noisylime

White label video host Fliqz launched a toolbar (IE only) that lets you easily upload and embed video content anywhere embed code is accepted. It doesn’t require a registration and hosts the videos on Fliqz servers for free. It’s a sort of distributed YouTube.

Getting a video up is simple. Just select the content from your computer and press upload. Once uploaded the toolbar will spit back some embed code so you can embed the video in a Fliqz player like below. Fliqz also remembers your upload history in case you want to embed them on multiple sites. There also appears to be no limit to how much you can upload and no easy way to discover who’s responsible for posting copyrighted content.

Flock has a similar video management functionality for YouTube built into their browser, minus the hosting.

[via TechCrunch]

Google may finally be preparing to re-launch wiki service Jotspot, nearly a year after it acquired the company. Jotspot has not allowed new customer registrations since the acquisition was announced, although existing customers retained access to their accounts.

Google Operating System noted that the Jotspot discussion board and help desk have moved over to Google. More telling, Google Blogoscoped discovered that “jotspot” is now a Google Apps service code name. Attempts to log in to the service are shown a page with a (somewhat fuzzy) Google Wiki logo.

Google previously announced that Jotspot would be integrated into Google Apps and part of the suite of online office applications Google is developing or acquiring.

We now have two fairly high profile Google product launches to anticipate in the near future. Google announced in April that an online presentation application would be launching soon as well.

[via TechCrunch]

The true hard core geek/fanboy crowd loved ValleySchwag when it launched in the Spring of 2006. For $15 per month you would receive a package containing tshirts, stickers, pens and other junk that new startups pay a fortune to have created with their logo printed on it. Usually this stuff is handed out at parties and conferences, but ValleySchwag created a way for people to get it even if they didn’t, or couldn’t, attend the events.

Sadly, ValleySchwag faded away as the founders moved on to other projects. Now another service, Startup Schwag, is taking its place with a similar business model. For $15/month, plus shipping, you receive a monthly shipment containing a startup tshirt and possibly other stuff as well.

Startup Schwag was created by Roddy Richards, a web developer, and is based in Chicago. Richards says he’s going to tweak the way they fulfill demand substantially to allow it to scale up. ValleySchwag failed, he says, because too many subscribers wanted a limited supply of schwag, and it became a real burden on startups to get enough actual stuff to fulfill that demand.

Startup Schwag won’t be looking to startups to send them stuff to pass on to subscribers. Instead, Richards says they’ll be licensing logo rights from hot startups and creating the schwag themselves, at exactly the amount to fulfill demand.

That means tech geeks who think a Digg or Twitter tshirt is cooler than a Nike logo will have a way of getting exactly what they want. Startups will pay nothing for the stuff, although they will be expected to license their logo to Startup Schwag for free. Something tells me that PR hungry companies will be more than willing to do exactly that.

The first shipments will go out in early to mid October. Sign up now – Richards says that first shipment will contain a TechCrunch tshirt, to kick things off.

[via TechCrunch]