Cosmin Ghiu Thoughts

On Sale – iPhone Refurbished

 

 

Today was the breakout news that Apple is offering the iPhone at a “reduced price” due to many former Apple employees turning in their iphones (allegedly).

The refurbished price is $100 the original (thats a 21% decrease). So the prices are:

• iPhone 4GB model = $399
• iPhone 8GB model = $499

Go ahead and order yours today from Apple. I have been waiting for a sale price since on eBay you can only find them for $100+ for each system (must be for all of those in Montana that need an iPhone )

 Though $399 is still too much for me, I am waiting for them to hit the $299 price range (perhaps the next generation combined with an AT&T phone plan?). Then I’ll order mine instantly.

roVideos.com – Ethnic Romanian Video Sharing

It has been a while since my last blog entry. I have been busy with my new role as a Web Analyst / Project Manager for a great company called: BOSSdev, Inc.

Among many responsibilities I continue to seek out emerging technologies and applications for the web. One avenue that I have noticed months ago is the fact that after the YouTube, MetaCafe, Revver, and more video sharing sites, there seems to be a wave toward “niche” specific video sharing communities.

So I have search on my off-time for some powerful scripts that can be used to startup such sites. I have run across many including: Alstrasoft Video Sharing, Clip-Share (A Romanian Script company by the way), Social Media, etc. Recently I have followed a new open-source video sharing script that quite honestly has impressed me head over heels considering the fact of easy of install and customization. This script is called: PHPmotion.

The script is a L.A.M.P. based architecture with the following requirements:

• PHP 4.3 and above (including support of CLI)
• MySQL database server
• LAME MP3 Encoder
• Libogg + Libvorbis
• Mencoder and also Mplayer
• FFMpeg-PHP
• GD Library 2 or higher
• CGI-BIN
• Be able to run background processes

The secret to these video sharing script of course is the web host behind them. I have had quite a few experiences with different webhosts. For example I had a site on ServeShare.com and they claimed compatibility for all video sharing sites but after hosting my site for a few weeks I get an email from them that they are closing shop. Fortunately, it was just a sandbox area where I was testing a script with video uploading capability and a community had not been formed yet, otherwise it would have been disastrous.

To end on a high note, I currently host the following niche video sharing site called: ROVIDEOS.com (obviously being ethnic Romanian its a perfect idea and I owned this great domain for almost 2 years now, prior to the YouTube bubble).

The webhosts I am talking about are: Cirtex Webhosting (Great Deal), and JaguarPC.com (Awesome deal of $29.99 for a Semi-Dedicated account).

Take a look at ROVIDEOS.com and I hope this small insight on the “niche video” sharing community setup helped. Here is a video embed from roVideos.com:

[video http://www.rovideos.com/play.php?vid=107 roVideos.com]