Rabbit Launches In Closed Beta, Bringing Pervasive Movie Talk And Content Sharing To Mac Users, TechCrunch
Rabbit Launches In Closed Beta, Bringing Pervasive Movie Talk And Content Sharing To Mac Users
In December, we wrote about Rabbit, a stealthy startup looking to switch the way we interact via movie talk. The company promised a movie talk application that would jiggle up many of the conventions we’ve come to expect, and suggest an alternative to the bland, mainly one-to-one practices available today.
Now, Rabbit is ready to come out of stealth and begin to permit users to play around in its interactive movie conferencing environment. The company is releasing its Mac app into closed beta, making the movie talk service available to a limited number of users, which it will little by little scale up as time goes on.
There are a few major differences to Rabbit that you’ll notice right away. Unlike typical movie talk apps like Skype, which you open or close based on when you want to use them, Rabbit is intended to run in the background, suggesting up notifications when friends come online or when they plan to join you in rooms to talk.
Oh, that’s another thing — the idea of rooms. While a few movie talk apps have emerged to enable one-to-many communications, not all scale gracefully. Rabbit is built with the idea of being able to come in various rooms which could have potentially limitless numbers of people interacting at any given time. But just as you’d go to a party and not attempt to talk to an entire room of people all at once, Rabbit enables you to break down conversations into groups. Users can lightly hover over groups and even other individual users to get a feel for what they’re talking about or how they’re interacting.
Another big part of the Rabbit application is content sharing. The app is built to enable users to share virtually any type of document or file that they have on screen, and can also be used to at the same time witness or listen to various types of media together. The evident use case is simultaneous group viewing parties for on-demand streaming movie, and the app makes it effortless for users to multitask, by letting users take on background tasks while still keeping a talk window open in the foreground.
There are other puny advantages that Rabbit has over other talk apps — for example, the capability to sign in with your Facebook account and lightly invite friends to join you in rooms, or simply to let them know the application exists. Then there’s the fact that the window with a user’s own movie photo is hidden down in the bottom right corner, so it’s not a distraction while attempting to interact with other people.
The movie talk window attempts to adjust viewer camera perception so that it shows up you’re staring someone right in the eyes while talking with them, and all windows are circular rather than square, creating a more intimate environment for communicating with one another. All these little things add up in a way that the Rabbit founders hope will set it apart from the numerous other talk apps that have come before it.
The Rabbit founding team is made up of a bunch of former game developers who had worked at places such as Sony Online Entertainment, Acclaim Entertainment, Activision, Magmic Games, Hands-On Mobile, and ngmoco. The company is privately funded, with ten employees, and is based in San Francisco. While Mac OSX is the very first platform Rabbit is launching on, the team hopes to also make it available on iOS, Windows, and Android devices soon.
Rabbit Launches In Closed Beta, Bringing Pervasive Movie Talk And Content Sharing To Mac Users, TechCrunch
Rabbit Launches In Closed Beta, Bringing Pervasive Movie Talk And Content Sharing To Mac Users
In December, we wrote about Rabbit, a stealthy startup looking to switch the way we interact via movie talk. The company promised a movie talk application that would wiggle up many of the conventions we’ve come to expect, and suggest an alternative to the bland, mainly one-to-one practices available today.
Now, Rabbit is ready to come out of stealth and begin to permit users to play around in its interactive movie conferencing environment. The company is releasing its Mac app into closed beta, making the movie talk service available to a limited number of users, which it will little by little scale up as time goes on.
There are a few major differences to Rabbit that you’ll notice right away. Unlike typical movie talk apps like Skype, which you open or close based on when you want to use them, Rabbit is intended to run in the background, suggesting up notifications when friends come online or when they plan to join you in rooms to talk.
Oh, that’s another thing — the idea of rooms. While a few movie talk apps have emerged to enable one-to-many communications, not all scale gracefully. Rabbit is built with the idea of being able to come in various rooms which could have potentially limitless numbers of people interacting at any given time. But just as you’d go to a party and not attempt to talk to an entire room of people all at once, Rabbit enables you to break down conversations into groups. Users can lightly hover over groups and even other individual users to get a feel for what they’re talking about or how they’re interacting.
Another big part of the Rabbit application is content sharing. The app is built to enable users to share virtually any type of document or file that they have on screen, and can also be used to at the same time witness or listen to various types of media together. The evident use case is simultaneous group viewing parties for on-demand streaming movie, and the app makes it effortless for users to multitask, by letting users take on background tasks while still keeping a talk window open in the foreground.
There are other puny advantages that Rabbit has over other talk apps — for example, the capability to sign in with your Facebook account and lightly invite friends to join you in rooms, or simply to let them know the application exists. Then there’s the fact that the window with a user’s own movie photo is hidden down in the bottom right corner, so it’s not a distraction while attempting to interact with other people.
The movie talk window attempts to adjust viewer camera perception so that it emerges you’re staring someone right in the eyes while talking with them, and all windows are circular rather than square, creating a more intimate environment for communicating with one another. All these little things add up in a way that the Rabbit founders hope will set it apart from the numerous other talk apps that have come before it.
The Rabbit founding team is made up of a bunch of former game developers who had worked at places such as Sony Online Entertainment, Acclaim Entertainment, Activision, Magmic Games, Hands-On Mobile, and ngmoco. The company is privately funded, with ten employees, and is based in San Francisco. While Mac OSX is the very first platform Rabbit is launching on, the team hopes to also make it available on iOS, Windows, and Android devices soon.