Futures Lab Update #45: Multi-Camera Mobile Video, Managing Social Content, and Website Push Notifications

PART 1: Multi-camera mobile video with Vyclone

Vyclone is a mobile app that allows users to easily combine video taken by multiple smartphones. It can pull together clips filmed in the same place and time, and its tap-driven interface enables nearly instant editing and posting online. We visit Vyclone’s office in Venice, Calif., and get a demonstration from co-founder and Chief Executive Officer David King Lassman.
Reporting by Tatiana Darie, Reuben Stern and Travis McMillen.
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Examples:

The Wall Street Journal’s Ben Rooney used Vyclone to produce a report from the GSMA Mobile World Congress 2013 in Barcelona:

Rooney’s accompanying text report includes links to some other useful mobile video tools.

Dan and Phil, a pair of DJs on BBC Radio 1, used Vyclone to enlist their audience to create a collaborative music video:

More examples can be found on the Vyclone blog and by just going through the gallery of posted videos.

PART 2: Managing social content with Chute

Newsrooms and consumer brands increasingly use photos and video posted by the public to websites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Vine. San Francisco-based Chute has created a system for finding, managing and publishing social media content that also includes a system for securing rights to reproduce the content from the person who created it. We hear from Chute co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Ranvir Gujral about the company’s approach.

Reporting by Colin Hope and Reuben Stern.
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PART 3: Pushing notifications to computer users

Technology from Apple now makes it possible for websites to send push notifications to computer users, similar to the way mobile apps can send text alerts, and several organizations are taking advantage of it. Roost is a vendor that offer publishers the ability to manage notifications with a bit of code dropped into existing websites. We hear about the technology from Roost’s Founder and Chief Marketing Officer Tim Varner. We also hear from Paul Yorke, manager of technology for user-generated content and messaging at the New York Times, which wrote its own code to add the web notifications.
Reporting by Tatiana Darie and Reuben Stern.
[To skip directly to this segment in YouTube, click here.]

For more information:

Apple provides full documentation about Safari push notifications.

Other browsers currently handle notification-like messages in various ways, as explained in this post from How to Geek.

Reuben Stern is the deputy director of the Futures Lab at the Reynolds Journalism Institute and host and co-producer of the weekly Futures Lab video update.