Buzz matches user-generated video with location: Could lead to radical political activism
When the iPhone 3G S launched two months ago boasting a video-recording feature, we all knew there’d be a surge of user-generated video content. The 3G S is the ultimate video-blogging tool: It provides a faster network, and lets you edit your video straight on your phone too.
Combine that with location, and you’ve got quite a powerful tool. That’s what a new video iPhone app, Buzz, has done with a new application that launched today (the date on the app says Aug 4, but Apple has just allowed it). It offers a way to geotag your user-generated mobile videos, and then search for them on a global map. 
You can search for videos from other users too. The pure focus on location and video, combined with the iPhone 3G S’ speed, makes it an especially useful tool for mobilizing people around events, and political protests come to mind. I’ll be interested to see whether this application gets adopted in countries where there is civil unrest.
Of course, that’s not all it can be used for. As the application owners note, it can also be used to find hot parties going on in your San Francisco neighborhood, see who’s on stage at the Music Festival in Chicago or watch a high speed chase in Boston. You can sort videos by categories (attractions, entertainment, music, food, hangout, nightlife, trendy) and you can also specify the proximity of videos you want to see (five miles away, or less than half a mile, etc).
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
