Smilebox is a company that provides consumers the tools to create personalized electronic greeting cards. It has aggreements with Hallmark and others and has become a major player in this industry.
Just last month, the company announced plans to offer users the opportunity to integrate video into greeting cards, making them truly multimedia.
Above is 5-minute clip of a visit to the Redmond, Washington offices of Smilebox by Robert Scoble for the Scoble Show. The segment features an interview with CEO Andrew Wright and a demo of the new service.
What is very cool about this tool is that it allows consumers to create multimedia messages locally by providing them the means to compress video and to create Flash 8 video right on the desktop. It is the final, smaller video that is then shared. So, unlike most photo and video sharing sites, the creation of quality Flash 8 video is done locally not on some server farm.
I think there could be important implications from this: Afterall, if Smilebox provides extremly simple tools to create sophisticated multmedia using Flash 8, I could see newspapers, colleges and consumer-oriented companies providing these tools for contituents to publish all sorts of rich media messages.
On2 Technologies provides the video compression software to make this work. The company explained its involvement with Smilebox last week in a news release.
(Coming clean: On2 Technologies is a client of Plesser Holland, the publisher of Beet.TV)
Smilebox
On2 Technologies
Flash Video
