Screen cast videos are one of the most powerful ways to show off anything on the web. They are also quite difficult to do well. That sounds like a pretty sweet spot for specialization and sure enough, a new class of freelancers is emerging to fill the demand.

In this post we look at the work of four of our favorite screen casting freelancers. We think you'll enjoy their work and we hope that you can point us to some still undiscovered people making this kind of magic.

The Pioneers

Jon Udel, who used to work at Infoworld and is now at Microsoft, is widely considered the granddaddy of the screen cast. Another strong old schooler is Don from Screencasts Online, a site that has free and subscription tutorials about how to use a Mac. Don uses ScreenFlow, a wonderful Mac app you can buy for $100. We've been using Screenflow lately to make some screencasts ourselves.

The first freelance screencaster available for hire that we discovered was Molly McDonald, whose work at DemoGirl has made her the go-to screen caster for hire for many startup companies of late.

Here's a sample of her work, a screencast demo of mixtape site 8tracks.

The Up and Comer

Colin Sproule at InternetJogging has been making a number of great screencasts lately, most of them about using the Mac single app browser Fluid. We discovered his work when he made a great video about Muxtape in Fluid.

Here's another one he made about using Fluid and Threadless together.

You Just Missed Him

Michael Pick was one of the inspirations for this post, but now that we take a look we find that he's no longer available for freelance work! Pick's been hired full time by Automattic, the makers of WordPress. While we are happy for him, we are dissapointed that we won't be able to see his work around the web about apps in general. His departure from freelancing leaves a big hole in the market.

The Champs

The reigning champs of freelance screen casting have to be Common Craft. This Seattle consultancy found a hit formula in stop-motion line drawn illustrations telling stories about web apps. Their first, RSS in Plain English, is still the best way to explain RSS that we've seen yet. The production value is downright quaint compared to the more professional work they are doing now.

Common Craft's charming storytelling skills have lead to jobs from a list of companies, including Google and Twitter.

Here's Our Best Effort So Far

We just bought ScreenFlow ourselves and it's so much fun to use! Here's one video we made for a post this week. We're just starting to learn how to do this, but ScreenFlow makes it really easy.

There's Huge Demand

Proficient screen cast producers should be cleaning up right now. There is so much untapped demand for this kind of service. Who else do you know that offers this kind of service?

Want to be that person? Check out Beth Kanter's fantastic screen cast tutorial wiki. (See this awesome screen cast of Beth's, in fact.) The future of screen casting is wide open, but we sure are glad there's some great examples already for all of us to take inspiration from.

Mozilla just wrapped up its Extend Firefox 3 contest and, after reviewing over 100 entries, its team of judges has announced the winners for Best Add-ons, Best Updated Add-on, and Best Music Add-on. In the Best New Add-on category, the winners were Pencil by Dương Thành An, Tagmarks by Felipe Tassario Gomes, and HandyTag by Rémi Szymkowiak, while the Best Music Add-on category was won by Fire.fm from Jorge Villalobos and Jose Enrique Bolaños.

The contest was meant to showcase extensions that made use of the new capabilities Mozilla introduced in Firefox 3 and managed to combine this with excellent usability and the use of open standards.

Grand Prize Winners

Pencil, one of the three Grand Prize winners, is an easy to use tool for GUI prototyping and diagramming, which makes uses of Firefox's SVG support for rendering and scripting. It's obviously not the most exciting of applications, but it works as advertised and is a great tool for anybody who needs to draw up a GUI prototype quickly.

The second Grand Prize winner, Tagmarks, adds a set of icons to your URL bar that allows you to easily add tags to your bookmarks or to quickly bookmark and tag a page at the same time. Out of all the plugins in the contest, this one is probably the most immediately useful. Adding tags to a bookmark can be useful, but few people make use of this capability. Tagmarks also allows you to safe your links to Delicious in addition to your local bookmarks.

The third Grand Prize winner is also a tagging extension: HandyTag. HandyTag suggests tags for your bookmarks based on the tags you have already used, tags given by Delicious users, and tags HandyTag's keyword extractor suggests.

Fire.fm

Fire.fm, the best new music add-on, gives you easy access to your stations on our favorite streaming music site, Last.fm. Fire.fm works exactly as advertised and provides a nice way to play music through Last.fm without having to keep a browser window open. You can also easily access your favorite stations by just typing in a few letters into the URL bar.

Google has long been offering iPhone-optimized sites for most of its services, as well as a dedicated search application for the iPhone. Yahoo, however, had mostly been lagging behind with respect to dedicated iPhone offerings. Now, Yahoo has unveiled a dedicated iPhone version of its search service, which, among other things, integrates results from SearchMonkey modules and also does a good job at displaying Flickr photos or movie showtimes in the results.

One of the best features of the web application is Yahoo's Search Assist, which suggests completed search terms as you type. Also, if you are logged into Yahoo already and if you have activated any SearchMonkey extensions, those will also work in the iPhone web application.

Nothing Special

Overall, however, the Yahoo web application, while nice, can't compete with the native Google app (iTunes link) or Google's mobile sites for Safari. Just like the Yahoo web app, the native Google application also suggests search terms, but besides that, it can also display results from your contacts and it can display the actual search results as you type. The Google app also features dedicated searches for images, news, shopping, as well as a Wikipedia search, something that is missing from Yahoo's offering.

Yahoo's iPhone-optimized search does what it promises to do, but it is far from being an exciting service. If you are a dedicated Yahoo Search user, then this new site is for you, but overall, we don't think this will get any Google users to switch to Yahoo for their search.

Yahoo's photosharing service Flickr is one of the more wonderful things on the web and today the company made a small release that a lot of people should enjoy quite a bit. There's never been a really easy way to embed a nice slide show of your photos off site, until now.

The new Flickr slide show (example below) is available for the photos on any page you're looking at, meaning you should be able to display your friends' photos, photos with a particular tag etc. We are happy. Thanks to the fabulous photographer Scott Beale for pointing to the new feature release.

The above are the latest from my personal account. I've tested it and privacy settings appear to be respected. A couple of changes that would be nice would be a link in the player to each photo's page on Flickr and the ability to turn on captions.

I've been posting to Flickr far, far more than ever before now that I've set up posting from my phone. To do that you go to the settings tab, find the post by email address, make that a contact on your phone and send it there by MMS. I've also been uploading a lot of screenshots using the wonderful Mac app Skitch. I've also got my Flickr account tied to my account at FriendFeed, which gives me more reason to post photos since I know more friends will see them.

Update: Ruby points out in comments that this service has long done a good job making Flickr's slide shows available in an iframe. That does look nice!

How about you? Tips on making good use of Flickr in general and the new embedded slideshow in particular would be great to share in comments.

Last month we announced the launch of 12seconds.tv. 12seconds.tv is being described as the Twitter of videoblogging, where users can create a short video clip of anything for up to 12 seconds. We even challenged our readers and received some hilarious responses. The service is taking off nicely and has recently implemented a host of new features and partnered with a few great up-and-coming services and applications.

New on 12seconds.tv

Soon after their successful public launch, 12seconds.tv implemented a host of new goodies to make the service more appealing for its users. The most popular new feature is the daily challenge. The service asks users to respond to a particular challenge of the day. A new challenge appears everyday. While it's fun to participate in the challenges, users can also win rewards for their participation.

API Launch

Today the service is launching the first version of their API. To give users and developers a taste of what can be done, 12seconds.tv has partnered with a great Twitter client known as TweetDeck, another video-blogging service known as Phreadz, and micro-review site Blippr. Now you can keep up with your friend's 12seconds videos right from TweetDeck and leave your own micro video comment on Blippr reviews.

It's a Micro-world Today Folks!

The latest additions to 12seconds.tv's offerings should be well received by users and fans of the service. Quite frankly, I'm more than excited to be able to use 12seconds.tv from TweetDeck. Let us know what you think about the latest API offerings from 12seconds.tv in our comments section.

The iPhone has been making headway in its battle to become a business-ready tool. Obviously, the addition of Microsoft Exchange support was a big step towards being considered a viable alternative to the traditional smartphones used at work, like Blackberry and Windows Mobile. However, beyond simply supporting enterprise email, the iPhone platform has a lot of potential to cater to the needs of its business users, too.

Today, we're introduced to what hopefully will continue the trend of more "serious" apps for iPhone: LinkedIn.

The new LinkedIn app for iPhone launched today in the iPhone store. The app itself is simple, but VentureBeat thinks simple is perfect. We have to agree. Business apps don't need to overly complex or feature-rich necessarily - they just need to provide you with quick and easy access to information and data.

The LinkedIn App

The app features four different sections: the main page, connections, search, and status:

• The main page of the iPhone app displays a news feed that shows updates from your LinkedIn contacts - things like whether they've updated their profile, changed positions, asked a question, added a new contact, etc.

• The "Connections" section displays your LinkedIn contacts in a way that's very much like the iPhone's built-in contact list.

• From the "Search" section, you can search for contacts by name, keyword, title, or company.

• The "Status" section allows you to update your LinkedIn status, which many people use to announce what they're working on. Others have this hooked up via Ping.fm or a similar app so it's updated with their latest tweet.

However, one of the app's best features is its ability to copy LinkedIn contacts over to the contact list on your phone itself. You can download the app from the iPhone store here.

Business Apps Rock, Too

Although a lot of the focus in the blogosphere has been on "fun" apps, like Twitter clients, games, and social networking apps from Facebook and MySpace, the iPhone is offers a lot of apps for business users, too. In the business section of the app store, there are three pages of apps that include everything from virtual rolodexes to time trackers to expense recorders and various calculators. There are even IT-focused apps like VNC clients and command prompt tools. Yet, there could be so many more apps available here.

When you think of the types of businesses there are today, you realize that there's potential for that business category to explode with apps. It could be subdivided into numerous sections focusing on the different types of business users: sales, marketing, retail, accounting, executives, HR, IT, real estate....the list could go on and on. The LinkedIn app holds universal appeal for anyone anyone who works for a living, but more importantly, we hope that, through its adoption, developers will see the potential for building iPhone apps for business as well.

Iterasi, the dynamic bookmarking tool we told you about earlier this year, has just announced a new release that finally brings their service to the Mac. Previously, Iterasi was available on Windows machines (IE & Firefox), but Iterasi will now also work on Macs via a Firefox plugin. In addition, the much-anticipated scheduling service has also been released.

What's New

What makes Iterasi unique is that, unlike other bookmarking tools that just save a link, Iterasi captures a web page at a particular moment in time. This makes Iterasi ideal for saving pages that change over time or pages that disappear after you navigate away (like a receipt for an online purchase).

1) In today's release, Mac users can start to use Iterasi by installing the provided Firefox plugin. The plugin supports both Firefox 2 and 3 and works on OS 10.5 and up.

2) However, all Iterasi users will be excited about the new scheduler service. Like the name implies, the scheduler allows you to have Iterasi notarize a page on whatever scheduled basis you configure - either daily, weekly, or monthly. There are so many different ways to use the scheduler. The Iterasi team suggest you could use to capture retail sites with daily specials, for example. You could also use it in an investigative way to track a site that you think might be changing its messaging over time. You could even use it to track the changes on a site that doesn't offer a news feed for you to subscribe to. We're sure you can think of million ways to use the scheduler - those are just a few to get you started.

3) Another new feature launched today are "public pages." Each Iterasi user has a Public Webpage created for them called "My Public Pages" in the Iterasi viewer. As you save pages, you can mark them as private to keep them from being added to the Public Page. Anything else is saved to the Public Page where you can share it with friends who can then subscribe to it via an RSS reader or by using the provided widget.

4) One last feature made available just for Twitter users is the introduction of a short URL service. Using the domain http://sqrl.it (short for Squirrel It - since you "squirrel" away web pages with Iterasi), you can now tweet links to your Iterasi pages.

You can check out the new service in action in the video below:

Yesterday we wrote about Enterprise 2.0 from the point of view of the Enterprise, the buyer. The conclusion was that the impact of social media on the Enterprise was very big, addressing the very "nature of the firm". This post looks at Enterprise 2.0 from the point of view of the vendor, specifically startups. This is a 30,000 foot view, but we aim to get past the hype to insights you can use in your startup. Further posts in our recently launched Enterprise Chanel will drill into specific market segments, companies and technologies.

1. Subscriptions are the best revenue you can get. Subscription revenue is more recession proof than advertising and more predictable than traditional enterprise software licensing. As long as you don't mess up, you will have a low churn rate. Then your new subscriptions drive your revenue growth
2. It is much easier to get subscriptions from a business than from consumers. Sure we all love the idea of consumer subscriptions, the potential is enormous. But do this reality check. How many subscriptions do you pay for? How many current subscription costs would you love to eliminate or drastically reduce? What would your really (no, really) agree to pay for every month? We are in a serious consumer recession in the developed markets that may last a while. What was always hard, just got an awful lot harder. Selling to business is much easier, if you focus hard on the next rule.
3. The other 80/20 rule. 80% of enterprise IT budgets just "keep the lights on". Only 20% goes to new stuff. I learned this in the technology nuclear winter in 2002, when a 20% cut in IT budgets meant that no (zero, nada) new projects were approved. If you can show how to reduce that 80%, you get a better shot at the 20%. That 80% market is a replacement market. You need to know what cost you are replacing. The incumbents are looking at the 20% budget as well and they have the inside track. You have to attack the 80% to make it big.
4. "Parallel replacement" is new. The old enterprise replacement market was based on capital expenditure write offs. If the client bought a $1m license fee over 5 years ago, you had a shot at selling another license fee for something "better, faster, cheaper". In the new enterprise world of SAAS and open source, upfront license fees are the exception rather than the rule. Buyers prefer to hold onto the old stuff a bit longer until they can see either an open source or SAAS alternative. Replacement is always very risky, leaving incumbents in control and startups banging outside the door in frustration. So you need to show that you can run in parallel with the existing solution for a period until you are established enough to be a viable, safe replacement. Step 1 is run in parallel, step 2 is replace. This is what Google Apps and Zoho are doing to Microsoft office (I use both Google Apps and MS Office. Even though I use Office less frequently I own a license, so why delete it? When I get a new laptop I will decide whether I need to buy Office). To play this new parallel replacement game you need to a) offer a free entry point (the Freemium strategy) so you get traction with a low cost of sale and b) you need to show one very clear new value proposition that will tap into that 20% budget for new stuff.
5. Have one simple new "blue ocean" value proposition that any business user can understand. You need this to access the 20% of budget going to new stuff. Being "cloudy" is not a value proposition, it is simple]y a way to deliver your value proposition. The incumbent can always launch their SAAS equivalent. Your free entry level just gets you through the door so that you get a chance to upsell to your subscription; free is not a value proposition. You have to show how you will do something really basic such as either a) increase revenue with a low cost of sale or, b) reduce cost on an existing process or c) create strategic sustainable advantage in measurable ways. Most likely you will do this by enabling better collaboration/communication, both within the enterprise but also, more critically, outside the firewall to the "extended enterprise". For a startup, this has to be "blue ocean", a market that has not yet been defined by the incumbents. By its very nature, this means the market size will be very hard to define and there will almost certainly not be recognized external authority that has defined the market size. Smart VC understand that Blue Ocean strategy and precise market size estimates seldom go together.
6. SaaS ++ means that Open Source is no longer a problem. Open Source has been great for buyers but it has also taken the entry level market away in most segments and that trend shows no sign of letting up. That is bad news for a startup looking to sell traditional software with a "better, faster, cheaper plus we try harder" replacement pitch. You cannot undersell Open Source. That has forced many ventures with great software and strong teams into the dead-pool. With a "SAAS ++" offering, you can use Open Source as the base, add a bit of new code and bundle it all up with hardware and service in a monthly fee. Unless buyers really want to do all that in-house, using their dwindling internal IT staff, you have a shot at it. SAAS alone however is not a barrier to entry. Anybody can replicate it. Which means (smart) VC will/should pass. You need the "++" bit as well. That is likely to be something to do with viral, communications and network effects that create a growing user base and proprietary data coming from that base. That is the "magic sauce".
7. You need to become a very good financial and data modeler. You will need some old-fashioned face to face relationship selling to get large enterprises to understand your solution, so that the "powers that be" encourage adoption and do not seek to block it. But the business will grow one subscriber at a time and users convert to subscribers one click at a time. Modeling becomes a core competency. Modeling the costs of all the SaaS components (R&D, hardware, infrastructure software, software maintenance, system and data maintenance). Modeling the cost of subscriber acquisition using SEO, SEM, social networking, conversion from free to paid and inside telephone sales in a highly efficient funnel process that delivers the right $ per subscriber. Modeling the revenue growth with multiple what if variable assumptions. Modeling the ROI for your clients at various levels of adoption.
8. Most external market size projections do not help your business plan. Forrester Research reports that Enterprise 2.0 will be a $4.6 billion market by 2013. That is not nearly granular enough for a real business plan. You are not really in the Enterprise 2.0 market. Saying "we will get 1% of the $4.6 billion Enterprise 2.0" market is totally meaningless and will simply get you shown the door in the VC office. You are in the market of solving a specific business problem, for a specific type of customer, competing against specific incumbents and startups. That is how you need to build a market size, from the bottom up. This is particularly true for "blue ocean" strategies where the market has not been defined by an incumbent. Building the real world, bottom up market size takes real hard work and detailed market knowledge. Look for a small enough market where you can get 20% and take that to 50% share and then leverage that market to get 10% in another market. Rinse and repeat. It is an old formula, but it works.
9. You need VC, they need you but there is a disconnect. Since 2000, most VC have sent any business plan with the word "enterprise" straight to the trash. With good reason. During the nuclear winter, the enterprise IT market was dead as a dodo. Then the big incumbents got into the consolidation game and it looked like you would count enterprise IT vendors on the fingers of one hand. The cost of entry was high, needing expensive sales teams upfront and the revenue was lumpy and unpredictable. Yech. Better to back a few inexpensive developers building a free service that some big vendor would buy and figure out how to monetize. That was a great game for a while. Most VC now view it as in its final innings at best. There is a shortage of buyers, no IPO market, we are in a cyclical downturn for advertising and in a major funk figuring out how social media can be funded by advertising. So VC need Enterprise 2.0. But they have missed the early winners. Very few of the current Enterprise 2.0 startups are venture backed. This is a disconnect. The early players always find it easier to bootstrap than later vendors. Today you need capital to fund the ramp-up and to build distance from competitors as the Enterprise 2.0 market moves from "below the radar" to "early hype" phase, thus dragging more entrants into every category.
10. Vertical is not the same as Horizontal. Classic Web 2.0 services such as Delicious, YouTube and Skype are geared at mass markets. Anything that is more niche has tended to be called "vertical". That is confusing. Vertical means a specific industry such as banking, healthcare or manufacturing and sub-sets of those industries. Horizontal (applying to any industry) should mean a set of common and linked features used by a specific type of person in the company (e.g. accounts payable by Finance, CRM by Sales and so on). The general rule of thumb has been for vertical ventures to be bootstrapped and eventually rolled up into larger entities. VC tend to view vertical as too limited. Horizontal on the other hand is big enough.
11. Know how to deal with secrecy, structure and control needs. Social Media is about being open, loose, unstructured, informal and fun; no ties allowed. Enterprises are about secrecy, structure and control. Ties show that you are serious and fun is for after work. The ties and fun bit is just style. But secrecy, structure and control is real. If you threaten those, many forces within the enterprise will shut you out. It will be like the red blood cells attacking the foreign virus. On the other hand, if you go along with all the secrecy, structure and control rules of the enterprise you will lose the social media benefits of extended enterprise collaboration and innovation. Many people within enterprises understand this and some of them are in a policy-making position of authority. In general, the trend is towards loose, unstructured, "emergent business networks". So "make the trend your friend", but beware of the very strong forces of opposition and deal positively with their legitimate needs.

Conclusion

What is your position in the Enterprise 2.0 market. Do you work in IT in a large Enterprise? Do you work for a large incumbent Enterprise IT vendor? Do you work for a startup that is going to change the Enterprise world? Are you writing about this rapidly emerging market? Do you have unique insights or research to share? We would love to hear from you in the comments and maybe as a Guest Author. Email us if you're interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb's Enterprise Channel.

You can subscribe now to our special RSS feed for the Enterprise channel.

Tonight, Microsoft has publicly launched Photosynth, its long awaited Live Labs product that allows you to stitch your photos together to create a detailed 3D environment.  While most of the computation is done on your desktop, the images are uploaded to Microsoft's servers and Microsoft is giving all Photosynth users a total of 20GB of storage for their collections. The rendering and browsing is done with the help of Seadragon, another Live Labs product.

Windows Only

When Microsoft first publicly showed a demo of Photosynth in 2006, it almost looked too good to be true. Now, getting started with it couldn't be easier - as long as you have a Windows machine - there is no Mac version available yet. You first have to install both a browser plug-in and a desktop application (all done through just one installer). The installation was as standard as Windows installations get and finished in less than a minute. We tested the plugin in both Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7 without any problems.

One interesting aspect of the uploader is that you can choose a license for your creation. You can either choose a Creative Commons license, put the pictures in public domain, or mark it as 'All Rights Reserved.'

Desktop App

The desktop application does most of the heavy lifting for creating the 'synths' and seemed to make good use of all available cores. You only have to pick your photos, give your collection and name and click 'Synth.' After it has finished, it will create a score telling you how 'synthy' your photo collection was. Obviously, your photos need to have common areas for Photosynth to be able to stitch them together. While Photosynth does a great job making these connections, it can't work magic and our first attempts with relatively unconnected images were futile.

The more pictures you have, the longer the process of creating your synths takes, of course, and depending on your connection, the upload to Microsoft's servers can also take quite a while. In the end, though, your patience will be greatly rewarded.

Online Viewer

The online viewer is quite intuitive and allows you to zoom in and out, move around the picture and also go through the pictures in a 3D slide show mode. One nice feature is that you can also go full screen, which is really the best way to showcase your photos.

You can also embed a copy of your synth on any website and email a link to your friends.

The animation in Photosynth is astonishingly smooth and our screenshots really can't do it justice. If you haven't seen it yet, you should watch Microsoft's demo of Photosynth at TED2007, which will give you a good impression of what the final product looks like.

Different Way of Shooting

It really takes a different approach to shooting pictures to make the most out of Photosynth. If you often stitch together photos, you are probably already used to this, but Photosynth also gives you more freedom, as you can zoom in and out, or walk around an object and still have Photosynth recognize the common areas.

In our tests, Photosynth performed flawlessly, but we would recommend that you have a set of at least 10 to 20 photos to create an interesting 'synth' and the more photos you have, the more interesting it will be.

Caveats

A couple of caveats:

• All synths are public - there are no privacy controls!
• Photosynth only runs on Vista and XP so far.

Verdict

Even though we only had a short time to test Photosynth, it has already changed the way we think about taking pictures. Suddenly, you can do so much more with your photos. But besides the cool factor, we can also see a lot of other interesting applications for Photosynth. A realtor, for example, could use it to create a more immersive virtual tour of a house.

If you already have Photosynth installed already, you can see a 3D view of Venice below - otherwise, clicking on the image will take you directly to the installer.