Ajax Girl

We first heard of video startup Cuts.com a year ago, although details were scarce. After spending over a year in development, the company is just about ready to launch to a small group of beta users, and expand from there. They let us take a quick look at the current product last week - look for an expansion of their private beta in two weeks or so.

Like Jumpcut (acquired by Yahoo) and Motionbox, Cuts aims to help users edit video online using the latest Flash tools.

Cuts lets you pull in and cut apart videos from sites like YouTube and Myspace, with wider support upon launch. To edit a video, you just need the URL of your favorite video or click a bookmarklet to cut the video on your current page. Cuts imports the video and takes you to their editing suite. As of the private beta, Cuts will let you add captions, add a group of sound effects, loop sections of video, and trim out parts of the video. Each of these functions runs on a separate track you use to sync the effect to a time frame in the video.

Not only will you be able to cut up a video once, but each video made with Cuts will also be able to be cut up again, and again. It’s sort of like the video version of music remixing sites JamGlue and SpliceMusic. Cuts will add a few more bells and whistles after their public launch. Check out some screen shots of the service below, or sign up for the beta on their site.

We’ll be waiting for YouTube’s response to Cuts, as users begin to take YouTube videos and start to remix them. YouTube hasn’t been shy about protecting its turf in the past, and they are not going to like what they see at Cuts.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/86139964/

When famous computer scientist Jim Gray went missing a few days ago, the coast guard launched a large scale search that found absolutely nothing. On Thursday, they gave up.

Then Amazon stepped in. They arranged for a satellite sweep of the area and stored the images on their S3 storage service. They then created a task on their Mechanical Turk service to allow volunteers to scan the images to look for the boat. It’s a tough task - the boat would only be about six pixels in size in an image, and there was a lot of cloud cover obscuring large parts of the area scanned. But volunteers are pouring in to help out.

If you’d like to help, go to this task on Mechanical Turk. You’ll be asked to view five satellite images and note any that should be looked at more closely.

I hope that new web technologies will make helping people more common in the future. When tragedy strikes, people may be able to help in an effective and organized way instead of simply watching events unfold on their television.

I’m off to look at satellite images of the water outside of the San Francisco Bay. Please come help me.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/86031893/