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Viddy is an adorable pinhole camera made of reclaimed parts and cardboard
Pinhole cameras might already be the domain of photography mavens and earnest summer vacation school projects, but does it look like this? The Viddy is a charming 35mm and medium format pinhole camera that has a glue-free construction and even promises to take less than half an hour to make. Better still, it takes design cues from the rolleiflex. It's currently on Kickstarter raising funds, and at the moment, the UK-based project is a quarter of the way to reaching its £18,000 funding goal. Pledging £30 or more will net you a VIDDY kit and includes UK domestic shipping. (You'll have to add £12 more to get your pinhole thrills elsewhere.) The camera even uses reclaimed spool for the camera itself, split pins to keep it all together, as well as a sticker sheet for customizing your hand-made camera. And if you don't like stickers, you're a monster.
Viddy gets celebrity backing from Will Smith, Jay-Z companies
Video-sharing app Viddy got a pretty nice financial boost on Monday, with backing from production companies that Jay-Z (Roc Nation) and Will Smith (Overbrook Entertainment) head. The New York Times says they join $6 million in funding that Viddy received from traditional venture capitalists in February. Viddy, released in 2011, lets users upload 15-second videos with a number of filters -- think Instagram for video. The New York Times claims the service currently has 10 million users, with an additional 300,000 signing up per day. Those number of signups per day seems unrealistically high, especially since Viddy posted on April 11 that the site has 4 million users, with 100,000 joining per day. If the numbers provided by the NYT are correct, that would mean more than 109.5 million would join Viddy within the next year. Compare it to Instagram, which launched in October 2010 and has 27 million users as of the end of March. Steve Sande took a look at Viddy last year and predicted that the app would be hot. If these user numbers do happen to hold up, don't be surprised if Viddy turns out to be Facebook's next billion-dollar acquisition.
Viddy for iPhone is like a mashup of Twitter, YouTube and Instagram
A new free iPhone app wants to take the ease of editing and sharing photos that Instagram has perfected and bring it to video. Viddy is a fun way to take short videos (15 seconds or less), trim them, add pre-set effects and then share the fun with your friends via Twitter, Facebook and/or YouTube. The app shows Foursquare and Tumblr as "coming soon," so don't feel left out if you are a fan of either of those services. Viddy also has its own service, so if you don't feel like sharing with anyone but other Viddy users, you're in luck. It occurred to me what a clever name this app has -- "vidi" in Latin is pronounced the same way and translates as "I have seen." That's a very apt description of what Viddy does, telling your friends and followers what you've seen with your eyes and your iPhone. To find out more about this clever and well-executed social sharing app, read on. Be sure to check out the gallery below for screenshots of the app in operation, as well as a short Viddy that was shared with YouTube for demonstration purposes. %Gallery-123752%
