Martin Weigert’s thoughts on the social web. And life.

If you have a video file available in the cloud, let's say via a torrent or hosted on Rapidshare, and you would like to access it from your iPhone at a time and place which suits you, how would you do it?

For me, the answer is using the recently launched cloud download and streaming service put.io (availabe in private beta). With put.io, you can add the link(s) to the torrent and rapidshare file(s), and after that the service is downloading the file(s) to your 50 GB huge cloud harddisk. From there, you can either download it on your computer, stream it directly or press the convert button - 5 minutes later, a video is availabe for on demand streaming from your iPhone.

I have been using put.io pretty often during the past weeks, mainly to access documentaries, and have been impressed by the speed and how well everything works. Streaming videos directly via put.io's iPhone site seems so much easier than going through the hassle of syncing it via iTunes - at least as long as you have WiFi (or a good coverage and an unlimited data plan) around.

put.io is based in Turkey and one of the most awesome services I have tried in the past month. Let's see how long it will be around, considering the obvious risk/chance of becoming a hub for pirated content.

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I ask myself pretty often why there is so much great web innovation coming from Sweden. Really awesome ideas and startups are much more rare in my homecountry Germany, despite a population almost ten times as big as Sweden's. 

This time, it's a new service called MyClubCards that caught my attention. MyClubCards offers a mobile application (currently iPhone only) which people who are members of one or more loyality programs can use for collecting points when paying in a store. So imagine you have club cards from three different loyality programs that you carry in your wallet. Instead of that, you can add those cards to your MyClubCards collection by simply entering the program name and your personal customer number. MyClubCards generates a barcode for each of those cards, which you can show to the cashier next time you want to use your card at a point of sale. Instead of scanning the physical card, the cashier is scanning the barcode on your phone.

I don't have a single club card in my wallet, but I know that I'm not typical here. I know many people who have half a dozen cards or more, and for them, MyClubCards could be the ultimate solution to remove some weight from their wallet.

For end users the service is free, so where does the revenue comes from? Since every user of the service has shown that he/she is fan of the concept of loyality programs (again, I'm not, but millions of other people are), there is a big chance that they would be willing to sign up for even more programs. With this idea in mind, the company is offering retailers the possibility to become a partner and to include their loyality program in the MyClubCards application, ready for signup. The retailer get's new loyal customers (and data about their shopping behaviour), and MyClubCards gets a commission. 

Even though MyClubCards will not be of any use for me, I'm convinced that with the right excecution, this startup could become huge. I'm not sure if there is a similar service somewhere else, at least I have never heard of anything like it. Though I'm pretty sure we'll soon see some other companies experimenting with the same idea.

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I'm just sitting at a Stockholm metro station waiting for the next train. As it looks, something is wrong, since the display with the info about upcoming trains is dead, and people are getting impatient.

Until December 2008, a situation like this would have annoyed me a lot. I cannot imagine anything worse that standing/sitting somewhere, just waiting (for the train/plane/bus/doctor/friends...). But in the end of 2008, I bought my first real smartphone (in my case an iPhone), and since that day, delays and unexpected waiting don't bother me anymore. Thanks to 3g/WiFi and a smartphone, there is always something you can do when you are waiting. And I don't just mean playing games or other entertaining but still time wasting stuff. I mean real work or tasks that somehow belong to your daily routine.

I'm sitting here, doing what I was planning for later this evening: Writing a post for this blog. So instead, I'm doing it now, using the waiting time in a productive way, gaining spare time for later. I also could scan through my RSS feed or stream the news.

Thanks to the mobile lifestyle, people are not that depending anymore on external factors/services for being productive and getting tasks done. We have gotten much more flexible, and I enjoy that a lot. Only sometimes, my first reaction to an unexpected delay is anger and irritation. A few seconds later, I usually realize that I still can use the time efficiently.

Of course, everything changes if there is no internet connection or if your battery is empty. To avoid the latter, I'll now try to find an alternative way home anyway.

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I just logged in to Spotify to be presented with a video premiere of Jimi Hendrix - Bleeding Heart. What's so special about that? So far, Spotify has been all about music, not music videos. Although there have been rumours in the past about Spotify launching a video service, this is the first time the company is actually using its popular and wide spread music app to broadcast a music video.

It could only be a "simple" promotion for the latest release of Jimi Hendrix (it obviously is a paid advertising format), but it could also be some kind of test to see how users react to the possibility of streaming music videos within Spotify.

I think it is great!

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In October, I wrote about Doit.im, a great task management tool for the PC/Mac desktop, based on Adobe AIR.  The software which has its origin in China quickly became one of my most favourite web tools. The only thing I had to critize was the lack of an iPhone application. A taks manager without a mobile app just isn't complete. But that's history: A few minutes ago I did a search for "Doit" in the App store, and voilà, the free Doit.im iPhone appeared, ready for installation.

I quickly installed it on my iPhone, and as far as I can tell, everything works the way it should. Push notifications are supported, too. For every iPhone user who has been hesitating to start using Doit.im, there is no reason left to not give it a try. An Android version is available as well.

And yes, it looks pretty much like Things, a task management tool for Mac. I'm a PC user so I don't mind.

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1. Global licensing
It's no fun to see national borders on the global internet when consuming media from popular sources like Hulu (US only), Spotify (a few European countries only) or YouTube (some videos only available in some countries). A better internet is an internet without these kind of limitations.

2. Net neutrality
The internet doesn't treat different kinds of content in a different way. Data is data. Some operators want to change that (or have already done it). A better internet is achieved when there will be no doubts left that all data is handled equally.

3. Better filters
There is no information overload, but there are bad filters. That's the problem that needs to be solved. Better systems for filtering and recommendations based on personal fields of interest and usage history is what we need in order to be able to use the web in the best and most efficient way.

6. Fast broadband for everybody
In the same way as water, electricity and roads are being seen as basic infrastructure, even fast broadband should be. The more people have access to fast down- and upstream connections, the better the internet experience and variety of services will be for everyone.

7. Higher status for founders
The higher status and confirmation people get when starting companies within the digital field, the more will feel encouraged to follow this step. With an increasing number of founders and startups, it is more likely to see innovative and revolutionary web services.

8. Higher media competence
The more know-how users, decision makers, politicians and companies do have about the way the web works and regarding the risks and challenges connected to the digital world, the better and smarter decisions they'll make when using and shaping the web. 

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I love the Shared Items feature in Google Reader. By following a few selected people with similar fields of interest as I have, I get access to a variety of sources that I personally didn't subscribe to. At the same time, I try to provide the peope following me with interesting and in my eyes relevant articles from the feeds I'm subscribing to in Google Reader. Give and take.

Still, even though I am a big fan of Shared Items, I always thought that putting the complete content from the shared articles into my stream of Shared Items felt kind of strange from a copyright standpoint. Shared Items are taking full blog posts or articles form its original source via RSS into a new layout on an external, public site, hosted by Google.

Fortunately, the Shared Items feature was one of the lesser known tools Google offered, so hardly anybody noticed this potential copyright issue.

But with the launch of Buzz, that might change. If you are using Shared Items in Google Reader, Buzz as a default setting is connecting those with your personal Buzz stream, showing all the pieces you shared directly within the stream - in full length, visible for everyone on your public profile.

Through Buzz, Google is for the first time exposing the feature to a wider audience, an audience of content publishers and media professionals that might not be that happy to see their content taken from its original source, imported to a public Google site. Eventually, that could lead to a removal of the complete Shared Items function from Google Reader. Which would be a pitty for those people who are using it "responsibly".

My suggestion to Google: Stop showing the full articles on destinations outside of Google Reader, instead highlighting only the first paragraph, linking to the original source. It wouldn't hurt the users who actively share items, it would generate traffic for the publishers and it could save Google some trouble.

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The Sunday Times is reporting about Google's development of a speech-to-speech software for mobile phones. With this app that is said to be available as a basic version in a few years, it will be possible for people to speak to each other on the phone in different languages, with the software translating on the fly. As soon as an application is able to do this kind of work, I assume the system could likely be used for every type of real time translation, for example on TV, in offices or at conferences. 

Personally, it's hard to imagine any other kind of software with more disruptive power than speech-to-speech tools with capabilities of translating what's being said by humans in the second it's being said. Suddenly, I could have a face-to-face conversation with people from China, Japan or Russia, with everyone speaking in his/her mother tongue. A totally new era of communication would arise, while language boundaries vanish. Private and business life would (once again) be revolutionized, with a lot of new possibilities and markets emerging for companies and organisations.

Like always there would be a flip side, too. People could become lazy and stop learning foreign languages, since there is no need for spending hundreds of hours on such a tough task when you can use technology to translate dozens or even hundreds of languages on the fly. The dependency on technology would increase, and since learning language always is healthy training for the brain, even negative neurological consequences could be possible.

Still, the concept of speech-to-speech software is fascinating, and it will be up to us to handle it the right way. Now let's wait and see if those "a few years" will eventually turn out to be a decade or more. Seeing today's Google translations from and to German for instance, there is still a very long way to go before automatic translations really can be used for more than rough-and-ready tasks, not to mention for sophisticated human conversation.

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