengo.

Stepping back a step further, both Wengo Visio and Wengo Phone are part of their long term plan of building a pay-per-call expert network, Wengo, where people can sell their time on the phone via PayPal or credit card. This may sound a lot like Ether, sans the 1-800 number, and it is very similar. Wengo, however, has opted to build their offering around their own Wengo community site, where users have categorized themselves, received ratings, and posted profiles. Ether has opted for a different strategy by relying on users to promote services on their own.

Today, ExpoTV, a site focused on user-generated reviews and product demonstrations, announced a $6 million Series A round of funding led by Masthead Venture Partners and Prism VentureWorks, including existing investors. Brady Bohrmann of Masthead and Will Kohler of Prism are joining ExpoTV’s board.David Beisel, with Masthead, writes on his blog that he feels the ExpoTV investment is a promising investment because of ExpoTV’s focus on the “intersection of online video and social commerce”.

ExpoTV is best described as a YouTube for product reviews. Users can peruse or upload video opinions by category. They also have their own reviews branded as ExpoTV on demand. To reward their users for their content, ExpoTV currently has a “Pay-per-Play” program where you will receive $0.01 each time any of your published Videopinion reviews is played. Payments are made once per month via PayPal. ExpoTV also has several holiday promotions on right now as they focus on collecting holiday gift reviews.

A company called jaxtr, which launches in private beta today, allows users to connect their personal phone to their digital personality.

Jaxr is a widget that users can put into their social networking sites or blogs. When someone has a jaxtr widget, it means you can call them in real-time. Jaxtr members assign a specific number to their widget. 

When a caller sees that widget, they can click it and jaxtr will ask them for their own phone number. The caller’s phone will ring, and when the caller picks up, jaxtr will ring the recipient who originated the widget. If the recipient was not available, jaxtr will notify them that they have a voicemail that they can access by calling into their jaxt service.

Fortunately, jaxtr never discloses the call recipient’s phone number so you can install a widget without ever exposing personal information. Users can also block callers or specify on a per-caller basis which callers can reach them live and which get routed to voice mail. The service is free but local phone rates apply.

With the launch of jaxtr’s beta, the company also announced that LinkedIn co-founder Konstantin Guericke has joined the company as chief executive officer.

“There is nothing less satisfying than creating a social network page or blog and not getting a response,” said Guericke. “Social networks are a catalyst for people to meet, and jaxtr ‘jacks up’ the power of networks to help users make new connections. By putting a widget on their social network page or blog, jaxtr users can hear from callers worldwide on their existing landline or mobile phone.”

To request a beta membership, visit jaxtr’s Web site.

Skype also released Skype 3.0 today, with several new social elements that enable things like virtual game playing and music recommendation through Last.fm.The new features in Skype 3.0 for Windows are called Extras and Public Chats. Extras enables game playing and music recommendation through Last.fm. There will also be something called “mood messages,” which will allow users to “explain how they are feeling and what they are doing with their friends and families, no matter where they happen to be,” according to Skype’s release.

Public Chats are essentially chat rooms, which are nothing new but Skype has not had them before. They have had group chatting capabilities but not theme-based chat rooms.

“Skype is about freeing communication on a global scale. Since the beginning we have enabled free conversations between friends and family – people that know each other,” said Stefan Oberg, GM of Telecoms & Desktop for Skype, in the release. “With Skype 3.0 and features like Public Chats, we are making it easier for people to make new friends and meet others that share a common interest from a global community of more than 136 million Skype users.”

The founders of new online gaming company Red 5 Studios are celebrating an $18.5 million round of financing today from Benchmark Capital and Sierra Ventures. Bill Gurley from Benchmark Capital is joining the board. The company previously raised working capital from WEBZEN pursuant to a game development deal earlier this year.

Red 5 Studios was founded by some of the key people behind Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, which claims over 6.5 million users. CEO Mark Kern told me that they broke away from Blizzard because they had a difference in opinion over the appropriate strategy for the next generation on online games, and that he’s aiming for Red 5 Studios to be “the Pixar of onling gaming” by creating games that are distributed and promoted by others. Look for their first titles to be launched in a year or so, initially through WEBZEN.

Google has added some new layers to Google Earth. The new layers are part of what is now called the “Geographic Web.”

The Geographic Web is a mashup of content from Wikipedia, the Google Earth Community, and Panoramio, a geographical photo sharing site. As you zoom into a specific location, you can see place marks of points of interest, user-generated photos, and selected Wikipedia articles. Hopefully it will remain uncluttered as content fills in but it appears that Google is only using select information in the Geographic Web from the three user-generated feeds.

Have you been waiting to share your photos on Picasa Web Albums in a language other than English? Well, Google is very happy to give you the ability to create web albums in 18 additional languages: English (UK), English (US), Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Taiwanese, and Turkish. If you’ve already got a Picasa Web Albums account in English, click the “Settings” link to change your language.

For the fastest and easiest uploading to Picasa Web Albums, get Picasa. If you don’t use Windows or you have another photo management tool, use your browser to upload your pix. Either way, your photos will be easy to arrange in a clean, uncluttered web gallery where you can add captions and share them. Take a look at the test gallery to see what it looks like.

There is word on the street that Steve Jobs will announce some sort of partnership with TiVo at the next MacWorld.

Rumors usually get pretty crazy around MacWorld time. During last year’s Intel announcement, it was rumored that all press in attendance would get new notebooks but that didn’t happen. This one is probably just a rumor but if we think along the lines of iTV on its way, then it wouldn’t be a bad idea. PVRWire thinks that a partnership is highly unlikely but a licensing deal may be a possibility. TiVo has brand name recognition but declining market share. Apple has undeniable power, especially considering the amount of movies they’ve been able to sell for Disney on iTunes, but they have absolutely zero footing in the television market. They need each other. Problem is, Apple doesn’t often admit to needing anything or anyone.

Traditionally, Hawkee has been a place for the developer community to share code, which is somewhat of a social network. As of today; however, the site is officially a bona fide social networking site.Hawkee’s new focus is social networking for electronics shopping - and right in time for the holiday season. Users can compare prices, opinions, and reviews on various electronics. Products are tagged and users can filter through a tag cloud to find what they want. They can also filter the tags to find the reviews written by people within their social network.

Scott Aikin, the founder of Hawkee, said he tried to make sure that he had all of the “basic social networking” features. So you can create a profile with a picture, leave comments for your friends, send private messages, etc. But you can also read your friend’s recommendations, snippets, and scripts, almost like their own personal blog. You can also search the electronics that they have tagged in their wishlists when it comes to gift giving time.

Hawkee also has a new Deals page where Aikin and his staff post coupons that they negotiate themselves with vendors such as Wal-Mart and Overstock.

I think Hawkee is a cool concept and has the potential to be as hot as the gadget-loving community wants it to be.