Nanocast!

I have been working to make this startup a reality for about eight months now. When I joined in Feb 2006, the office in Koregaon Park, Pune was a bare space without anything in place. Parsh (the COO) was losing his sleep trying to just get hold a reliable ISP, and electricians were pouring in and out, their raucous making any conversation or discussion impossible. From the bare floors in Feb, we have come a long way. With a super charged Flash team, some outstanding Java developers (and one from the original Java team), and work hours and pace that I have never before seen (no, not even in the Valley), we have finally launched the most cutting edge tool in the Web 2.0 landscape.

Check out.... Nanocast!

We think it will become the next generation tool for bloggers. Nanocast is all about "Remixing everything, everywhere" --- in other words, you grab your pics from Flickr, Photobucket, your videos from YouTube, Blip, remix them online, and then drop them either in your website, ebay, myspace or wherever you choose.

To demonstrate the power of the tool, check out the slideshow below that I created in less than 5 minutes. There are numerous gadgets in the site, so check it out...

Machinima! Machinima!

Till now relatively unknown, Machinima films have been coming to fore for the last few months, specially after the sudden mushroom cloud of online video sites started spreading in the blogosphere. From the (semi) official website,

"As you probably learned before, machinima is filmmaking in a virtual environment. To clear things up, let's talk a bit more in detail about how machinima movies can actually be produced and what ways there are to do machinima.
Generally speaking, there a two main ways to produce a machinima movie:

Live Action Machinima

The action takes place in a networked computer game, mainly using a FPS game. Every player controls a virtual character via mouse and keyboard commands.
Each actor uses a headset with a microphone to perform dialogue, if there is any. Though, sometimes the dialogue is added later in "Postproduction".
One of the players is serving as the cameraman/-woman. His/her point of view is recorded to tape (or harddisk) and represents the "film-footage".
Most of the time, the settings and characters are taken from the game that's being used for filming.

This way of making machinima is easy to learn and feels close to "real-life" filmmaking. It has room for spontaneity and improvisation and adds that human touch to the behaviour of your actors."


A highly recommended one is Red Vs. Blue series, which is a must watch. I have been trying to figure out if I could create Machinima films using my Mac laptop, but am yet to find the right gaming engine for it. One day...