Alex Blum, CEO of KickApps, met with me at Digital Hollywood. KickApps like some of the other companies Digital Podcast interviewed at the show provides an on demand white label social network application. Unlike some of the other services, KickApps can be self administered and if you are willing to give up some advertising inventory KickApps can be used without cost.

 

 Digital Podcast 22 [20:07m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1174)

A KickApps-enabled website provides your visitors with a complete rich media community experience. Users are invited to upload media and create their very own “personal space” directly at your site. Site visitors are provided with easy to use media management tools to manage their personal space. Similarly, your site administrator is provided an array of easy-to-use media management and administrative tools to ensure that only appropriate content makes it on to your website.

KickApps has a rich feature set focused on social networking, community building and managing user generated content.

Sites that use KickApps have lots of features to choose from including uploading videos, audio and photos, user customizable profiles, guest books, blogs, feeds and a variety of widgets. They also go beyond technology and offer help via white papers such as their current whitepaper called Nine Steps to a Successful Online Community which you can download for free.

You can use KickApps for free if you allow KickApps to take part of the advertising. If you want to keep all the advertising for yourself, then you can use their paid version which is based upon a CPM model.

This is definitely worth checking out if you want to add social networking features to your site.

Technorati Tags: KickApps, Social Networking Application, Social Networking, Digital Hollywood

Chris MacDonald, Libsyn’s EVP of Business Development and Operations, told me all about the Association for Downloadable Media.

Chris is the newly elected Chairman of the Association. Chris explained that the Association for Downloadable Media is focused on providing standards for advertising and audience measurement for episodic and downloadable media. If you are producing downloadable media the association is working on making it easier for advertisers and publishers to buy and publish ads on this type of content. If you want to get involved you can join the association. Individual memberships are $150 and corporate memberships are $1,000 for now.

 

 Digital Podcast 21 [16:40m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1510)

In today’s announcement, The Association for Downloadable Media (ADM) announced the election results for the 20 inaugural office seat positions including the Executive Board (Chair, Vice Chair, Secretary, Treasurer); eleven (11) Advisory Board seats, Chairs for: Advertising Standards Committee, Education & Outreach Committee, Measurement Committee, Membership Committee and the Terminology Standardization Committee.

Elected individuals for the 4 Executive Committees (Chairman, Vice Chairman, Secretary and Treasurer), 11 Advisory Board seats and 5 Committee Chair positions are:

• Chair
  • Chris MacDonald, Chris MacDonald, Libsyn PRO Enterprise Platform and Indiefeed
• Vice Chair
  • Susan Bratton, Personal Life Media
• Secretary
  • Matthew Snodgrass, Porter Novelli
• Treasurer
  • Duncan Perry, Podcast.com, Treedia.com
• Committee Chair: Advertising Standards
  • Brian McMahon, National Podcasting System
• Committee Chair: Education & Outreach
  • Rob Walch, Wizzard Media
• Committee Chair: Measurement
  • Angelo Mandato, Raw Voice
• Committee Chair: Membership Committee
  • Bryan Moffett, NPR Digital Media
• Committee Chair: Terminology Standardization
  • David Rowley, Kiptronic, Inc.
• Advisory Board
  • CC Chapman, The Advance Guard
  • Jonathan Cobb, Kiptronic Inc.
  • John Furrier, Podtech
  • Rob Greenlee, Microsoft Zune
  • John Havens, BlogTalkRadio
  • Risto Koski, Nokia
  • Jim Louderback, Revision3
  • Mark McCrery, Podtrac
  • Elisabeth McLaury Lewin, PodcastingNews.com
  • Kent Nichols, AskANinja.com
  • Tim Street, French Maid TV

Technorati Tags: Association for Downloadable Media, ADM, advertising, new media

Rex Wong, CEO of DAVE Networks, met with me at Digital Hollywood. DAVE Networks provides white label social networks. That means that DAVE Networks provides the infrastructure to power sites like America’s Funniest Home Videos, Stargate’s Community and Dave.TV. The users of the sites don’t see DAVE Networks, they see the customer’s brand. The customers get the benefits of offering a wide range of social community tools to their users.

 

 Digital Podcast 20 [11:44m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (2071)

The system provides the tools to deploy a custom social broadcast network, including

• Self publishing
• Video upload, download, rating, comments
• Blog, video blog, moblog
• DAVE points system
• A modular player can be customized with your brand and embedded in user’s MySpace, blog or web page
• User contests

Rex also told me about an exciting new project that DAVE Networks has launched called Next.TV. NEXT.TV, a competitor to the much hyped Joost, is a new Internet TV service that delivers over 50 channels of high quality TV content. NEXT.TV’s content is sponsored by advertisers so that you can get premium TV content for free.

NEXT.TV will be available initially in October 2007 on HP consumer notebooks. A version will also be available to the general public shortly thereafter for download of which you can sign up to be part of the Private Beta Program by signing up at www.next.tv.

Technorati Tags: DAVE Networks, Rex Wong, Next.TV, IPTV, online video, video, Digital Hollywood

In a world where competition for attention is growing faster than ever and consumers get to skip the ads if they want, will advertisements as content save the day for advertisers? It’s not clear yet, but there is a growing body of evidence that it can and is being done by advertisers, both big and small.

The Wall Street Journal provided five case studies today of advertising as content, and all done by small companies.

1. Blendtec’s Will It Blend

Blendtec is in the blender business. One day the marketing guy sees the enginneering guy test blenders with chunks of wood. The net result is one of the most successful Ads as Content campaigns, Will It Blend.

The video series is so popular they are now selling it as a DVD for $9.93.

Straight from the success of YouTube.com, Will It Blend has been known as an internet marketing sensation, viewed by more than 30 million people. Now for the first time ever, you can take home the glory, passion and power of Blendtec CEO Tom Dickson with his blending antics on the first 50 Will It Blend videos, including Will It Blend facts and behind the scenes footage.

Not only has it been successful as content they say sales of blenders have shot up 500%.

Here’s the video of one of my favorites Will It Blend: the iPhone edition.

2. MJ Safety Solutions Bullet Resistant Backpack

MJ Safety Solutions MyChildsPack is a bullet resistant back pack. The video is serious with lots of explosions and guns firing. YouTube reports that the video has been viewed just under 25,000 times at the time I write this. The company reports that it has sold over 1,000 of these backpacks at $175 each.

3. All Natural Maine Root’s Free Range Root Beer

In this video campaign, All Natural Main Root is marketing the fight against corporate root beer and of course their alternative: Free Range Root Beer. Sales have gone up from $500,000 to $3,000,000 year over year. Maine Root paid $20,000 for the campaign. Not a bad return from some viral videos.

FreeRangeRootBeer.com is dedicated to stopping corporate root beer “by any means necessary.” Non-violence is our modus operandi. We spread our message mostly through non-violent protests, but also use root beer “breakouts” to free root beer from their bondage in their inhumane storage facilities. We’re on a path of peace, love and organic root-based beverages.

Here’s the SugerCane Shuffle from the SugerCane Gang - fans of Maine Root.

4. Make Magazine’s Weekend Projects

Make Magazine takes a different approach. They not into comedy or even trying to sell you something. They provide How To videos that focus on things you can do over the weekend. Think of what Popular Mechanics or Popular Electronics could have been if they got the web. The other benefit for Make is that the videos have sponsors so they get to advertise their website and re-advertise someone else’s product at the same time. Is that like re-gifting?

5. Moe’s Southwest Grill

Moe’s Southwest Grill decided to get the customers to do the work. They held a contest for a “Burrito in Every Hand” campaign. The winner gets 2,860 vouchers good at Moe’s. They got 40 videos and over 200,000 visitors to the website set up for the campaign. They say sales have gone up, but no details and they expanded their email mailing list by over 200,000.

And here’s a link to the Notorious M.O.E. and Nacho Daddy video, the winner of MOE’s contest.( sorry,I could not get the player to publish -)

So there you have it. Some great, well maybe not great, content that deliver the goods as advertisements. There’s some good lessons for content producers in here and for advertisers as well. It’s time to think differently.

It’s too bad the Wall Street Journal doesn’t understand what it writes about as I would have provided a link to the WSJ story, but it’s behind a walled garden. And I would have provided a link to to the Wall Street Journal video on makes a video go viral, but it had too many ads to make it bearable.

The journal should also get the news that viral is not only about getting a great funny, useful or how to video, its about working the system to get to the top of the most viewed video list. Here’s a link to TechCrunch’s Secrets to Viral Videos. Too bad there’s so much gaming and shady practices involved.

If you know of more case studies, let me know.

Technorati Tags: viral video, online video, advertising, ads as content

ZML.com is positioning itself as the movie version of AllofMP3, a Russian service that provided downloadable music on the cheap. They claim over 1,500 movies, such as Transformers, Live Free or Die Hard, The Bourne Ulitimatum and lots of other big tiles with prices starting at $1.99. The service requires registration and a prepaid account using Visa or Mastercard. Downloads are billed against the prepaid account.

According to ZML, they have lots of hot movies that are playable on iPods and just about every device.

Over 1500 movies of premium DVD quality

Thousands of hot movies that you dare to watch. Movies are playable on various devices including iPod, PDA (HandHelds), PC, DVD & DivX players. Lowest prices on the web ever. Start downloading movies from $1.99 only! Absolutely no limits. You can download as much as you want with incredibly high speeds. No additional software required. Click on a link, download a movie and watch it on your favourite player.

Sounds good, but there’s a catch. The catch as reported by NewTeeVee

ZML.com isn’t licensed by any of the Hollywood studios. The site is selling hundreds of blockbusters anyway, referring to a collective licensing agreement with an obscure Russian rights holders agency.

And here are the details from ZML’s terms of service:

6 Copyrights
6.1 All materials presented on this site are available for the distribution over the Internet in accordance with the license of the Russian Organization for multimedia and Digital Systems (ROMS) and intended for personal use only. Further distribution, resale or broadcasting is strictly prohibited.
6.2 The Site remunerates the fees for every downloaded File in accordance with the license agreement.
6.3 All trade marks, trade names, company names, slogans, logos, and any other copyright items, which can be seen on the Site pages in various contexts, are the property of their respective owners. You have no right to copy, distribute or use them without written permission from the owners.
6.4 The Client has no right to download any Files from the Site if this violates the law of his country.
6.5 The Site Administration can not control actions of each Client therefore the Client is responsible for any illegitimate use of the Site’s materials or/and Services

Wow. This is a nightmare for Hollywood and another blow to the copyright. I’m sure there will be lawsuits filed, if they haven’t been filed already.

The problem is that this seems to be legal in Russia according to AllofMp3 who is reporting court room victories in their copyright infringement suit.

On 24 October a district court in Moscow has confirmed the “no copyright infringement” verdict.

Earlier this year, on 15 August 2007 AllofMP3.com was acquitted of all charges brought up by IFPI. Consequently the Federation filed a protest on behalf of the labels. This protest was declined last week. This time IFPI promised to go as far as the Supreme Court.

I wish the music industry and Hollywood good luck in protecting their copyrights. However, this is the sad, but unfortunately accurate reality of digital media. Movies, music, news all need new business models that allow content to flow openly AND money to be made by the creators of the content when it flows openly. There’s only way to fight blatant ripoffs like ZML in the long run, turn them into profit opportunities for the originators of the content.

Technorati Tags: movies, online video, drm, piracy, downloadable movies, ZML, AllofMP3

I came across RCRD LBL today on my stroll around the net today. RCRD LBL is a network of ad supported online record labels and blogs offering completely free music and multimedia content from emerging and established artists.

All the music is released in DRM-free MP3 format and will work on any personal computer or portable digital music player.

They support the site by selling sponsorships to advertisers that want to help hook you up with good music.

They even have a podcast that shows off some of their favorites of the week.

Technorati Tags: music, free music, ad support music, rcrd lbl, rcrd-lbl

Reuters is reporting that

Internet users in France who frequently download music or films illegally risk losing Web access under a new anti-piracy system unveiled on Friday.

The three-way pact between Internet service providers, the government and owners of film and music rights is a boon to the music industry, which has been calling for such measures to stop illicit downloads eating into its sales.

Under the agreement — drawn up by a commission headed by the chief executive of FNAC, one of France’s biggest music and film retailers — service providers will issue warning messages to customers downloading files illegally.

If users ignore those messages, their accounts could be suspended or closed altogether.

I wonder how they will monitor this and know who is downloading illegally. The ISPs are signing up for a major headache if they want to try and keep track of all this. And how will they get paid for doing this extra work? Probably, higher fees for internet access in France.

I’m glad I don’t live there.

Technorati Tags: music, file sharing, France, piracy

According to USA Today,

The Zune 80, Microsoft’s recently announced high-capacity digital music player, is competing with Apple’s entrenched iPod to be the electronic darling for holiday sales. But the Zune 80 is sold out or in limited supply after its first week at leading retailers, including Amazon, Best Buy, Target and Wal-Mart.

Perhaps this generation of Zune stands a better chance against iPods than the last one did.

Technorati Tags: zune, microsoft

TechCrunch UK is reporting that:

An unconfirmed rumour has reached me via a reliable source that LinkedIn is in talks with media giant News Corporation over a possible buyout in January 2008.

This kind of move would really make sense given the growing importance of the “Social Graph” and the potential for LinkedIn to play a role in providing the social glue that connects us all.

Given that LinkedIn covers a completely different demographic than MySpace, News Corp could also use an acquisition to extend its scale, content and advertising inventory to another segmented social network.

Maybe this will be the next generation of what it means to be a network where demographically segmented social networks are aggregated under an umbrella network that allows for super scale on the infrastructure.

Via Techmeme.

Technorati Tags: social networking, LinkedIn, News Corp

Amazon introduced its $399 Kindle portable e-book reader device, and a library of more than 90,000 books available for download through the Kindle Store for about $9.99 each.

One nice feature of the Kindle is its ability to connect to a wireless network through a new service called Amazon Whispernet, which enables content downloads without a PC or Wi-Fi hotspot.

Pricing of newspaper subscriptions are $5.99 to $14.99 per month, Kindle magazines are $1.25 to $3.49 per month, and wireless delivery of blogs starts at 99 cents each per month.

The Kindle includes storage capacity for up to 200 books, and supports standard SD memory cards as well; battery life is pegged at about 48 hours with the wireless feature on, and a week or more with wireless connectivity disabled.

Here’s the affiliate link if you want to buy Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device.

The device is getting incredible buzz around the blogs and in mainstream media and that’s good for Amazon. Many of the features on the Kindle seem great and while I haven’t seen the device myself it probably is pretty cool (and the affiliate cash certainly helps raise interest among the bloggers).

However, it seems like a lot of money for an electronic book reader and I have a hard time seeing it gaining serious volume at that price point. Maybe if they gave it away like cellphones and sold me a subscription to books it might have a chance, but I can’t see paying this kind of money for a Kindle.

Technorati Tags: Amazon, ebooks, Kindle