The firm is funded by venture capital and says it is making money though not yet profitable.
The company, with its 12 employees who call themselves “ninjas”, follow in the footsteps of other Nordic IT darlings such as Skype and Spotify.
War of the gods ustream plus#
On one recent Friday, Eriksson had the usual burst of activity in Syria plus demonstrations in Cairo and video from outside the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been holed up for several months.
War of the gods ustream archive#
That video, Eriksson said, reached 80 different networks and was aired 600 times.īambuser has also become a favourite of anti-Putin activists in Moscow, anti-austerity campaigners in Madrid as well as the Occupy Movement which has used the instant archive Bambuser’s live streaming provides to document police activity. I’m going to show the world what happens’.” “He came online and he told me ‘I’m going to stay here’. He recalls one, an activist called “homslive”, who broadcast on Bambuser from his rooftop in the middle of a mortar attack on Homs earlier this year. Sitting at a desk cluttered with tobacco containers, an Egyptian fez cap and a copy of Wired magazine with the face of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Eriksson is in constant contact with many on the ground in Syria, helping them with uploads and promoting streams to other media and on twitter. “It gives us a good sense of what’s happening live on the ground.” ACTIVIST APPEAL “For us, as a news organisation which may not be on ground to get those images in real time, and unfiltered - the face of war - those can be really powerful images,” he said. Riyaad Minty, head of social media at Al Jazeera, said his news network monitors Bambuser on a regular basis to keep up with events in Syria. Some of its live Syria video is picked up by news outlets such as the BBC, CNN, the Associated Press and Reuters as it gives them access to several hundreds of Bambuser broadcasters. Industry experts say its simplicity, its ability to deal with poor connectivity and a huge range of mobile phones has made it the de-facto place for activists in the Middle East. It’s not the only live streaming site - in the United States is far bigger and better-funded, for instance - but Bambuser has gained its own niche in the world of activism. “This one does funerals and bombings,” he says, pointing at a user who has just posted a new protest.īambuser started in 2007 and gained popularity early on in the Arab Spring when 10,000 videos were uploaded on a single day during Egypt’s parliamentary elections in 2010. The Muslim day of prayer is when the largest number of demonstrators, from Damascus to Deraa, pour onto the streets from mosques and then upload live images to the site.Īt the company’s HQ in central Stockholm, Executive Chairman Hans Eriksson sits glued to his laptop, recognising users as notifications of new streams flash across his screen. STOCKHOLM, Oct 2 (Reuters) - Syria’s civil war has made Friday afternoons a busy time at Bambuser, a tiny Swedish IT startup in an old bicycle factory which streams live video from the latest uprisings.
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