Justin.tv on the Startup Crawl

On Friday November 20th, 2009 launches the first annual Startcup Crawl! Justin.tv will be participating with heroku, Scribd, heyZap, Yammer, Zendesk and Engine Yard for a tour of some of San Francisco's hottest startups.

The Startup Crawl an open-studio-like tour of SF startups, open to any interested folks (locals or those in for RubyConf). They'll have a shuttle circling between the RubyConf hotel and a number of stops in the city. The first shuttle is at the hotel at 5:30p; the last one leaves the city at 11p.

So if you're in the San Francisco bay area and want to a chance to visit the locations of the awesome startups mentioned above, head on over to startupcrawl.com and sign up! You can also check out @Startupcrawl on twitter to get more updates!

Y Combinator wants Justin.tv API ideas. We have some.

As some of you may have heard, our friends (and investors) over at Y Combinator announced yesterday that they would like to get applications from startups building on the Justin.tv API. Well, we agree, and we want to help. Any Y Combinator startup working with our API will get direct access to our founders and engineering team to make sure you have all the support and features that you need. Pretty good, right? Well, maybe that's not enough, so we put together a list of ideas to kickstart your brainstorming.

These are part of a list we made a couple months ago while thinking about what we'd ultimately like to see people do with our API. Thanks to Paul, Jessica and the rest of the YC crew for helping us out. Now, on with the list...

• Hardware broadcaster for video game console inputs - We get a ton of gaming broadcasts on Justin.tv, but it's hard to do. Maybe you can make it easier.


• Customer service application - Ever wanted to yell--err, calmly request assistance - face to face from that CS rep on the phone? We have.


• Professional services - Taxes, legal advice, etc. Sometimes you want to see a real person, but you don't want to leave your house.


• Video dating - Match.com and Eharmony leave out a lot of information. Some people have noticed but they're not using live video yet, seems like that would solve the problem.


• Remote education - We've occasionally stayed up late watching obscure lectures online. Wouldn't it be more fun if you could interact in real time?


• Preview a business - Anyone who's waited patiently for a Shack Burger or wondered if a particular item is in stock can appreciate the value of seeing a business from your couch.


• Real interactive gaming - Trash talking is fun. Trash talking to someone's face is more fun. I'd like to watch you cry while I beat you in Heyzap games.


• Presentations - Anyone ever use WebEx? Ever use it a second time? Yea, neither have we. Make it better with live video.


• Real "video" games - Make a game that responds to actual movement on camera that you can play across the web

Hopefully that gets you started. We'd love to hear any other ideas if you have them. Let us know what we can do to help.

Haunted Channel Design contest!

Think you've got awesome design skills? Want to get a chance to win up to $300 to buy cool stuff? Love Halloween? Then you've come to the right place! Starting today until Friday October 30th, Justin.tv is hosting a channel design contest! Top three winners earn a gift certificate from our friends over at ThinkGeek.

1st Place: $300

2nd Place: $150

3rd Place: $50

Rules:

The channel design has to be done on the new layout channel pages. You can go to your settings and on the Design tab to change it. After you've designed your page head on over to our Contest submission page and click "Enter now". Give us the URL to your designed Justin.tv channel in the title and description field and you can even include a screencapture of your channel page for folks to see, give us your Justin.tv user name in the display name field and a valid email address where we can contact you if you win, then viola!

For a great example of a channel that's been spruced up for Halloween take a look at ThinkGeek's channel here on Justin.tv!

Remember, to keep your submissions clean and appropriate! Any submissions that don't follow our general community guidelines around Justin.tv will be disqualified.

Winners:

So how do you win? The winners will be selected by you the community! Every submission can be voted on and the designs with the most votes wins! So don't forget to tell your friends about your design and get them to vote!

Super awesome thanks to our friends over at ThinkGeek for sponsoring this contest, if you're not familiar with ThinkGeek you should certainly head over to ThinkGeek.com to take a look of the cool geek toys and items they sell and certainly give them a follow on twitter @ThinkGeek.

Extra Life 2009 - Gaming for Charity

This weekend, all around the US, gamers will be participating in Extra Life. Extra Life is a 24-hour gaming marathon to fund pediatric cancer research and treatment. Many of our gamers here on Justin.tv will be participating, like Swiftor, Chingy1337, Brokendesign and even Justin.tv's own Tia Marie. They will all be pitching in this weekend to broadcast for the charity!

You can even participate yourself! Just head over to the Texas Children's Hospital's website and create a login. Then you can join an existing team, like GameOn, or create your own. All proceeds go directly to the Texas Children's Hospital.

Don't forget to check out Gaming.justin.tv this weekend to catch the action or sign up yourself to broadcast! Don't forget, if you can't participate you can always donate.

Kristinia DeBarge Live Chat

Come chat live with Kristinia DeBarge tomorrow as she talks about going on tour with Britney Spears, her new single "Exposed" and much, much more.


If you have a question for Kristinia, submit them below and she'll answer them live.


Don't forget to tune in Wednesday, October 14 at 5:30PT on Justin.tv

Justin.tv Networks

As many of you are already aware, Justin.tv has been going through a lot of changes and we've been thrilled at the feedback, support and awesome community that we have here. We're constantly looking on ways to improve Justin.tv and make it better for everyone.

We've seen a lot of features come to Justin.tv, many of which have been strongly embraced by the community and have made themselves an integral portion of the site today.

After a lot of consideration, we've decided that we will be removing the Networks feature on Justin.tv so that we can better focus on more features in the future and better support the present features that have been so strongly embraced by our community.

For those of you who use Networks, it's not going to just go away overnight. There will be about a two month transition phase so that those who are network creators can create an alternative and direct your friends and fans there. One suggestion is to use BlastGroups.

Once you have something set up as an alternative you can have it linked to your Networks page:



We know that it's difficult to accept a change like this, but we hope by making this change that we can focus our attention and time on better features that will make your experience on Justin.tv that much more exciting.

Live Q&A with Kaci Battaglia!

Kaci Battaglia's single “Crazy Possessive” is sweeping the nation as it can be heard on radio stations across the country and Kaci will be here live on Justin.tv to answer your questions!

Join Kaci and the rest of her fans here on Justin.tv on her channel: www.justin.tv/kacibattaglia, Saturday October 10th at 12pm PT/3pm ET.

Got a burning question to ask Kaci? You can either send it to on her Twitter: @kacibattaglia with the hashtag: #askkaci or by submitting it in the form below. Then tune in to see what she has to say in response!

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Boxee gets a little more Justin.tv, and we like it

First, if you haven't used Boxee you should check it out. Here's a short video demo of exactly what Boxee does and why it's cool:

quick intro to boxee from boxee on Vimeo.

Boxee is a great application. In short, it's a media browser built for your TV--if that doesn't make sense, go back and watch the video :)

Today Boxee is rolling out a new version of their Justin.tv application and I want to tell you about it. First, I want to point out that the first version of the Justin.tv application on Boxee was built 100% without our involvement and is a perfect example of what you can do with our API. We saw it and liked it so much, though, that we wanted to help it grow. First, we added a couple of new API features to allow things like the producers directory to be included. Ike Gilbert, the developer who built the app, also added some great new features like the ability to log into your Justin.tv account and access your favorite channels.

The quality of broadcasts on Justin.tv is rapidly increasing--the average bitrate of Justin.tv broadcasts has increased 25% in the last 3 months! That means this is the best time ever to enjoy Justin.tv on a big screen TV, exactly what Boxee is built for.

Let us know what you think about the app and check out Boxee if you haven't yet. Ike is great to work with and has been very open to feedback, so if you have feature suggestions I'm sure he'll be interested in hearing them.