What’s After MoshiMonsters and WeeWorld? MovieStorm and Stupeflix. #TG2009

by on July 15, 2009 at 4:51 pm

The real-time web. The semantic web. Augmented reality. It’s all happening right now. And for most Boomers not in the tech world, most of these new technologies will pass us by. But not so our progeny.

Taylor, my 12 year old daughter, like your children, has been raised on Nintendo, creating virtual worlds to pass time in the car. Today there are next generation online worlds like WeeWorld and MoshiMonsters from MindCandy, that are a new breed of stimulating, mentally challenging game environments. And as our kids grow up, they will be creating their own 3D movies with MovieStorm and promulgating their customized online videos with Stupeflix.(yeah, I know, bad name to translate from French into English)

These four companies were just a few of the extraordinary organizations with whom I met during last week’s Traveling Geeks tour of London and Cambridge.

Jeff Zie, Founder, Movie Storm - Cambridge, England

Jeff Zie, Founder, Movie Storm – Cambridge, England

I have a rule with Taylor that she can spend as much time online as she’d like, as long as 50% of her time is focused on content creation, rather than content consumption. After growing up steeped in the dimensionality of computer games, I hardly think she’ll be satisfied with photo montages set to music. She’s on her second Flip Video camera and prefers to create her own movies.

Tay and Maddie Making a Movie "The RatSkat"

Tay and Maddie Making a Movie "The RatSkat"

With the advent of MovieStorm, her generation won’t be satisfied with anything less than the ability to generate 3D animated movies like this.

MovieStorm 3D Room

MovieStorm 3D Room

Stupeflix was another impressive player on our trip, allowing one to go beyond creating a simple slide shows set to music ala Animoto. Instead Stupeflix  leverages the beauty of XML to allow you to create a standard templated video that can pull files into it to mass customize as many versions of the video as you need.

One application Nicolas Steegmann demoed at the Seedcamp event was a weather video that showed a US map, but filled in the local weather from a feed. Here’s a great article from BoxofTricks on how to use Stupeflix.

If these companies seem “far out,” they are not. They really get where the online users are going. The only question is will they able to reach scale and drive profits fast enough? The Mattels of the world should be investing in them now, because they are the future.

Coming up on DishyMix is my interview with Jack Lang, Cambridge Angel investor who has put money into MovieStorm.

Jack Lang, EIR, Judge School of Business, University of Cambridge with Susan Bratton, Host of DishyMix

Jack Lang, EIR, Judge School of Business, University of Cambridge with Susan Bratton, Host of DishyMix

Image representing Stupeflix as depicted in Cr...
Image via CrunchBase

Seedcamp Details for Stupeflix:

Twitter: @stupeflix

Email: nicolas@stupeflix.com

Website: http://www.stupeflix.com

Company Description
Stupeflix is a web service aimed at people and companies that want to generate massive amounts of videos automatically from their pictures, music and videos.
It comes as a fully customizable REST API and an embeddable online video editor.
Stupeflix uses unique technologies allowing faster than real time video rendering, as well as the generation of 10,000’s videos a day using one server only.
The public API that Stupeflix offers to developers is pretty much unique in the flexibility and level of control it allows.

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