Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre

It has been more than two decades since I last walked through Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre (black and white shot is of the church in 1885).

A deeply spiritual and moving place, a Greek orthodox woman prayed to my left, a Polish catholic priest led a group to my right and every religious variation in between stood among me. Within its walls, you can either pray or quietly reflect with every other walk of life from around the world and be at peace.

I took a few short video clips while inside which are captured below. Click play.

As I took these earlier today, they were streaming live on Flixwagon.com, a real-time video solution by an Israeli start-up. More on them later.

Vlogger Cat Fight

This is hilarious. There's apparently a "cat fight" between New York Times video bloggers David Carr and David Pogue after Carr awards himself “Best Video Blogger” Oscar. More from David Carr's Carpetbagger and Pogues posts, who btw, has an excellent rant about something that annoys me as much as it does him - mobile phone spam.

We pay for it, the spammer doesn't and there's no way to stop it. And as he points out, "its not new," but its getting worse. It's like saying that its acceptable and we would all be okay paying to receive junk mailings in our mailboxes. We don't ask for it, we don't want it and yet the spam keeps coming. And, the calls keep coming even if you're on the "do-not-call" list. No means no damn it!

SceneCaster on 3D Media Sharing

The SceneCaster team is on the DEMOfall stage. SceneCaster makes 3D available to anyone who can enter a keyword into a search engine like Google. They are opening this up to communities and have even opened this up to Facebook users. They'll allow people to both create and embed 3D scenes.

Mashable writes: This network is for creative professionals and those that enjoy media-sharing. It’s an interesting way of taking pieces of social networking and the virtual web-based communities that are gaining a stronghold for Internet culture. SceneCaster lets you add all sorts of images, effects and items to your virtual 3D space–it’s integrated with Google’s 3D Warehouse, which hosts a good amount of 3D images, both recognizable and imaginary.

Video & More Kicks off DEMOfall 07

DEMOfall07 kicks off this morning in San Diego unveiling new video technologies. First on stage Digital Foundation showing Splash, which is a video content platform that provides entertainment grade delivery over any network.

They're using Amazon web services to deploy splash and pay only for what they use, which means capital costs for next to zero. They say their competitors are Akamai Technologies, Limelight Networks, and Move Networks.

GlobalCast is next up, a platform which enhances delivery of content 3-dimensionally through revolutionary patented capabilities that allow seamless integration of broadband content delivery and full-scale interoperability on a continental and global scale.

Client MetaRADAR is also up in this segment, which I wrote about earlier this morning. Performed with grace under fire (back-stage technical glitch), they showed RADAR, the world's first MediaMasher. While yes, RADAR can help you navigate video, RADAR is not all about video.

As a rich new media delivery platform that transforms both web navigation and content discovery, RADAR provides people with a easier and more effective way to navigate and explore all digital rich media across multiple platforms, from mobile devices to the desktop.

With RADAR, you can manage, navigate and discover ALL of your digital rich media under one roof. Today, you have to go to hundreds of sites just to keep up. RADAR solves this by bringing together all your favorite meia and websites in a way that is visually stunning and remarkably easy-to-use.

ClipBlast is an online video widget, which makes it possible to search, navigate and watch the Video Web without having to launch a browser or visit a specific Website. They try to go beyoond pure video search, by helping viewers personalize and discover videos, using streaming real-time indexing to alert them of the most recent and relevant videos as they come online. He throws out a $4.3 billion number out there, that will be spent on advertising on the v ideo web, eluding to the massive opportunity in this space.

MotionDSP is a consumer video site that dramatically improves videos uploaded from mobile phones, digital cameras, security cameras and webcams. They're launching FixMyMovie, which can enable your mobile phone to become a viable video camera.

Moritz Chats With Andreesen, Filo and Hurley

Venture Capital legend Michael Moritz moderated a panel with Web 2.0 industry illuminaries Marc Andreesen (Netscape, Mosaic, Ning), David Filo (Yahoo) and Chad Hurley (YouTube) at the TechCrunch40 event earlier this week, largely on their humble early beginnings, what motivated them and now.

On the mistakes they made and what they learned from early lessons, Yahoo's David Filo says, "running out of bandwidth and server capacity. We were lucky, Marc and some of the folks at Netscape gave us some space in their data center, which helped us get started."

Moritz asks Marc, "at the beginning of Netscape, did you know what the next few years would look like?"

Marc talks about why it was most definitely no. "For a big opportunity to be a big opportunity, it has to be a crazy and lunatic idea. It's the one in a thousand of the crazy and lunatic that actually succeed. It's more sensible to say - what would we use? what would solve our pain? what do we believe in?"

 

They are all asked what the worst decision each of their companies made. YouTube's Chad Hurley says, "we could have hired faster. We knew we needed to provide a better service to our customers and we only had 60 employees and all of us felt the weight of the world on our shoulders."

David of Yahoo says, "similar thing for us really. We made too many short term decisions compared to our competitors. We did not always take a long term view. We were not building platforms to get us through the next ten years."

Andreesen says of his Netscape days, "when we sold the business in 98, we had a $200 million dollar business, with advertising services, etc. We were getting money in from Excite and other major sites at the time, and I don't think we really took that opportunity seriously enough. Instead of looking at ourselves as a software company, we should have looked at ourselves as a content services company."

Mike then asks all of these entrepreneurs who their favorite hero is? Can you guess? All of them voted for Steve Jobs. Sexy Steve Jobs, although it wasn't his sex appeal that won him kudos. It was the fact that Jobs always pulls through with unbelievable products. Says Chad, "he gives really great presentations and focuses on really great products." I'll say. Time and time again.

Marc pipes in, "we're a product business. Compare Apple's business in 1996 to 2006 - there were great marketing campaigns back then and today. They continue to hit their strides."

I'd add that its not just Job's commitment to delivering great products, but his discipline around superior design and continuously thinking differently than everyone else in the business who dares not to go there. Steve always dares, brings you in kicking and screaming and then leaves you with a memorable experience that no one else can touch.

GigaOm's TV Network

I haven't had a chance to watch some of the content on GigaOm's new TV network. Check out their interview with Slide on September 14th.  Joyce Kim is co-hosting the show with Om Malik.

They interviewed a number of folks at the TechCrunch40 event this week in San Francisco, so watch for interesting new content in the forthcoming days and weeks.

Ads Aggressively Moving into Social Networks

Arrington today on news of former client VideoEgg's new EggNetwork. He talks about their strategic direction and how it has changed over time, from a pure enabling play to powering video to monetizing video.

They're powering video on 14 of the 20 largest social networks and according to his research, this is 680 million video plays per month, from 23 million unique users. Next move is selling flash ads into Facebook apps.

As a Facebook user, I'm trying to figure out how this move will impact me -- not today, but in six months or a year. It's not hard to see that this is yet one more starfish arm who is after my eyeballs and mindshare. After a lengthy chat with Scoble at Gnomedex last week, every video, audio and content play seems to be moving in this direction -- or figuring out a way to jump on the revenue bandwagon.

He used the starfish as a metaphor for ways individuals and corporations can distribute 'messages' through social networking apps, like Facebook and others. Fellow flack Dan Greenfield who was also part of this discussion wrote about it in much more depth on his blog today.

Cozmo's Customized Widgets

I have been dabbling with Cozmo TV lately, and am impressed with the direction that CEO Alex Rowland and team are heading. CozmoTV enables you to group one or hundreds of channels into a single customized widget that can be embedded into any site. Think of the widget as a personal network TiVo.

They built a Gnomodex widget for Pirillo's event in Seattle this week, which is now in Day 2. Whether you're in Seattle or not, tune into the channel below to see new 2007 video content over the next few days. Chris also posted the widget here complete with a fabulous shot of his mug. Or should I say I several shots of his mug :-)

Digital Hollywood Topic Chatter

Digital Hollywood has been going full force in LA all week. Yesterday, there was lots of TV, TV, TV...IPTV and Internet TV connectivity, what's next, where's it all going. What is the tipping point going to be, where does mobile come into play and so on?

There was also more chatter about next Generation P2P music and film, the lawyers on both sides over DRM (again), and noise over trends I participate in nearly every day - broadband, social networks, RSS, blogs, mobile, VoIP, personalized video and video aggregation.

Video has been knocking on my doorstep lately in a big way. I'm starting to feel like a VC based on the number of start-up video company pitches I've been receiving lately. Interestingly enough, very few compete with each other - they all seem to compliment. Some are only partial solutions, some too early and some really compelling. More on that front in the coming weeks and months.

Google Video Now a Privacy Concern

Hmmmm. On top of general privacy concerns over at Google earlier this week, now we hear about privacy flaws in Google Video. While privacy and security remain an ongoing debate, consumers haven't really started screaming yet. I wonder what it will take.