Matt tried to make me look good.

Moving out of this building next month.

Ate lunch with Kyle and Jeff. 5 stars.

In a rented Best Western conference room. Classy.

Not everyone but closer than usual.

“The idea that every tech company needs to be in the Bay Area is dead and buried. May it Rest in Peace.”

In a recent video interview at Streaming Media East Viddler’s own President Rob Sandie made this point too. We’ve built Viddler in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (and in Krakow, Poland, Phoenix, Arizona, Iceland, Australia, etc.) and have used the Internet to keep ourselves up-to-date with some of the things going on around the world in tech.

For more information, see the Viddler developers page.

Note: If you are using Google Reader you may not be able to see this video. The Reader team is dragging their feet on supporting Viddler’s latest embed code. Come on over to my site to see it.

We’ve got a brand new parking garage at Viddler HQ, which is annexed in the excellent Ben Franklin Technology Center, and it is pretty nice.

Believe it or not Viddler‘s “Super Sys Admin” Todd Troxell uses this text-based, window-less UI full time.

No question this time. Just Mountains. Special guest is Viddler’s Lead Designer Andrew Smith.

As you may recall Bernie has a support control center on his desk. Today I came into Viddler HQ to discover that he’s pretty much a switcher.

Bernie‘s ‘computer bank’ for Viddler support is pretty awesome.

Random 60: What time do you wake up?

I wake up every morning around 6:45a. I love it. Back in 2006 I was getting up at 7. As I get older, I’m getting up earlier. But really, I enjoy waking up early and getting things accomplished. It is when I work best.

What about you?

Note: No Jeffs were harmed in the making of this video.

Random 60: What is your favorite music genre?

Special guest Jeff Johns, a friend and fellow Viddler team member, has a particular taste in music so I put him on the spot to name his favorite music genre.

My favorite music genre would have to be Rock.

What is your favorite music genre? Let us know in the comments!

Welcome to Random 60 season 2! Sorta. Today we have a special guest, Kyle Slattery, who is a friend and fellow Viddler team member. Today’s topic, haircuts.

I just got my haircut and I usually just tell the lady at the hair place to cut as much off as she’d like to. What do you do? How often do you get your haircut? Answer in the comments!

After climbing a tree at Lehigh University in an attempt to capture a cicada I ended up finding several skins left on a tree at about eye level. Go figure. There is tons of information on Cicadas on Wikipedia. Worth perusing.

Eating a Gombo at The Goose with Kyle, Jeff, and Rob. Incredisandwich.

Related: I’m adding “The Goose” to my favorite places less than 2 hours from home list.

Viddler all-star Kyle Slattery (right) is back from his semester in Germany. He’s already back at work and back to eating Gombos from The Goose. We’re happy to have him back and to feed him.

Oh yeah, Rob Sandie is in this photo too.

Random 60: What can save newspapers? | Favorite on Viddler.

Can anything save newspapers? Today I’m joined by Rob and Bernie, two of my coworkers, and we all have simple ideas that may help save the newspapers for us. For Rob he thought he needed to see more talk about technology in his local newspaper. Bernie said the main reason he gets the newspaper, like so many others, is to help his family save money using coupons. For me, I’d much rather an online solution by giving my local news on my phone or with alerts.

What would save newspapers for you? Would you subscribe to them in paper form or online?

Random 60: Getting songs stuck in your head | Favorite on Viddler.

Today’s random 60 topic was suggested by Sam. Thanks Sam.

Have you ever had a song stuck in your head? How did it get there? Maybe you listened to the radio, or a friend is addicted to a song and plays it over and over, or perhaps you were in the grocery store and heard it. No matter how it got there, for a while, it is there to stay.

Most recently I’ve had the song Jump Rope by Blue October surgically planted into my head by Chris because he plays it over and over (it is also the intro to today’s Random 60 video).

What was the last song you had stuck in your head and how did it get there?

Random 60: Are you camera shy? | Favorite on Viddler.

Do you find yourself shy around cameras? Maybe you have no trouble chatting with your friends at bars but the second someone takes out a camera, you find yourself hiding?

Today, we explore why that is with Donna DeMarco, Vice President of Viddler, because she is camera shy and would know best why that is. She says it is because “it is permanent, and she can see herself on the video”.

If you’re camera shy, share why in the comments!

Date taken: February 10, 2009.

In the lobby of Ben Franklin TechVentures is this neat piece of metal/art of the Ben Franklin logo. Viddler is annexed in this building.

I haven’t done a video on Viddler since November! This doesn’t make up for it but at least there is something with me out there now. I’ve gotta hop on it. Maybe I’ll take one of the Skribit suggestions for this site and use video instead of writing to check it off the list.

Thanks to Owen for coming into Viddler HQ last week and for doing this video.

Having a teleconference with ten people in Pennsylvania, New York, and Crakow, Poland.

Putting the finishing touches on Viddler’s B2B site. Photo by: Rob Sandie.

Donna, Rob, and I are having a strategy meeting today. Kyle is on his way from Boston. We’re all Macintosh all the time at Viddler.  Actually, I think the entire US team has a Macintosh now, while our team members in Poland need to “upgrade” soon.

Todd Troxell, Viddler‘s system admin, does actually exist.

Rob, a Monster drink, and a laptop. The usual scene here at ViddlerHQ.

Taken while walking to get coffee.

Under I-78 between Hellertown and Bethlehem, PA the trees are blooming.

These four TVs show weather, news, stock market information, company profiles, and much more. These are in the ViddlerHQ lobby.

All of that aside: When the Viddler team gets together in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania we have some crazy times. Today was no exception.

Today we met with the Haydenfilms team. Haydenfilms has a great history. What began as an idea in 2001 to “enhance artistic vitality of collaborative film projects” resulted in a company “dedicated to the support and development of emerging independent, and student film producers”. And this is exactly what Haydenfilms has done over the last few years with great success.

Hayden Craddolph, founder of Haydenfilms, and his team stopped by ViddlerHQ today to brain storm about how Viddler and Haydenfilms can collaborate on this year’s Haydenfilms Online Film Festival. Between the meeting we had a few months ago and our meeting today – we’ve now laid the ground work for what I believe will be a great relationship between two companies that I feel share a very similar vision; “the empowerment of community”.

Haydenfilms shares Viddler’s mantra of allowing the community to be the driving force behind everything the company does. Unlike many film festivals, the entries into the contest for the annual Online Film Festival are not chosen by a committee or a party wrought with political and social turmoil – but rather by the community of those that created and/or enjoy this content.

We’ll have more details on our site, and the main Haydenfilms site, about exactly how you can help make this year’s Online Film Festival (happening between August 30th and October 30th) the best yet. And – by participating in the selection process – you can come to New York City and hang out at the red carpet event in January of 2008 in celebration of these films complete with the teams behind the top four films, celebrities, the Haydenfilms and Viddler teams, and much, much more.

I’m definitely looking forward to seeing how this all plays out.

I knew I’d be going to ViddlerHQ to giveaway the second iPhone for the month of July. Giving away an iPhone is a production in and of itself. You have to prepare the entries. Get everything together to do a video “broadcast” to announce the winner and try to build a little hype by involving the community along the way. This alone is a pretty big thing to accomplish in a day.

My mobile setup – at the offices of Viddler

We weren’t certain that we’d be launching a brand new version of our site and our player on this same day until about the day before. Yesterday we launched a new player that, although aesthetically the same, takes advantage of an entirely new infrastructure that the Viddler team had been building for quite some time. Video playback and responsiveness should be vastly improved for most people, especially those that were viewing videos that had a high amount of traffic associated to them. We also managed to release Viddler Groups which allows our users to create their own little communities to add video and discussions to. I’ve personally been waiting with baited breath for Groups since before we launched Version 2.0 in April.

Rob working hard

While we were rolling out Groups we had a hiccup. I’m no system administrator (not by any stretch of the imagination), but from what I gather it wasn’t something we could avoid because we experienced a problem during a routine automatic upgrade process that happened to coincide with our update. I’ll let Rob, Kasper, and/or Todd elaborate on this if they feel the need to. We were able to restore everything fairly quickly once the problem was indentified and release groups with much success!

While one contest was ending, another one was beginning. Our MeToday contest in July was such a success that we wanted to do it again – so we came up with what I think is a natural extension to the MeToday contest – the MealToday contest. Just tell Viddler what you ate or drank today and you can win your choice of an iPhone or Canon TX1 HD camcorder. We’re running this contest with two of our favorite Viddlers WineLibraryTV and ForkYouTV for the entire month of August. We’re now planning an event in Philadelphia for September 1st to giveaway this prize in style!

To top off the day our very own Viddler Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibraryTV was scheduled to be on Late Night with Conan O’brien! How much more jammed packed and fun could one day get? After watching Gary’s few moments with Conan last night – I have to say he did an extraordinarily good job. We’re all so proud of the success that WineLibraryTV has worked so hard for and we’re sure this trend will continue.

So that was my day; how was yours?

9:30am – Woke up around 6, left at around 7:30, arrived at Viddler HQ – hit up Starbucks for Rob to get his “fix”, and now we’re at the office.

The first order of business? Update the featured videos on the explore page for the week. These videos are hand picked by internal staff so if you see a video highlighted there, you know we all really like the video and the use of Viddler.

10:00am – Donna just got here and now it is time to go through some community strategy.

10:09am – Before we head off to the conference room, maybe any of you could leave some suggestions.

12:37pm – Great strategy meeting. Hopefully some of the ideas we generated during it will be put into play pretty soon. Exciting things not only for Viddler but anyone that wishes to promote their video online.

Rob, Donna, and I at the Viddler HQ

1:09pm – Rob just ordered some lunch (I’m starving). I’m getting a “huge salad”.

Donna is sitting next to me on a brand new HP laptop running Vista. Donna is no slouch when it comes to computers and she’s spent about 30-minutes trying to get a printer running. I think Vista is showing its true colors for sure right now.

Maybe I can get the Viddler team, since Andrew and I are already running Mac OS X, to switch? Oh wait, Rob needs the nipple (more on this later).

Be sure to check out the new featured header I created for this post.

2:26pm – Lunch was good! I’m actually really full. Now back to writing today’s blog post!

4:09pm – Finished today’s featured videos blog entry (look for it on the blog after it is reviewed). I can’t wait to be able to create those types of posts much quicker with some of the tools I envision…. more on this later.

For now, enjoy a photo we got right before lunch. It is the serious version of the one you see in the new header promoting this post.

5:06pm – The featured video post for this week has been published. It is nice to have all of the featured videos in one location to quickly flip between them.

5:36pm – I’m on my way home. Good day.

[tags]viddler, bethlehem, pennsylvania, live, video, photos, windows vista, donna demarco, colin devroe, rob sandie[/tags]
[slug]live-viddlerhq-again[/slug]

You can look at my profile over on Viddler, subscribe to the Viddler blog, or just learn how to use the service – while you’re following me around today.

6:00am – Just showered and fired up my Macbook to get last minute directions. I’m going a different way than I did the first time because I’m dropping Eliza off at some friend’s in Slatington (the Rosarios) before heading into Bethlehem.

It snowed last night! I got all of my gear ready (camera, ipod, laptop, etc.) and I’m going to start the Jeep up early. First time I’ve had to do that all winter. Off I go, next time I blog will be from the Viddler HQ more than likely.

9:19am – Just arrived at Viddler. Man, what a hassle with the ice and snow! I didn’t account for school buses or blinding sun on icy roads.

Of all things, Rob and I are talking about how Web 2.0 Viddler is. Oh, and we’re going to start posting in the new Viddler forums!

9:59am – The forums are up and running and you can even use video to respond or post in the forums. Very slick.

10:25am – Just finished a quick video, in better quality, letting people know you can respond to forum threads with videos.

We’re on our way out to Dan’s Camera Shop to see if we can get into some trouble.

1:54pm – Had a great meeting at Dan’s Camera Shop with Mark Woodland. Great guy, great company, if you live anywhere near them, I recommend you check out their site, and their shop.

By odd coincidence we saw Eliza, Andrea, Ava, and Giana there. I couldn’t believe it. I thought for sure they were stalking us.

I got to meet Donna finally! After leaving Dan’s Camera Shop we headed to a chinese buffet and went over what we learned in our meeting. Seeing this business from all perspectives is not only important, but it is also extremely interesting. Mark was able to teach us a lot about their side of the business in a relatively short period of time. Invaluable experience.

We’re now back at “the ranch” listening to some Cold War Kids and going over the new yet-to-be-released Viddler API.

2:56pm – We’re going to head over into the conference room and I’m going to record a “ScobleShow-esque” interview with Rob so that people can get a pretty good feel for Viddler.

If you have any questions, you can send them to me via email or comments.

4:02pm – Rob and I recorded a quick interview video and we’ll be publishing that on Viddler slowly over the next week or so. It has some great insight into not only Viddler’s past, but also Viddler’s present, and future.

I’m on my way out of Viddler HQ now. Going to head back to Slatington to hang out with some friends and get a bite to eat. I had a great day here at Viddler and I hope to come back really soon.

[tags]viddler, bethlehem, pennsylvania, slatington, macbook, eliza devroe, api, andrea rosario, dans camera shop, giana rosario, ava rosario, mark woodland, chinese buffet, food, lunch[/tags]
[slug]live-viddlerhq[/slug]