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.

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?