TechAddress

Animoto Launches Mashup Service for Professional Photographers

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:31:23 +0000

A person with money; a person who spends it; a person who is easily influenced: an Advertiser’s dream is to reach those individuals with targeted messages on the go. Mobile application advertising is extending the mobile advertising paradigm with new inventory, larger audiences, and more advertiser budgets to reach exactly those users.

Within the social media space, in-app advertising on Facebook has a higher eCPM than Facebook advertising. Following that model, a new breed of applications is now available for Smartphones such as the iPhone, which, at close to ten million sold, is becoming the must-have gadget of the decade. Google’s Android OS gadgets also push mobile application execution to its limits – the key will be seeing how viral the actual devices become.

A Huge Opportunity for Advertisers

According to industry reports, iPhone users have downloaded more than 100 million applications since the App Store opened in July 2008, and the Android platform is predicted to significantly raise the marketshare of Smartphones by allowing more device makers into the marketplace.

A recent forecast by Magna Global predicts that mobile media will be one of the fastest growing of the emerging media channels, estimating it to grow by 43% to approximately $300 million in 2009. That reach provides advertisers with a huge market opportunity to reach and engage with consumers in a new and scalable way by staying ahead of the curve in advertising innovation – reaching people when and where a decision is most likely to occur.

So why not just mobile advertising? Why mobile application advertising? By integrating into an application, you have much more control over the type of advertisement and the level of interaction available with users, as opposed to the mobile Web where ads are generally static banners. This mobile application platform provides an infinitely engaging and accessible device for targeted advertising, but if social networks are still untested waters, advertisers are still wary of this new environment. And just like social media, when you get past the education, advertisers really just want to know - “How can we make money there and how much is it costing me for a new customer?”

Creating Revenue

The good news is: many of the tenets of social media and mobile marketing apply to Smartphone application marketing, and there are several ways to approach it to ensure you walk away with some real value.

Smartphone application marketing connects brands with their target audiences no matter where they are. Ads on iPhones, Android-enabled devices and other Smartphones have the ability to deliver high-impact interactive rich media to an engaged, targeted, self-selected audience and the new breed of application analytics companies help measure the success of campaigns, interaction and brand recognition.

More visibility. Brand awareness. High impact creatives. Mobile applications and Smartphone technology allow advertisers to extend their imagination to the path of reaching targeted audiences. Users can interact with a brand by tilting the phone and using the built in accelerometers, poking and playing with the product, or getting location-based advertising. Essentially, for the first time consumers become a part of the advertisement springing open the advertiser wallets.

Mobile Application Analytics

Applications only drive higher revenues if advertisers can identify the users consuming those apps. This has opened the door for many mobile application companies focused on identifying who the users are, what they do in the application, and what devices they are using.

Analytics provide application developers with granular insight into how users interact with applications, helping them identify user experience challenges and improve the overall performance of their applications.

What Are You Waiting for?

Smartphone applications are starting to make waves in the digital advertising world, but advertisers need not be daunted by a new platform. These apps operate in essentially the same ways as social media, targeted display and mobile marketing models. However, they offer deeper engagement, more sophisticated analytics, and a great way to broaden reach beyond the computer — significant opportunities for advertisers to boost revenue and build consumer relationships in a unique personal way.

Mobile advertising has the potential to exceed not only Internet advertising, but also the four traditional pillars of advertising as well: TV, radio, print and billboards. We are only in the first phase of the real mobile application market and this is a significant player that’s here to stay.

Former BlueLithium co-founder and general manager Krishna Subramanian has spent a 10-year career on the forefront of emerging technology. He is currently focusing on creative and inventory optimization, predictive targeting as well as scaling and monetizing social applications. Prior to BlueLithium’s acquisition by Yahoo!, Krishna led corporate and product marketing initiatives, positioning BlueLithium as the leading behavioral ad network; launched the first national online/offline social network, MingleNow, and led BlueLithium’s strategic acquisition of 123out.

Source:Mashable!

Animoto is a mashup tool that allows users to make movies from the images and music they already have on their hard drive. Over the last year they have introduced a variety of features and functions. The latest of these is Animoto for Photography.

Animoto takes the pictures as slide show concept a bit further than most by incorporating a kind of artificial intelligence into the process. This twist means that the movies you get often seem more like trailers than home videos. Over the last few months they’ve applied this approach to a variety of things, from creative music mixing to business videos and everything in between.

This new feature, Animoto for Photography, enables photographers to use Animoto’s interesting technique to make their photography into a video. Animoto makes it easy to create these photography-based videos, freeing up a photographer’s time by reducing the amount of time spent futzing with the computer.

How is this different from the existing Animoto mashups for music, business and more? The company has added adjustable speed to the image display. Formerly the “intelligent” Animoto program would match the images to the tempo of the song they were being displayed with, now photographers can make the images appear at the intervals they design. they can also let Animoto match images to the song tempo still, if that’s what they want. Animoto for Photography gives them the choice.

The other feature Animoto has added is a button at the end that can call viewers to action. This makes Animoto a new way for photographers to market their work and services. Photographers who have tested the software seem to love it as a sharing and marketing tool:

“Animoto is a perfect fit for professional photographers,” said award-winning wedding photographer, Linda Jennings. “I can quickly upload my photos, pick just the right song, and Animoto automatically creates a show-stopping video. And when the video is complete, I can easily share it in more ways than ever before: email, blogs, my own website, Facebook, iPhone. The possibilities are endless with Animoto.”

Animoto for Photography is not free. It will run you $99 for three months or $249 a year. The subscription does allow photographers access to a library of music that is licensed for public use, which is a great benefit in addition to the other features subscribers get access to. Animoto’s claim to fame is that its artificial intelligence (aka Cinematic Artificial Intelligence) ensures that no two videos are ever the same, even if you use the exact same images and music.

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Shwup Makes Creating Photo Albums and Muvees Easy

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 22:34:21 +0000

Source:Mashable!

shwup is an online photo and video album sharing service from muvee. Yes, there are a plenitude of such services, but shwup offers a couple of new features worth mentioning.

You can create shareable online photo albums for photos as well as videos. Also, instead of just uploading your photos and videos one at a time or even in batches like similar services, shwup actually allows you to import photos from any website. So, you can create a new Photo Album with the contents from an album on your Flickr, Picasa, iPhoto or Facebook account. You can select all of the contents or just the photos you want to add to your shwup album.

The file size limit for uploading is a hefty 100 MB per file, which isn’t bad for photos but not so great for video files, which can get much larger than that. Still, you’ll be able to upload a boatload of photos without any problems.

Once you create albums, you can actually create a muvee online. A muvee is a photo slideshow that you can customize with styles, themes and a music soundtrack. You simply drag and drop the photos you want to use in the muvee timeline. They recommend up to 25 photos for optimum performance but you can surpass that total if you want.

You then select the theme you want for muvee and choose from a collection of songs provided by shwup, or you can upload your own mp3 songs, which is a great option. The only downside is that any songs you upload do not stay online for future use. You have to upload them each and every time which isn’t very convenient. Still, it’s nice being able to use your own music.

Once completed, the muvee can be added to your Album. You can then share the album with anyone you want by sending them the unique URL that’s created for every album you make. You can also share your albums on your social networks. The photos, videos and muvees will all appear in the album that you share.

shwup appears to be a little plain at first glance without many bells and whistles, but when you dig deeper you start to see some cool features like the ability to important photos from other sites or being able to create multimedia muvees online. shwup isn’t just trying to compete with online photo sharing services like Flickr or Photobucket by allowing members to share their photo and video albums. They seem to be trying to carve their own niche by letting members create and share online multimedia muvees as well.

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The Financial Crisis in Pictures: 8 of the Best from Around the Web

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:30:04 +0000

Source:Mashable!

With the stock market continuing to plunge, one thing remains constant: financial news sites like to tell part of the story with images of distressed Wall Street traders and executives that are experiencing some of the worst moments of their careers. While the news of the day is indeed troubling and makes us all nervous, the emotion captured in some of these images is better than that any story could tell. Here are 8 of the best pictures we’ve spotted on the homepages of various business news hubs during the current market meltdown:

from The Motley Fool

from TheStreet.com

from Reuters

from WSJ.com

from USA Today

from Fortune - the CEO of General Electric

from BusinessWeek - the CEO of General Motors

Feel free to post links to some of the best imagery you’ve seen from around the Web in the comments.

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LIFE is Big. Getty and Time Plan Site for Historic Number of Photos

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 22:35:36 +0000

Source:Mashable!

Drama queens (or kings); we all know at least one – and if we spend a lot of time on social networking sites, probably at least a few dozen. As its name suggests, a new website called Dramalevel is looking to provide a ranking of the amount of drama that individual users bring to more than a dozen different online communities, including MySpace, Twitter, Digg, and YouTube.

The service is pretty simple. First, select the service for which you would like to find out someone’s Dramalevel. Then, enter their username and connect to that user’s Dramalevel profile. Since the service is new, most users don’t have scores yet, but once you arrive on the person’s DL profile, you can report drama, which will increase their score, or leave a comment documenting why that person is so dramatic.

Posting and rating on Dramalevel is anonymous, which is both a gift in a curse. It means that you are free to speak your mind about a person (which may get them to clean up their drama), but it also means people can easily gang up on someone to increase their score and make everyone think they are more of a drama queen or king than they really are (OMG!). It reminds me a bit of the very popular Honesty Box application on Facebook, except in this case, everyone’s anonymous submissions are visible to everyone else, as opposed to just the person who owns the profile.

While this all sounds like something likely to be popular with angsty tweens and teenagers, the application’s developers actually see some more sophisticated uses for the site. One example given by the company is eBay – which removed the option to leave negative feedback earlier this year. Dramalevel could serve as a replacement, allowing users to see brutally honest (though still anonymous) feedback of eBay sellers.

Further, Dramalevel plans an API, allowing other sites to integrate Dramalevels instead of proprietary Karma systems. Another way they have been testing the API is “An iphone app that lets you track the drama level and comments on any number of users you want to keep an eye on. This idea came from a friend who wanted to see what people were saying about any of his ex girlfriends or his “internet-enemies.”

OK, so Dramalevel probably won’t move far beyond the market of people ranting about what huge drama queens and kings certain social networking users are being. But, judging by the number of overdramatic tweets, facebook status updates, and digg comments I see daily, that market might be pretty huge, so keep an eye on Dramalevel … unless you really want no more drama in your life.

Source:Mashable!

Would you be excited to hear today about a service that will have its launch next year? That’s what publishing veteran Time Inc and archival giant Getty Images are promising.

The two plan to launch what will be LIFE.com to house “the most comprehensive iconic and professional photography collections available anywhere online.” This will go for things historic and things current, things well-documented and things never-before-seen. The bulk of content will be available at launch, and “more than 3,000 new images will be uploaded daily from Getty Images.”

The sheer volume of what will be presented through LIFE.com makes the effort momentous. No doubt about it. It is in effect a match between something with the technical potential of a Flickr-like structure and an extensive premium media trove. Valuable? For many people, definitely. Getty of course only offers a limited view of the entire medium of professional photography, but as with anything to do with corporate interest (Hulu versus competitors, YouTube versus Photobucket and MySpace TV, and so forth), all cannot be found in one place, no matter where you look. So here’s to looking on the bright side. The quantity to be delivered by Time and Getty is alone something hugely worthwhile.

The activity of sharing such media is another topic, however, and one that will get considerable attention when LIFE.com has its debut. The partnership is said to entail giving users the ability to “interact intimately with imagery, including printing select photos, sharing photos with friends and family… creating collections of photos around special interests and purchasing photo albums of user-made collections.” The sole key word to watch closely in this description is: select.

Yes, the conveniences of sharing and printing material are appreciable in and of themselves. But the distinctions to be made over user permissions will be what drives the consumer world to either feel content with what is offered or noticeably dismayed about the rules. Naturally, a more liberal play by the content providers will prove more popular. Giving the house away, though, is potentially ridden with losses that cannot be returned. If history is a guide, the caliber of names involved in this effort will presumably ride a very cautious route into the new year.

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25+ Tools for a Road Trip 2.0

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:54:49 +0000

Source:Mashable!

Mobile TV just doesn’t seem to die. For years now, I’ve heard from countless companies that they’re going to provide the “real” Mobile TV experience that will totally change the way we enjoy television. All the while, I’ve laughed to myself wondering if these companies will ever realize that time has already passed them by.

To prove my point, yet another Mobile TV solution has died. According to published reports in Germany, an effort by Mobile 3.0 to offer Mobile TV services was pushed aside due to its desire to support paid TV and work over DVB-H.

Didn’t Mobile 3.0 get the memo? Mobile TV is dead in the water.

Let’s figure out why it’s dead, shall we?

First off, the Slingbox has made it abundantly clear to all of us that Mobile TV doesn’t really make much sense. If I can watch all of my home programming no matter where I am, for free, with the help of an Internet connection and laptop, which is almost always with me, why would I pay for, or even use, a Mobile TV solution?

Oh, and what about Hulu and the rest of these video services that allow me to watch practically any show I want? Sure, it may not be the same feeling, considering I’m streaming or buying the show after it has already aired, and it requires that same broadband connection, but who cares? At least I’m getting something out of it from a reputable source instead of paying more for something I barely want to watch.

And perhaps that’s where the biggest issue comes along for Mobile TV: no one wants to pay. More often than not, Mobile TV services will say that you’ll need to pay to use it. Why would I want to do that? You mean to tell me that in order to watch your crappy programming, I’ll need to pay a set fee for use of the service, on top of the fee I pay to have Internet access? Sorry, but that doesn’t seem quite right to me.

I should also point out that most of these Mobile TV services seem to forget that battery concerns are real, user interfaces really do matter, and more often than not, we don’t really want to watch TV on a junky little cell phone screen.

More companies will undoubtedly crop up and claim to have the solution to making more people use Mobile TV, but none will work.

We don’t want Mobile TV because it doesn’t make any sense. And because it doesn’t make any sense, it’s failing – miserably.

[Image credit: Wowbagger (attribution)]

Source:Mashable!

Ten, five, even two years ago, documenting a road trip meant disposable cameras, a fold-out map, postage stamps and planning ahead. Now a road trip means streaming video, GPS, email, and Hotels.com.

Even if you’re not rocking an iPhone or BlackBerry, I know from personal experience (like last month, before I had an iPhone) that you can still have a digital adventure with something as simple as the Sony Ericsson w580i. In fact, if I’d had an iPhone then, I wouldn’t have been able to take all of the embarrassing footage I ended up with after 62 hours in the car.

Plan your trip with TripIt.

What makes TripIt a good planning tool for a roadtrip is that it has a mobile counterpart. So whether you start at home or start on the road, you’ll have access to your itinerary from anywhere. Book your hotels on Hotels.com and you have yourself a digital agenda.

Blog your whole story with Utterz.

There are, again, dozens of blogging apps for the iPhone. But not everybody has, or wants, an iPhone (keep stickin’ it to the man guys!) and there have been blogging apps for the mobile phone since the dawn of social media. An especially great mobile blogging platform is Utterz. Utterz is fantastic because it works with all of the popular blogging platforms including Blogger, Wordpress, Flickr, Typepad, Drupal, and others. You could also use MoBlog to start a whole new mobile blog, but I’m not sure what the value is in creating yet another blog unless it’s your primary site.

Track your progress with Brightkite.

The benefit to Brightkite is that it has a more tightly knit social network than other mobile posting sites. Besides that, it will cross-post your check-ins and pictures to Twitter. Brightkite is simple in that you can just text or email them your location, and voila, you’ve checked in.

You can also post pictures and notes from anywhere you’re checked in and send a “hello” to anyone in the vicinity. This was pretty hip and original before the iPhone 3G came out and released a lifetime supply of GPS-enabled social networks like Loopt, and Whrrl. Dodgeball is a more bare-bones version of Brightkite but if you don’t want or need to post photos, it could work

Upload your cellphone pictures with Shozu.

Shozu is a great picture service because it connects with popular photo-sharing sites like Flickr, Picasa, Blogger, Facebook and others. It’s also a great service because it lets you post videos as well, thus eliminating the need for a separate service. Brightkite is again popular for this purpose, as is the comparable Twitxr service since they both cross-post to Twitter. All you need is to attach a picture to a text message and hit send.

Stream video from the road with Qik.

Qik is arguably the best mobile streaming service, the only problem is that it’s limited. In other words, if you don’t own one of the 40 phones they offer the service with, you’re out of luck. If you are lucky enough to use Qik, you’ll find it’s easy to stream live and chat with your viewers at the same time. People watching your stream might get some buffering, but unlike some sites, will be able to pick up where it left off instead of skipping a chunk of your video.

A more primal service like UPhoneBlog makes mobile video blogging easy for regular phones. It’s also possibly the most obnoxious site on this side of Google, with its iPhone and Wii talking ads. However, they do give you a video player that you can place on your blog. Every time you email a video from your phone, it gets put as the first video in that player, so anyone who’s watching can follow all of your new videos.

Services like JuiceCaster, Treemo, and Shozu are also popular vlogging portals.

Find your way with TomTom.

I like TomTom because it’s easy to hack and create your own voices for, plus they offer MapShare and TomTom buddies which was social media before social media was GPS enabled. Equip your car with a TomTom, Garmin, Navigon, or even the Internet-connected Dash (if you’re feeling extra-geeky). As a personal note, I wouldn’t trust Google Maps on any phone to get me to my next-door neighbors house, so be smart about it.

Track your MPGs with MileMarker.

Available on any mobile phone, MileMarker is better than any of the iPhone or other mobile apps I’ve seen and it can be accessed via your Web browser. You put in the amount of miles you’ve driven, how much you paid for gas, and it will tell you how much you’re spending, how many MPGs your getting, and what your gas spending future looks like. With gas in mind, you should also check out the Cheap Gas mobile app by Mobio, which tells you where the cheapest gas stations are in your vicinity. If you have an iPhone, you probably already know the many gas applications available, so I won’t waste the space here.

Connect with friends via Twinkle.

If you have the time, make sure to stop and smell the social media. While you’re out traveling the countryside, don’t forget that your Twitter, Plurk, and Pownce friends are probably somewhere along the route. Suggest a Tweetup via Twinkle or one of the many Twitter apps available if that doesn’t sound too dirty to you.

Find places to eat with Yelp.

Point your cell phone browser to mobile.yelp.com for quick access to great eats nearby. Urban Spoon has an amusing iPhone app that you have to shake in order to find dinner. It works like a slot machine and it’s fun to watch, but it only gives you relevant results in certain metro areas.

Other things to consider:

Wireless card: If you want to be connected 24-7, you might want to buy a wireless card for your laptop through your mobile provider. These cards are usually around $100.00 and have a subscription fee of around $60 a month with a 2-year contract. With that said, unless you plan on using that baby all year round, it might not be all that important.

A/C adapter for your laptop: If you plan on watching movies, editing pictures, or playing solitaire on this trip, you’ll need a backup battery or an adapter for your car. You can find them for around $30 and they’re worth the investment.

Mp3 player: Stock your Mp3 player as full as you can. Don’t only load it with music; make sure to add podcasts, audiobooks and comedy tracks to the playlist. Trust me, music will get old after 12 hours and you’re going to need some dialog to ease your brain.

Sure, you could take a road trip to rid yourself of technology for a few days or weeks, but what is good is doing something if you don’t have anything to remember it by? So remember, take lots of pictures and videos, and don’t forget to review everything on Yelp.

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PicApp Makes it Easy to Legally Blog the Latest Britney and Lindsay Pictures

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:48:59 +0000

Source:Mashable!
Want to start a celebrity blog but don’t have the bankroll to hire your own paparazzi? PicApp, the service for free and licensed images, has teamed up with celebrity picture agency Splash News to offer up celeb photos on a revenue share basis.
This means that if you’re a publisher, you can now browse […]

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