New Mozilla's Firefox OS Dongle at $25 - A Serious Threat to Chromecast

Mozilla and Matchstick announced a new Firefox Operating System powered HDMI dongle on Wednesday. The $25 dongle is being considered as their open-source take on the Chromecast. In an effort to lower the price tag, the HDMI dongle will first be made available through Kickstarter.

A serious threat to Chromecast, Firefox OS powered dongle called 'Matchstick' is essentially a small, WiFi-connected HDMI stick that plugs into your HDTV or HD Monitor that lets you stream and interact with your favorite stuff from the Internet - movies, TV, music, games etc. You can even use it in a conference room to get presentations or other media from your laptop to an HDTV. All in all much similar to what Google's Chromecast offer but its cheaper than Chromecast has open-source software and open-source hardware as well which means now developers can build their your own TV dongle just like Chromecast.

Matchstick is the world's first open source software and open source hardware HDMI streaming dongle. Matchstick provides full hardware design source files for interested developers, device manufacturers and service providers to build their unique TV streaming devices.



Jack Chang, General Manger, Matchstick, US described the HDMI dongle as "essentially an open Chromecast". The device at $25 is still cheaper than Chromecast which is available for $35 in the market. Further, the kickstarter is making the streaming Internet and media stick available at an early bird price of $12 and a regular price of $18.



Matchstick has an initial plan of raising around $100,000. A free shipping of the dongle will be provided in the United States and an additional $5 will be charged for international shipping. The full breakdown for the kickstarter goal amount is as follows:

1) Pledge $2 or more: This donation amount will be used to support the open software and open hardware platform.

2) Pledge $12 or more: The first five hundred units of the HDMI dongle will be made available at this price.

3) Pledge $18 or more: This is the price at which the streaming Internet and media stick will be offered to everyone else during the Kickstarter campaign.

4) Pledge $24 or more: 250 developer units will be offered in prototype. This includes access to all APIs and SDKs and Matchstick team’s developer support.

5) Pledge $34 or more: Two Matchsticks will be made available at this price.

6) Pledge $ 160 or more: 10 Matchsticks will be made available. Extra shipping charges of $10 for International shipping and free shipping in the US.

7) Pledge $ 10,000 or more: Four Matchsticks will be made available at this price along with a bunch of Matchstick swag. On the top of that, a trip for the one who was pledged the amount to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Les Vegas along with a guest. The trip would include a stay at the Venetian, free passes to the CES show, $200 daily spending money, a show one night and a dinner with the team.

The startup is hoping to get the HDMI dongle into the developer hands by November this year and everyone else’s by February next year.

Mozilla is playing a huge role in the Matchstick’s debut since the device runs on the Firefox Operating System. This device is a part of Mozilla’s plan of pushing its OS into more devices than just Smartphones.

Both Mozilla and Matchstick share the same vision about the device: the first streaming stick which is free of any walled garden ecosystem. This vision means the constraints of Google Play doesn’t exist with this HDMI dongle.

New Mozilla's Firefox OS Dongle at $25 - A Serious Threat to Chromecast

Mozilla and Matchstick announced a new Firefox Operating System powered HDMI dongle on Wednesday. The $25 dongle is being considered as their open-source take on the Chromecast. In an effort to lower the price tag, the HDMI dongle will first be made available through Kickstarter.

A serious threat to Chromecast, Firefox OS powered dongle called 'Matchstick' is essentially a small, WiFi-connected HDMI stick that plugs into your HDTV or HD Monitor that lets you stream and interact with your favorite stuff from the Internet - movies, TV, music, games etc. You can even use it in a conference room to get presentations or other media from your laptop to an HDTV. All in all much similar to what Google's Chromecast offer but its cheaper than Chromecast has open-source software and open-source hardware as well which means now developers can build their your own TV dongle just like Chromecast.

Matchstick is the world's first open source software and open source hardware HDMI streaming dongle. Matchstick provides full hardware design source files for interested developers, device manufacturers and service providers to build their unique TV streaming devices.



Jack Chang, General Manger, Matchstick, US described the HDMI dongle as "essentially an open Chromecast". The device at $25 is still cheaper than Chromecast which is available for $35 in the market. Further, the kickstarter is making the streaming Internet and media stick available at an early bird price of $12 and a regular price of $18.



Matchstick has an initial plan of raising around $100,000. A free shipping of the dongle will be provided in the United States and an additional $5 will be charged for international shipping. The full breakdown for the kickstarter goal amount is as follows:

1) Pledge $2 or more: This donation amount will be used to support the open software and open hardware platform.

2) Pledge $12 or more: The first five hundred units of the HDMI dongle will be made available at this price.

3) Pledge $18 or more: This is the price at which the streaming Internet and media stick will be offered to everyone else during the Kickstarter campaign.

4) Pledge $24 or more: 250 developer units will be offered in prototype. This includes access to all APIs and SDKs and Matchstick team’s developer support.

5) Pledge $34 or more: Two Matchsticks will be made available at this price.

6) Pledge $ 160 or more: 10 Matchsticks will be made available. Extra shipping charges of $10 for International shipping and free shipping in the US.

7) Pledge $ 10,000 or more: Four Matchsticks will be made available at this price along with a bunch of Matchstick swag. On the top of that, a trip for the one who was pledged the amount to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Les Vegas along with a guest. The trip would include a stay at the Venetian, free passes to the CES show, $200 daily spending money, a show one night and a dinner with the team.

The startup is hoping to get the HDMI dongle into the developer hands by November this year and everyone else’s by February next year.

Mozilla is playing a huge role in the Matchstick’s debut since the device runs on the Firefox Operating System. This device is a part of Mozilla’s plan of pushing its OS into more devices than just Smartphones.

Both Mozilla and Matchstick share the same vision about the device: the first streaming stick which is free of any walled garden ecosystem. This vision means the constraints of Google Play doesn’t exist with this HDMI dongle.

'Neembuu Now’ to revolutionize TV, video streaming and entire entertainment industry

Shashank Tulsyan was frustrated when one of his favorite shows, Dragon Ball Z stopped airing and left the story incomplete. He came up with the idea to watch and download at the same time (also called super streaming). Thus Neembuu was born with their product 'Neembuu Now' for super streaming. The project started in 2008 while Shashank was in first year of his college. He started working full time on it in 2014 along with Davide Pastore (Italian Developer) and Ameya Paseband.

"I did not know much programming and I was just in the first year of my mechanical engineering. I didn't even know if it was possible that I was trying to do. But I thought that I should at least try, I have 4 years before the tensions of real life come and haunt me. In college, all I needed to do was get decent grades, pass and get placed." says Shashank.

While Ameya takes care of the marketing, business development, talking to investors, getting feedback from the users and all non-technical aspects. Davide Pastore develops support for websites like YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion etc on Neembuu. He is also working on the android version of the software.

"The Watch & Download technology that we have developed was big challenge and took 4 years to be completely developed. In total 6 years have passed in I have been working on this technology. It took 6 years just to make a decent prototype which people can download and try.", says the founder. "The challenges were exceptionally compounded due to the fact that we developed a highly scalable, future proof, Virtual Filesystem technology and Video virtualization technology. This is such a new concept that automatic spell checking software think it is a spelling mistake.", he joked.

What are the advantages of Super Streaming over normal streaming?

• When user forwards the video, previous buffer doesn't get deleted.


• When buffers collide they join. All this while the user watches the file as if it was any other file in his hard disk.


• Super streaming gives flexibility to user to use his favorite media player (VLC, gomplayer, any player they like).


• Super streaming works on any video format, not just mp4. It works on avi, rmvb, mkv all of them. In fact it is future proof, any new format created in future will also work in this platform.


• Before downloading a user doesn't know if the content of the video is interesting enough for him to download or not. So the user can always watch the file before completely downloading it.

"We wanted to block YouTube advertisements. There is a no video streamer out there which blocks YouTube advertisements. It either downloads the entire video, or streams the video with ads. Blocking ads is essential because in India, the internet speed is so less that sometimes buffering the content is impossible.", they said. They have successfully tested their software on TV. This allowed them to watch shows without TV advertisements. Using more than 10 technologies like Virtual Filesystem JPfm, Windows Kernel, FUSE on linux, Pismo file mont, libvlc, vuze api for their application they are also making a platform on which video apps can run.

How to use Neembuu Now software to create highly advanced video services with Google Chromecast device ?

Start Neembuu Now uploader, click the big yellow icon, the NeembuuVirtualFolder will open - Find your file which you want to cast to your TV. Copy the filepath of the file. The path typically looks something like this:

C:\Users\Shashank Tulsyan\.neembuu-now\release1\NeembuuVirtualFolder\BigBuckBunny_320x180.mp4

Open this file in chrome. The path will change to look like a URL, something like :

file:///C:/Users/Shashank%20Tulsyan/.neembuu-now/release1/NeembuuVirtualFolder/BigBuckBunny_320x180.mp4

Play the video in chrome itself and cast this Chromecast tab.

Interestingly, Neembuu is also in the process of developing a Neembu TV dongle to compete with Google Chromecast and the world wide ordering of their prototype will start shortly. Shashank mentioned, ‘User have a lot of expectations. They need everything. They are not ready to compromise with anything. Neembuu allows watch & download.

People need power to ONLY download as well. They want Neembuu to support more websites. They want Neembuu on mobile, on their tablets. They want better User Interface. They want better integration with browser. They want unified search, playlists, ability to queue downloads like traditional downloaders. They want us to release the experimental bit torrent version to general public. The demands just don't stop. However it is good input, it shows that people like us for one thing, they want us to do a lot more.’ He recommends the future entrepreneurs to validate before making anything and also to target less features and release more often.

In the first 3 months, there were a 1000 downloads and more than 1TeraByte of data streamed using Neembuu. Their earlier product called Neembuu Uploader (it is just opposite of downloader), does a 1/4 million uploads per month and had 1400% usage growth rate in the last quarter.

Google's New Chromecast Device Cast Everything Online to Your TV screen

Google yesterday launched a new device - Chromecast, a small pen-drive like device that you simply plug in to your high-definition (HD) TV and it allows you to use your phone, tablet or laptop to 'cast' online content to your TV screens. Its costs around $35 i.e. aprrox Rs.1800. Chromecast, is an solution to simply plug Chromecast device into any HDTV, connect it to WiFi, then send online content from your smartphone, tablet or laptop to your TV with the press of a button browse online content like video, music, movies or games to your TV screen. It works across platforms like Android, iPhones, iPads, Chrome for Mac and Windows and turn your smartphones to remote. It works with Netflix, YouTube, Google Play Movies & TV, and Google Play Music, with more apps like Pandora coming soon. In addition to apps like Netflix, you can use Chromecast to bring a broad range of content available on the web to your big screen by using new feature in the Chrome browser that allows you to project any browser tab to your TV. From sharing your family photos to enjoying a video clip from your favorite news site, Google has launched this feature in beta as of now.

Along with the device Google has also launched Google Cast SDK to enable your mobile and web apps to cast content to the TV. Chromecast then streams that content directly from the web. The SDK helps app developers integrate Google Cast technology into apps which makes it easier for app users to enjoy videos, playlists, movies and more on the big screen like TV, without requiring them to download a new application or learn a new interaction model. The new Google Cast SDK developer preview includes the SDKs for Android, iOS and Chrome, which enable developers to extend applications to the TV. The Chromecast has been launched togather with new Nexus 7, a Android smartphone shipped with Android 4.3, the newest version of Android.