Image via CrunchBase

In this edition of Living in the Clouds Series, I am going to talk about a startup, created on a nerd out session by a bunch of techies and film/tv producers, that is creating quite a bit of buzz recently. This service can be considered as music video on the clouds or slideshow on the clouds or, during holiday times, greeting cards on the clouds. This service lets users to select photos and music and churns out amazing music videos.

I love this service for two reasons. First, it falls into the SaaS category in terms of their service offerings. Second, they are a zero infrastructure company using Amazon Web Services and Rightscale for their entire operations. They use S3 to store photos and music, EC2 for video processing and SQS to take care of their queuing needs. In short, this is a 100% unadulterated Cloud Computing company.

As it is customary in this series, I am adding a video that will help you get started with this service.

As I usually do in this series, I will list out the pros and cons from my point of view.

Pros:

• Extremely simple and easy to use. I mean it because if this company becomes a big hit (well, it is already a big hit after their facebook integration), one of the biggest reason is that it is simple and easy to use.
• Good collection of music for those who want it out of the box without worrying about any legal issues.
• Reasonably fast. I tried it just before Christmas (with their holiday greetings option live) and the wait time is not bad (thanks to the utility based scaling offered by cloud computing.
• Reasonable cost and I like the option to buy just one full length movie instead of forcing you to buy in bulk.
• Youtube integration.

Cons:

• Sometimes the free short video uses only 2 photographs with lots of unused black space. Since you don’t get the same video if you do it again, I couldn’t reproduce it. It could be one odd thing.
• Some fine grain customizations for advanced users will be good.

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