Archive for November, 2009
Client News: Ardica Wants You To Vote For Your Favorite Design & Win!
In June, Ardica announced its global “Power To The People” contest designed to have creative designers from around the world come up with a brilliant new application using their miniaturized, portable power system called the Moshi Power Pack. From over 120 entries, the judges narrowed it down to eight finalists that will present to the judges at the Ardica offices on Saturday, December 5.
Judges from technology websites Gizmodo and Wired, IDEO, Mountain Hardwear and Stanford will examine each entry carefully and ultimately award the winners cash prizes for their innovative ideas for integrating the Moshi power pack into their design. But what exactly is a Moshi? It’s a battery pack that is both lightweight and unobtrusive and can charge most electronic devices quite frequently. The Moshi power pack can even be used as a heater so when you’re in a cold environment, it’ll keep you snug and warm.
As part of the Ardica design contest, they have also decided to award one of the eight finalists the “People’s Choice Award” whereby that winner will receive an extra cash prize of $1,000. In order to be the winner of this prize, Ardica is asking for people to cast their votes by clicking here, looking at each of the eight finalists and casting their vote. As an added incentive, three random voters will be given a Moshi power pack!
Voting goes now through noon on December 4. To cast your vote, simply click here.
Client News: VUDU brings Wikipedia into HD movie streaming
VUDU today unveils yet another great new feature to their interface, the integration of Wikipedia into VUDU. When you land on a movie page, you can view all the information Wikipedia has to offer about that film – links to actors, directors (and anything else) are all active, so you can explore to your geeky content. And film links actually can take you back into VUDU!
Their blog post says it all, so we won’t repeat it here. But this is yet another reason why their implementation of a “streaming user interface” is so darn smart. They can update VUDU with great new features like Wikipedia, Rotten Tomatoes, theatrical trailers and more, quickly and easily. It doesn’t require a user download or a firmware upgrade – it’s very much like updating a web page.
A number of outlets have covered the news. The list of coverage is below.
Client News: Pogoplug Unveils 2nd Gen Device – Pretty Darn Cool In Pink
The New Pogoplug!
At a great late night event held in their SF headquarters, Cloud Engines – creators of the ubercool award-winning Pogoplug “multimedia sharing device” unveiled the next step in their Pogoplug product evolution (see picture).
A very select group of techgeeks got a very special sneak peek and hands-on with the new Pogoplug, which boasts 4 USB ports (a big crowd pleaser), very cool new design, and a bunch of new features:
- Automatic sync with your music, movies, photos…really any folder you want
- Bulk uploading
- Improved data display for media – cover art, albums, genre, artists for music, timeline for photos
- Super easy and cool looking drag and drop slideshows
- Streaming video from my.pogoplug.com in just about any format – even stream to your iPhone
- Improved address book functions, incorporating Myspace and Facebook friends for easier sharing
- Global search across all Pogoplugs and drives – never forget which drive that file is sitting on. Just hit the search button
The Pogoplug has had an incredible year after just launching at CES in January, earning huge accolades and a very dedicated community of followers (check out www.pogoplugged.com). We’re thrilled that the second generation already seems to have captured the imaginations of many in the tech world just a few hours after its release. Check out some of the great client coverage below:
- Slashgear
- LA Times
- Engadget
- CrunchGear
- VentureBeat
- Gizmodo
- CNet
- Electronista
- MacWorld
- Ubergizmo
- PCWorld
- Cult of Mac
- OhGizmo
- GeekTonic
- Inquisitr
- Geek.com
- eHomeUpgrade
- Gadgetell
- GottaBeMobile
(more to be added as they come in)
Client News: BOKU announcing 12 major partnerships at once
BOKU has a big announcement today, which includes 12 major partnerships with some of the biggest names in free-to-play and social / casual gaming. BOKU offers a direct mobile payments system for virtual goods. Want some digital alfalfa for your virtual horses in Barn Buddy on Facebook? BOKU lets you pay for it with your mobile phone.
The new partnerships account for more than 200 million (yup, million) new customers with access to BOKU to pay by mobile for their virtual goods. BOKU is a global outfit with offices in the US, South America, the UK and Singapore. Their release went out on the wire at 9AM PST today – the full list of new partnerships are available there.
BOKU also announced the 3rd generation of their user experience today, which includes some great features to simplify and streamline customer checkout – the ability to instantly differentiate between a landline and mobile number is one example. Innovations like this make life simpler for the end consumer, and nncrease conversion for their customers, and making life better and more profitable is what being in business is all about – well done BOKU!
Several outlets picked up the news this morning, the list of publications covering the news is below. We’ll update the list as we see articles appear.
Client News: Clicker is live and ready for Prime Time
Great news for Clicker today – they’re launching out of Beta, making the service available to anyone in the world. Clicker has also increased their content index dramatically, partly through collaboration with Netflix and Amazon to index all of their video-on-demand content – this brings Clickers content index up to:
- 400,000+ episodes, from over 7,000 shows
- 30,000+ films
- 50,000+ music videos
And, they have some great new feature enhancements thanks to all the Beta feedback they received. This includes features like use of Facebook Connect (to create an account using your FB credentials) and improvement to their amazing playlist function (sort of like a DVR for Internet television to create season passes, and get alerts when new episodes are available, etc.)
We issued a press release via Business Wire this morning. A little later today, founder and CEO Jim Lanzone will be publicly unveiling the site at the NewTeeVee Live 09 event in San Francisco (in our fair city!)
A number of outlets have covered the news this morning. We will update the list of coverage below as we see it come in throughout the day.
Client News: worlds collide as Blake Krikorian joins board of Clicker.com
We had a great announcement this morning from one of our newest clients, Clicker.com. Blake Krikorian, the founder and former CEO of Sling Media (makers of the Slingbox) has agreed to join the board of directors at Clicker. He’s also investing in the company personally. This has special significance to me as Blake was my old boss back in the day.
Blake joins CEO/founder Jim Lanzone (former CEO of Ask.com) on the board, along with Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital and Geoff Yang of Redpoint Ventures. Clicker’s mission is to be the ultimate programming guide for television on the Internet, and they have the team to do it. Of all the thing’s Blake could have done since leaving Sling (and that’s more or less whatever he wanted) he’s decided to make Clicker his first move. That’s a heck of a vote of confidence – not to mention some personal financial investment.
I’ve known Blake since my Mediabolic days when he first saw me demo the “Digital Library” from Pioneer back in 2003. He then hired me as the first employee at Sling Media, where I worked my proverbial tail off to help bring his vision (the Slingbox) to the market. Sling was a huge success, both by making great products and by the eventual acquisition by Echostar in 2007. Now with Blake joining the Clicker team, he is yet in the position where he controls my fate (albeit to a slightly lesser extent than in the past).
The press release went out on the wire this morning. Some of the coverage we’ve gotten is listed below – we’ll update the list as other coverage comes in.
Client News: VUDU Internet Apps are live
VUDU today releases their Internet Apps for the embedded streaming HD movie service. This means that VUDU customers on embedded devices like the Mitsubishi Diamond Unisen HDTVs will be able to use some of the hottest Internet apps around, including Pandora, Flickr, Picasa and others. Owners of the original VUDU box will recognize this as the VUDU Labs feature. Now it has come to VUDU enabled embedded devices.
A few folks have picked up the news, which went out via blog post on the official VUDU blog this morning. We will update the list of coverage below as we see it.
Helping BOKU Stand Out At The Virtual Goods Summit.
Last Friday, Stage Two helped our client, BOKU reach out to its fellow industry professionals through some creative guerrilla marketing during the Virtual Goods Summit in San Francisco at the Westin Hotel. The conference was quite fitting for BOKU since it is focused on being a mobile online payment system designed to make it easy for people to “pay for digital goods and social experiences” across the Internet.
The issue that BOKU had was that it needed to draw some attention to its product even though it was a sponsor but didn’t have a booth on site. Stage Two was tasked with coming up with a quick solution that was easy to implement and could generate some positive publicity. After mulling through several options internally, including the possibility of holding a contest, conducting live interviews or utilizing Twitter, our team decided that the best way was to keep it a little simpler.
At the Virtual Goods Summit, each attendee was given a pin to wear and the ones that wore them the most creatively & were spotted by the BOKU team were awarded one of two prizes. Some received a working remote-controlled helicopter with the BOKU logo while others were given embroidered BOKU track jackets. The Stage Two team rolled into action by photographing and video recording the recipients playing with the “BOKU-copter” – which was also posted on the BOKU blog for additional promotion.
You can view some of the photos taken from the Virtual Goods Summit on the BOKU blog or their Flickr page. Additionally, videos are also on their official YouTube channel as well.
