Harnessing spare computer cycles isn’t new. Trying to use robots to harvest and produce news isn’t new. The start-up Shakr Media intends to “…automatically produce video versions of that company’s bloggers text, in near real time.” Shakr says it will come up with an app so that end users to create multi-media shows out of their home media assets and thus become newscasters.

This won’t replace mass media news broadcasts, but consider narrow niche news areas. Just as bloggers capitalized on some of the long-tail areas (mommy blogs, knitting blogs, music genre blogs, fan fiction, etc.) there could be a market for news that you and few hundred other fans want to hear.

A South Korean startup called Shakr aims to use the processing power of its users’ distributed computers to create video news coverage of breaking events faster than international news giants can with human labor. Shakr unveiled its use of WegGL technology, which uses a computer’s powerful graphics processing card to extend the capabilities of Javascript in the browser, at TechCrunch’s startup event today in Beijing, China.

via Robot Network Seeks to Enlist Your Computer to Beat Fox, CNN to Breaking News Video.

Related articles

• Shakr Automatically Creates Video Snippets For News Stories As They Break (techcrunch.com)
• The Complete Guide To Disrupt Beijing (Day 1) (techcrunch.com)