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Opportunity Notes

By Rafe Needleman

Lightt Moves at the Speed of Thought

Software |

The audio version of this column includes a short interview with Lightt CEO Alex Mostoufi

The clock at Evernote. Click to view Lightt version of it.

Once again, a startup is working on an iPhone app that takes what I call “long photographs” — or very short videos. This startup, Lightt, is a little different, for two reasons.

First, it crunches its 10-second videos into one-second-long “Highlights.” They look like Keystone Kops scenes. Or maybe Blipverts, the ad format from the TV show Max Headroom: Commercials were blasted so fast that peoples’ heads exploded.

LIghtt CEO Alex Mostoufi isn’t trying to make heads explode, but he does say that presenting content at “the speed of thought” makes them more emotional and easier to digest. “When you are laying back at night and replaying your day, you don’t do it in real-time,” he says. “We can put something emotional in your mind in seconds.”

The other difference is that Lightt assembles highlights into streams based on your social network. You can see your highlights with your friends’, sorted into one big hyper-fast movie. It’s like a visual Twitter.

So the opportunity I’m calling out in this column is not the social sharing business (Moustafi is extremely vague about his revenue plans) but rather the idea that we can absorb social — and other — data in new and time-efficient ways. And, critically, that it might be more enjoyable to do it like that, if you’ve got the right formula. Everyone I’ve shown Lightt to has liked it and downloaded it on the spot.

We’ll see if they’re still using it in a week, though.

- Rafe

See also
Download Lightt (iTunes App Store)
Rafe’s Lightt feed
Seeing the Lightt: Introducing a new social medium (TUAW)
Don’t call it a GIF: Lightt lets you upload silent, looping clips for friends to comment on (Engadget)
Is Lightt an Instagram killer? It sure is fun! (Robert Scoble / Video)
Related products: Color (news), Glmps (review), Jittergram.

Audio of this column:

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  • Dave Mathews

    A few of us played with this in NY during Social Media Week and its cute, but video is still no “quick and dirty” production like Instagram is for photos. Composition and setup makes or breaks the scene, even in Max Headroom’s head.

  • Brian

    Neat program. I just tried out lightt and like the idea of highlight video, but was expecting it to be “smarter” and intelligently create a highlight reel from a whole bunch of long actual video. The sped up video was fun to watch for about 3 reels and then made me nauseous.

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