Harvard Business School is in Allston...not Cambridge. That means Allston is the seat of great business and mktg knowledge. coBRANDiT is in Allston. Get it? Here's a short drive-by tour of HBS and surrounding Harvard properties.
Harvard Business School is in Allston...not Cambridge. That means Allston is the seat of great business and mktg knowledge. coBRANDiT is in Allston. Get it? Here's a short drive-by tour of HBS and surrounding Harvard properties.
Ok folks...a breakdown of the technologies we used to vlog from WOMM-U last week in Miami. We used two cameras: a Nokia N95 8gb and a Flip Video Ultra. The N95 is a multi-functional phone/computer often billed as competition for the iPhone. It's user interface blows by comparison but it shoots very nice video and has a few video apps. available that make it a great vlogging tool. You can shoot video to memory and then send the video (we use Shozu) to many social media video sites at once with one touch of a button. I typically send videos to a couple of youtube channels, a couple of blip.tv channels, and utterz.com though there are 20+ others i could set up. Shozu uploads are limited to a 10mb file size (though direct uploads to individual sites are not). That's why we didn't use Shozu in Miami. Instead, we live streamed via Qik.
We loaded Qik onto the N95 and set up our account online. When you open up Qik on the N95 it takes about 2 seconds to load, then you hit the button labeled "stream" and there you are, live streaming to the web with a few seconds of delay. Viewers can type in chat comments and they appear on the screen of the N95 in real time. This means if I'm talking to Joeseph Jaffe (as I did at the womma party in Miami, see photo above) viewers can ask questions which appear on my screen and I can ask Joe to respond. Joe sent out a tweet to alert his audience and we were off and running. As a side note: Qik videos can be viewed or embedded in two ways: you can embed a player which shows live video whenever you go live, or you can embed and view archived streams as individual clips (like you do on youtube). Here's the archived stream created while Joe was running my N95. I had gone to get beer...
Ok, understand so far? Good. Now it's gonna get more complex...we were also using Mogulus. Mogulus allows you to produce a 24/7 video channel that's always playing a rotation of selected video. Whenever you go live (which you can do via an N95 and qik, or via a web cam like the one built into you laptop) the live stream automatically bumps the rotation and there you are. Live. Mogulus lets you overlay branding and tickers and titles and crawls, so you can apply text and images to your live feeds (and the vids in rotation for that matter). We set up a Mogulus channel for WOMM-U at mogulus.com/womma. Mogulus is set up so that multiple producers can login from remote locations. You could run a live or near live channel from different places around the world. This just in from our team in Dakar! Pretty cool. Mogulus allows chat in the same way Qik does, and offers customized embeddable players. I'm not embedding one here because they're a pain in a blog post. They're always on! They need to be on a standalone page like this one: the coB homepage.
So far so good. But it turns out that live video is hard to produce (surprise!). Easy technically, but in terms of compelling content you've got to have your interviews and situations lined up pretty well. And to get the chat going you've got to do a little pre-publicity and then run the camera for awhile to give people a chance to respond. People aren't used to live web video. The first comments we get are usually something like "Are you really live? Say hello to me if you are." To make live video work well you've got to have pre-determined go live times and you've got to stream for 15-20 minutes minimum. AND you've got to have some good content lined up. A hot interview, a sweet scenario, a crazy event, a compelling demo. Want the easy mobility of an N95 but don't need or want to go live? Want to produce video you can actually edit? Ahhhh....Flip Video Ultra.
These $140 cameras hold an hour of flash video content and produce amazingly crisp 600x480 video with good sound. The file formats can be a little wonky (.avi) but there are easy workarounds available. The converter I use is streamclip, available from apple. Here's the Flip workflow: Put it in your pocket. When you want to shoot, pull it out, turn it on and in 3 seconds you're ready to shoot. Hit the red button and you're recording, hit it again and you stop. There's a basic digital zoom that helps in some situations, but it degrades the video quality. When you've got an hour of content, flip out the built in USB and load it on to your computer. You can load on files directly (the camera functions just like an accessory hard drive) or you can edit and compress videos right on the Flip--all the software is on the camera's drive in a nifty little program that opens up on your computer screen. The way we work is to bring the files into iMovie or Final Cut Pro and edit them down a bit and add titles and music. Then we do our own compression and throw it up on YouTube or Viddler or load it into our Mogulus stream or whatever. Here's a mix we produced this way at WOMM-U. It's not live, but pretty close if you work fast and the content can better because it's edited...but you lose the live chat functionality. Though you can chat about non-live video through Mogulus if you want to.
Part of the question here is quality vs. quantity, and is live really valuable? Depends on the situation. I can certainly think of a lot of applications for live video, but you really need to do the advanced set-up, PR, and pre-production to get it to engage people and work properly. Near live like we did with the Flip worked pretty darn well, though at an event you need to set aside time for editing or be prepared to stay up late. Need more quality? That's why we aren't throwing out our nice Sony HD camera and our wireless mics...yet.
Jesse and I will be live vlogging portions of WOMMA's WOMM-U down in Miami May 7-9. For the next few days you can check out the action on our front page and here at a more permanent site. I'll do a more detailed post on what tools we're using soon. Hint: Mogulus, Qik, Nokia N95's and Flip Video Ultras.
We are taking the opportunity to make a PR announcement: coBRANDiT is teaming up with guerrilla marketing agency Street Attack to offer a full suite of alternative marketing services. We've built out the widget below to help spread the word. Check it out and let me know what you think! (That goes for the live vlogging too...)
Jesse and I attended Bryan Person's Social Media Breakfast in Cambridge MA this morning...fun event. I shot some N95 qik video of the 4 presenters and did a little video show and tell. Topic: getting hired via social media. Guess what? If you want to get hired in the social media jobspace, the paper resume is dead. You can see all the video posts here.
From Beet.tv:
Sarah Meyers [of] daily show Pop17, a joint production with Rocketboom...
Like superstar blogger Robert Scoble who has both an edited and a live show at fastcompany.tv, Sarah two as well.Robert uses QIK. Sarah uses Flixwagon. Both use the Nokia N95.
Beyond the live audience for these video casts, the clips are saved and archived by both services. Earlier this month, YouTube announced an API to allow streams from QIK and Flixwagon to upload directly to YouTube. Robert reported this first on QIK earlier this month. Flixwagon announced the news on it's blog a few days later.
It is the archival use of these video that is the promise of this new technology.
In addition to live uploading, Sarah explains later in this interview how the 3GP files on the Nokia can be downloaded into a editing system.
I finally got around to checking out Kyte. Impressive. I'll be playing with this once i get my N95 back. The above video is too long but sure tells a good story: Video, live video, live text and audio chat, full embedability, app. development tools for facebook etc. This is advanced stuff.
Well, I really do love ShoZu, which allows you to easily upload video from your phone to any number of different locations quick and easy....as long as your file size is less than 10mb. That is a tiny limit! It means that people running decent camera phones can only upload 20-30 seconds of material. Bummer! There's a petition on the ShoZu forums to raise the upload limit, or make it a pay service, but no answer from Shozu yet. ShoZu! Help! I can't use your service enough!
Continuing to figure out Qik.com, a platform for live streaming video video from your phone. We're trying to integrate it with mogulus.com, which is not as easy as they pretend. Video shot on N95.
The N95 arrives and is unboxed...and the mobile era begins at coBRANDiT. Shot a bunch of sound bites and office views, then strung some of them together in iMovie. The raw footage can be seen (and contributed to) at obttv.com.
And can I take a moment to talk up Viddler? Viddler is an amazing service...good video quality, all the sharing tools you'd expect, plus you can comment and tag in the playbar, embedding links...you can even leave video comments. Very cool. And we've discovered that comments in Viddler vids index very well (great google juice).
Watch above for a demonstration of video buffering probs with my new N95 8gb. This blows. Maybe the Easter Beagle can help?
We just got ok'd for a Qik alpha account...sweet. Here's the first little test vid. The Qik interface on the N95 is very sweet i gotta say. Once you've got the application installed (easy) you just turn it on and the video screen opens up with a little Qik bug in the corner and a buton for "stream"...hit the button and you're live. The player above contains the first vid I shot, but will update as I shoot more or play live if that's what's going on. At least that's how I think it works...we'll see!
update: yeah, that's how it works.
Note on the N95: I've gotta send it back 'cus it's having trouble buffering video when I shoot to memory, which is to say whenever I'm not shooting live to Qik. Big bummer. Video is of course the only reason I spent $700 on the thing. This better be a solvable problem.
I'm sick of hearing about SXSW. Look, we all know it's a music festival that got glommed onto by marketers. So here's a little video about how Jesse and I stayed in Allston (aka Rock City). Shot with the secondary camera on the N95...only 2 megapixels.
Now that I'm finally getting into mobile video I've discovered Veeker.com (though I haven't played with it yet). Veeker's front page lists these capabilities:
* Send videos and pictures from your phone to any phone
* Send videos and webcam messages from your PC to phones
* Store every video and picture you ever send or receive
* Embed a Message Widget that lets others send webcam messages to your phone
That last one's pretty nifty...see an example above. It's monetized with ads, of course. Their blog has some other examples and a video interview with some Veeker poo-bahs.
I've got a Nokia N95 8gb on loan to play with while I wait for mine to come in (thanks to Brett at Street Attack). It's UI is not great...buttons feel cheesy...and I can't get it to download video over MMS (yet). But I can upload videos of my sleeping puppy!
Here's a test through Blip.TV (much better vid quality):
And here it is on utterz.com:
Part playing with Veeker, part introducing Schlitzuation.com. Love Schlitz? Check it out.
I'm playing around with utterz.com, which is a mobile blogging platform. It takes audio, pics and video from your phone and drops it into a web widget like the one above. Seems like I need a new phone though...the video above is all out of synch! I've got a not so fancy one year old LG. Hmmm. Here's Mashable's review of Utterz.
