Media Sharing on a Mission

We are happy to announce Gangstaa as the winner of our Velvet Revolver - “What does ‘Libertad’ means to me?” Contest.

Rachel and her guest - her sister - have arrived in NYC for the concert.

Check out her channel right here:

We are honored to be working with Velvet Revolver on a user generated contest in conjunction with the release of their new album, ‘Libertad.’  We are asking users to upload photos, videos, and words on what Libertad means to them.

The winner will get two tickets to see Velvet Revolver at Jones Beach on August 18, 2007 (NY), airfare for two, and accommodations for two nights in New York City.  Farecast is sponsoring the airfare.

The entries are flowing in here but we are still looking for that entry that seals the deal and will be going to NYC on us at Treemo.

Thanks and good luck!

So, we are now less than two weeks away to the coming of the iPhone. It has gotten so much press and momentum, with the cool ads, the previews, the digerati saying that this is going to change everything in the mobile world. It is exciting.

I’ve been developing mobile applications since 1999, early WAP, SMS, MMS, J2ME, BREW, and now back to WAP or XHTML or mobile internet through Treemo. The iPhone is shedding the light and pushing the mobile internet to the mainstream - at least the tech savvy mainstream. All this hysteria is good for ‘mobile data.’ There is a ton of talk about about how this could change the whole ecosystem.

Do I think it’s going to change everything? No. It takes a long time for phones to go ‘mainstream’ - it will take years if the iPhone is a huge hit to become a major phone to ‘build’ to. Is it going to be a force in the mobile world? Yes, but not sure to what effect immediately, but I will not count it out. Will Treemo develop something specifically for the iPhone? Yes. Not because we think this is the biggest opportunity ever, but.. go to next question.. Will it take long for us to develop? No, because our platform is built for this kind of stuff. You should see a iPhone specific ‘view’ within a couple weeks of the iPhone coming out. Am I going to wait in line to get one? No - not into that waiting on line stuff, but if you have one, please send my way.

So, we’re excited about the iPhone as it will draw more attention to mobile internet applications and bring competitors up a notch. It will drive mobile data - AT&T is going to have a great run with this. Everyone who buys this phone will also buy the $20/month ‘all you can eat’ data plan. Treemo will look and run great on the iPhone and we’re psyched to see it on there.

Come back in a few to see Treemo on your iPhone.

Well, it’s time to pick up the pace here. More blog posts, maybe beyond company news and features, we should pontificate about the market.. anyway. We have a lot brewing here and getting ready for a pretty big release with some long awaited new features.

In the meantime, on a personal note, my wife and I had our second daughter, Lilia, on May 20. A photo of her on the scale was on Treemo less than an hour after she was born ;).

Here is a preview of what’s coming… more news and pontification I promise..

We got some press last week, sorry for the late notice on it. Doug Dobbins did a video interview of us for the Spokane Spokesman Review - you can find it right here. Doug did a good job of showing what we do through video - we love video here, in fact we love photos, video, audio and text..

We quietly, or not so quietly released ‘80′ last week as well - while not too many obvious web features, there is a lot ‘under the hood’ including full international support. Does that imply something for the future? Hmm.. not sure.. Anyway, we had a couple issues on the mobile application with this release, but all better now. We also added ‘mobile preferences’ with ‘block user’ and other default preferences for notifications and privacy of content now all accessible from the mobile.

We are gearing up for a big release very soon - date TBD - it will be a summer gift. More news coming soon..

This past weekend was Arts Corps’ 7 Annual Festa del Arte - their annual fund raising event. Arts Corps is a Seattle Non-profit that teaches arts of all types - visual, dance, poetry, and digital photography and much, much more. They set up after school programs all over King County (Seattle and area), Washington.

This was my second time at the event and it is not only a great time with lots of great people, but truly inspirational to see such a healthy non-profit doing such great things. Arts Corps has some great funders from Boeing to Starbucks, to Bill and Melinda Gates, to the Allen Foundation to the Kirlin Foundation and many more and many individuals. Their budget continues to grow and their programs are in constant and growing demand. They are expanding as fast as they can…

Treemo has been a partner of Arts Corps for more than a year- we help start their digital photography classes. We helped get them donated digital cameras and we ended up buying them several digital cameras for their classes moving forward. Students post their photos and videos on Treemo - when their classrooms allow outside browsing.

Here is a video of 18 year old poet Jenna Whittington talking about ‘art’:

Here is a video of some ‘hip hop’ dancing of Arts Corps students and teachers:

It’s been far too long since the last post.

What have we been working on? What is going on?

We’ve been seeing increased and increased usage of the site in the last few months which has been great. We took the time to go back and do some really unexciting optimizations to make Treemo continue to hum under increased load. That took a while, but we’re really happy with the outcome - we’d rather continue to roll out new features, but sometimes you have to back and make things in the backend better.

We also recently updated our Etiquette Policy. This update lays out in more detail what kind of content we will allow and don’t allow. We have recently brought on a couple of mobile partners who need us to abide by this rule set. With that said, we also now have 24/7 content moderation. We’re still working out the kinks of this system, so if you see some of your content is being deleted or ‘flagged’ please email us and we will re-review and if need be, re-post.

We have some new features coming very soon, so check back soon and thanks for your support.

Hey all. After a holiday break, we are back with another release and more features.

We rolled out a release a couple days ago, but we’re so good at it, you didn’t even know. We are starting to release more frequently, with less new features, so we can continue to get out new stuff more quickly.

We now support streaming for mobile video on a bunch of phones, especially Sprint devices. We now offer users the option to either ‘download’ or ’stream’ video. Some videos you are going to want to stream because they are large and you don’t want to save them to memory while some videos, you may want to download and keep a copy on your phone for quick viewing. We now support both.

Block user is now implemented. If you find somone on the site that you don’t really want to hear from, you can block them. They won’t be allowed to comment on your videos, photos, etc and they also can’t  private message you.

We launched a couple other minor features and a bunch of bug fixes that you probably didn’t notice.

We have some other big things brewing here but we’ll save that for another day.

We are continuing to build out our platform with the mission of ‘any content, any time, any where.’ We hope you are enjoying the service and please send on any and all feedback.

If you use our upload by email feature you may have noticed some misbehaving over the past few hours. We’re sorry about that. It’s sorted out now.

Details

Uploads by email were negatively affected by yesterday’s push.  If you sent an email to your upload email address after 4:30 pm PST yesterday (in other timezones) you may not have seen your upload until today.

The good news is that they were only delayed, not lost. All uploads have been processed and are available in your channel. Any uploads from now on should be processed at the normal speedy pace.

A note to the frustrated: If you tried uploading multiple times you might have ended up with duplicates in your channel. We tried to detect them, but we can’t be 100% sure that we got them all. You might want to give your recent items a quick once over.

In conclusion. We’re sorry about the delay. Thanks for bearing with us.

We just rolled out a very big release for us. We made some quite big architectural changes that our users won’t notice, but behind the scenes are rather large.

Here is the top level list of features and changes:

We added a ’subscribe’ button to every users’ channel. There are three ways users can subscribe to other user channels; via email, via SMS or through RSS. Everytime a user uploads a file, they are sent an email, sms or standard RSS updates. We are excited about this feature especially for the implications on the mobile application. A user can upload a multimedia file (video, photo, audio or text) and if they’re friends are subscribed to their channel via SMS, they will  get a message and see the new content in ‘real time.’ This  innovation, where a user uploads a video and is made available instantly on mobile phones, is not available anywhere else and we are excited to have our users start playing with it.

We changed our ‘logged out’ home page with a simpler message, ‘Your videos, your photos, anytime, anywhere.’ We also added featured content on the home page so people can see some of the great content our users have contributed to the site.

We cleaned up design across the site, still getting to those last pages that need design attention. This will hopefully make for better ease of use and navigation.

We added better share functions. We now allow users to customize the message and send to a users’ mobile phone number.

There are some other smaller features, but those are the biggest.

We now will take a bit of a break for the holidays and come back and continue to add more features. We’d love to hear your feedback.

Thanks - have a great Holiday Season!