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Season after season I sit front row at all my favourite designer collections taking copious notes on the many outfits that catch my fancy, so that post-show I may pre-order my selections. What? Isn’t that how you all shop? Of course it’s not. And that’s not how I actually shop as I am neither celebrity, socialite, nor legitimate press worthy of front row seats to ... well anything. I am relegated to watching the collections with the rest of the fashion plebeians via Style and Elle dot com, and the less than stylish, You Tube. This would fine, except that outside of being given the requisite info regarding the designer’s name, we are given very little else, like where we can purchase said outfits, or even details regarding the garments and accessories. The fashion detective in me is left to scour the Internet in search of answers, because as any fashionista worth her Louboutins knows, nothing is ever conveniently housed in one suitable location.

Take for instance one of my favourite designers, Derek Lam. His site, while fabulous, has no options to purchase, rendering it nothing more than a virtual look-book. And even when you can purchase right from a designers website, it’s often a limited selection leaving you looking to outside sources such as Net-a-porter, Eluxury, and Neiman Marcus for purchasing power. Wouldn’t it be much simpler if you could shop without having to figure out which of the plethora of online shops the outfit you like is sold at? Like say right from the video of the fashion show itself?

I created an Overlay using footage I found on Elle.com from Derek Lam's fall 2008 runway show. All the outfits are clickable and give you the option to purchase that outfit, or in situations where the ensemble is is not available for purchase, I have linked it back to Derek Lam's official site, so that you can, at the very least, find out more details.

You are cordially invited to take a virtual front row seat at the Derek Lam Fall 2008 Collection. Watch and shop. What could be easier?

As we roll into full launch mode at Overlay.TV, I’ve been spending more and more time "giving the pitch" in front of anyone that will put up with me, but recently it’s got me thinking. During my opening pitch I would usually include something like, “At Overlay we are turning the passive video watch experience into an engaged interactive one …”. While this is very true, I’ve started thinking more about the word "passive". If I look at my life am I ever passive, either physically or mentally? More and more the answer is no. Now don’t get me wrong, as addicted to social media as I am, my thoughts at this time of year often turn to unplugging everything and taking a vacation, but this is a very rare event. During a normal week, I am never passive. Even when asleep my mind is invariably racing about some business situation. Then it suddenly dawned on me. The only time I am ever passive is when I sit in a movie theatre watching a show. I can’t multitask, my cell phone is on mute, my Mac is nowhere in site, and Wi-Fi signals are weak. If the movie is half good I passively sit and watch. So I ask myself, "Am I the norm? Is anyone passive?" I bet the answer is no, especially when there’s a laptop close at hand. We are always multitasking: Email, IM, Skype, Twitter etc, etc. We watch TV, but "work" on our machines at the same time.

This leads me to the question. Should online video be passive?

At Overlay.TV we clearly believe we enable the user to add layers of relevant (hopefully) stuff over the video. I’ve read the comments on the Google acquisition of Omnisio, and surprisingly, many of them are negative. They criticize Google for trying to make YouTube a more interactive and connected application. My view is all the power to them. If they can achieve this objective for a mere $15M then that’s amazing. I personally think that Omnisio is only a small step along the path of what YouTube could really be, but I’m very biased given what I do.

What do you think? How passive are you?

Ok, so it's already pretty cool that you can appear next to your favorite artist using the video record widget but I'm experimenting with other possible features.

Tyler helping Radiohead out

What if my surroundings were removed and I could appear right in the studio helping my favorite band out with my wicked guitar skills? Kind of Holodeck-style. That would be really cool. Professionals do this all the time, normally with the use of green screens or blue screens and a video editing program that can remove the color of the screen so that another image or video can show through. It's called Chroma Key.

Although it's not very hard to make a functional green screen, I can't expect music fans to erect one and light it properly. More likely, they won't want to even change out of their pajamas and will expect the performance to work in their messy bedroom. That's ok, I'll see what I can do.

Instead of subtracting similar colors from the video image, I'm experimenting with subtracting a known background from the video. This requires first getting a picture of the background and then in each frame removing any pixels that are similar to the background shot.

I tried various combinations of BitmapData.compare() and a DisplacementMapFilter but in the end the best results involved processing each pixel in each frame. Yikes... What I really need to do this efficiently is the ability to create a custom bitmap filter. Custom filters are possible but they're new in Flash 10 with Adobe Pixel Bender and well, were not going to require a Flash 10 player just for holodeck support.

Here's a work in progress. It's not smart enough or efficient enough yet and it cuts out part of your body if it happens to be the same color as the background but it's still fun. Oh, and you need a video camera.

I'll post updates as the code improves.

Clickable, interactive video by Robin Browne

This past February the Ottawa, Canada-based company Overlay.TV launched its interactive video service that let’s user add clickable links to videos. This means companies can link products images in videos back to their website to sell products. (Thanks to Mark Blevis for blogging and podcasting about a recent Social Media Breakfast he attended at which Overlay presented). [MORE]

Overlay.TV has hooked up with GetSatisfaction to provide our users with instant access to members of our team. Start a discussion, fix a problem, show us something interesting, or even help other users.

How can we help you?

Rob Lane, CEO of Overlay.TV explains the story behind Overlay.TV, in an Overlay.

Since we launched the first Overlay.TV beta back in February this year, we have been working on one key deliverable - the final integration of all our affiliates and the billing and payment system that allows Overlay.TV creators to benefit from affiliate commissions for products they place in Overlays.

While we are still in beta, this feature is now live. If you add products using the product widget, and share that video with your friends, fans and family you can now extract your share of the affiliate commissions from your Overlay.TV Account.

For more information on this feature, go the Learn section, and click on Make Money.

Ten Canadian firms that are using social networking tools and techniques creatively to win new business and influence customers have been named in an IDC report on the subject titled: 10 Canadian Web 2.0 Companies to Watch.

Authored by Krista Collins, analyst for Canadian ICT Innovation Export at IDC Canada, the study focuses on the following firms:

AdHack, a Vancouver-based, three-man company that provides a hosted site where ad creators can showcase their portfolio to various companies and potential ad buyers

dthree Inc. in Mississauga, Ont., that helps businesses contextualize online and offline interactive marketing campaigns.

Octopz Inc., a Toronto developer of an online collaboration tool that enables people work together on more than 100 different types of files.

Overlay.TV, an Ottawa company that has developed a way to tag items on videos and digital photos, and allow users to embed these on social networking site, Web sites or even blogs

PlanetEye, a Toronto-firm putting a new spin on travel Web sites by making it possible for footloose people to develop their own vacation tours using video, digital photos, online maps which can be hooked up to a GPS system.

Ramius Corp. This Ottawa company builds social networking systems for businesses using blogs, online communities, profiles, tagging and other Web 2.0 tools. Its Community Zero software was designed to help companies to build secure, scalable online communities.

SceneCaster, a Richmond Hill, Ont.-company that used its decade-long experience in Web services and rich media to develop a site where an community members can create online vignettes using virtual objects.

Standout Jobs, a Montreal-based Web firm that helps companies create job sites that use videos, blogs, podcasts, polling widgets and other Web 2.0 tools to generate better jobseeker contact and feedback.

Tomoye Corp. In ancient Japanese, the word tomoye means "revolution in the universe". This Gatineau, Quebec company is essentially an online expert advice aggregator for businesses. It helps professionals learn and solve problems by networking and collaborating inside and outside of the companies they belong to.

Tungle, from a Montreal-based company is a free Outlook plug-in that helps users easily share their calendars to other people without the need for expensive exchange servers. Users can coordinate meetings across platforms such as Google Calendar, iCal, Lotus Notes and even with people not using Tungle.

Overlay.TV is proud to have been part of this report and congratulates all the Canadian firms that are named herein.

You're right. Things have changed around here at Overlay.TV. This blog for example, looks different. And this post marks the first time we have had enough time to post since the end of April. Why, you ask, has it taken so long to post? It has taken this long because our small team has been working heads down to update Overlay.TV - the website, the player, the widgets and more are all updated now, and this is the last phase of our beta - 0.9 - before we launch our GA version soon!

We will definitely be blogging a lot more now. We will also be working pretty hard to get to the final production version ready.

For now take a run through the new site - let us know if you have any issues on our new GetSatisfaction site. And be sure to give us any suggestions, feedback, ideas or kudos in the comments here.

Thanks for sticking with us and enjoy the new site!

WEB 2.0: The Future of Advertising

The previous post listed 10 leading-edge Canadian companies with innovative Web 2.0 applications. Here we provide more details on four of them, each in their own way demonstrating some potential future aspects of advertising.

(1). OVERLAY.TV

Overlay.TV's digital image overlay technology delivers what many advertising agencies have dreamed of for years: the ability to tag various items ... [MORE]