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Today we release our first application significant more so as a sign of whats to come from within our group:
If you have an iPhone, just navigate to this link:
http://rocketboom.com/iphone/
Here is a demo of what it should look like(video flip not in demo):
http://rocketboom.com/iphone/demo
Considering we have never even tested it on an iPhone, we still have some work to do this weekend Im sure just to get v0.1 up to par.
This application is outstanding for us not because it’s designed as yet another standalone Rocketboom player, but due to our primary intent to make it available as a player that anyone can easily customize for their own show.
There have been lots of things I’ve built for Rocketboom over the years, but Ive never had the resources to do anything with them or take them to the next level. I always wanted to for even more ideas come up than I could ever take action on.
Enter our superstar programmer Jamie Wilkinson who has been a saving grace the last few months. When we decided to take on this particular project about 3 days ago, Jamie put it together almost overnight. This weekend we’ll test and spiffy up the player (still dedicated for Rocketboom) and next week, once we have a grip on the iphone standards, we hope to release the custom functionality so anyone can use it for their own show, or their own favorite shows.
I’ve always been really transparent about everything because I still dont believe in competition for the show, Rocketboom, but this is for a new business (along with RB and other shows in development) so the plan is to keep our other ideas under wraps until they are up. Nevertheless, we plan to work mostly within a GPL when spinning things off.
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Shouldn’t Microsoft and Federated Media at least understand why shilling is wrong for a lot of bloggers and stop trying to sell dishonesty?
Michael at Techcrunch said he doesn’t care about what he wrote for Microsoft even though he signed his name to it. Yet he signed his name for me – someone who admires and looks up to his opinions. That is why Microsoft had him do it – so I would believe in Microsoft indirectly.
This whole chain of events – Microsoft paying bloggers to write for them for this reason, Federated Media promoting the idea to their clients knowing best what the implications would be and the clients agreeing to do it – shows a major sign of laziness or a desperate need for banner ad money.
** I always assumed these ads were quotes bought from prior articles or blog posts written by the blogger, without being payed to write them **
Apparently, people who value journalistic integrity and transparecy of information are willing to write messages they don’t believe in just for money, in the very same way they write on their blogs, about the same stuff, to the same people who read them, in the same space and in the same place.
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From the German conference I keynoted last week, The Brain Behind on Web-TV and IPTV, a very noteworthy article from Eyetag ( Nikolaus Reinelt and Bertram Gugel):
“Increasingly, a separation between Internet TV as “Over-the-top” distribution and telco IPTV as a new “institutionalized” means of distribution, becomes difficult to make.”
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Im pretty excited about this. It’s called ROFL. It’s kinda like a live, non-screen based version of screen-based internet media. In competition form. At a really cool venue:
Info below from the ROFL website:
Friday June 22
11:30 PM
$12.00
Joe’s Pub (this is a major theater near Astor)
Featuring web art, presentations and
“teh funney” from
Josh Fruhlinger of Comics Curmudgeon and Wonkette
Cintra Wilson of Salon and Dregublog
Joe Garden of The Onion
(the voice of Jim Anchower and Jackie Harvey),
Vote Joe Garden! and Monkeywire
Michelle Collins of You Can’t Make It Up and
VH1’s Best Week Ever
Andrew Baron, creator and producer of Rocketboom
Marisa Olson, artist / editor / curator of Rhizome.org
Stu VanAirsdale of The Reeler
Charles Broskoski of Supercentral
ROFL is the very best of the internet, lovingly hand-picked by eight of America’s most-respected blogger types for maximum freshness and optimum awesomeness.
ROFL is high art, low humor, YouTube video, Myspace weirdness, flash animation, web memes, conceptual puzzles, original film and non-sequiturs galore.
ROFL is a gong show for the new millennium.
ROFL puts the “hyper” in hypertext, the “interest” in internets, the “blow” in weblog… or possibly the “glob”.
ROFL is twelve bucks to get out of the house and meet people who are even more web-obsessed than you are!
Hosted by the ever-pithy Slovin and Allen (Comedy Central’s Premium Blend, Saturday Night Live) and featuring live improvisation from avant-garde oddball Reggie Watts, ROFL promises to be the finest internet variety show you’ve ever drunkenly laughed yourself sick to.
SEE! Eight bloggers enter with their finest internet finds and online creations… but only 1.0 will exit with the kind of digital hipster cred that can’t be bought by PayPal!
SCREAM! Your applause will mercilessly separate digital wheat from the GIGO chaff as the eight blogger bracket is winnowed down to the ultimate dorko-el-dorko match.
COVET! As the winner makes off with a kingly $150 grand prize!
MOCK! As the losers run home PWND and sobbing.
OGLE IN DISBELIEF At the astonishing lineup of writers, producers, programmers and curators we’ve assembled from the fields of journalism, business, comedy, art and television. It’s multidisciplineat-o!
REMEMBER! There’s only room on the ROFLcopter for a few… so get your tickets early.
Presented with The Onion and Paper Thin Walls
Additional production provided by John Seroff of The Tofu Hut, Paddy Johnson of Art Fag City and Jon Williams of Wizard Is Hungry
More information on licorice can be found on the internet.
OMG, so WTF is ROFL?
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Tomorrow on Monday we will be launching a new sponsorship model on Rocketboom!
Just over a year ago, we ran out money for Rocketboom. We were not mature enough to consider investments and so I decided Rocketboom had to go forward with an E-bay auction. The plan had materialized months prior but I never wanted to take the risk. I certainly was into the excitement, but what if no one bid? What if the bid was too low? What if our reserve was too high? The immediacy of a check in the bank was an important part of the decision too.
I’ll never forget the fear of failure that buit up to 5 seconds before the auction ended a loser, followed by a final refresh click with just 2 seconds to go that suddenly showed a $40,000 winner. To this day, I had never publicized that $40,000 was actually our reserve, helping to set the high market value.
When people went on to write about the sale, they broke it down to a CPM comparison, though most people didn’t take into account that the $40,000 for a week of advertising on Rocketboom included not only airing the commercials, but also creating 5 of them! Also, managing an account like this while working to appease the advertiser is a very difficult feat in and of itself.
A few months later, Rocketboom went through a bit of internal turmoil that required me to set all of the business aside for awhile to devote {303de987cc6916da36e13969c33ddde86941a7a7dd0e4e1455e523d98097d3da}100 of my energies on just the production. While we would go on to bring in a total of $210k from creative advertising for the year, the amount of energy and conviction we had to put into each piece ultimately put us further behind.
To our suprise, during the process, we learned that companies weren’t really interested in us having complete conviction in them anyway. Ultimately, they really were big fans of Rocketboom and they wanted us (and our audience) to know that. *They* had the conviction in *us*.
So that’s why we took that original model and flipped it. Our relationship to the sponsor now starts off with a sign of gratitude for their support.
In return, we have a great, critical audience that a sponsor can leverage to provide feedback and insight into their situation. While the system may not be right for many other environments, I think it will be extremely effective on Rocketboom. The entire program was designed to match Rocketboom as it already is.
I’m extremely proud to kick off this Monday with YouTube as our first sponsor. Regarding the broad topic of “video online”, in my personal opinion, there is not a single other group in the world that has done more to democratize the moving image. We finally got a Rocketboom YouTube account up and running as well. It’s amazing to think we have made it this far without any flash distributions. YouTube will make Rocketboom much easier to share, obviously.
For more details, you can visit http://www.rocketboom.com/sponsorship
Next, look forward to more content offerings from Rocketboom soon. Extra special thanks to Kenyatta, Joanne and Ellie, the hard-core team that makes RB happen!
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