Today's Tip to Win an iPhone4:

As you all know, we are hosting a competition for you to win a shiny new iPhone4. Share your most memorable holiday moments by broadcasting in real-time to your friends, family and loved ones that aren't able to be with you. Each day we will be posting a new, clever "Tip of the Day" to help you win!

Tip of the Day:

Sing us a holiday song! Rockin around the Christmas tree...
We look forward to seeing you!

Competition ends on January 2nd, see previous blog post for more details.

Share your holiday season moments and win an iPhone 4!

To celebrate the holiday season, we thought of a little treat for you to share your most memorable holiday moments.

So now is a great time to grab your phone and webcam and take part in our holiday competition to win an iPhone 4!

How to participate?

- FIRE UP A LIVE STREAM showing of the most spectacular, awkward, lyrical, weird, fun, hilarious or extraordinary moments of your holiday time

- INCLUDE THE TAG #Dec2010 in the video title (be sure the broadcast is publicly available to automatically participate in our competition)

And yes - you're allowed to create as many broadcasts as you want.

The video generating the most views and the most appreciation from the Bambuser Crew all together will make a happy winner of this new, shiny, SIM unlocked iPhone 4.

The competition starts today and ends at 8pm GMT on January 2nd 2011. Be quick!

And don’t forget to follow-up on our twitter and Facebook pages to get tips and increase your chance to win.

The image shown is for illustrative purposes only.

Terms and conditions

1. The competition is running from the 15th of December to 8 pm (GMT) the 2nd of January 2011.
2. The winners must be aged 13 years or over.
   
3. This promotion may be conducted over several different websites simultaneously.
4. User can broadcast as many videos as they’d like to participate.
5. The broadcast needs to be publicly available on bambuser.com until at least January 9th 2011
   
6. An email will be sent to the winner informing them of their win.
7. If you are a winner, simply follow the instructions on the email within 30 days of receiving it and your prize will be sent to you within 28 days.
8. Only persons registered with Bambuser are eligible.
9. Prizes must be claimed within 14 days. Unclaimed prizes will be void.
10. Bambuser reserves the right to withdraw this competition at any time.

We're live on Samsung bada!

We are constantly extending our list of supported devices and platforms.

Anyone with Samsung's first bada device, the Samsung Wave, can now use Bambuser to share experiences from their mobile phone in real time. Bambuser for bada lets you broadcast using the front or back camera, geo-tag your broadcasts and share them with your friends and favourite social networks.

Bambuser for bada is available for download in Samsung Apps and the application can be installed either directly on your phone or through Samsung Kies.

This first version of the application officially supports the Samsung Wave (S8500). Future versions will bring support for more models and features, as Samsung adds more models to the platform. The application participated in Samsung's global bada developer challenge with over 2000 other contestants and was, after a long wait, announced a device phase winner!


Feel free to share your feedback with us so we can keep on improving the Bambuser experience.

Bambuser technology awarded Social Innovation Award.

You cannot do everything yourself, you cannot be everywhere at once. That is why we always tried hard to open up for external innovation on the Bambuser platform. Our friends over at LiveResponse and their dutch partner RESPOND just got awarded based on their fantastic service built on our API´s.

The LiveResponse partner RESPOND in the Netherlands was yesterday the winner of a Social Innovation Award.

The award was given to Respond for the innovative work of using mobile live-video solutions to improve communication between safety authorities and citizens. Key enabling technologies in the concept called SafeCity are provided by LiveResponse and Bambuser.

We are very happy on behalf of Respond and deeply honored that LiveResponse is seen as fundamental technology for social innovation.

Helping citizen journalism evolve

As many of you have probably read in the news, the recent election in Egypt has been marred with claims of violence, vote rigging and general unrest. Alongside a voice on Twitter and Facebook, users flocked in their thousands to stream their live footage on Bambuser, enabling everyone to share their side of the story, with journalists barred from covering the event on the ground. Over 10,000 live videos have been streamed over the past few days on Bambuser, capturing events in the lead up, during and post-election, a tenfold increase in daily broadcasts, with videos continuing to come in even now. One of the key visions from our founders in creating Bambuser was to support citizen journalism and the freedom of all to report, and we are proud to be enabling people all over the world with their own voice.

We very much look forward to hearing what you have to say on the issue of ‘citizen journalism’ and encourage you to debate, share your thoughts and experiences here with us.



Hear what others have to say

We are hiring

The person we're looking for is an experienced marketer, with an outstanding track record of creating and executing strategies to build user base, usage and brand. Someone who can be a strategic contributor as a hand-on doer. This person should be driven and excited by huge user growth while being as cost effectively as possible, with the creative ability to do a lot with minimum budget. She/He will be responsible for all initiated marketing activities and associated budget.

The right person will also have:
- A vast knowledge in both on-line and mobile marketing and has previously been successful in building user base in on-line and mobile services

- Very good understanding of how social media works and what drives virality

- Good experience from closing international partnerships

- Experience in user communication accross all communication channels including PR, email, blog, SEO and more.

- Good knowledge of SEO

- Extensive and documented global network within the on-line media/entertainment and/or mobile sector, especially in Europe and US

- B2B and multi-territory marketing experience will be a plus

- A great sense of details and will be metrics and results driven


Responsibilities will include:

- Creating and executing the marketing and communication strategy

- Settings acquisition, conversion and retention targets and being responsible for their successful achievement

- Leveraging the Bambuser brand

- Working with product to deliver a compelling and effective customer experience

- Driving offline and online marketing activities: PR, SEO, PPC, email, affiliates, blogging and social media, partnerships, referral schemes and campaigns

- Internationalising the proposition

- Managing the marketing team and external agency relationships including PR

- Managing the marketing budget 


We believe the person we're looking for matches the following: :


- Understands how an entrepreneurial company works 

- Full of energy and can share that energy with external and internal parties

- Looking for a long-term engagement with colleagues and the brand

A great sense of humour


Someone who will breathe, eat and sleep Bambuser
This person will work closely with the company's CEO on strategic and PR activities as well as close with the product and sales teams to ensure opportunities are captured and that communication, marketing and PR are consistent.

This is a person who lives either in Stockholm, London or San Francisco today. Travel will be extensive and working hours will be long but it will be great fun and a true opportunity to make a big impact.

So once more it is time to announce Europes hottest start-ups through the european techcrunch awards called "The Europas". Last year we finished on a strong top5 position in the "Best Mobile Startup" category. This year we are nominated in the "Best Video Startup" category. Please help us to be ranked higly this year as well, vote for Bambuser here

Check in support for Foursquare, Gowalla and Brightkite

The check-in hype is all around us, but how fun is it to only check in at a venue? Why not check in with a live broadcast?

For a while we have been testing this on Foursquare and Brightkite and we are now adding Gowalla to our portfolio of supported check-in services.

To check in with a live broadcast you need to connect Bambuser with the service of your choice, which you can do on your dashboard. When you start a live broadcast you can choose Share, the service you want to check in through (i.e. Foursquare) and then choose the location you want to check in to!

Updated app for iPhone

The latest release of our iPhone app, version 1.7.2, brings our live broadcasting experience to the iPod Touch fourth generation, includes support for the front facing camera on the iPhone4 (requires iOS 4.1) as well as support for sharing your broadcasts using SMS.

To share your current broadcast to friends via sms, simply tap on the Share icon and choose SMS.

As always, you can get the latest version from iTunes.

Private sharing is here!

We're finally ready to launch a first version of this feature that countless of our great users have requested. The sharing concept is based on your Facebook friends lists and as of today, users that have connected their Bambuser accounts to Facebook will be able to share private broadcasts to selected friends. It works like this:

When you start a private broadcast, the Bambuser application will fetch available friend lists from your Facebook profile.
When you chose "share" and then "Facebook" the Bambuser app will show a list of friend lists you can share to. Simply click on one or more friend lists that you'd like to give access to your broadcast.
Your friends will be asked to confirm their identity to start watching (this only needs to be done once).

The rationale for using Facebook is that many have their friends listed there already, which lowers the barrier of sharing, compared to if you had to ask all your friends to create a Bambuser account first. If you don't use Facebook, hang in there. It's likely that we add support for sharing between Bambuser accounts as well down the road.

So off you go now and stream birthdays, confirmations, holidays, weddings or even love songs to your special one(s) :-)

We're hiring!

Things are moving quickly here at Bambuser and to meet the demand from our fast growing community and client base, we're now looking to expand our world class team!

Currently, we're a team of 10 young and vigorous guys and girls and one old guy, with a burning passion for Bambuser! Our development office is in Åbo/Turku and our head office is located in Stockholm.

We're now looking to hire

- UI-wizard with a proven track record of creating state-of-the-art designs. The person will be based in Stockholm.

- Web-developer with excellent skills in PHP, Python, JavaScript and Actionscript and familiar with Drupal and Jquery (will lower period of introduction). A good sense for graphic details is preferable. The person we’re looking for will be based in Åbo/Turku or Stockholm.

If you're the perfect match for any of these positions, send your resume and some work that you're proud of to jonas@bambuser.com, add the position you're applying for in the subject field

Cheers

Adding yet another platform Maemo.

The bambuser factory has produced yet another application for a new platform. This time it is the open source platform Maemo 5. This platform is actually a bit special for us, not only because it has its roots in Finland, but because we can access all the goodies we want in the phone, such as hardware accelerated video encoders, to get crisp, sharp, full frame rate video.

If you have an N900, go and get Bambuser at the Ovi Store or from our download page.

To see just how good the hardware accelerated video is, take a look at the frame rate in the following broadcast:

Telia 4G tour continues

This weekend one of Sweden's largest music festivals, WayOutWest, is being held in Gothenburg. There will be several interviews held from the 4G bus, mobile reports from the festival area and of course a lot of behind the scene material all brought to you through Bambuser. To get a hold of it all tune into WayOutWest or Telia.

Facebook Developer Garage London

Jonas, Tom and Hans just got back from a couple of great days in London where we were invited to join the Facebook Developer Garage in a hackathon and the following Facebook-bonanza featuring Mark Zuckerberg. The hackathon was great and sported lots of ideas, appreciated advice and support from Facebook executives. We did some Facebook related product development ourselves and we hope to be able to share the results with you in the near future. Lots of amazing and talented people gathered during the two days and the atmosphere was truly inspiring. It was of course a pleasure to chat with Mark, Ethan, Mike and the other guys from the Facebook team and we thank Christian Hernandez for inviting us!

So look out for the latest Facebook features, soon in a Bambuser-app close to you.

Here's a pic from the Monday socializing. Mark from FB, Leif from RIM, Tom & Hans from Bambuser :-)

4G world premiere

Back in january when TeliaSonera released their 4G network they broadcast the press conference over Bambuser using 4G. This was a world premiere. Now this summer the commercial launch of 4G networks is happening in Sweden. To promote the release TeliaSonera is using Bambuser all over the country to stream live events to the public. We just want to give you a short preview of what the future of broadcasting can look like when broadcasting Live HD video. Here a computer, a HD camera and a 4G dongle is used, all nicely packed up in a back pack. We cannot wait until mobile phones can take full advantage of all this mobile bandwidth.

Go 1000 km in a 4 km/h excavator

Jukka Mutanen from Finland put up a Facebook group where he promised that if the group gathered more than 50000 fans he would take his mini excavator and drive 1000 kilometers through Finland - from Hangö to Kuusamo. Pretty insane idea if you ask me.

When you realize that the mini excavator makes only 4 km/h things get even crazier. 4 km/h is about the speed your grandmother walks. Accordingly, Jukka has to spend some 250 hours in the mini excavator to reach his goal. To please the massive crowd of 83000 Facebook fans and quite a lot of non-Facebook-fans as well, Jukka placed a live streaming web cam and a GPS inside his vehicle and is now broadcasting his extravagant journey live on Bambuser as well as on Facebook. Fans and followers can tune in and watch his exact position and a lot of people have gathered along the road to get a glance of the pretty odd carriage.  

We think this is an awesome and extremely fun way to use Bambuser. As of today he's had almost half a million views on his channel!

TV4 Live from Stockholm Marathon (this was national TV)

This Saturday the yearly Stockholm Marathon took place. From Bambuser's perspective it was a great event for two reasons. Our CXO Jonas Vig made it around the full 42km and you can follow his run. Our friends at TV4 were also running around with their phones broadcasting live while sweating and grasping for air. A great and impressive way to see the usage of our bambuser specific SDI server together with traditional broadcasting. Watch the broadcast

Great success for NRK

As we previously told you NRK has been covering the behind the scene action from the Eurovision song contest with Bambuser, and the result has been overwhelming. Quarter of a million viewers have watched all the action not available usually, including the first live interview with the Spanish contender right after the Jimmy Jump incident.

Norwegian broadcaster NRK to broadcast Eurovision Song Contest with Bambuser

The Norwegian delegate will in collaboration with NRK cover their Eurovision journey, starting today and lasting through the competition ending on Sunday 30th of May. The viewers can follow all the behind the scene action, follow their daily lives up until the final. We are of course happy to see bambuser being used in the coverage of the event as wikipedia states -

"The Contest has been broadcast every year since its inauguration in 1956 and is one of the longest-running television programmes in the world. It is also one of the most-watched non-sporting events in the world, with audience figures having been quoted in recent years as anything between 100 million and 600 million internationally."

Follow the action (in norwegian)

Check in on Foursquare with a Live video

At the Bambuser offices we love live streaming and we love checking in to places. We've heard that there are quite a few of you who fancy that as well... Therefore it was quite a no-brainer to merge two cool things into one. Starting from today you can connect your Foursquare account with your Bambuser account (go to your dashboard -> settings -> share -> and connect to Foursquare). Next time you fire up a live broadcast from the Bambuser mobile app, you will have the option to share the broadcast on Foursquare and check in on the venue you're at. If you've connected your Foursquare account to for example Facebook it will be posted on Facebook as well. Neat, right?

Try it out and let us know what you think!

Cheers

Introducing Customized Sharing

Since we introduced sharing of live broadcasts to Facebook, Twitter and other 3rd party services we've received a lot of requests for more customizable sharing options (yeah, we know... not ALL videos are Facebook material :-) To be honest, we feel the same way. Therefore we just released an improved way of customized sharing

With the new sharing functionality you connect your Bambuser account to your 3:rd party services as usual but you will now have the option to auto-post (as before) or to choose which broadcasts you want to share and where you want to share them.

The improved sharing functionality is available for Symbian and Android phones as of last week and today we got the approval for our updated iPhone application as well. Windows Mobile users, fear not. It will be available for you as well shortly. Here's what the sharing menu looks like for iPhone users (click on the image to enlarge it);



That's it for now but stay tuned as we have a lot of other awesome, fun and useful new things coming up including some really great updates of the sharing feature.

Cheers

Bambuser signs finnish public service YLE

We are very proud to have secured YLE as Bambuser’s first major commercial partner in 2010 and are encouraged that such a credible company has identified new future social media trends and a completely new way of using a mobile phone. YLE has seen the potential benefits and opportunities with Bambuser’s unprecedented low latency and quality and we are convinced this agreement will inspire other media companies to use the service.

Tuija Aalto, Head of New Media Development at YLE said: "YLE wants to connect with its audiences in new ways. Broadcast journalists no longer have the monopoly in spreading news fast. Learning about real time web and mobile video streaming with Bambuser is one way of implementing our social media strategy. During the pilot test several teams of journalists will be testing mobile video streaming as a way to document everyday work life as well as a new way to report stories. We think it is important that we know how to use the tools that are available to consumers. In that way we my also understand how people might best share their videos and stories with us and the rest of the world"

Testimonial video by Tuija Aalto is available to view here

Facebook fan pages integration

One of the most requested features since we launched our facebook integration has been the possibility to also send to your facebook fan pages. Today we are happy to say that it's possible. If you have a band and want to stream your next concert live, or if you are a company wanting to make a live press release about your latest product and get real-time feedback, you can now post your broadcast automatically to that facebook page.

To get the magic going, head over to your Dashboard, go to Settings, 3:rd party services, Facebook, Connect to Facebook if you haven't already, and then you can add the pages you want to post to.

Server Maintenance

We are currently performing server maintenance and adding storage, so expect some downtime today.