<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" version="2.0"><channel><description>Our thoughts and ideas behind crafting a fun and special way to engage loved ones.</description><title>Kincast Blog</title><generator>Tumblr (3.0; @kincast-blog)</generator><link>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/</link><item><title>Closing down Kincast</title><description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;figure class="tmblr-full" data-orig-height="349" data-orig-width="462" data-orig-src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/bde1a7a09bfdd0119270b11ec7578b65/tumblr_inline_n36bmgn03V1qgpng5.png"&gt;&lt;img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/bde1a7a09bfdd0119270b11ec7578b65/tumblr_inline_pk8yozSkmj1qgpng5_540.png" data-orig-height="349" data-orig-width="462" data-orig-src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/bde1a7a09bfdd0119270b11ec7578b65/tumblr_inline_n36bmgn03V1qgpng5.png"/&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;It&amp;rsquo;s with much personal and professional sadness that we announce that Kincast will be closing. Ultimately we were unable to acquire enough users to make the business model work.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;We are very grateful to everyone that has used Kincast and provided us with feedback and encouragement along the way. We truly loved building and running Kincast. &lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;We also sincerely apologize for any inconvenience in migrating your media off Kincast. We realize this isn’t a fun task. While Kincast will no longer be accepting new uploads of videos or photos we will give all accounts 45 days to download media and/or share it.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Here are instructions on how to download your videos and photos from the Website or the iPhone: &lt;a href="http://help.kincast.com/customer/portal/articles/885316" target="_blank"&gt;http://help.kincast.com/customer/portal/articles/885316&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;For those that have an active premium subscription we will be issuing refunds to your credit card on file over the next several days for the remainder of the subscription period.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Once again thank you for believing in Kincast and we’re sorry we weren’t able to make the business successful.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Tom Belote&lt;span class="Apple-tab-span"&gt; &lt;/span&gt;        Raul Mujica&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Timeline&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;March 28&lt;/strong&gt;: Kincast no longer uploading new videos/photos or opening accounts. &lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;May 12&lt;/strong&gt;: User accounts will be closed. All media on Kincast servers to be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;</description><link>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/81029351078</link><guid>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/81029351078</guid><pubDate>Fri, 28 Mar 2014 18:34:06 -0700</pubDate></item><item><title>Hello Photos</title><description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;figure class="tmblr-full" data-orig-height="540" data-orig-width="360"&gt;&lt;img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/a5340ae284d253b8089721d9e596be50/67969b4b4052c954-74/s540x810/df3c8c2dcd0b635ab870920f647885636d200cfc.jpg" data-orig-height="540" data-orig-width="360"/&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;We&amp;rsquo;re excited to announce that Kincast now supports photos. With the new &lt;a href="http://iphone.kincast.com/" target="_blank"&gt;3.0 version of the iPhone App&lt;/a&gt; you can snap, import and share photos. And of course they&amp;rsquo;ll be automatically uploaded to the cloud. This is a big convenience that many of you have asked us for. &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;What&amp;rsquo;s also really neat is that by sharing a group of photos and videos you&amp;rsquo;re automatically creating a beautiful, “lean-back” experience of your special moments. No need to go into a movie editor. And you can bump it up a few notches with a few taps by turning on Flair to add music and fun designs. Delve a little deeper and you can even change the playlist order or edit titles..&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Other goodies in this release include:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Import in bunches. You can now select as many photos and videos from your Camera Roll to import into Kincast where they’ll be automatically uploaded to the cloud and available for sharing. &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Download links will automatically appear next to moments you share. (You can also turn this feature off.)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The mobile website your friends and family experience got a makeover. &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Consolidated the plans from three to two: Free and Unlimited. And the Unlimited plan got cheaper. It&amp;rsquo;s now $40/year.&lt;/p&gt;</description><link>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/58103177404</link><guid>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/58103177404</guid><pubDate>Mon, 12 Aug 2013 17:25:58 -0700</pubDate></item><item><title>Only order what you'll eat...</title><description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;figure class="tmblr-full" data-orig-height="519" data-orig-width="500"&gt;&lt;img alt="image" src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/0aed73797b49e4da7e009d58e4cbda57/64c220c792daa877-4d/s540x810/bd2f6260a470508ccf57c9bb0777005385316b0b.jpg" data-orig-height="519" data-orig-width="500"/&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;When I was a kid and the family went to a restaurant my mom always fretted about us kids ordering too much. She wasn&amp;rsquo;t worried about us over-eating or anything like that. It was about money and not wasting it. There was pressure and re-enforcement for finishing one&amp;rsquo;s plate. Never mind that these were adult-sized portions. &lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I&amp;rsquo;m the opposite with my kids. We tell them to only eat until they&amp;rsquo;re comfortably full and of course they shouldn&amp;rsquo;t expect to finish a dish designed for a 170 pound man. At the same time we&amp;rsquo;re trying to make them conscious of not over ordering because it&amp;rsquo;s just wasteful, doggy bags notwithstanding. &lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;In designing apps it&amp;rsquo;s tempting to ask for a lot of information. But we&amp;rsquo;re not big fans of typing on phones. Nor are we big fans of long setups. We used to think our onboarding process was pretty good. Then we took another look &amp;ndash; specifically at the account creation process. &lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;This is what we&amp;rsquo;ve been asking:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;figure class="tmblr-full" data-orig-height="568" data-orig-width="320"&gt;&lt;img alt="image" src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/247c32c555c5a9a4567368b83cc43288/64c220c792daa877-93/s540x810/80d41d33b0432200481be31642d696dd0fd21c8b.jpg" data-orig-height="568" data-orig-width="320"/&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;That&amp;rsquo;s five fields we&amp;rsquo;ve asked you to type in. Compared to others that&amp;rsquo;s pretty good but we knew we should be better. In hindsight, making an input field optional should be the first indicator that it&amp;rsquo;s not needed. Since we&amp;rsquo;re a sharing platform having a name is pretty important but do we really need a last name? No. Could we go even further? &lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;rsquo;s what we&amp;rsquo;re asking with our latest release, v2.0.6.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;figure class="tmblr-full" data-orig-height="568" data-orig-width="320"&gt;&lt;img alt="image" src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/ffd5990e2a1b86358075bcb415852cb2/64c220c792daa877-2e/s540x810/86f6af6fe3cc5725ab9600a759b07448b1b7e808.jpg" data-orig-height="568" data-orig-width="320"/&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Just two fields. And we&amp;rsquo;ve implemented type-down search from your contacts so your email address (and first name too) should get filled by entering  3 - 5 characters. We&amp;rsquo;ve gone from requiring something like 50 inputted characters to around 4.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;But what happened to the dreaded password field. Where we asked you to type it in twice and didn&amp;rsquo;t even let you see what you typed. Well, we went a little out-of-the-box and are no longer asking for a password. Instead, the app is assigning a unique password and saves it. For most users they&amp;rsquo;ll never need to create or remember a password. When you upgrade to new versions, the app remembers the password. If you buy the latest iPhone and restore your apps, the app will remember the password. &lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;If you access your Kincast account from a different device, like an iPad, or on the Web then we&amp;rsquo;ll prompt you to verify your email address and create a password. And addressing one of our pet peeves, we&amp;rsquo;ll default to displaying your password as you type it. I mean come on, how often is someone peering over your shoulder as you type in a password on your phone (or even your laptop). &lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;figure class="tmblr-full" data-orig-height="568" data-orig-width="320"&gt;&lt;img alt="image" src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/8f7e4272994e40c400c41f77a5a606f9/64c220c792daa877-aa/s540x810/7615fd75761685ce671878bcf9ad9af2971d3015.jpg" data-orig-height="568" data-orig-width="320"/&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;So hopefully we&amp;rsquo;re doing a better job of only asking for what the experience really needs. Now If I could only pass on dessert next time.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</description><link>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/51080590806</link><guid>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/51080590806</guid><pubDate>Wed, 22 May 2013 10:40:00 -0700</pubDate></item><item><title>"Help, I'm running out of space"</title><description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;figure class="tmblr-full" data-orig-height="333" data-orig-width="500"&gt;&lt;img alt="image" src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/96a754b2eb04bfcf77e377101128b21f/73273b586872a640-02/s540x810/98716c7c045c43cc75b0af66c299642e105b463a.png" data-orig-height="333" data-orig-width="500"/&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Our iPhones are great. We can load tons of photos, videos, apps, movies, music, etc. on them. Until…&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;At some point our device just doesn&amp;rsquo;t seem to be working as well. Well, many times it&amp;rsquo;s because your iPhone is running low on space, aka, capacity. This is what Apple measures in Gigabytes. Almost no one remembers if they got the 16 GB, 32GB or 64GB version. (Here&amp;rsquo;s a quick &lt;a href="http://voices.yahoo.com/how-check-much-space-re-using-iphone-3814596.html" target="_blank"&gt;way to check&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Anyway, most of us will run out of space on our device at some point. While Kincast does some clever things to minimize the space our videos take up, we realize we&amp;rsquo;re one of the culprits &amp;ndash; in a good way ;-)&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;But, we want to do better. So today we&amp;rsquo;re releasing two really helpful features. &lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Space Saver&lt;/strong&gt; – lets you determine how much of your device&amp;rsquo;s space is used for Kincast media storage - this helps make room for other content like movies or music - combine it  with a Kincast Cloud premium plan and all your videos will be safely stored and available forever without filling up your iPhone or iPad.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Low Space Alerts&lt;/strong&gt; - these will let you know if your device is running low on space which sometimes causes unpredictable behavior - combined with Kincast Space Saver you can free up space and never worry about what to delete.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;p&gt;So go ahead and download those TV shows for the airplane ride, Kincast videos will play nice and stay lean.&lt;/p&gt;</description><link>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/46613337499</link><guid>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/46613337499</guid><pubDate>Fri, 29 Mar 2013 12:15:00 -0700</pubDate></item><item><title>Playing nice...</title><description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;figure class="tmblr-full" data-orig-height="332" data-orig-width="500"&gt;&lt;img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/4589e554d4c13a685845b23f60987c41/6bf6ff7973e17271-ab/s540x810/ee5157a479a6f10931e54046fa7089668e5667b0.png" data-orig-height="332" data-orig-width="500"/&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;We&amp;rsquo;re taught from a young age to &amp;ldquo;play nice&amp;rdquo; with others. For Kincast that means letting you share videos regardless of how they were created. It also means making sure you can always take your videos with you to another service. So we enable the downloading of your videos on the Web App. &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;But what if you want to do something different with videos recorded on your Kincast iPhone App. Like using another app to apply some special effect. Well, we want to enable that too and we&amp;rsquo;re happy to announce that now you can &amp;ldquo;Export to Camera Roll&amp;rdquo; with the iPhone App. (Here&amp;rsquo;s a &lt;a href="http://help.kincast.com/customer/portal/articles/1045653-export-to-camera-roll" target="_blank"&gt;help article&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&amp;ldquo;Export to Camera Roll&amp;rdquo; is available in the latest update, &lt;a href="http://iphone.kincast.com" target="_blank"&gt;v2.0.4&lt;/a&gt; along with other neat features like:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&amp;ldquo;&lt;a href="http://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/45299144927/a-couple-of-touches" target="_blank"&gt;Mute the Recorded Sound&lt;/a&gt;&amp;rdquo; and an ending fade-to-black on Flaired videos&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Newly designed Relationship Picker with many more options&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;New, beautiful time bar for the Video Timeline&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;p&gt;And many performance improvements.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Make sure to update at &lt;a href="http://iphone.kincast.com" target="_blank"&gt;http://iphone.kincast.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</description><link>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/45690911367</link><guid>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/45690911367</guid><pubDate>Mon, 18 Mar 2013 12:44:25 -0700</pubDate></item><item><title>A couple of touches… </title><description>&lt;p&gt;A couple of months ago we introduced Flair. A super-easy way to add some, well, &amp;ldquo;flair&amp;rdquo; to your videos. For those that haven&amp;rsquo;t tapped around, Flair is video editing gone super-simple. It includes title screens, frames, music and playlist ordering. This feature is getting a lot of use and we&amp;rsquo;ve heard from many of you asking for a couple more touches. So we&amp;rsquo;re more than happy to oblige.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;One of the most popular requests is to mute out the original recorded audio. We totally get why muting out the original audio is useful. Sometimes the background noise is just too much like in a restaurant. Or, there is wind noise. Or, you just want the Flair music to be heard cleanly.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Another popular request has been to finish flaired videos with a fade-to-black. That&amp;rsquo;s another nice touch.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Both features are in the next update currently under review with Apple. We hope you like them :-)&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;figure data-orig-height="500" data-orig-width="282"&gt;&lt;img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/b4436425572433f24efe12adbab7c245/5d4d06dbbb5fb84b-85/s540x810/1d175ca9accace12a7b07921f74eaded577e657a.jpg" data-orig-height="500" data-orig-width="282"/&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</description><link>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/45299144927</link><guid>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/45299144927</guid><pubDate>Wed, 13 Mar 2013 15:55:55 -0700</pubDate></item><item><title>Making it fun and worry-free to keep your loved ones close</title><description>&lt;p&gt;We&amp;rsquo;re super excited to release a major upgrade of the Kincast iPhone and Web Apps today. Version 2.0 is a major step in making it fun and worry-free to keep loved ones feeling special and involved. &lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;We started Kincast by solving the frustrating problem of how to share, store and handle video. Especially video taken on a smartphone. How to make it easy to share and not have to worry about how big it was, or where to put it, or who could see it. We worked hard on building technology to get the video uploading, encoding and sharing experience easy and dependable. &lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;As we heard from customers, we soon realized we were on to something even bigger. Our eyes were opened to the basic need we all have to make our loved ones feel appreciated and included. And none of us feel we do a good job of it. We saw that video sharing was playing an important part but could do much more. With renewed vigor, we embraced the challenge of making your loved ones feel special &amp;ndash; turning every good thought you have of a loved one into something they can enjoy.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;With our partners at &lt;a href="http://sproutbox.com" target="_blank"&gt;SproutBox&lt;/a&gt;, we&amp;rsquo;re excited about today&amp;rsquo;s new products that evolve from pure video sharing to a communications platform for loved ones to engage in simple, frequent and impactful ways. Specifically, Kincast 2.0 includes:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Chat.&lt;/strong&gt; Every share starts a chat – giving loved ones an easy way to say thanks and join the conversation without having to create an account.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Say Hello.&lt;/strong&gt; Our video messaging feature is an easy way to say hello. It’s more personal than a phone call and easier than writing.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Video Greeting Cards.&lt;/strong&gt; A new, neat way to reach out on holidays and special events – helping you stand out and show you really care. Plus it’s personal, fast and free.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Another goal was to step up the user experience. This resulted in a beautiful new user interface, the addition of Flair (a fun way to add sizzle to your videos with professionally designed frames, music and titles), and a “scroll-friendly,” immersive timeline.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;We hope you enjoy Kincast 2.0 and look forward to hearing from you as we continue on our mission to make your loved ones feel special!&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;figure class="tmblr-full" data-orig-height="431" data-orig-width="500"&gt;&lt;img alt="image" src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/8ec47964dcd96b533fa99914507652ea/395f2ae84e07f9b2-02/s540x810/0bd9d842dceb45c59b1aca4dea0e21caf1bbc3ee.png" data-orig-height="431" data-orig-width="500"/&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</description><link>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/37807912236</link><guid>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/37807912236</guid><pubDate>Wed, 12 Dec 2012 12:51:00 -0800</pubDate></item><item><title>Easier and Faster</title><description>&lt;p&gt;At Kincast we pride ourselves on being the easiest and fastest way to shoot and share mobile video. For the latest version of the iPhone App we focussed beneath the covers. Some of the usability and speed enhancements include:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;Smart Sleep Management - Importing a large video? Or, watching a long one? Aggressive sleep management could turn off your iPhone when you&amp;rsquo;re in the middle of something. Well, no more with &lt;a href="http://iphone.kincast.com" target="_blank"&gt;1.9.4&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;WiFi optimization - Say your on the cellular data network and uploading a video. You suddenly realize that you don&amp;rsquo;t have much left on your data plan or the phone battery is running low. So you switch on the &amp;ldquo;WiFi-only&amp;rdquo; setting. Not to get to technical but your uploading will stop as soon as the current block of data is finished. Or, basically it will stop almost right away. And, any part of the video that got uploaded won&amp;rsquo;t be wasted. Next time you open the app while on a WiFi network the video will resume uploading from where it left off.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;Slow or balky cellular network connections can cause issues with sharing. Like sometimes identical share messages could get sent. We greatly improved the app&amp;rsquo;s ability to handle these conditions.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;In-App renewal reminders - If you&amp;rsquo;ve upgraded to a Premium Plan, you surely want it to continue. However, iTunes doesn&amp;rsquo;t support auto-renewing subscriptions for our type of app. You can only purchase one month or one year at a time. (You could set up an auto-renewing subscription on our &lt;a href="https://video.kincast.com/account" target="_blank"&gt;website&lt;/a&gt;.) So, we&amp;rsquo;ve added some visual prompts to let you know if your month or year of subscription is coming to an end.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;Along the way we quashed bugs that were related to using iPhone Contacts, location tagging and trimming.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;p&gt;We hope these improvements go largely unnoticed and you continue enjoying Kincast to share with your loved ones. &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://iphone.kincast.com" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;figure data-orig-height="247" data-orig-width="260"&gt;&lt;img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/b133d72091edbfccb43e0d5a3dbc975d/c738eda7d751a2bf-52/s540x810/0d31ec3fe841ea6c820137e13d447f7880201726.png" data-orig-height="247" data-orig-width="260"/&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</description><link>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/26934365803</link><guid>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/26934365803</guid><pubDate>Tue, 10 Jul 2012 15:48:00 -0700</pubDate></item><item><title>Latest features help sharing</title><description>&lt;p&gt;Folks have asked us for a way to figure out if their grandma or aunt was able to watch the video. It&amp;rsquo;s a natural question. Until we&amp;rsquo;re confident a technology works we like to test it out. Plus, not all our loved ones are the most tech savvy so we&amp;rsquo;d like to know if they need any help or were able to watch the videos.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;We&amp;rsquo;re excited to announce two ways to see if your loved ones were able to watch your shared video, on both the iPhone and Web. The first way will be with email notifications. Kincast will send an email once a day if a loved one has watched one of your videos. Here&amp;rsquo;s a screenshot of an iPhone email:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;      &lt;figure data-orig-height="360" data-orig-width="240"&gt;&lt;img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/d1cf4087ff5a480d951cf744d9707476/ece0780fa5db9754-c3/s540x810/a5f4eb7465c351cfc81e2d966c0ead9b6e307f00.jpg" data-orig-height="360" data-orig-width="240"/&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;rsquo;s how the email looks on a laptop:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;     &lt;figure class="tmblr-full" data-orig-height="340" data-orig-width="500"&gt;&lt;img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/a19bc41935e825314f759c02fd2b97d4/ece0780fa5db9754-e0/s540x810/abafdccb8d019746e8186522e4788c2906bff641.jpg" data-orig-height="340" data-orig-width="500"/&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The second way is by checking out the Activity Panel. Here you can check the latest status. Here&amp;rsquo;s how it looks on the iPhone App:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;     &lt;figure class="tmblr-full" data-orig-height="333" data-orig-width="500"&gt;&lt;img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/5af21d643fba639a551d058a4157b702/ece0780fa5db9754-e1/s540x810/00ef85f62c3a2d564c5b76ac4a24f59461798bdf.jpg" data-orig-height="333" data-orig-width="500"/&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;rsquo;s a screenshot of the Web App:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;     &lt;figure class="tmblr-full" data-orig-height="343" data-orig-width="500"&gt;&lt;img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/3e44f6674b36c10917be102f10fa74a8/ece0780fa5db9754-71/s540x810/4ec1b460a812d05a36fcaf714eb80dbc6613ee04.jpg" data-orig-height="343" data-orig-width="500"/&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Both the &amp;ldquo;Watched&amp;rdquo; emails and Activity Panels are premium features available with the $20/year &amp;ldquo;&lt;a href="http://kincast.com/pricing/index.html" target="_blank"&gt;Memory Starter&lt;/a&gt;&amp;rdquo; plan. To see how they work we&amp;rsquo;ll let everyone trial the feature a few times.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;All videos aren&amp;rsquo;t meant to be 30 seconds or less. And the sleep timer in iOS 5 has gotten more aggressive. What a pain to be recording, watching or importing video on the iPhone and have it interrupted with the screen going dark. Well the Kincast iPhone App has gotten a lot smarter in dealing with the sleep timer. No more dark screens when recording, watching or importing video!&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;One more goodie with this batch of features. The Location feature got more robust. If the iPhone is able to capture the latitude/longitude we&amp;rsquo;ve gotten better at translating that to a city location on the server. And it will sync back to your iPhone too!&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;To get the latest goodness update your iPhone App to &lt;a href="http://iphone.kincast.com" target="_blank"&gt;version 1.9.3&lt;/a&gt;. On the Web it&amp;rsquo;s already been updated!&lt;/p&gt;</description><link>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/21333825698</link><guid>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/21333825698</guid><pubDate>Wed, 18 Apr 2012 11:50:00 -0700</pubDate></item><item><title>A rose by any other name...</title><description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;figure data-orig-height="346" data-orig-width="202"&gt;&lt;img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/9e9e7989649afb3074be491dd58aee74/5d34414dfcd5bfb0-5b/s540x810/5a201478d6fb460440912e349e73114bf6a8e552.jpg" data-orig-height="346" data-orig-width="202"/&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The line from Shakespeare&amp;rsquo;s Romeo and Juliet goes, &amp;ldquo;What&amp;rsquo;s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.&amp;rdquo; While we certainly agree with William that the essence of something doesn&amp;rsquo;t change there is something to be said about making your brand easy to spell. So, we&amp;rsquo;ve changed the name to &amp;ldquo;Kincast.&amp;quot; &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;What, don&amp;rsquo;t see any difference? We know it&amp;rsquo;s subtle. Here&amp;rsquo;s a hint. We dropped the second &amp;quot;K.&amp;rdquo; We always wanted to spell Kincast with a &amp;ldquo;c&amp;rdquo; but couldn&amp;rsquo;t get the domain name until recently. While the double-K had visual appeal, whenever we asked people to spell Kincast they used the &amp;ldquo;c.&amp;rdquo;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;What does this mean to you. Well, really not a whole lot. Everything should have transitioned seamlessly, including all your shared links. Hopefully this will help more people find Kincast and we can continue growing and improving the Kincast experience.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;</description><link>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/17710711465</link><guid>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/17710711465</guid><pubDate>Thu, 16 Feb 2012 06:12:05 -0800</pubDate></item><item><title>The right way to ask for customer reviews?</title><description>&lt;p&gt;For an iPhone App it&amp;rsquo;s no secret that a great way to help your app show up on App Store searches is to have a ton of current and excellent reviews/ratings. (Also helps to have a lot of downloads and keywords in your meta data that are popular and consistent with your app.) Besides the holy grail of being featured by Apple, we&amp;rsquo;re convinced the next best way to get your app noticed is through App Store search.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Prospective users also like to see a bunch of 4 to 5 Star ratings and reviews. It gives us confidence that we&amp;rsquo;re not wasting our time or money. Amazon and TripAdvisor have been the best at leveraging reviews to &amp;ldquo;close a sale.&amp;rdquo;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;So, if reviews are so important what&amp;rsquo;s the best way to get them?&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The theory goes that if users love your product (or are really pissed off) they&amp;rsquo;ll go to the marketplace or site and write a review. But that takes a lot of steps. I wouldn&amp;rsquo;t be surprised if 95% of people that thought of leaving a review (either positive or negative) never get around to it. We all have too many to-dos. Stuff gets in the way.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;(Recently there were was some press about companies giving away their product in exchange for reviews. I&amp;rsquo;m all for incentives but that just feels wrong. You&amp;rsquo;re basically paying for a review and I sure hope that backfires for companies that try that.)&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;So what to do? Amazon will send you an email after a few days of receiving the product asking for a review. Like all email, most of it doesn&amp;rsquo;t get seen or acted upon. But Amazon just makes it up on volume. What&amp;rsquo;s an aspiring boot-strapped start-up to do?&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;One advantage of iPhone Apps is that you have the user&amp;rsquo;s attention while they&amp;rsquo;re using your app. You could time your ask for when the user has experienced some delight. For us, that&amp;rsquo;s sharing video. So for free users we&amp;rsquo;ll ask for a review after your 2nd, 5th and 8th share. After your 12th share and every 3rd share after that we&amp;rsquo;ll give the user the &amp;ldquo;No Thanks&amp;rdquo; option so they&amp;rsquo;re not asked again.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;For paying users we&amp;rsquo;ll ask after your 2nd, 6th and every 3rd share after that. Starting with your 6th share we&amp;rsquo;ll give you the &amp;ldquo;No Thanks&amp;rdquo; option.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;rsquo;s how it looks:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;figure class="tmblr-full" data-orig-height="392" data-orig-width="500"&gt;&lt;img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/32dfea788a988adf08618c44135fb517/21afb898b4d3be2e-5a/s540x810/3c96c368d3326aa02a825fba428e3927c145116f.png" data-orig-height="392" data-orig-width="500"/&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;If you tap &amp;ldquo;Rate Now&amp;rdquo; you&amp;rsquo;ll be taken to the App Store review page and we&amp;rsquo;ll stop asking for a review whether you leave a review or not. (We don&amp;rsquo;t know either way.) On the 3-button version if you tap &amp;ldquo;No Thanks&amp;rdquo; we won&amp;rsquo;t ask again. When we release a major update (likely every 9 months or so) we&amp;rsquo;ll reset the count. &lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;We&amp;rsquo;re trying to balance:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;making it super easy for folks to review us in the moment&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;getting reviews so we show up on searches&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;not annoying users&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;p&gt;Time will tell if we got this right. What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;</description><link>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/17001217520</link><guid>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/17001217520</guid><pubDate>Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:36:05 -0800</pubDate></item><item><title>When more is less - What's wrong with iPhone 4S video</title><description>&lt;p&gt;We&amp;rsquo;re big Apple fans here at KinKast. Love the attention to design and prioritization of the user experience. My co-founder is one of the first to buy the latest Apple anything. His friends now eagerly await his &amp;ldquo;throwaways.&amp;rdquo;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I&amp;rsquo;ve always loved how Apple moved to where the experience should be. From floppy disks to flash drives. From mice to touch. And, with the iPhone camera they prioritized color and light processing for better image quality while the rest of the industry just added more megapixels regardless of resulting image quality.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;However, Apple has stumbled with the iPhone 4S and video. Don&amp;rsquo;t get me wrong. The video quality is excellent. (It was already excellent on the iPhone 4 too.) But with the iPhone 4S they more than doubled the size of video files. So now, a one minute video is approximately 188 MBs. So, what&amp;rsquo;s the big deal? Well, most people want to share their video or at least get it in the cloud. (Apple even promotes this.) Uploading a one-minute, 188 MB video file takes about 24 minutes over a 1Mbps upload connection - what you may get on AT&amp;amp;T 3G. (Many folks don&amp;rsquo;t even get that.) That&amp;rsquo;s almost a half hour and a lot of battery power.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;iPhone 4S video at a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels (aka, 1080p) gives you more pixels than the iPhone 4 at 1280 x 720 pixels (aka, 720p). But is the 2.5x file size increase worth it? Will the video look that much better on your 55&amp;quot; flat screen TV?&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Well, Apple doesn&amp;rsquo;t seem to think so. Look to iTunes and Apple TV. iTunes HD movies come with a 720p resolution (and 3.5 Mbps bit rate) and they look great on the big flat-screen. Heck, the standard definition iTunes movies look great on the big flat-screen. Why did Apple go with lower resolution video for their streaming movies? It&amp;rsquo;s simple, they didn&amp;rsquo;t want you to have to wait too long to start seeing the movie and heck, who can tell the difference anyway. They totally made the right user experience trade-off here.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;On the iPhone 4S they made the wrong trade-off by choosing more pixels over ease of sharing. &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;rsquo;re a KinKast user we&amp;rsquo;ll take care of you with our upcoming 1.8 iPhone App update. Your videos will be recorded in a resolution that will look great on your smartphone, tablet, laptop or TV and will be optimized for quick sharing and fast uploading to the cloud.&lt;/p&gt;</description><link>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/12611435872</link><guid>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/12611435872</guid><pubDate>Thu, 10 Nov 2011 13:39:28 -0800</pubDate></item><item><title>Why Facebook will never be private</title><description>&lt;p&gt;We recently did an interview with Robert Scoble, (@Scobleizer ).  You can see it &lt;a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IN4WSyqVdUU" target="_blank"&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.  Robert was very gracious with us.  That&amp;rsquo;s despite him not being a great fit for KinKast.  If you&amp;rsquo;ve read Scoble, you know he is in the business of discovering cool new things and building a public brand.  He lives his life publicly.  That&amp;rsquo;s cool.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Where we disagree is on the assertion that Facebook is the place for &amp;ldquo;&lt;a href="http://scobleizer.com/2011/08/23/facebooks-new-privacy-and-sharing-defenses-its-quite-nice/" target="_blank"&gt;folks to talk to their PRIVATE families and friends&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot;  One of the things that makes Facebook great is how easy it is to be found and &amp;quot;friended.&amp;quot;  I especially love reconnecting with an old classmate or colleagues.  Even if the conversation is only 3 or 4 short messages and usually ending with me not answering yet another open-ended question, I still love it.  I don&amp;rsquo;t know.  I think I love the nostalgia of it.  I also like having some way to get back in touch with my old classmate or colleague, even though I know I never will.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The consequence of this is that my friends list grows.  It&amp;rsquo;s no longer my &amp;quot;private&amp;rdquo; family and friends but a superset of really close friends, old work friends, new work friends, kinda friends, not really friends anymore and close family and not so close family.  I could un-friend folks but frankly I like seeing what they post.  Naturally, this affects what I post on Facebook.  I now have a semi-public persona/brand on Facebook.  Not Scoble-scale, but still large for me.  It&amp;rsquo;s definitely not an intimate place with unconditional acceptance and trust, like you have with family and close friends. (According to Facebook, the average user has 130 Friends.)  So, I end up treating it like it&amp;rsquo;s public and that affects what I post.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Is this Facebook&amp;rsquo;s fault?  Not at all.  And they&amp;rsquo;re doing astronomically well with this model.  It just doesn&amp;rsquo;t solve all my social networking needs.  Especially the more special ones.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Facebook recently released simpler privacy controls:  Friends, Public or Custom.  I applaud them for renaming &amp;ldquo;Everyone&amp;rdquo; to &amp;ldquo;Public.&amp;quot;  But in my experience Friends pretty much equals Public (for the reasons listed above).  I could go into the Custom controls but that&amp;rsquo;s a lot of work.  And frankly the opportunity to mistakenly not remember to hit Custom when posting is too high.  Yes, you can go back and change the privacy settings on a post, but jeez, that&amp;rsquo;s a lot to manage.  It&amp;rsquo;s just too much to have to think about.  Wouldn&amp;rsquo;t it be better to have a social service that&amp;rsquo;s dedicated to my &amp;quot;really close&amp;rdquo; family and friends.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Facebook makes it&amp;rsquo;s money selling ads (it needs a ton of page views) and getting a cut of transactions (mostly virtual goods in games), so it needs people to have big friends lists.  No surprise that it&amp;rsquo;s experience is optimized to encourage large friends lists.  Again, that&amp;rsquo;s ok.  It&amp;rsquo;s a great product for what it does:  casual sharing and gaming amongst casual friends.  It&amp;rsquo;s just not good for the private sharing of my kids&amp;rsquo; lives.  That I want to keep private, special and forever.  (More on that later…)&lt;/p&gt;</description><link>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/9740170224</link><guid>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/9740170224</guid><pubDate>Sat, 03 Sep 2011 01:01:05 -0700</pubDate></item><item><title>Who doesn't love the sun?</title><description>&lt;p&gt;Well if you&amp;rsquo;ve been using KinKast outdoors it hasn&amp;rsquo;t been easy. Dark colors on an iPhone screen are basically washed out in sunlight - our bad. We&amp;rsquo;ve fixed this in our latest iPhone App update available today.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a title="KinKast iPhone App" target="_blank" href="http://iphone.kinkast.com/"&gt;Download it here.&lt;/a&gt; Then go outside and record some fun and fear the sun no more.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;figure class="tmblr-full" data-orig-height="368" data-orig-width="500"&gt;&lt;img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/a5865c128cae3f7b8742ca1f25a000c8/fdfcde1721ae7f28-2a/s540x810/c804fd305ddb51fba7fd6ce77ee66d6584e602dd.png" data-orig-height="368" data-orig-width="500"/&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</description><link>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/9118761333</link><guid>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/9118761333</guid><pubDate>Fri, 19 Aug 2011 03:56:24 -0700</pubDate></item><item><title>Did they get it?</title><description>&lt;p&gt;Seems everyone wants to know if their friends &amp;ldquo;received the video.&amp;rdquo;  (In our case it&amp;rsquo;s an email with a link.)  We&amp;rsquo;ve had questions on this and we&amp;rsquo;ve observed users sending &amp;ldquo;test&amp;rdquo; share emails to themselves (either the same email address or an obvious secondary one). We&amp;rsquo;re beginning to think they don&amp;rsquo;t trust us.  All kidding aside, it&amp;rsquo;s very real that users don&amp;rsquo;t trust a new service and will test it first.  &lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;We&amp;rsquo;ve had a &amp;ldquo;cc&amp;rdquo; option on share emails from the web app and everyone used it.  So now were rolling out Share Confirmation emails for all users.  It will include who you shared with and  thumbnails of the videos that were shared.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;figure data-orig-height="486" data-orig-width="250"&gt;&lt;img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/59f4e3f2f1b2460105eaaf3416eee63e/bce26e2551fe638d-6d/s540x810/2e39dbdc90278eaf3859a5d582f8128ba82a4cef.png" data-orig-height="486" data-orig-width="250"/&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;To see the whole email, check out the &amp;ldquo;laptop&amp;rdquo; version here: &lt;a href="http://on.fb.me/qdh21u" target="_blank"&gt;http://on.fb.me/qdh21u&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;(We also like that we&amp;rsquo;re getting some air time for Kobe, our sea otter.)&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;So, what&amp;rsquo;s the next question?  From our research it&amp;rsquo;s pretty clear:  Did they watch the video?&lt;/p&gt;</description><link>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/7392366699</link><guid>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/7392366699</guid><pubDate>Fri, 08 Jul 2011 13:40:08 -0700</pubDate></item><item><title>Extend your videos stay</title><description>&lt;p&gt;Hi KinKasters,&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Today we&amp;rsquo;re introducing subscriptions. As you may have read on our &lt;a href="http://kinkast.com/pricing/" target="_blank"&gt;website&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href="http://iphone.kinkast.com/" target="_blank"&gt;App Store page&lt;/a&gt;, KinKast gives every video 30 days of free online storage.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;We feel 30 days is enough time to let your friends see your shared videos.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;However, many folks have asked to keep their videos permanently stored online in the KinKast Cloud. This is a great way to ensure your videos are safe forever as well as instantly available to you and your trusted friends.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;How safe? Well, every video uploaded to KinKast is processed and stored in three separate geographically-located data centers. This helps guard against not only physical hard disk failures but also regional natural disasters. It&amp;rsquo;s really the best and meets our need to provide you, our customer, with peace of mind.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;figure class="tmblr-full" data-orig-height="321" data-orig-width="500"&gt;&lt;img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/dffcba179dd78de52a9b4092abdc511e/4b625c7098d50eb7-56/s540x810/8ee7cdd26d1906e2cbec61aaed38565120a8bf9f.png" data-orig-height="321" data-orig-width="500"/&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;What will this cost? For unlimited online storage we&amp;rsquo;re charging $4.95 per month or $49.99 per year. That&amp;rsquo;s basically two cups of fancy coffee a month. We figured a straight forward subscription plan made the most sense for us as a business and for you as a consumer. We&amp;rsquo;ll make money and you&amp;rsquo;ll have a stable video partner that isn&amp;rsquo;t relying on risky advertising schemes.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Whether you upgrade to a Premium Plan or use us just for &amp;ldquo;30-day&amp;rdquo; sharing, we&amp;rsquo;re delighted to have you onboard. We&amp;rsquo;ll continue to treat your videos with the same care we take with ours and look forward to delivering you more exciting innovations.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;On behalf of your friends and family, thanks for sharing. And, thanks for using KinKast!&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;All the best,&lt;br/&gt;Raul…&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;p.s. Feel free to reply with questions or feedback. Also check us out on &lt;a href="http://facebook.com/kinkast" target="_blank"&gt;Facebook.&lt;/a&gt; Liking us there would be nice too :-)&lt;/p&gt;</description><link>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/7089437330</link><guid>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/7089437330</guid><pubDate>Thu, 30 Jun 2011 11:54:53 -0700</pubDate></item><item><title>When less is more</title><description>&lt;p&gt;We track a lot of stats at KinKast.  It gives us the best window into how people are using the product.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;We also strive for simplicity.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;rsquo;s look at our Share form.  We provide default text and visually prompt the user to enter a Subject and Message.  Pretty standard stuff, right.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;figure data-orig-height="380" data-orig-width="254"&gt;&lt;img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/e964c00acb4051ea06a0ce274c6fde8a/51d5fc21de9936d9-85/s540x810/4eba2f5a5b09941b7e011236abb9edebe41bc660.png" data-orig-height="380" data-orig-width="254"/&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Well, we found that while 80% of users personalize the subject or message.  Almost no one personalizes both the subject or message.  Sounds like an opportunity to simplify.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;So, in the next KinKast iPhone app update we&amp;rsquo;ve removed the subject field.  What will go in the subject line of the emails?  LIke web mail services, we&amp;rsquo;ll include part of the message.  (This should also improve our &amp;ldquo;don&amp;rsquo;t mistake us for spam&amp;rdquo; profile.)&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;figure data-orig-height="380" data-orig-width="254"&gt;&lt;img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/91211dc12caada3a9817370087322c07/51d5fc21de9936d9-d1/s540x810/2f32202172590fb6c66c63bbc475d018655c32c7.png" data-orig-height="380" data-orig-width="254"/&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;In hindsight this is terribly obvious.  And we beat ourselves up a little for not starting this way.  But we&amp;rsquo;re happy the stats showed us the way and we have a better user experience.  (Of course, now we&amp;rsquo;re worried about what else we&amp;rsquo;re missing!)&lt;/p&gt;</description><link>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/5672648305</link><guid>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/5672648305</guid><pubDate>Fri, 20 May 2011 12:16:52 -0700</pubDate></item><item><title>Thoughts on Flip's Demise</title><description>&lt;p&gt;This may sound odd coming from the co-founder of KinKast, which makes a great video recording and sharing iPhone app, but I think there may be a place for pocket camcorders.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;It&amp;rsquo;s true that the smartphone + video recording app pretty much replaces the pocket camcorder&amp;rsquo;s functionality.  And being able to share right away and upload videos wirelessly in the background is awesome.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;However the smartphone&amp;rsquo;s versatility is also it&amp;rsquo;s weakness.  You use it so much that  at some point you run out of battery.  This happened to me this week.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;We were at an amusement park.  I recorded several short videos and shared them right away.  Before I knew it I had about 8 minutes of video that had been uploaded.  Uploading video sucks up battery. (Disclaimer: this experience happened before updating to iOS 4.3.2 which is expected to increase battery life by 2 - 5x)  &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;By three o'clock I got the dreaded &amp;ldquo;20% of battery left&amp;rdquo; alert.  And I still needed to use my iPhone for texting, email, maps and maybe an emergency phone call.  Would&amp;rsquo;ve been nice to have a pocket camcorder for the rest of the day.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Now, we could get smarter about battery usage in the app like turning off uploading for the day when reaching a battery threshold.  And, iOS 4.3.2 improves wireless battery usage greatly.  But, I&amp;rsquo;m not recycling my pocket camcorder just yet. &lt;/p&gt;</description><link>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/4884744330</link><guid>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/4884744330</guid><pubDate>Sat, 23 Apr 2011 20:00:05 -0700</pubDate></item><item><title>Phone first, Laptop second</title><description>&lt;p&gt;We&amp;rsquo;ve always designed emails for nice big laptop monitors.  But increasingly we found we were reading email on smartphones.  And KinKast emails looked terrible.  Fonts were too small and everything looked cramped.  &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;What are our users doing?  About 30% of our emails (user or system generated) are read on smartphones.  Yikes, that means a third of our users are getting a poor experience.  We had to fix this.  (Of course we decided to improve our emails at the same time with less copy, less graphics and wider email-client support.)  &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Creatures of habit that we are we designed the new email templates for the laptop and then altered them for the smartphone.  Well this created a bunch of copy, graphic and layout re-work as we then edited the laptop templates to accommodate smartphone space constraints.  &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;When designing for an 870 pixel wide template you make many different choices than for a 320 pixel wide screen.  You can even say you get lazy when you have so much real estate.  Lazy delivers a bad user experience.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;From now on were designing first for the smartphone screen.  Trying to squish 870 pixels into 320 gets you tired eyes or tons of horizontal swiping.  Going the other way by displaying 320 pixels on an 870-wide template works much better.  And if you&amp;rsquo;re smart with wrapping it can look good without a bunch of coding.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;We&amp;rsquo;re getting better but still learning how to design and code emails so they look good on both platforms, work on the major email clients and don&amp;rsquo;t require a major programming effort.  &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;You can check out screenshots of our latest email templates at:  &lt;a href="http://on.fb.me/i7Kyvk" target="_blank"&gt;http://on.fb.me/i7Kyvk&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;rsquo;s the first one:&lt;/p&gt;


&lt;p&gt;&lt;figure class="tmblr-full" data-orig-height="700" data-orig-width="360"&gt;&lt;img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/304a155a2d6931b7e6416e93d02b7b54/3fbfc66718550420-b3/s540x810/88361daccbf7b90682926c8a390f16696499db08.png" data-orig-height="700" data-orig-width="360"/&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</description><link>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/4789665527</link><guid>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/4789665527</guid><pubDate>Wed, 20 Apr 2011 16:38:31 -0700</pubDate></item><item><title>A Comfortable Thumb</title><description>&lt;p&gt;So you know we like to record video on the iPhone with one hand.  It&amp;rsquo;s why we introduced the Flipscreen feature in 1.5.  But we noticed our thumb was never happy.  The poor thumb has to contort itself unnaturally to reach the record button on the bottom of the screen.  &lt;/p&gt;
&lt;br/&gt;&lt;figure class="tmblr-full" data-orig-height="400" data-orig-width="400"&gt;&lt;img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/1254dc433578496ba1c701f4f3056db1/da9725fced2717f9-4d/s540x810/9e3550558c5c758c10ab30cc954f970b600b9edf.png" data-orig-height="400" data-orig-width="400"/&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;p&gt;So, we&amp;rsquo;re moving the record button higher up the screen.  It&amp;rsquo;s easier and more natural.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;figure class="tmblr-full" data-orig-height="400" data-orig-width="400"&gt;&lt;img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/41ab417878e63bb9ac6648bceee940df/da9725fced2717f9-14/s540x810/aa033679a8b0a8fbe5daac40af02e96211070995.png" data-orig-height="400" data-orig-width="400"/&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/p&gt;


&lt;p&gt;Finally, some relief for the thumb!&lt;/p&gt;


&lt;p&gt;(Coming soon in v1.6.  For an &amp;ldquo;Early Look&amp;rdquo; see screenshots on &lt;a title="v1.6 Early Look" href="http://on.fb.me/hoKcoh" target="_blank"&gt;Facebook&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;</description><link>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/4444813491</link><guid>https://kincast-blog.tumblr.com/post/4444813491</guid><pubDate>Fri, 08 Apr 2011 11:15:16 -0700</pubDate></item></channel></rss>
