By Ed Tittel
Imagine you run a start-up website. Users visit to learn about the latest cool tools and technologies for creating amazing multimedia sites of their own with animation, video, audio and social media integration. Your site must be a fast, high-quality user experience on the PC, mobile devices, tablets or even giant screen TVs, without having to encounter pixilated or squashed graphics.
What really makes it different is that your users can create their own multimedia projects on your site. They share their “masterpieces” with their friends on social networks, bringing more people to your site. Anyone can access the projects from any device and contribute to it. You make money through ads and when your users subscribe to a premium tools package with more allocated project space.
This site experience and set of features are not only possible, they’re part of a larger web and computing experience occurring right now. Web developers use the “cloud” to create these virtual media playgrounds and to take advantage of humongous storage capacities and low costs, and then stream the fun down to users. Users get a better multimedia experience when they have a browser that is fast enough for streaming content from the cloud. They can access it anywhere, including larger size computers, such as desktop and laptops, and more portable devices like smartphones and tablets. Developers need only use HTML5 markup like scalable vector graphics (SVG) and video/audio that are supported across many browsers and devices to make it a reality.
