Alec Saunders SquawkBox

TMC publisher Rich Tehrani talks up iotum Talk-Now, encouraging Blackberry owners to download it and try it.  Thank you Rich!

Earlier this year, my friend Anupam Gupta left his position with MSN to join startup Mixpo. I’ve been waiting to find out what they’re up to ever since. Mixpo is a personal publishing tool that lets you manage video, photos, and music across multiple sites, right from your desktop.  Imagine YouTube combined with easy-to-use editing and content creation tools. Exciting, no?

Mixpo debuted at DEMO this week.  I give full marks to their demonstrator.  The internet was obviously not cooperating with them during the demo, but he stayed cool despite the fact that the demo was close to crash and burn several times. You can still get the flavor of their product, but perhaps the best way to find out about it is to simply go and try it, which is what I did. 

The good news is that Mixpo really is as easy as they say.  It has the feel of many of the other storyboard based editing tools out there.  You basically drop your media elements into a timeline, and then add voice overs and audio.  Publishing a Mixcard is as simple as any other video sharing site.  Either tell Mixpo to publish to a specific URL, or grab the snippet of embedded code they provide, and stick into your blog or website directly.

Even better, though, is that you can simply go back and re-edit later.  Change the storyboard, or the audio line, and boom!  It’s automatically replicated to all the places that the you’ve published. That’s a key difference between this tool and any of the sites like YouTube that simply share video.  

I like it.  Nice job guys!

Demonstrating a new printer at a conference like DEMO has to be a tough proposition.  That’s what Zink did. 

Zink stands for “Zero Ink”.  At DEMO, they debuted the Zink printer, a print platform which prints without ink cartridges.  Their technology uses heat to fuse die crystals embedded in their special paper, resulting in beautiful prints, printed without ink cartridges, which emerge dry and “ready to enjoy”.  I saw the results last week in a meeting with one of their investors, and the prints are truly gorgeous.  My immediate reaction was “I’d buy that”.

You can see their demo here.

It’s a very cool product, but it wasn’t a great demo. Don’t get me wrong, the two founders did a very smooth job of presenting their product and company.  But at the end of the day, DEMO is about the products, not the company.  It would have been a better demo if they had demonstrated more of the advantages of the technology. 

• Claim: small form factor. Proof: Just two products with the embedded print platform.  Would it have been possible to show more?
• Claim: durability versus standard prints.  Proof: the print was dipped in a bowl of water, and the demonstrator attempted to tear it.  Could they have put their print up side by side with a print from a standard printer, or a commercial print?
• Claim: gorgeous prints.  Proof: none.  It would have been great to see enlarged prints of another digital printing technology placed side by side with this technology.

Ultimately the success of this technology is going to be decided by two things — economics and utility.  We didn’t hear at all about the economics of it, and the demonstration of the utility of the technology could have been beefier.

Tough to demo, but very cool technology. 

Ink2 launched this week at DEMO.  They allow on-demand printing and mailing of common print products from their web site.  Right now, it’s just greeting cards, but in the future it will include calendars and other products. 

You can see a video of their demo at the DEMO web site.  Better yet, though, for the next week you can simply visit the web site, and print and mail cards from it.  I went there and made a Valentine’s card for my sweetie ;)

You can select from just two layouts at the moment — a greeting card, and a tri-panel card.  They also have a postcard and a calendar pictured on the site, but neither of these links are yet active.

Next you choose a photograph for the front.  I chose this picture of chocolates in a store window from our vacation in Venice in 2001. 

Ink2 lets you either pick your photos from Flickr, or photos you have stored on your hard disk.  Choosing from Flickr requires you to pop over and log-in first, and I was unable to choose from all of my Flickr photos.  Only a subset was displayed.   

Inside the card you have the option to choose from several layouts.  The layout I chose allowed a typed message on the inside fold, and another photograph.  I typed my message, and then added another photograph from our Venetian holiday.

The final step is to address the envelope.  Press the mail button, and you’re done.  Ink2 takes care of printing, addressing and mailing your card. 

For this week, it’s free.  When they launch commercially, it will all cost roughly the same as heading to the local card shop and picking one of Hallmark’s finest.

These guys have a winner in my opinion.  Ink2 is easy, personal, and the price is right.