FORA.tv is a video sharing site which describes itself as YouTube for thinkers. The San Francisco start-up company concentrates on intellectual content.

This content varies from politics, science, culture and business, but it all has a heavy bias towards intelligent, and cogent debate, rather than the more fun and frivolous content you may find at other video sharing sites such as YouTube.

New Venture Funding

The site also organizes videos from think-tanks and symposiums at universities and other highbrow organisations. And now, despite being a very young company, it has secured $4 million in venture funding.

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If you are like me, when you heard that Google had bought YouTube for $1.6 billion back in November 2006, you wondered “Why couldn’t that have been me?”

Well, maybe now it could be, as with the help with StartYourTube, you too can start a video sharing site to mimic YouTube.

Using YouTube

The people behind the website realise that YouTube is by far the most popular video sharing destination on the Internet, and have utilised that popularity to entice people to sign up to the site.

The site even includes the immortal line “YouTube sold for $1.6 billion. How much will you sell yours for?” feeding straight in to the egos of people who think they could be behind the next Web phenomenon.

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The Archos 605 Wi-Fi Portable Media Player is part of a new generation of media players which utilise the Web for content. For the first time, you can now stream content from the Internet to your TV using a media player.

Using the Archos 605’s Wi-Fi feature, you can download media content from the net using the Archos content portal. This offers movies, TV shows, and music for download to your portable media player.

This enables you to be no longer tied to a PC or Mac, and instead be able to download content easily to a device which has a full-colour 4.3-inch touch screen capable of showing an 800 x 480 picture resolution.

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It’s a known fact that adding a photo or photos to an eBay listing (or Craigslist, or any of the other options open to sellers) can massively increase the chance of a successful sale.

Another way to boost your chances of getting a good price is by using a photo of the actual item rather than a stock image of the product weaned from the manufacturer’s site.

Prospective buyers don’t just want to read a description, they want to see exactly what they would be spending their money on since some sellers can be very vague with their words.

Picture Managers

For this reason, several services such as Auctiva, MyEasyPics, BiggerBids, and even eBay’s own Picture Manager have become profitable in offering indispensable tools to eBay sellers.

Now, with the popularity of online video rapidly growing, vzaar is aiming to take eBay auctions to the next level by allowing sellers to include short video ads (2-3 minutes maximum) of their items within listings… YouTube-style. 

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Nokia has recently announced that they are teaming up with Spike Lee to create a series of shorts for the User Generated Content community.

This is certainly a positive step for the handset maker who seem to  be seeking to extend into more diverse markets.

Certainly, UGC is huge and the goal of converting millions of eyeballs into dollars has been the Holy Grail for YouTube and a slew of smaller companies.

That Nokia is using their platforms; I gather the N95 along with a name director is certainly a good marketing strategy. Certainly, this is not the first company to seek to work from the top down.

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IPTV is growing every year, with advances in technology, and distribution systems happening often. So, knowing where to start can be a confusing and complicated business.

Thankfully, there are a number of resources available for anyone keen to learn the basics about IPTV, and the how, where and when of IP Television.

There is Web TV Wire of course, which thankfully you are reading now, but we simply cannot offer the type of crash course some people may need to get in to the business of IPTV.

There are, however, books on the subject which cover exactly that, providing readers with a good basic knowledge base to work with, and start increasing how much they know about IP Television.

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Have you ever thought text is becoming a thing of the past? Videos are becoming such a normality on the Internet, that the written word just doesn’t do it any more.

So, to that end, Seesmic, a video micro-blogging application for the Web, is now available as a Wordpress plugin, which will instantly make it available to millions of new users.

What the new Seesmic plugin offers is the chance for bloggers and writers on websites to easily record videos for their posts, as well as the opportunity for readers to comment using video rather than text.

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