Boxee brings the TV revolution 03 december 2008

The last few weeks I've been trying out a new service. In short, Boxee empowers your living room TV. Basically it composes of two parts: An application to view movies, locally or over the Internet and a community which lets you share what you've watched with your friends, much like Last.fm.

The application is pure gold. It scrapes your harddrive and selected network resources for video, pictures and music. Through a sleek interface you can then easily browse through your content, play movies, listen to music or play photo slideshows. But it doesn't stop there. The guys at Boxee has connected the application to various online content, be it Jon Stewart on Comedy Central, mixing mentos and coke on YouTube or a sucky 70's martial arts movie (public domain through a built in torrent downloader). In all it's a very full application.

The community is still a rough diamond. Clearly this is where Boxee will have the most impact. Having tried other full TV oriented applications like Joost, Boxee has the potential to build a much more interesting community. Since I can provide my own content to the recommendation engine Boxee has the potential for being as useful as Last.fm for content discovery, something that really, really sucked while using Joost, YouTube, et.al.

Using Boxee makes two things obvious to me: 

First, it's all about the content. And Boxee provides the content for you, through your collections, the internet or your friends recommendation. No more dull moments.

Secondly, community is so powerful. The Boxee dashboard is a fluid view of what your friends have watched and recommends, and a great way to finding interesting content. Add some intelligent matching to this and no more being slave under the TV guide. 

Boxee is alpha, but already useful. I'm missing some features like seamless integration with iTunes and iPhoto. However my general feeling about it is that Boxee might very well be the one killer application for the living room computer. It's very powerful and has so much potential. I'm just in love, and hoping that it keeps developing as quickly as to date.

Visit the Boxee website at: www.boxee.tv. Leave a comment if you want an invite.

Entreprenörens dilemma 17 mars 2008

Har suttit det mesta av eftermiddagen och försökt knåpa ihop en presentation att skicka till en tänkt kund. Syftet är att kunden skall tycka "skitcool, detta kör vi på".

Så jag har reflekterat över hur svårt det är.

Nästan allt man gör i livet har någon annan gjort. Därför kan man alltid hitta ett facit, eller någon annan som kan råda en. Det mesta jag sitter med gör jag för första gången. En hel del har aldrig gjorts (specifikt) innan. Det är grymt knepigt.

How good is "good enough"? Jag vet inte? Hur skall jag veta? Dessutom är jag huvudsakligen ensam om att arbeta med detta i mitt företag. Usch, skall ni veta. Det är jobbigt att inte kunna uppskatta om något är bra nog.

Jaja... Blir ett härligt kvällspass. Just nu känner jag mig lite låg. Ledsen om jag verkar gnällig.

Ta hand om er.

Mindmancer i Metro Teknik

Vårt systerföretag Mindmancer är med i Metro Teknik.

Mindmancer utvecklar intelligenta övervakningssystem. Du kan screena bort saker som du inte har rätt att filma emedan annat fortfarande blir kvar i bild.

De är precis som vi en del av Chalmers Innovations inkubatorverksamhet. Håll ett öga på dem.