Archive for the year 2010
Stage Two helps to feed those in need during Social Media Week
Today, the entire team from Stage Two spent the entire morning helping the community. For the second time this year, we were honored to participate in some community service at the San Francisco Food Bank to do some social good – a perfect tie in to Social Media Week in the city. Joining us this time were Alyce Lindquist, the president of the San Francisco/Silicon Valley chapter of the Social Media Club and Dana Oshiro, writer for tech blog ReadWriteWeb.
While last time we had a good time packaging orzo pasta, this time we were needed to package cabbage and oranges that would be sent to schools and other non-profit agencies who would distribute the goods to those who needed it. You might think it was tedious work for the three hours, but it was really fun to talk with other volunteers and the employees there about the Food Bank’s mission.
To help highlight our efforts to bring social good to Social Media Week, both Jeremy and Dana Oshiro were guests on the Social Media Hour – a weekly podcast that highlights different trends in the industry and is hosted by storyteller and thought-leader Cathy Brooks. You can listen to the entire podcast by clicking here.
At the end of the day, our reward was hearing how much we have helped the community. For just three hours, we packaged around 12,000 pounds of food! If you consider the fact that 150,000 people in the city alone go hungry every day, the amount that was done in such a short time just by volunteering speaks volumes and can greatly help the people that truly need it.
To help out at the San Francisco Food Bank or to learn more about what you can do, please click here.
Here are some photos from our time at the SF Food Bank (and even a short video!)
Most of the entire gang that helped out today at the San Francisco Food Bank
Team Stage Two and volunteers packaging cabbage
Jeremy Toeman doing some social good
Even the oranges were happy for the help!
David Speiser helping to package some oranges
Mielle Sullivan with her specially formed orange
Jeremy Toeman just can’t stop himself from packaging oranges!
Client News: Clicker.com & UCLA
Clicker.com is partnering with a major, public CA university to provide access to an enormous index of online content. The University of California, Los Angeles has created a portal to Clicker.com on their student site, my.ucla.com
This serves a number of different purposes:
- Original student-generated and University-generated content will be indexed on Clicker.com for student (and public) convenience
- All the regular (network and other broadcast content) indexed on Clicker is available to students
- This provides a comprehensive guide to legal content available on the Internet
- Rather than downloading or BitTorrenting content they want to watch, students can use Clicker to find legal versions hosted online. Clicker is a great solution for this because:
- they index full length and high-quality show
- they index TV shows, movies, and music videos
- they let you know what is (and what isn’t) available online
- they have a huge index of content (400,000 episodes from more than 7,000 shows)
The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) has offered a quote in the release, supporting the effort by private companies and public universities to offer legal viewing options for content online. This announcement went live through a press release this morning at 6AM PST. Already several publications have covered the news, we’ve added links below for the coverage we’ve tracked, and we’ll update as we see new stories appear.
Camping out to kick off Social Media Week in San Francisco
Today marks the beginning of Social Media Week around the world. Social media enthusiasts gather in Berlin, London, New York, Sao Paulo, Toronto and here in San Francisco. To kick off the week, Chris Heuer & Kristie Wells of Social Media Club organized the Social Media Camp in the Presidio. Designed to be both a conference and an unconference, today’s event centered around helping people understand social media. Presenters offered much more than a “101″ view on social media and gave lively and informative discussions on things like how you can measure your return on investment, creating a social media business, understanding the synaptic web, professional storytelling and a panel that addresses the reality of the real-time web.
If you’ve never been to an unconference before, the standard model is that at the beginning, the attendees submit panels that they are interested in participating in, typically as a speaker/panelist. Once voted on, the ones the majority find interesting are placed into different times. Essentially the agenda isn’t set until that actual day so participants will be able to have a thorough and customized plan for the day.
The Social Media Camp opened with three great keynotes. The first one was by Echo founder Khris Loux who talked about the synaptic web and how the depth of connections was a powerful mechanism designed to continuously bring important information to our attention. After that, Ribbits/BT’s Vice President of Web Services, Kevin Marks, took the stage to promote the chief communication officer before Cathy Brook’s thought-provoking keynote on personal storytelling and why the hell we are really matters.
Afterwards, the agenda went into full swing with breakout “camp” sessions and more panels that helped educate and influence the way people used social media. According to the organizers, the hope was that the attendees would enjoy hearing from leading voices in social media and make some connections with people of different backgrounds.
Even our very own Jeremy Toeman took part in helping to educate folks at Social Media Camp. During the last panel, he teamed up with Collecta co-founder Brian Zisk and ReadWriteWeb’s community manager & blogger/reporter Jolie O’Dell to wage battle on the reality of the real-time web. It was a lively debate on how people how people have & are responding to customers almost immediately and even presented some great takeaways.
When all was said and done, the attendees left hearing from these “thought leaders” on a wide arrange of topics. It wasn’t about how to use Twitter or what benefit you could get from Facebook fan pages or anything elementary. The Social Media Camp helped teach people how to communicate using social media with an emphasis on listening and customer service. It was all about understanding the fundamentals of social media and not about transparency, authenticity, credibility or any other buzz word imagined.
So for the opening day of Social Media Week, I’d say it was a good one. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing more in the next few days.
Come meetup after the 01/27 Apple press event!
I wanted to call this a tweetup, but if I’m blogging it I think that breaks the rules? Just kidding. Anyhow, a bunch of us mobile/gadget/convergence folks wanted to get together, chat about how the world just changed (or didn’t), and also talk in advance of Mobile World Congress (aka 3GSM). We’ve teamed up with Lisa Whelan, from SocializeMobilize, to gather fun people and the great people at Jillian’s (at the Metreon, spitting distance from the event. literally) put aside a little space for us.
No RSVP needed, but all the details are available here. Looking forward to seeing you there.
I’ll buy a drink for the first person to show up WITH whatever new thing got announced at the event. 
Yes, multiple winners if there are multiple things.
BTW – you can visit my personal blog to see recent thoughts I’ve shared on the supposed tablet.
Happy Holi-Warming-Versary from Stage Two!
It’s been a while since we’ve moved into the new office and we definitely wanted to celebrate the holidays, so we figured that this year, we’d knock off some long-delayed things to celebrate, including having a nice office “housewarming” party and to celebrate our third-year anniversary.
To help spruce up our place, we turned to our friends at 1:AM gallery and Quinn Wharton who generously provided art and photography work that is currently hanging on our walls. And not one to leave our friends famished and parched at a party, the fine folks at Work of Art event planning & catering made some delicious hors d’oeuvres and set them up on our very own meat tree – yes, you heard that right…we had an artificial tree that was filled with meat on a stick on the tree. It was absolutely delicious!
Stage Two also made a couple of cool announcements as well, including a new “soon-to-be” website for the company and our next new product called Gunman – the first iPhone First Person Shooter using augmented reality. We encourage you to give it a shot and to let us know what you think.
We thank you for stopping by our office for our Holi-Warming-Versary party and regardless of whether you were there or not, here’s a recap of photos:
Send a text, send some real help
No client updates, no social media marketing thoughts, nothing but a brief plea to send some help to those in need in Haiti. Our friend Andru Edwards at gearlive.com has put together a great gift-matching program, and we’re supporting it. The Red Cross has created an SMS-based donation plan, and we along with a few other groups and individuals will gift match to a certain dollar amount. Details:
Starting now, if you send an SMS donation to either the Red Cross (by texting the word HAITI to 90999) or to YELE (by texting the word YELE to 501501) Gear Live will match it, up to $500. In addition, we have a bunch of our friends joining in as well:
- David Geller of Eyejot and WhatCounts will match up to $2500
- Leslie Camacho, President of EllisLab (which makes the fantastic ExpressionEngine CMS) will personally match up to $600
- Nate True of Tap Tap Revenge and iPhone hacking
fame will match up to $500
- Jeremy, Adam, and the team at Stage Two will match up to $500
- Dave Taylor, the man behind AskDaveTaylor.com, will match up to $250
- Don McAllister of Screencasts Online will match up to $250
- Robert Scoble, the face behind Building43, will match up to $200
- Local Gear Live fan Shauna Causey will match up to $100
- Parnassus Ventures, the folks behind 140: The Twitter Conference, will match up to $100
- Jason Neudecker, a Gear Live Twitter follower, will match up to $100
- TechieDiva.com will match up to $50
In total, so far, that’s $4500 $5400 $5650 in pledged matching donations! For each donation you make, each entity above will match it, until their limit is reached. In other words, with our current eight eleven twelve contributors, your $10 donation will actually be matched six nine eleven twelve times, resulting in a $70 $100 $120 $130 payment. So, what do you need to do? This is the easy part. Just scroll down and leave us a comment letting us know that you made a donation, and whether it was a $5 or $10 contribution. If you do it multiple times, let us know that too. Even better, if you want to be on our list as a person or company that will match donations, let us know!
I just read a piece which claims that over 300,000 people are now homeless. And this is a poor country with very little quality infrastructure – in other words, it’s not going to just “get better” without some serious help.
Huge kudos to the Red Cross, Andru Edwards, and the millions of people who will inevitably help.
As one side note, and not to distract from this, we at Stage Two have decided we’ll be making a monthly stop at the SF Food Bank. If you feel moved to help the ONE in FIVE residents of San Francisco that live at or below the poverty line, please get in touch and you can join us!
Client News: Pogoplug Now Streaming to Your PS3 and XBox
The Pogoplug launched at CES last year, so coming back this year with the second generation and a bunch of new features was a celebration. We saw some old friends, met some new ones and had a lot of Showstoppers style fun.
This year, CES was all about the connected home: gadgets and appliances that communicate to each other and the pull information off the web. The Pogoplug, already being a master of connectivity, expanded it’s range to the PS3 and XBox. Now you can view photos, share files and stream music and movies through your Pogoplug –all without putting down your game controller.
The company also announced its first retail partnerships: you can now find the Pogoplug through TigerDirect.com on shelves at Fry’s electronics–just look for the pink box.
Client News: VUDU is in Vegas with new partners, new services, and lots of bling
VUDU is at the Consumer Electronics Show today (as are most of the staff of Stage Two btw.) They have a few amazing pieces of news to share today, and have issued not just one, but two press releases to announce that news to the world. The brief synopsis of that news, in three parts, is as follows:
- Expansion with existing partners – many new HDTVs and Blu-ray players (BDPs) with VUDU on them will ship in 2010 from exisiting partners LG Electronics, Mitsubishi and VIZIO.
- New partners: Samsung, SANYO, Sharp and Toshiba will all ship products in 2010 with VUDU services embedded, both HDTVs and BDPs.
- Launching VUDU Apps: The VUDU Apps platform delivers a wide range of Internet services and applications to HDTVs and BDPs. These services include streaming video, music on demand, photo browsing, social networking and more. More than 100 applications are available on VUDU Apps, including Pandora, Picasa, Flickr, Dailymotion and leading news providers, such as The New York Times and The Associated Press.
The VUDU blog post goes into additional detail. VUDU is announcing this from Las Vegas, as some of their CE partners also announce the relationship as well via press release or press conference (or both.)
CES is always a noisy time of year to try and announce something important and expect to get significant news coverage. But VUDU has managed to transmit some signal despite the noise, and a few outlets have already covered the news. The full list is below, and we’ll update as we see coverage come in.
VUDU Apps
