April 17th, 2012
There have been some pretty interesting milestones in the history of Viddler for the last 5+ years I’ve been on the team. This is one of them. We’re working with Foreigner of Waiting for a Girl Like You fame to help them bring a video contest online in a way that no other company could have.
I just unbuttoned the top two buttons on my shirt.
June 30th, 2011
It was a hard fought battle.
July 30th, 2010
I’ll admit it, when I saw 10K Apart‘s challenge I first thought it meant to build a web app for less than $10K. In reality, the challenge is to build a web app that weighs in at less than 10K – or kilobytes.
The challenge is simple. Build something that inspires the Web and keep it as small as possible. You can cheat a bit though. You may use jQuery (which weighs in at over double the entire challenge-limit), Prototype and Typekit as your tools.
Fantastic idea. My favorite submission so far is gravity.
January 13th, 2009
I have no idea what the criterion for such a contest is but the results are absolutely stunning. The winner, Cheng Slu Wai from Hong Kong (pictured above), is without a doubt gorgeous but how does one possibly make the call?
Also interesting to note that most of the top entries were from Japan with Vietnam and Taiwan also being strongly represented. Only one from the United States.
Source: The International Aquatic Plant Layout Contest Results 2008.
July 7th, 2008
There is a new 5 things group on Viddler, started by my friend Edwin, and it has turned into a small contest on Viddler – so I threw my hat in again stating a new set of 5 things. Â Here is that video.
If you have the time, consider throwing in your hat as well.
May 3rd, 2008
Ok so, the album cover art wasn’t real, if you haven’t already figured that out. Â I had a lot of fun for the few minutes it took to put the cover art together and so I thought you might want to also take a crack at it.
I’ve created a zip file that contains the following:
Download this zip file, create your own creations, and either link to them or (preferably) embed them into your comments below using the IMG tag. Â If you want to go really crazy cool you can record a screencast, upload it to Viddler, and use the video commenting plugin here on my site to include a video of your work too.
I’ll work on getting some sorta prize together. Â Right now the winner (which I will choose before the end of the week) will get a Viddler tshirt for sure. But I think I can find some things to sweeten the deal in between time. Â (If you have something you want to add to the pot you may contact me.)
I took a few moments to create my own examples of some of the things you could do. Â Here are two really quick Photoshop jobs to help inspire you.
Basejump!
Underwater
What can you make Andrew do?
I’m looking forward to seeing what you guys can come up with!
Update: I’m getting submissions for this through email, but I’d much rather them as comments so that others can see them too. So if you are going to email them in, at least leave a comment here, and I will add the image to your comment myself (if you don’t know how, etc).
April 2nd, 2008
Blurb, seemingly, is a really great way to make books online using your digital photos. I haven’t tried it yet but if their site says anything about their company/books, I think you might enjoy what you get out of giving it a try.
They also integrate with Flickr and are running a photo book contest where you could win $25,000.
(Source: Blurb)
August 2nd, 2007
Yesterday was a huge day in the history of Viddler. So many different things ended up converging onto one another to end up creating one crazy day in Bethlehem. (Yes, I realize this sounds like a movie by Kevin Smith about the day Jesus was born.)
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?
July 3rd, 2007
Before I begin gushing about the iPhone I have to mention, especially for those of you that do not have one yet, that you can win one of two free 8Gb iPhones that we’re giving away over at Viddler just for doing simple MeToday videos. Each video you do (one per day per person) is an entry into the contest. No, you don’t have to do one every single day. But since each video is an entry one would think that the more MeTodays that you do, the better chance you have at winning! We’ll give someone an iPhone on the 15th and 30th of July. So don’t read the rest of this post! Go get a Viddler account!
My precious!
Ok. So what do I think of the iPhone? As you might have already guessed, I love it. For the entire weekend I rarely got onto my Macbook to do anything except sync my latest settings of my iPhone to the computer. The iPhone is a great mini-computer for getting most of your core Internet activities done like checking/responding to email, surfing the web for information, or other simple daily tasks like this.
I won’t get into the speed of the EDGE network or how the virtual keyboard is. To me these are non-issues thus far and I don’t have much to compare these two things to since I have never had a cell phone that used the Internet, nor a full sized hard keyboard. I can type pretty fast on the keyboard and the Internet is nearly as fast as being home on Wifi. So again, both are non-issues.
One of my fellow line-waiters John Gruber did a fantastic job giving his general overview of each feature of the iPhone the other day. My impressions are on par with John’s except that I’ve found myself typing just fine. Be sure to read his thoughts if you’d like to catch some of the nice things about each “feature” of the iPhone.
However, I’d like to extend his list a little bit to remark on some of the little things I’ve noticed while using the iPhone that I think make the experience all the more enjoyable.
The weight of the iPhone came as a surprise to some. Yes, it feels heavier than it looks. To me this make the iPhone feel tough and rugged when compared to the way it looks. I think the fact that we’re seeing people surprised at how tough the iPhone actually is, is because it doesn’t look very rugged. It looks elegant, which doesn’t usually mean tough. However the weight of the iPhone makes it feel very rugged to me.
The speed of the interface is something that I was very skeptical about. The commercials led me to believe that the interface was just as fast, if not faster, than switching windows on my computer. In my relatively little experience with mobile phones – the interfaces on these things have never been described by me as “snappy” or “fast”. However the iPhone’s interface, in general, is incredibly fast. When speaking with John Gruber in line, he remarked how the iPhone’s “one app at a time” focus really lent itself to being able to be very fast. The iPhone doesn’t need to show windows inside of windows or multiple layers or even windows on top of windows. The application that you are currently looking at is obviously getting the priority in the Operating System which makes the iPhone blaze.
The sleep, volume, silent, and home buttons are the perfect combination of buttons that were decided to be “hard buttons”. Although one can easily adjust the volume in most applications within the iPhone’s interface, you can also use the hard volume control on the side of the iPhone. The same goes for the silent and sleep buttons – I never have to “turn on” the iPhone to use these options. And the home button is definitely far better than keeping the “doc” visible and having a “desktop” button or something. I’m really glad the iPhone has a home button.
Within each application on the iPhone there are small, hidden gems that you will only find through experimentation or someone telling you that they are there. Like the ability to turn on the caps lock key, or tapping the top bar to auto-scroll to the top of the page in Safari (both tips came from John Gruber’s site), etc. None of these small interface features are handed over, but once you find them you love them.
Keeping in mine that, technically, this is iPhone 1.0 which includes all the hardware and software that came in those beautiful black bags on Friday, I have a few things that I’d like to see improved. I’m sure that, internally, this is build 10,000+ of the iPhone’s OS and its applications, but from my perspective it is still 1.0. Being such, I fully expected to have the wish list that follows.
I’m going to cut this list short because, as I said, this is a 1.0 release and one that I’m overwhelmingly happy with. I’ve found the iPhone becoming an extension of my laptop in ways I hadn’t considered before. I knew that I’d find the iPhone useful, I didn’t expect to want to use it more than my laptop.
What are your thoughts on the iPhone? Any wishes that I didn’t cover?
January 24th, 2007
Viddler is running a little contest to see who can best impersonate their favorite actor and role. I’m no good at impersonations and I couldn’t find a box of chocolates quick enough to put together a Forrest Gump video, so I threw together this short snippet of me training as Rocky.
This kinda stuff is fun to put together, I should do more of them. I used Keynote to create the “Rocky” slide, iMovie to cut up video of me punching the air and add effects, Quicktime to grab the audio from the trailer, and Garage Band to add in the audio to the movie and mix it all together. Not bad for software that comes free on all new Macs.
Submit your own, maybe you’ll get a little something out of it.
[tags]rocky, movie, impersonation, sylvester stalone, video, viddler, contest, entry[/tags]
[slug]me-rocky[/slug]
January 17th, 2007
Quick update: PodTech and Seagate held a competition. I entered. They announced the winners. It looked like I won, but I didn’t.
But something has gone wrong.
There was supposed to be third place winner(s). They did not list a single third-place winner. A number of us asked in the comments, and on our blogs, what was going on and why no third-place winners were announced. No response.
A blogging (podcast, vidcast) community / business, such as PodTech, that does not respond to conversations that it itself starts is very strange behavior. Either they are not being notified of comments from their own blog or they are simply up to their necks with other tasks.
I doubt that any of us care about the “pocket-drives” that we may nor may not be entitled to, we’d just like our questions answered. If anyone has the ear of anyone at PodTech or Seagate, please notify them of what is going on.
Update Jan 18th @ 11pm or so: I got an email asking for my mailing address, so even though I am happy to have actually won something, I’m more happy that there was some type of response.
Not sure why this is being taken care of via email rather than answering comments or updating the blog posts – but at least progress is being made.
[tags]seagate, podtech, contest, responses[/tags]
[slug]podtech-no-response[/slug]
January 15th, 2007
Seagate and Podtech held a contest to win a 750GB external Seagate drive. I entered. They announced the winners and at first glance it appears like I won. But, if you read the entry word-for-word you will see what I merely came in fourth place first.
Congrats to Christopher Penn for his win. Enjoy the prize Chris.
[tags]seagate, podtech, contest, hard drives, christopher penn[/tags]
[slug]i-won-nope[/slug]
December 12th, 2006
I need more storage so that… I don’t have to make rash decisions on what personal data to keep (especially photos) just because I’m running out of room on my laptop. I love using a laptop as my main computer. It’s portable, compact, and works almost as well as a desktop. Currently the main caveat to using a laptop is hard drive space. Laptop hard drives are smaller and slower than their desktop brethren and as such I find myself making decisions as to what I can “take with me” when I’m on the go.
My laptop’s hard drive is 80Gb. Currently I have 5.17Gb free on the entire drive (see screenshot). How much space is that really? Considering that one of my passions is photos – and that I have two digital cameras that each have 1Gb sticks, this means that I only have the room on my laptop to hold 5 more sets of photos from these cameras. This is very depressing to me.
I’m hoping to find a solution to this problem by switching to Aperture and having it store my full-res photos on an external hard drive, while keeping decent resolution thumbnails on my laptop’s drive for viewing when not at home.
My main reason for wanting to win the Seagate “I need more storage so that…” contest, would be so that I could keep taking photos and not have to decide what personal data to keep just because I don’t have the room to store it.
[tags]seagate contest, hard drives, laptop, contest, entry, podtech, seagate[/tags]
[slug]need-storage[/slug]
June 15th, 2006
Wow, I have been chomping at the bit to tell all of you what has been going on, and now I finally can. When the-diet started it received an overwhelming amount of response. Family, friends, and then strangers started to join in to get fit. There was no plan for this diet, no one had to follow any strict rules, no promises of certain weight or inch losses were given – yet people were very excited to join us as a group. So, once I saw this response I told myself that I wanted to be responsible for trying to make everyone that joined successful, and to achieve their goals. This entry gets a bit long, so stay with me for a minute.
Hopefully today’s announcement will be seen as a big step in the right direction. One of the challenges that faces us all is the motivation to continue on a strict course towards our goals. I’ve failed at dieting on more than one occasion, and so I was hoping that each of us could provide each other with the motivation to continue. Some of us have stronger wills than others, since this past weekend I didn’t do so well, while others like James Mathias are thriving on the diet.
Still going strong, super proud of myself I’ve made it two weeks and one day without cheating on my diet, and since I got the [basketball] hoop I haven’t missed my exercise either. — James Mathias
Official sponsor: The Diet Channel
Learn more about them, and the sponsorship.
As with all things though, this diet of ours could get stale – people could move on and some have yet to really participate. (I’m looking at Bryan Veloso here). So I thought, what could I do to keep everyone involved? How could I build incentive to stick with the weigh-ins, the updates, the overall participation each and every week? That is where our first official sponsor of the diet, The Diet Channel, comes in. After a little noodling, Brad Prescott (General Manager for The Diet Channel, you can read his personal letter to all of you) and I were able to put together a program that I think will help to keep everyone involved with the diet.
We’re going to start “a contest” of sorts. Not necessarily a weight-loss challenge because our goal is not to shed as many pounds as possible, but rather to stick with our diets to reach our goals and maintain a healthy weight far into the future. This takes time, discipline, and support. So, how do you participate in this contest? We’ve put together a simple set of instructions on how to be eligible for this contest. Simply put, you need to weigh-in each and every Tuesday, and link to both The Diet Channel’s web site, and the diet’s web site. Quick and easy.
But what do you win? Well, we thought about this for awhile, and rather than give away traditional prizes we’d rather give all of you something useful – that would help you succeed on your respective diets. Remember, this isn’t “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”, this is Colin’s diet. So bear that in mind.
We’ve put together a list of “prizes” which are diets that you can choose from that The Diet Channel will sponsor you to do. In effect, if you’ve ever wanted to try out the South Beach Diet (as an example), we’ll fit the bill. For each month that you continue to use that diet, let The Diet Channel know about your progress, and they will continue to sponsor you. It really is a win win, and hopefully everyone will find a diet that fits their needs.
So, as a recap – each Wednesday (since our weigh-ins are on Tuesdays) we will pick two “winners” by reading all of the entries written on your blogs. We’ll notify the winner, and The Diet Channel, and you can choose if you want to get involved with any of the specific diets on the list. But there’s something more… Each month, we’ll pick one winner for another prize. This prize will be some sort of tangible product, though we’re not releasing any information about that prize just yet.
If you have any questions about this contest, please feel free to email me and hopefully I can help you out.
We also have a few new dieters that were added to the all new dieter listing page. It is absolutely crucial that this list remain as up to date as possible. So if you are on this list, and you have a web site that I did not link to, please send me a quick note. If you are not even on this list, send me a note right now! And, if you have not given me your full name – please do so – as we’re all friends here.
The entire diet page has been updated with tons of information and I ask that each of you participating in this diet take a few minutes to review the new information. If I missed something, it probably means I forgot about it and so you’d do well to inform me. I’m really hoping that these moves will really help everyone stay involved, keep dieting, and ultimately remain healthy.
Buttons for your site – So, Ana thought it’d be cool to have some buttons. I couldn’t agree more. If you would like to put some buttons on your site, linking to either the diet page or The Diet Channel (as Ana has done) – you can use these graphics. If you need any specific sizes, just ask.
[tags]diet, the-diet, sponsorship, the diet channel, contest[/tags]
