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Filemobile helps photographers Share The Experience with photo contest

posted by Steve Hulford on 06.07.12

July 6th, 2012, Toronto.The Grand Canyon, Yellowstone National Park and Badlands National Park—these are just a few of the stunning federal lands, national parks and historical sites that draw millions of visitors to the United States each and every year. Of course, the country is host to hundreds more magnificent natural monuments, but few tourists have the time to see them all—until now.

The innovative Share The Experience photo contest—a partnership between the Active Network and the National Park Foundation— aims to bring these natural wonders to the living rooms and mobile devices of people the world over. The contest invites legal residents of the U.S. to submit photos of their favourite national park, historic site or federal lands in five categories: adventure and recreation; historical and cultural; scenic, seasons and landscapes; friends, family & fun(ny) on federal lands; and wildlife. Photos must be taken on the lands or within the facilities of the National Park Service, U.S. Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or the U.S. Forest Service.

After submitting their prize-worthy shots, amateur photographers are encouraged to share their submissions with friends and family and drive voting for a chance to win the $15,000 grand prize, the $10,000 second-place prize or the $2,500 prize for the third-place finisher. The top three finalists will also receive an annual Federal Recreation Lands Pass, while those who earn an honourable mention will enjoy a free two-night stay at a selection of hotels across the U.S.

Amateur shooters take note: Photographs must be taken between January 1, 2010 and December 31, 2012, while contest entries will be accepted from June 28, 2012 to December 31, 2012. Winners will be announced by March 15, 2013. Photos will be judged on their originality, artistic composition, technical quality, photographic technique and how their photograph showcases the best of America's recreational opportunities.

Filemobile is powering the Share The Experience contest with its Media Factory social media suite. The platform provides cutting-edge functionality including Facebook Connect to allow for simple log-ins and sharing, geo-tagging of photos and full commenting capabilities to maximize interactivity among participants and voters.

Filemobile chief creative officer Steve Hulford predicts the contest will garner some memorable submissions. “Given the number of high-quality, unique photos that were entered in the contest last year—and given the photos that have already been submitted to the contest so far in 2012—I’m confident Share the Experience will prove an even greater success this time around.”

To enter or vote on photo submissions, visit www.sharetheexperience.org

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Filemobile Participating in Canadian Trade Mission to Amsterdam's IBC Conference

posted by Chris Becker on 08.09.11

Sep 09, 2011 - Amsterdam, NL - Earlier in 2011, Filemobile was asked to participate in the Ontario Partnering Mission to IBC 2011 which is being held from Sep 08 - 13.

IBC is the leading global tradeshow for professionals engaged in the creation, management and delivery of broadcasting media and entertainment. This mission has been organized by the Ontario Ministry of Economic Development and Trade - International Trade Branch and Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada.

This event includes attendance at the conference, networking events, site visits and scheduled business development meetings with various European media companies and digital agencies.

IBC provides a great opportunity for Filemobile to showcase its expertise in user generated content, citizen journalism and community to help media successfully grow into a range of new digital opportunities.

We are excited to be participating in this mission and broad set of events with these other participants:

Stay tuned for a summary of events and happenings from Filemobile @ IBC 2011!

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Project Wildfire Goes Live with Social Entrepreneur Contest

posted by Steve Hulford on 29.03.11

Project Wildfire is a Toronto-based incubator that finds, sparks and supports youth business ideas that serve the greater good.

March 28th, 2011, Toronto - Filemobile is pleased to present Project Wildfire. Project Wildfire is a youth business incubator to help spark and support business ideas that will support communities and individuals across Toronto. The brainchild of social entrepreneur Mike Brcic, project wildfire is a collaboration between The Center for Social Innovation, Toronto Housing, Ryerson and Filemobile. CityTV and Omni have signed up as a media sponsor with Telus as a corporate sponsor.

Starting April 6th Toronto based youth who are aged 19-29 will be able to upload their 90 second pitch on a business idea that has social benefit. All they will need to do is upload their video or record from a webcam their idea. The community will vote on the best business pitches and the top 25 (5 wild-cards will be chosen by Ryerson business students) will go into a second round where a panel of business professionals will pick 10 finalists.

Project Wildfire will also provide six workshops where contest entrants can attend workshops called: "An introduction to entrepreneurship and social business" where they will learn: a) How to create a business plan b) What is entrepreneurship c) How to spot opportunities d)how to pitch ideas and more. The project all wraps up in July where 5 of the top 10 finalists will win $35,000 (total) in cash to fund their business ideas.

The website is powered by Filemobile's Media Community application. This allows the contest entrants to have a profile and to participate in the dialogue in the Project Wildfire Community. Facebook connect ties in the massive Facebook community where the demographic (19-29) lives.

What's your wildfire? Check it out at Project Wildfire.
Come check out our launch party April 5th at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto.

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Social Media for Business

posted by Marc Milgrom on 26.05.10

May 27, 2010 – Toronto, ON | We hear a lot about social media every day in blog posts, Twitter, traditional media and the like. It’s “the” method of communication for many people, surpassing speaking on the phone, even if it’s mobile. It has become an accepted, effective and growing method of marketing and interacting with customers. So what about within your business?

Historically, technology was developed in the business world, government or academia first, and then later adapted for consumer opportunities. Examples include the desktop computer, email and the Internet itself. Today, what we’re often seeing is the opposite, with consumer products later finding business application, such as desktop search, podcasts, broadband video and mobile applications.

It’s also normal to see consumer software used by employees in the workplace before being formally adopted by IT departments. Want your people to be more productive and lower IT costs at the same time? Find out what your employees like to use and involve them in determining what tools the business can benefit from. Like it or not, changes are occurring in how people think, learn, process information, communicate and collaborate.

Social media is now becoming more widely accepted within businesses to enable people to communicate, collaborate and share knowledge in a more productive manner. LinkedIn and Twitter are two public sites that can be used effectively for specific business purposes such as recruitment or customer support. While management often debates the pros and cons of allowing employees access to popular, public social networks such as Facebook, YouTube and MySpace, they are starting to see the value of these types of tools and functionality within the organization. You can now have functionality similar to the public social networks inside your organization – to share information in a safe and controlled environment, without the worry of exposing sensitive corporate information to others outside the company.

A few factors contribute to the value social media can play for business. Humans are social and visual creatures by nature. There is a strong move online toward images and video, for management communications, product information, presentations, blog posts and training (see Video Opportunities article for more examples). We are continuing to see communication go towards shorter, searchable and contextual “sound bites”.

Social media can aid in one other business challenge. The loss of corporate knowledge is a growing issue, with an aging population and significant numbers close to retirement, regular employee turnover and the high cost of training new people. When people leave your business, they walk out the door with some of your most valuable assets: applied knowledge and experience. Making it easier for people to share knowledge in a safe and controlled manner and wrapping social activities such as commenting, rating and tagging around online information and dialogues, helps draw out this experience and convert it from individual to organizational value. Capturing just a small percentage of this day-to-day experience and making it searchable within your organization unlocks a knowledge base that was previously inaccessible.

Your younger employees expect to have tools in the workplace that they already use daily. Providing similar, easy-to-use tools within the organization helps break down the traditional cultural resistance to knowledge sharing that many businesses struggle with.

“Social business” opportunities to share what’s important and interesting include:

management communications;
a central place to aggregate, manage, access and repurpose all presentations;
innovation tools;
competitor information;
profiles with documents authored, recent work experience, speaking engagements, areas of interest and blogs; and
online, just-in-time and distance training.

Through the use of video and interactive applications, you help attract, engage, interact and retain your people. You also reduce the time of onboarding, making employees more valuable, more quickly.

Additional benefits of making your business social are:

unleashing creativity and innovation;
reducing time to market;
increasing productivity through quicker access to knowledge;
increasing revenue by delivering broader value to more customers;
significantly reducing email messages; and
improving overall employee engagement.

By building true organizational knowledge, these tools help strengthen brand and corporate loyalty within an organization, thereby increasing external brand value.

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Opportunities | Part 3: The Potential Applications for Video are Everywhere

posted by Chris Becker on 03.02.10

Feb 1, 2010 – New York, NY

Opportunities | The potential applications for video are everywhere

The implications of the growth and interactivity of video is a major challenge for the media industry and is part of debate about the future of media. While digital media is experiencing health growth and provides promising opportunities for content producers, marketers and brands, it is unclear how broadcasters and publishers will capitalize on these changes.

For business in general, the opportunities are more clear. From a competitive standpoint, any business interested in increasing effectiveness, improving efficiency or lowering costs needs to seriously look at video given the changes in the market place, capabilities of technology, and everyone’s expectations, knowledge and use of video.

The power of video to address one or more business challenges is compelling. Imagine if:

product videos with overviews and descriptions were available on demand and searchable on Google;
the knowledge of departing employees was captured on video beforehand;
focus groups and interviews were cataloged by question or topic and made available to the appropriate business functions and management;
customer feedback could be received that includes facial expressions, intonation, and intent;
meetings, events and conferences could be recorded and made available to anyone in the company at any time; or
that great sales pitch, turn of phrase or great conversation was captured, indexed and searchable.

For most businesses, almost every business function can be looked at from the perspective of how video can improve service delivery, customer feedback, knowledge management, marketing, sales, communications, public relations, training … the list goes on and on. A more detailed and longer list of applications for video can be found in “42 ways to use video to grow your business”. This article catalogues many ways to use video to grow business, including a rating of the popularity and growth potential of each idea.

Here are some examples of innovative and new ways to interact with video:

Interactive video | Klickable.tv offers a product that creates a 'wrapper' around any video player, allowing users to add clickable tags throughout any video. This could be used for creating video 'treasure hunts', product tie-ins', character descriptions and more … kind of like creating a video based wiki.
Searchable video (e.g. tags, metadata) | YouTube and Obama use indexed video to enable users to choose specific video segments from a longer speech. Check it out at mybarackobama.com.
Shareable video | Video that is more interactive, shareable and searchable is moving beyond YouTube to anywhere on the web or mobile device. For example, here at Filemobile, we’ve developed several applications that are designed to share and interactive with video including a Media Community application and a Broadband Video application. Sheridan College’s Shine Brighter website uses the Media Community application to collect and share video. Vision TV leverages the Broadband Video application to distribute content online at video.visiontv.ca.
User generated and contextual video | With webcams and video enabled phones, everyone is becoming a video producer. User Generated Content (UGC) can be used to engage customers through campaigns such as contests. Filemobile works in this area with a UGC Contest application. The related meta-data collected along with UGC video can be used to target content and messages to specific groups based upon criteria such as interests or location. Marketers such as Kraft have used UGC to create engaging national campaigns that have a local appeal. One example is the Kraft 10 in 10 contest, asking people to nominate their community in a cross-country competition.
Transcribed video | Speakertext aligns transcript text with video to allow deep video integration with written content. Video segments can be selected and distributed to any website by choosing the relevant transcript text. This requires the manual alignment of transcribed text to video on setup but this transcription can be outsourced to services such Mechanical Turk.

As the old saying goes: “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Well, If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth at least a million.

Check out Part 1 | Evolution: Video, Not Just for TV Anymore.

Chris Becker
CEO – Filemobile Inc.

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Market | Part 2: Rapid Increases in Video Supply and Demand

posted by Chris Becker on 03.02.10

Feb 1, 2010 – New York, NY

Market | Rapid increases in video supply and demand

The market for video will grow in all directions. There are several demand and supply side forces that are setting the landscape for this change:

Demand for video is growing | In particular as the public becomes more comfortable with the power they now have to consume media in the way they choose. The growth in the popularity of Personal Video Recorders (PVR’s) such as TIVO exemplifies this shift.
Expectations are rising | The standard for interactivity and participation is continuing to grow. Not offering interaction for websites and content (e.g. providing comments, reviews, ratings) is becoming less common. The public is also becoming more comfortable with interacting online with people they never met in the real-world. Including recording video of themselves. Recording yourself for the web is already second nature to teens and twenty-somethings.
Supply of video is growing | Every day, more and more video is uploaded, indexed, digitized, and mashed, creating ever growing library of content.
Infrastructure is available | The idea of watching a full length computer via the web was seen as impractical just a few years ago. Now it is the standard, and more possibilities are on the way.

Some fast facts on the growing market:

Quintuple | The amount by which Global IP traffic will grow from 2008 to 2013.
40% | The compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of IP traffic.
4x times | How much bigger the Internet will be in 2013 in comparison to 2009.
10 billion | The equivalent number of DVDs that will cross the Internet each month in 2013.
33% | The 2009 percentage of consumer Internet traffic that is video.
60% and 91% | The 2013 percentage of consumer traffic that will be accounted for by Internet video and all video (TV, video on demand, Internet and P2P) respectively.
700 to 1 | The amount of Internet video in 2013 in comparison to the entire U.S. Internet backbone in 2000.
500,000 years | How long it would take to watch all of the online video that crosses the Internet each month in 2013.
18 Exabytes | The amount of Internet video generated each month in 2013.
1 Billion | The number of ‘Gigabytes’ in 1 ‘Exabyte’.
2x times | The amount by which Video-on-Demand (VoD) traffic and mobile data traffic will increase every two years through 2013.
66x times | The amount by which global mobile data traffic will increase between 2008 and 2013.
30 | How many traditional mobile phones it takes to equal the amount of data traffic generated by one smartphone (e.g. iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile).

Source: “Cisco Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2008-2013” Cisco, Jun 9, 2009.

With strong growth in both supply and demand in video, what are the opportunities? Check out:

Check out Opportunities | Part 3: The Potential Applications for Video are Everywhere.

Chris Becker
CEO – Filemobile Inc.

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Why you need to own your own community

posted by Steve Hulford on 04.11.09

Toronto, Canada - November 4, 2009 - There are two significant forces at play pushing firms towards creating their own online communities: the ‘flight to free’ and a failure of costly agencies to deliver a significant and consistent return on investment.

At Filemobile, we believe that brands, content producers, media companies and enterprise-level firms can benefit significantly from building and managing their own interactive online experiences, which they can brand and then post moderated user-generated or in-house content.

But why should companies host their own online community when they can simply create an account on an existing social networking site to display content or speak to their target audience? Simple, these other websites don’t supply the critical levers to control and manage the online experience and interaction with their customer base.

Pages on websites such as Facebook, YouTube and MySpace can’t be pre-moderated, creative can’t be fully or properly branded, and they own all terms of use and user data. This leaves critical brand control in third party hands.

Filemobile’s creative products and services empower organizations of all sizes and in all sectors to create interactive online community platforms they brand and control themselves.

But we also encourage firms to establish a presence on popular social networking sites. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have massive audiences which can help a company grow their brand reach exponentially, offering near-limitless marketing opportunities.

We encourage customers to use those websites to leverage audience interaction and drive traffic to their online community to improve time-on-site and page views, improve brand recognition and interaction, and monetize content by creating the most compelling online experience possible.

Once fans, followers, and viewers have paid a visit to a firm’s online community, they can engage visitors in a moderated conversation and can capture their valuable demographic, sociographic and psychographic data to employ in other marketing endeavours. Each new visitor to a community is a potential new customer or content consumer.

There simply is no other more cost-effective or efficient media platform to reach members of a target audience than through a branded online community.

Facebook connect brings a much broader audience into the online experience, while still offering brand control.

Other large brands, content producers, media companies and enterprise-level firms are beginning to understand that hiring expensive digital agencies to build online platforms on a project-by-project basis is far too costly to provide a sustainable marketing solution to their client interaction and brand-building needs.

As so many of our clients have learned, Filemobile’s reliable, proven software-as-a-service products are a far more efficient way to build their brands and communicate with their target audience.

Find out how Campbell's Chunky grabbed an extra 26% of their audience from Facebook with a Filemobile Media Community.

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