Media Sharing on a Mission

Our friends over at Groovy Green, did an interview with us about Treemo. Groovy Green is green lifestyle and educational web site on all things green. Please read the whole article, you will be graded if you missed any of the main points.

Also, in light of the Verizon/YouTube deal that was announced last week, GigaOm,did an article on alternatives to YouTube, which we were hightlighted. Check it out here.

We’re working diligently on the .5 release and hoping to get it out very soon. I can’t tell you what great features we will be launching, but the innovations keep coming here.

Here is a fun post for you all.

Have a great thankful day.

Peace!

Last night we pushed out our .4 release of Treemo. We’ve fixed a bunch of bugs, tweaked some design and added ‘TreemoTXT‘ - our new innovative SMS feature. We just made publishing any media type anytime, anywhere even better.

Users can now SMS to Treemo (873366) and get right to our mobile application. Users can text ‘username’ to 873366 and will be taken directly to that user’s channel of content. Currently, our ’shortcode’ - our six digit number for text messaging (873366) is live on Cingular and Sprint and will be launching on other carriers soon. For more information, visit our ‘My Mobile‘ page. You can also text ‘recent’ for recent items, ‘featured’ and others. We will be adding more commands in future releases.

We know of no other application where you can upload any digital media form - video, photo, audio or text and it’s instantly available on the web or your mobile phone - one text message away, instantly. We transcode your video for the phone or the web, optimize your photos, convert your audio on the fly and right away. We make mobile video publishing a reality - just upload from the web or from your mobile phone, its done.

Other enhancements are a new ‘featured‘ page that has a new, improved design and some tools for us to feature content more easily. We improved our RSS feeds - we now have support for more readers and enclosures (photos) should be working on all major readers. We revamped the ‘My Mobile‘ page - now has information on TreemoTXT and a live simulator to what our mobile application looks like. We also made a couple minor fixes to our flash video/audio player. Lastly, we made our mandatory, ‘press‘ page which includes some of the press we’ve received over the last year.

Publishing Policy Changes:

We instituted a new rule for publishing content to the web. Users who create accounts on their mobile phone are required to come to our website, give their email address and login, before we will post their content publicly to the web site. Mobile users’ content will appear in their channels on the web and mobile right away, but will only appear on the ‘recent’ page on the mobile application going forward.

We are in the process of editing our Terms of Service to be stricter in terms of overt sexual content and conduct and trafficking of pornagraphy through the Treemo site. Our goal is to provide a safe place to share content, with your friends and family privately, or publicly. We are continuing our goal of promoting freedom of expression, but with this expression, comes responsibility. We want all our users to express themselves but users need to be sensitive to other users. Our goal is to be a postive force in the community.

In the last few weeks, we also have launched our second digital photography class with Arts Corps. We have another 10 or so students who are learning digital photography and posting photos to Treemo. Treemo donated more than 10 digital cameras to this cause.

We appreciate any feedback on this update or any other comments.

Bruce Sterling, science fiction author and futurist, says that worldchanging.com is “the most important web site on the planet.”  Ignore the fallacious leap in logic here, but doesn’t that make their book the most important book on the planet?  And wouldn’t that make their book tour the most important book tour on the planet?  If so, then how could you possibly justify not attending?  Don’t know what Worldchanging is?  The Worldchanging Manifesto begins:

WorldChanging.com works from a simple premise: that the tools, models and ideas for building a better future lie all around us. That plenty of people are working on tools for change, but the fields in which they work remain unconnected. That the motive, means and opportunity for profound positive change are already present. That another world is not just possible, it’s here. We only need to put the pieces together.

So it makes sense that their book falls along a similar line:

Worldchanging: A Users Guide for the 21st Century is a groundbreaking compendium of the most innovative solutions, ideas and inventions emerging today for building a sustainable, livable, prosperous future.

The book tour isn’t just about promoting the book, either:

In each place, we’ll be giving talks and parties to celebrate not only the book, but also the local community of people and organizations who are engaged in worldchanging work. Each event will also feature brief introductory remarks from people we respect and admire. The point is to create an avenue for spotlighting and connecting worldchangers and worldchanging things…and most importantly, to meet one another and have a great time.

Worldchanging and Treemo each have a global reach, but they both call the Emerald City home. That’s why Worldchanging is kicking off their tour in the beautiful city of Seattle. If you’ll be in the area this Saturday, stop by and check it out. Don’t forget to take a lot of pictures or make some videos and upload them to Treemo! =)

With Halloween comes the beginning of handing out candy and good cheer all around it seems. We at Treemo have not handed out any kind of treats to our faithful users, but that is about to change as we prepare to bring on the swag..

We need some help or at least I do on what we should be handing out.. should we do the normal t-shirts, stickers, buttons, posters, airplane tickets to the launch party, postcards, beanies or what?

Please pass on suggestions!

Last Thursday night (or was it Friday morning?) we told you we were going to take the site down today. Well, we have good news and good news.
Let me tell you the good news first. We were able to do today’s update without taking down the site at all. This is due to Aaron’s mad skills, and the fact that he made us a good hardware infrastructure in the first place. The changes are actually all in place now.

And now for the good news. The changes include a couple of much wished for features, amongst a multitude of bug fixes.

First on a lot of people’s list is the ability to rotate images. When you’re viewing the image, click the edit button, and you will see ‘rotate left’ and ‘rotate right’ buttons right under the thumbnail image. The other big, fun feature is browsing by media type on the explore pages.

Roll that up with last Thursday’s video processing upgrades, and the forty or so bugs we fixed, and you can see we’ve been pretty busy. We’re not slowing down though. We’ve got a lot more good stuff in the pipeline. I almost can’t wait to tell you about it. Almost.

Don’t worry, it’s all ok. We’re upgrading some of the video processing software that we use. This will improve video quality on some source formats for web playback, and make playback possible on more mobile devices.

We sort of sprung this one on you, we know. Next time we’ll give you more warning. As a matter of fact, we have another bit of downtime scheduled for Monday night (that’s the 23rd, and pacific time). That one should be fast, but we’ll give you more details as we get closer.

In the mean time, our changes are all in place. We’re running through our tests as I type this. So far, so good.

UPDATE: We’re back up.  Send any feedback you have using our feedback form.

So.. catching up here, we launched a weekly contest we’re calling Treemo Tagged! last week.

Here’s how it works.. We supply the ‘tag’ of the week, and the community submits content ‘tagged’ with that word. The best video, photo or audio file we receive gets a nominal cash prize. Content is judged on views, comments, favorites and by ‘quality’ by the staff. We are building an ecosystem here where content creators can be compensated for their content if they choose and this is the start.
We also are interested in asking questions and seeking out good content. Our first tag was recycling.
This week’s tag is ‘football‘ and we’ve already received a bunch of great entries.
Hope you enjoy Treemo Tagged!

Apologies for not having this here blog up for news and dialogue and such. It’ s on now.

So, we moved into our new office in the last couple of days. It has way more natural light as well as offices and a kitchen - right in the heart of Ballard - that’s part of Seattle for those who don’t know.

Here’s my new office within the new office:

We’re now on with more news on releases, issues, events and all things Treemo.

We’ve put off publishing a blog on the development and behind-the-scenes of Treemo for far too long.
We’ve been working hard on the development since September and launched our private beta back at the end of May - when I say end of May, I mean, May 31.

There are a number of factors that have driven us to develop the technology platform we are creating:

• We love technology. We love gadgets from mobile phones to digital cameras, to video iPods to Sony PSPs to Nintendo DSs - not to mention our Macs and PCs. We like writing code, we like inventing and thrive on innovating.
• We believe in freedom of expression and that everyone has a right to have a voice - we also believe that people need to be responsible for the content they create and share.
• We believe in open access to all - while everyone ‘can’ have a voice, we want to empower ALL people to use the powerful tools of digital media combined with the publishing and broadcasting power of the current and future Internet.
• We believe in giving back to the community and are working with a couple of non-profits; Arts Corps and Youth in Foucs. We’re asking our users to donate their used digital cameras to our non-profit partners to be used in digital photography classes. We’ve received the first 4 cameras and our first class is underway.
• We believe in responsible disposable of technology - we’ve teamed up with Collective Good, who is the company behind our mobile phone recycling program. (They also go by the name RIPMobile).
• We believe that we are creating the best platform for personal publishing and broadcasting layered over our community and social software features.
• We believe that the mobile phone will continue to become more integral as the starting point and end point of content creation and consumption and that our technology will marry the web and mobile experience better than any other application out there.

So, this is the first post. Our intention is to continue to expose our thinking and strategy as we move forward.

We hope you enjoy what we’re building, we welcome your comments and suggestions.