Optaros Labs

Kaltura is an interactive, multi-user video editing platform made available as a service. They provide plugins for WordPress, Drupal, and MediaWiki, as well as a reference implementation and detailed documentation for how to leverage their service in PHP and Ruby.

In essence, Kaltura provides a mechanism whereby users can upload, transcode, and edit video used in web sites. Click “remix” button below to get a sense of the capabilities Kaltura offers.

These are videos of my dogs, Georgia and Lucy.

I’d put Kaltura’s model, in which plugins to open source web frameworks and languages are combined with services offered “from the cloud,” in the context of what I’ve been calling the Assembled Web. Businesses get the flexibility and agility of the open source stack while leveraging the economies of scale and ease of management offered by SaaS (Software-as-a-Service).

Some other similar services have started to emerge, including CDN2 (a video offering for Drupal) and (Optaros Partner) Acquia‘s Mollom-based anti-spam and hosted search (also for Drupal).

Mixing the strength of open source and collaborative development models with the financial benefits of SAAS is something we expect to see much more of in 2009.

Microformats are “a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards” – essentially small html markup standards for representing specific kinds of data, like contacts, events, and relationships between people.

In this post we’ll look at three microformats tools for popular browsers:

1. The Operator plugin for Firefox
2. The Safari Microformats Plugin
3. The Microsoft Oomph! Add-in for Internet Explorer

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