The cobbler’s kids are always the last to get shoes, or so the saying goes.

In my business, it is always our own design work that is left to last. 5 months after we moved in to the new Auckland office, we’ve finally got a sign on the building!

Thanks guys, this looks great.

• Thinking this USB drive would be a problem at the airport http://tinyurl.com/2vzqoa #

• Portishead return http://tinyurl.com/2v4hvq #
• Upgrading my iPhone to 1.1.4 - thanks LIfehacker http://tinyurl.com/227ewm #

Very clever. Although the irony is that this is Microsoft advertising their digital advertising products…using a TVC…developed by an above the line agency. Still, clever none the less.

YouTube has annnounced major new features for their API. These include:

• Upload videos and video responses to YouTube
• Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)
• Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales
• Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales
• Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software

So what does this mean to you? Essentially this makes it even easier for you to leverage YouTube as a video platform. You can directly integrate YouTube into your own website. The key difference is essentially YouTube has to date only really offered Read access to their videos. You can pretty much do everything you can do on YouTube itself.

Example

You want to allow visitors to submit video content to your site for a competition.

• Visitor fills in the competition entry form on your site.
• Visitor uploads video on your site.
• You use YouTube to transcode the video to Flash and store it on their platform (for free!).
• You retrieve the videos and display them on your site in a customised player.

It now makes even less sense to try and build your own online video capability. What’s not clear, is what advertising might be delivered around your video content, however, I imagine they’ll introduce an advertising free albeit paid option in the future.

What do you think you could use this for?

Technorati Tags: youtube

Thanks Katie. This is simply brilliant.

• Thinking World Time Engine is very useful http://worldtimeengine.com/ #
• Wow - 2,800 Mashups currently in existence http://tinyurl.com/3yckle #
• Signing up for the Microsoft SQL Server Data Services Beta http://tinyurl.com/3xmuvy - store your SQL Server Data in the cloud. Interest … #
• Search boxes in Google SERPS http://tinyurl.com/2lplzw #

Google is churning out the code as usual:

Contacts Data API

Google keeps a common contact list in your Gmail account which is shared with Google Reader and Google Calendar. They are now making this available so that any developer can access this data programmatically. This includes read, create, edit and delete functionality. Potential uses for this are:

• Sync tool for your Address Book or Outlook Contacts
• Tool that adds all your LinkedIn contacts to your Gmail
• Use Gmail as a cheap database and store survey or competition entry form contact data into a Gmail account
• Using this plus the existing Google Calendar API, you could potentially build quite a powerful but cheap event registration solution

I would like to have all my contacts in Gmail, I have never bothered to do a manual import but if it was synched up with my main contact list, I would be happy.

Google Gears Mobile

Google Gears is a framework released by Google last year that will allow you to build web applications that run offline then synch back up with the web server as soon as you are online again. This is the really the last frontier in web application development, as we have never been able to get around the issue of requiring connectivity back to the server for the app to work. Google Gears Mobile is a port for Internet Explorer Mobile on Windows Mobile 5 and 6.

Whilst this means a limited amount of handsets could actually use an application that you developed using Google Gears Mobile, this is undoubtedly going to ported to other mobile operating systems in the future.

In theory, mobile handsets shouldn’t be offline, but Gears Mobile will allow you to run an app when you in Flight Mode on a plane, or when the coverage is very poor. Even you are fully connected, Gears Mobile allows the developer to take advantage of the local data cache to improve performance and get around potential latency issues on a slow data network.

Here is a video on Google Gears Mobile if you would like to know more, or check out the blog:

What ideas do you have for how these new tools could be used?

• Reading Nivin’s summary of the iPhone SDK announcement http://blog.markerstudio.com/archives/445 #

• Enterprise 2.0 in a box - clever business model http://www.connectbeam.com/ #