TechCrunch
Instagram Hit 5 Million Video Uploads Within 24 Hours
Judging by the massive spike in selfies and lunch shots in our Instagram feeds following the launch of their new video functionality, it certainly seemed like a successful launch. Now, thanks to some stats that the team just shared with us, we know exactly how well it did right out of the gate.
In the first 24 hours after the switch was flipped, Instagram saw 5 million videos uploaded.
In the first 8 hours alone, Instagram saw roughly a year’s worth of content uploaded.
Curiously, their biggest spike in traffic didn’t come right after launch — instead, it was a few hours later, when the Miami Heat won Game 7 of the NBA Finals. At that point, they were seeing almost 40 hours of videos uploaded per minute.
Developing.
Scrooser Is A Motorized Scooter From The Future
The unfortunately-named Scrooser (the creators are from Dresden so maybe it sounds better in German) is actually surprisingly cool. It looks like a standard, two-wheel kick scooter but actually has a motor built in and it can go about 15 miles per hour on a good day.
The Kickstarter project has been running for 19 days and is already at $43,000. The Scrooser itself can be yours for $3,950. It’s obviously quite pricey but it looks like it could be a fun way to get around town. It has a range of 20 miles.
The design of the Scrooser is quite unique and compact. The batteries are under the footboard and the motor is in the rear wheel. Quoth the creators:
While seeing grown men on scooters is always comical, this powerful hybrid could make scooting cool again… maybe.
Thankful Registry Is A Wedding Gift Registry For Thoughtful Couples
Registries present an etiquette quandary for engaged couples. Open one at a major retailer, fill it with suggestions from a checklist and you end up looking greedy (how many newlywed couples really need a gravy boat?). Skip the registry, and you risk receiving multiple toasters. Thankful Registry tackles that problem by re-imagining registries as a way for couples to sign up for a thoughtful selection of items while connecting with their guests.
Bootstrapped by founder Kathy Cheng, Thankful Registry launched three months ago. Cheng worked with Web design studio Crush + Lovely to set the tone of the site. Each wedding registry features a full-bleed photo of the affianced pair and a personal message. Instead of the sterile lists seen in most wedding registries, photos of potential gifts are arranged like a catalog into categories such as “delicious,” “play” and “nest.” Items can be chosen from different vendors, separating the registry from big-box retailers like Bed Bath & Beyond that derive a large portion of their sales from the $10 billion wedding gift market. Once shoppers select an item, they are taken to the vendor’s order form pre-filled with the couple’s shipping information.
Though there are other sites, like NewlyWish and Registry Love, catering to couples who want to avoid retailer registries, Cheng says she drew on her design background to set Thankful Registry apart from its competitors by honing its elegant and simple user interface.
“I focused less on adding a bunch of features just for the sake of having features and more on the tone of the brand because I feel that in the wedding space, people are looking for something that draws them in emotionally,” says Cheng, a senior copywriter for consulting firm Smart Design. “Everyone else is about creating a wishlist and convenience.”
Cheng, who started brainstorming Thankful Registry three years ago, says she likes to take her time finding the perfect present and found shopping her friends’ wedding registries frustratingly impersonal.
“I consider myself a pretty okay gift-giver and it wasn’t cutting it. I was disappointed. I also felt that couples felt obligated to add things to their registries,” says Cheng. “Our site looks modern, it doesn’t look greedy. I thought, gifts are as much about the giver as they are the couple.”
“Couples put so much time into their weddings, but the true touchpoint that guests see outside of the actual wedding day are invitations and wedding registries,” she adds. “We don’t say things like ‘register for whatever you want’ because you don’t want guests to spend their time and heart picking out a gift that ends up just being returned for cash.”
With their gift registries independent from major retailers, Thankful Registry’s couples can add items from any site, allowing them to support smaller vendors. One couple, for example, registered for handcrafted Japanese cutlery.
“I am surprised at the retailers they pick sometimes. They are usually not retailers who are heavily represented in the wedding registry sector,” says Cheng.
Though Cheng expected almost all of the site’s users to come from the U.S., couples from different countries, including the U.K., Norway and Australia, have signed up, and she plans to make the site friendlier for international couples by making the content less U.S.-centric.
Thankful Registry is free for a one week trial, after which couples pay a $30 fee, and Cheng says it currently has a 24% conversion rate. The site also makes revenue by participating in Amazon’s affiliate program. Cheng’s next step is to create a baby gift registry with the same low-key approach as Thankful Registry, as well as versions of the site for other life milestones, including birthdays and graduations.
YouTube To Live Stream Wimbledon Matches For The First Time
YouTube has been getting deeper into live-streaming sports lately and today, Google’s online video site announced that it will live-stream the Wimbledon tennis tournament, too. The company says YouTube will stream “the key moments of the tennis, interviews, behind the scenes and press conferences” throughout the two-week tournament. The coverage, which will be sponsored by Rolex, will be available on the Wimbledon YouTube channel, starting Monday, June 24.
The Wimbledon channel debuted in 2006, and this year marks the tournament’s first foray into live-streaming the matches.
The coverage will be available “anywhere YouTube Live is available.” There are some geographic restrictions, though. The live video and full broadcast will be restricted to the U.S., Canada, South America (except Brazil), the U.K., Netherlands, Belgium, Cyprus and New Zealand. Highlights will be available globally except for the U.K., the U.S., South America, Germany, Austria and Italy. All other content will be available on a global basis.
As Google tells me, tennis is about as popular as baseball on YouTube according to searches, but both are still well behind soccer. Currently some of the most popular sports channels on YouTube that stream live video include the UFC’s and WWE’s channels, but YouTube has also recently streamed major soccer tournaments, cricket matches and similar sporting events with a worldwide audience.
Given that YouTube offers live streaming in its mobile apps, as well as through Google TV and its web-based “leanback” experience, this actually puts YouTube in direct competition with the traditional TV broadcasters that generally had a lock on major sporting events coverage.
Adobe Photoshop CC Proves That The Cloud Isn't A Cure-All Refuge From Software Piracy
Adobe released Photoshop CC this week, as part of its Creative Cloud-only revamp of the entire Creative Suite of software products it offers. The new version of Photoshop offers some exclusive new features, which I’ve covered previously, but the cloud-based and subscription nature of the program were seen by many as a way of counteracting the rampant piracy that greets each new edition of Adobe’s software.
Fast-forward a couple of days, and Photoshop is encountering the same old problems it has always had, thanks to a pirated version hitting the web only one day after its broad release. The pirated version has some trade-offs like a lack of cloud-based functionality tied to creative portfolio network and recent Adobe acquisition Behance, as well as other CC services, but it’s functional enough for most. So is Adobe’s grand cloud experiment a failure, at least in terms of deterring pirates? Yes and no.
On the one hand, Adobe is shifting more of its services and feature to the cloud, which is accessible only with a legit subscription. and add to that the fact that it’s actually much easier now to just sign up for a Creative Cloud subscription than to go through the often complex process of installing a pirated copy of software. Adobe’s David Wadhwani recently talked to Frederic about these aspects of piracy prevention, and said that that’s more where their energy is focused in terms of discouraging product theft, in fact.
Adobe has never played up or even talked much about the benefits of going with a subscription-based model for its creative suite products in terms of piracy prevention, so it’s hard to say specifically that that’s what they were trying and that those efforts have been thwarted with the rapid breaking of Photoshop CC’s DRM. But it’s worth an Ian Malcolm-esque “Piracy, uh, finds a way” to observe just how fruitless the subscription shift has been in terms of changing at least how easy it was to make Photoshop available to those who’d secure it by nefarious means.
The cloud might not be a cure-all, but Adobe’s right that it can build in additional, cloud-based functionality that will forever remain off-limits to pirates, and convenience is a huge factor for those who do have the money to pay for products like Photoshop but simply opt not to. The other big promise of CC is that it will be subject to frequent updates to address just do its (JDIs) to improve features and address nagging issues, and that kind of stuff might not make it through to pirated versions, so it’s early yet to say definitively what kind of impact going all-subscription will have on long-term piracy rates.
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Instagram Video, Samsung Stuff, And MakerBot
Instagram now has video! It may or may not be better than Vines. Samsung showed off a bunch of computers and cameras and phones with strange names. That was fun. And of course, 3D printing sweetheart Makerbot sold for $400 million to Stratasys.
It’s been a long, crazy, eventful week, and we’re here to discuss it with you on the TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast, featuring John Biggs, Jordan Crook, Darrell Etherington, Chris Velazco, and a touch of Matt Burns.
Enjoy, folks!
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Intro Music by Rick Barr.
Kickstarter Says It Was Wrong About ‘Above The Game' Campaign, Bans Future ‘Seduction Guides'
Kickstarter just published a blog post offering its take on a controversial campaign to fund a book called Above the Game: A Guide To Getting Awesome With Women.
The title of the post, “We were wrong,” makes the company’s position pretty clear. What was so bad about the campaign? Well, comedian Casey Malone had a pretty damning blog post about it — Malone basically quoted the parts of the guide that have already been published on Reddit, with tips like:
Decide that you’re going to sit in a position where you can rub her leg and back. Physically pick her up and sit her on your lap. Don’t ask for permission. Be dominant. Force her to rebuff your advances. …
Pull out your cock and put her hand on it. Remember, she is letting you do this because you have established yourself as a LEADER. Don’t ask for permission, GRAB HER HAND, and put it right on your dick.
(The author Ken Hoinsky has said the quotes were taken out of context, and that he was just saying, “Don’t wait for signs before you make your move,” not advocating for sexual assault.)
Kickstarter says it first saw Malone’s blog post, and the material that he was linking to, on Wednesday morning, and it found the content pretty offensive. But the company didn’t cancel the campaign, it says, because it only had two hours before it ended (“We’ve never acted to remove a project that quickly.”) and because Kickstarter has an obligation “to approach these investigations methodically as there is no margin for error in canceling a project.”
“These factors don’t excuse our decision but we hope they add clarity to how we arrived at it,” the post says. It goes on to say that material glorifying violence against women has always been prohibited, and that if Kickstarter had seen this material when the project was submitted (again, the offensive content was first posted on Reddit, not the actual Kickstarter page), it would never have been approved.
Despite the apology, Kickstarter says there’s no taking back the money after the campaign has been funded. However, it says it is banning any future “seduction guides” from the site, and it’s also donating $25,000 to the anti-sexual violence group RAINN.
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