VentureBeat

Bill Gates reflects on crappy Windows experiences — As the beginning of a farewell series to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, the Seattle PI has printed a long, stream-of-consciousness rant by Gates about the frustrations of using a piece of Windows software in 2003. “The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind,” Gates says in summation. Any ideas for retirement presents?

A123 looks to electrical grid storage market — Wildly successful (so far) battery startup A123 has signed contracts with several utilities to plug its lithium-ion batteries into the electrical grid for short-term storage needs, according to CNET. The technology is for “grid stabilization”, or meeting short-term shifts in demand, rather than storing power for long periods, a requirement for solar and wind power that has still not been satisfactorily met.

Google joins drive for ubiquitous Internet — The search giant has thrown its weight behind a national initiative that aims to put broadband web access in everyone’s hands, regardless of social status. Hopefully, it will be more successful than municipal WiFi.

Japanese browser companies invade Silicon Valley — Lunascape has established a Silicon Valley beachhead, following the example of another Japanese company, Fenrir, that recently released its Sleipnir browser to the international market. The two are intent of breaking into a browser market already jostling with offerings like Camino, Firefox, Flock, Opera and Safari.

Japan may restart solar power subsidies — The Land of the Rising Sun may finally live up to the name, with a proposal on the table to renew subsidies and provide a boost to the solar industry. Japan’s local market dried up when it cut the grants in 2006.

IPhone may set sail early on July 11th — Boy Genius speculates that the iPhone may launch hours before expected on July 11th, so that week-long camping trip iPhone addicts embark on over the July 4th weekend may end early.

Animoto offers video creation for business — Animated slideshow creator Animoto has begun offering its video creation tools for business use, on a subscription basis. The company’s last product launch was a Facebook widget we reviewed in March.

Tech jobs up, New York number one — High tech jobs are up in 51 cities, according to new statistics reported by BusinessWeek. Seattle leads in the number gained and New York in overall jobs, likely due to the banking and ad industries. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley still has the highest concentration of techies, not to mention entrepreneurs.

Halo 3 body count exceeds Earth’s population — Are you working, reading blogs, or just playing Halo 3 again? Smart money is on the third option, with Halo 3’s kill count up to 6,743,784,316, some 40 million more than Earth’s population.

More hit games, really? — Meanwhile, just to seal the free-time fate of tech geeks everywhere, Blizzard appears to be dropping hints that its next blockbuster is on the way.

Animoto, a company that lets you create music videos out of your photos albums, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Amazon.com.

New York-based Animoto offers a way to create a more advanced version of the sorts slideshow widgets you see on MySpace, made by companies like RockYou and Slide.

Animoto launched last year with a stand-alone site where users could create 30-second videos by uploading photo albums, choosing a song, and letting the company turn it into a sequence of flashing lights, your pictures, and the song you choose.

More recently, Animoto launched a Facebook application, which caught our attention because it made smart use of the photo collections that users have already created for themselves (Facebook is the largest photo-sharing site in the world, remember). This application had a big growth spurt earlier this year, around the time Animoto won the Web Award in the Film/TV category at this year’s South By Southwest conference.

A look at Adonomics shows that the application has since seen its number decline. I asked chief executive Brad Jefferson about this, and he gives some good insight into the nature of building a Facebook application:

For a while we became so focused on viral growth for our FB app that I think we lost sight of the user experience. We were successful in drawing lots of installs through our viral tuning - in fact, we went from 25K installs to over 700K during the week of April 14th - but we weren’t creating raving fans on FB like we have on Animoto.com. We’ve since changed tactics with a renewed focus on the user experience within FB. This change has affected our installs and actives in the short term but we believe it will payoff in the long term. In fact, it looks like we’re starting to see this in the chart you sent in that our daily actives bottomed out on 5/10 and have since started to inch up again.

The company, which is comprised of traditional media producers and technologists, also has a revenue model. It has had more than 160,000 registered users total, with more than 7.5 percent of them paying for a premium service where you can create longer videos and download them in the MP4 file format for further editing.

The company has also introduced a music video production tool designed for YouTube users, and a program for musicians to promote themselves on Animoto. It has also begun launching its application on other social networks.

Here’s a video of Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos, talking about Animoto’s usage of Amazon’s developer services.

We don’t usually write about individual Facebook applications when they launch (there are thousands of them, and most of them are poorly made), but Animoto’s is worth taking a look at. It cleanly and simply makes use of Facebook’s data and distribution, to bring its core strength — making good slide shows — to users.

Last August, the San Francisco company launched a slide-show widget creator that lets you upload your photos and add songs from its collection or your own (our coverage). It creates a video out of the photos and music, where the photos flash and twirls the photos in time with the music, so you get an engaging experience — a more sophisticated offering than what leading slide-show creators Slide and RockYou offer. Even though you can embed videos into other sites, the company isn’t satisfied with its growth rate to date.

So here’s why the company’s new application may have stronger legs. First, you install the application, then select between 10 and 15 photos from your photo albums on Facebook and add your preferred music track. (This is a smart move, because Facebook is the number one photo sharing site on the web, according to comScore, with more than 14 million photos uploaded daily — it’s where the photos are.)

Second, Animoto’s Facebook application generates the slideshow video — and it also identifies who else was tagged in the photos you included in the slideshow. These people receive notifications of the video through Facebook. This is an easy mechanism for viral growth that Animoto doesn’t have a way to offer on its own site.

While the average VentureBeat reader may not find this application meaningful, imagine a college dorm that wants to commemorate a formal dance, or roommates that want to reminisce over a going-away party at a local bar, which is what I made mine about (screenshot below; unfortunately the company doesn’t offer embed code of its Facebook video, presumably because Facebook doesn’t let you remove your photos from Facebook).

Try it for yourself here. The company gave us an early look and will formally launch the application on Monday.

Animoto helps you produce widget-based slideshow in slicker ways than you can with Photobucket, Slide and RockYou.

The difference?

While most other sites rely on Adobe’s Flash-based video technology, Animoto relies on its own technology to pair photos and a music track together to create them. The result is a more emotive experience, with photos being displayed for you in patterns and shapes that Animoto matches with the music.

Think of iTune’s music display, but for your photos.

If you choose a classical music track to go with your photos, for example, you’ll get a slower, more sedate video of photos than with rock or hip-hop tracks. During the fast points of songs, you’ll see photos fade in and out, swirl around and duplicate themselves more quickly than during the slow parts.

The New York City-based company, which is comprised of a number of video technologists and producers, wants to be used by the many garage bands on MySpace and other web sites — and really anyone looking to create a more compelling presentation of their photos.

It is self-funded.