Jing Pro: The First Paying Customer

Whoot! I’m stoked to claim bragging rights as the very first paying customer for Jing Pro. That’s right for a modest $15 bones a year you can get some real time MPEG4-AVC (h.264) recording and transcoding goodness sans branding and I beat all you people to the punch! Slackers!! Ahem, well I did cheat and use insider connections, but its a dog eat dog world right. ;-)

Here’s the very first customer email to get sent out:

Finally some proof that it pays to know TechSmith’s Sales Manager Brian “Tour de” Lesperance (get a real golf game Tour):

It took a lot of effort by a lot of people to get this crazy little “what if” from a backyard project to full blow product–I’m just happy and proud to have played a small part. Thanks peeps–it was a fantastic ride (I’m affectionately flipping you all the bird right now). ;-)

If you want more info about Jing (free) or Jing Pro ($14.95 a year) check out Tony’s (Jing Product Manager) blog post or visit the various links sprinkled on this page.

Macworld Bound Jing Demo Machine

Tomorrow I’m heading out to San Fran for Macworld 09. I’ll be giving demos of Jing, my favorite TechSmith product, and yacking about video and visual communication. If you’re attending come on by and say hello–I’d love to chat. Oh, and if you’ve got any recommendations for for food and drink (ahem, beer) I’d love to hear them.

…uh, yah…I hate being subtle….we’ll be making a nice little announcement about Jing on Tuesday, January 6th. ;-)

The Ethics of Screencasting in the Read-Write Web Era

While watching a Charlie Rose interview of Lawrence Lessig I was particularly struck by the description of our uneven legal / ethical handling of copyrighted text content vs digital media.

Essentially Lessig questions why we treat the use of digital media differently from text. We freely and frequently quote (aka copy) text from copyrighted sources yet “throw the book” at anyone who uses digital media in the same manner. In Lessig’s view this treatment stifles ideas and creativity, inhibiting our individual and collective contributions to culture.

Call me a twit for saying it, but this has profound implications for screencasting. In fact, I used Jing to “quote” the section of Charlie’s interview with Larry you see above. Is this legal? Is it ethical? A small citation would seemingly fall under fair use guidelines, but there’s been so much FUD that its hard to ascertain how the copyright owners and their lawyers would perceive my use.

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