Posts Tagged ‘social viewing’

Pitch It To Me One More Time!

March 4, 2011

Cindy McCreery


Guest Writer Series, Part 11 Cindy McCreery, Hollywood Screenwriter. Cindy is a graduate of the Walt Disney/ABC Feature Writing Fellowship program for the 2002-2003 year. In 2006 National Geographic Films hired Cindy to rewrite ELEPHANT WILD and later in 2007 in partnership with Warner Brothers, they hired her again to develop and write FREE WILLY: ESCAPE FROM PIRATES COVE. Cindy also teaches Advanced Screenwriting at UCLA.

Beginning December 15, 2010 I helped organize Vpype’s second Hollywood Screenplay Pitch Contest, which ran until the end of January. As some of you might recall, the first pitch contest held December 2009 through April 2010 turned out to be a very big success as we had over 400 five-minute-pitches submitted via Vpype’s Facebook application, vBroadcast. We had contestants from all over the world with ideas ranging from epic period pieces to massive blockbusters to outlandish comedies to touching dramatic true stories. Not only did the winner of the contest get the opportunity to develop her pitch into a screenplay with a known producer, but many of the top ten were contacted by judges and are still currently working on ideas as well.

This year, we made some changes to the contest. Rather than running it for several months, we decided to run it for two months and make it a three-minute pitch, rather than five. We also had participants use Vpype’s newest application, vComedy, which has a three-minute cap already in place, to pitch their screenplay. We had a 100 pitches submitted from all over the world including Spain, Germany, Pakistan and India. Many of the judges from last year participated as well, including Julie Richardson, Producer of “Collateral” and “The Collector” and Christopher Lockhart story editor for William Morris Endeavor and producer of “The Collector” and most recently the documentary, “Most Valuable Players”. The other judges included former Disney executives, Producers and even a Professor from the top screenwriting program in the country.

Pitching is a funny thing because writers generally are not actors or extroverts. It’s especially tough to pitch alone in a room to a camera because you can’t read your audiences body language. Also, getting across an entire story from start to finish in under three minutes is really an art and I must admit I was very impressed with the quality of the pitches this year. I was also inspired by the courage it took to actually do it! One of the top 10 from this year is a speech therapist who isn’t in “the biz”, in fact lives in a very small town far from Hollywood and sent me a Facebook message admitting to me how terrified she was, but she did it and did a great job. All of her friends and family who watched her pitch were impressed and proud of her, as they should be! At least when I have a meeting with a producer and pitch them my idea it’s not recorded and posted on Facebook for everyone to see and critique! The judges were all impressed with everyone as well and I’m encouraged by the fact that many of the judges personally reached out to several of the top ten, wanting to read their work and or further discuss their pitches.

This year’s winner is Joe Palladino from Santa Barbara, California. His winning pitch, “Towers of London”, is a fictionalized account of Harry Houdini, Arthur Conan Doyle and Jack the Ripper. Joe’s story was not only compelling, clever and simply a lot of fun, but his actual pitch was very clear, very well thought out and a delight to watch. His personality shined through and he made it enjoyable for his audience. All of the judges agreed that they easily envisioned the movie – both the tone and the hook of it, which isn’t an easy thing to pull off!

Vpype - Hollywood Screenplay Pitch Contest

Wilton Richards, who came in second with his pitch “The Hitman”, pitched twelve ideas all of which were really fun and original. His other pitch, “Battle For Earth” made it into the top twenty. “The Hitman” is fun action comedy about a hitman who is dying of cancer and puts a hit out on himself but is cured and must save himself from the other hitmen. Wilton lives in The Bahamas and I am pleased that this contest brought Hollywood within reach for him and that he has been in contact with two of the judges.

In third place was AD Smiths, “The Assigned” which was definitely the most entertaining of the entire contest as he had props, music and he even acted out a scene using cardboard cutouts! I have to admit that I watched his pitch at least five times because the theatrics of his pitch were so fun. AD has a very natural pitching ability, which I’m a little jealous of.

Hollywood can feel very far away for most aspiring screenwriters, even for those of us who live in Los Angeles and it’s exciting when you come across a company like Vpype who has the resources to make it just a little more accessible. Having a voice, but not being heard is a very frustrating and lonely thing and I’d like to hope that this contest has helped a few writers feel as though they’re being heard. If anything, everyone who participated in the contest now has a community of other writers who they can share their ideas with.

The Hollywood VPYPE Pitch Contest group page on Facebook has become a sort of water cooler hang out for a lot of aspiring screenwriters and it continues to grow every week. Also, the vComedy application page has become a place to share ideas and notes on each other’s work. Every pitch that was submitted has been viewed multiple times and many have comments and suggestions from other participants. I hope that writers in the group will continue to share their ideas with each other and really use each other as sounding boards. I know that some members have used vBroadcast to discuss ideas with each other and over the next few weeks, I’m hoping to created a “writer’s group” using vBroadcast where each week a writer will broadcast their own ideas live, while other members of the group can watch and chat with them live.

What every aspiring screenwriter dreams of is an audience and Vpype has helped provide one!

Joe Palladino’s pitch, TOWERS OF LONDON on vComedy…
http://apps.facebook.com/vcomedy/vcomedyviewer?auth_token=82020b1098aa9a22b34c89b2453ffb1c

Wilton’s pitch, THE HITMAN on vComedy…
http://apps.facebook.com/vcomedy/vcomedyviewer?ref=ts

AD Smith’s pitch, THE ASSIGNED on vComedy…
http://apps.facebook.com/vcomedy/vcomedyviewer?ref=ts

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Posted in citizen journalism, cloud computing, cloud storage, comedy, Facebook, hollywood, hollywood scriptwriting, humanties, interactive tv, internet, movies, social applications, social media, social networking, social tv, social video, technology, video, video platform, virtual computing | Leave a Comment »

The Vpype Advantage

February 7, 2011

Gary Klein

Guest Writer Series, Part 10, Gary Klein, Product Manager, Vpype Corporation

Facebook has revolutionized the web by providing consumers with an easy to use interface and common sense controls over how they share the digital information of their lives. If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world, with a population in excess of 600 Million. Facebook Pages, special sites just for businesses and brands, have become the new standard for marketing to this global audience. Consumers can “Like” your brand, and then are automatically subscribed to updates from your business; when you share information with them, it aggregates in their News Feed right along with pictures and updates from their friends and family.

The Facebook platform is in a near constant state of development, changing frequently, and it can be difficult for marketers to find quality tools to help them leverage this market. Other streaming video companies have launched Facebook applications but then failed to maintain them or integrate them fully with Facebook. Justin.tv, Ustream, and Livestream all claim to support Facebook streaming.

Justin.tv uses a single Facebook Live Stream next to any of their embedded videos, meaning users may not even be chatting about your content, and you have no moderation tools or transcript. Ustream will custom build a viewer for you in fourteen days, but wants you to pay for a subscription first and requires your Facebook Page to have 1,000 followers before they will begin the work. Livestream has a Facebook application, but subscriptions start at $350.00 per month if you want to remove advertising. None of these applications integrate with Facebook Events.

Vpype identified the strategic importance of Facebook several years ago, and designed our real time communications system to integrate fully with Facebook as well as the web. Our premier application, vBroadcast, requires no software download and runs as a hosted service from the cloud, allowing you to stream live video events straight to your Facebook Page and Web Site simultaneously. Viewers can use your Facebook Page, your Web Site, or the vBroadcast application to view and interact with the live show; Facebook Connect, Facebook Live Stream, and Twitter are all supported.

vBroadcast scheduler integrates with the Facebook Events system so your fans will know when you are planning to go live. When you begin the broadcast, we can notify your followers on Facebook and Twitter for you, so everyone can find the show. Once you have finished, we can notify anyone who could not attend, and give them a link to the recorded show, complete with chat transcript.

Whenever you want to reach out to your audience, vBroadcast makes it easy to interact with your customers, wherever they congregate.

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Posted in cloud computing, cloud storage, Facebook, interactive tv, internet, social applications, social media, social networking, social tv, social video, technology, video platform | Leave a Comment »

Get Discovered by Hollywood Execs on Facebook

December 16, 2010

Cindy McCreery


Guest Writer Series, Part 6 Cindy McCreery, Hollywood Screenwriter. Cindy is a graduate of the Walt Disney/ABC Feature Writing Fellowship program for the 2002-2003 year. In 2006 National Geographic Films hired Cindy to rewrite ELEPHANT WILD and later in 2007 in partnership with Warner Brothers, they hired her again to develop and write FREE WILLY: ESCAPE FROM PIRATES COVE which will be released in March of 2010.

Last January Vpype held it’s first Hollywood Screenplay Pitch Contest. It was the first and only pitch contest exclusive to Facebook, which allowed users to pitch industry professionals live via webcam. Judges from MGM, Fox, William Morris Endeavor as well as many known Producers with credits that include COLLATERAL, REMEMBER ME, THE COLLECTOR, OVERBOARD and ELF. I’m proud to say that not only did the top three winners win great prizes, but also they are still currently developing their ideas with producers that judged the contest. The gains weren’t limited to the top three; in fact, many of the contestants were contacted by producers who watched their pitches.

vComedy app on Facebook

This December we’re proud to announce the 2nd annual pitch contest! This time we’ve made a few changes. First we’ve limited the pitches to three minutes, as that’s really all the time one needs to get out what their movie is! Secondly, we’ve shortened the duration of the contest to a little over a month so we don’t lose momentum. Third, participants must submit their pitches using Vpype’s latest application, vComedy, although pitches aren’t limited to a specific genre.

Many of the judges from last year will be participating including Julie Richardson, Mac Torluccio, Christopher Lockhart, Trevor Engelson and many more.

What makes this contest special is that it’s not only free but it’s open to writers all over the world. Last year we had participants from as far as Israel to Pakistan to Italy to Australia. It really opens Hollywood to writers who don’t have the resources to live in LA.

Also, what I think makes this such a special contest is that everyone involved is really dedicated to the idea of helping aspiring writers get their feet in the door. The CEO of Vpype is also a filmmaker and understands not only the importance of the writer but also the importance of making industry contacts.

This might be a small contest, but it has provided big opportunities for many writers including Marc Maxwell recently wrote this to me, “Living in Pembroke, Kentucky feels a million miles away from Hollywood. But that’s where I find myself working as a Department of Defense Guidance Counselor for the 101st Airborne at Fort Campbell. As an Army Counselor, I assist our Soldiers in achieving their Adult Education goals of obtaining a degree or diploma. My writing partner, David Horne, and I started collaborating four years ago. To date, we have co-written nine sports trivia/history books through the Sports by the Numbers series, however we have always aspired to write screenplays. With me in Kentucky and Dave stationed as a civilian in Germany, the dreams of being a screenwriter were just that…dreams. Geographically, even if we had a great script, we weren’t in any position to pitch our ideas. That was, until the first Vpype Hollywood Pitch Contest came to Facebook. I heard about the contest through Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat website and immediately started working on our pitches. After pitching five ideas, we found ourselves with two submissions in the Top Thirty and one pitch in the Top Ten. Even though we didn’t win the contest, we were contacted by a judge and Hollywood Insider to send them our completed screenplay. We continue to work with them on rewrites and have been invited to submit any future screenplays we complete. Without the Vpype contest, our screenplay may never have been seen or read by movie producers. And because of this contest our dream lives on.”

No matter where you live or what you do for a living, if you have a movie idea be sure to pitch it via vComedy before January 25th 2011! Who knows, this time next year you could be living out your dreams!

For more information join our Facebook Group, The Hollywood VPYPE Pitch Contest!

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=259144206323

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Posted in comedy, Facebook, hollywood, hollywood scriptwriting, humanties, interactive tv, internet, movies, social applications, social media, social networking, social tv, social video, technology, video, video platform, videos | Leave a Comment »

Social Video 101: Start Your Show Today!

October 4, 2010

Najeeb Nadeem

Guest Writer Series, Part 7 Najeeb Nadeem, Vpype User Community and IT Support Manager. Najeeb is an IT expert, responsible for user community activities, web infrastructure support and cloud management services.

Vpype vBroadcast Quick Start Guide

What You Need
• A computer – Macintosh or PC will work equally well.
• A web camera – Most laptops have these built in.
• A microphone – Most laptops have these built in.
• A quiet, well-lit broadcast location with a solid Internet connection.
o You will need at least 300 Kbps, and preferably 500 Kbps, of upstream bandwidth
o You can test your upstream bandwidth at http://www.speedtest.net
• A web browser – Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari – they all work.
• The latest version of Adobe Flash – http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer
• A Facebook account – http://www.facebook.com
• Access vBroadcast and “allow” the application to install in your Facebook account – http://apps.facebook.com/vbroadcast

To Start a Live Broadcast
• Open a web browser and navigate to the vBroadcast application, http://apps.facebook.com/vbroadcast
• Click the “Broadcast” button in the menu bar
• The application will attempt to detect your webcam and microphone. If unsuccessful, you will need to manually select them to continue.
• Complete the Broadcast Information form
o Enter the Location of your broadcast.
o Show Name is required and should contain a concise title for the show
o Keywords are required and can contain any other information you would like indexed in the search engine.
o Select on how’s behalf you are going to do the show
o Select your audience
o Select the language in which the show will be conducted
o Select the category
o Start should be set to Now
o Save Recording should be selected
o Announce should be selected for Facebook and/or Twitter
o Duration should be set to the desired length
o Viewers limit should be set high enough to cover possible attendance
o When Ready, Click Start Broadcast
• You will be taken to the Broadcast panel where you can adjust your camera to ensure a good broadcast. When ready, click the Camera button to start the live show.
• You will be prompted to publish about your show on your wall and your friend’s wall
• When you see “Live” indicator in the top right hand Conner, you are Broadcasting Live
• When the show is over, click the Stop button. The show will terminate, the transcript will be closed, and the recorded show will be published the broadcaster’s Shows tab.

To Obtain Support
• For customer support, send email to support@vpype.com

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Posted in citizen journalism, Facebook, interactive tv, social applications, social media, social networking, social tv, social video, technology, video | Leave a Comment »

Five Tips for Social App Developers

September 13, 2010

Mursil Sayed


Guest Writer Series, Part 4
Mursil Sayed, VP of Product Development, Vpype Corporation. Mursil is the principal architect of Vpype products and leads the entire development effort. Mursil enjoys transforming complex technology into consumer-facing products. Prior to Vpype, Mursil was VP of Engineering at EzValidation, a fingerprint security software company.

The explosive growth of social networking has lured many software companies to develop social applications to instantly reach millions of users on various social networks like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Social application software encompasses a range of software systems that allow users to interact and share data with their friends and network. Although it is very easy to quickly develop and launch a simple social application, it requires some skill and experience to develop an application that attracts and retain visitors.

I would like to list a few guidelines that developers and as well social media marketers may find useful and put into practice to develop an effective and maintainable social application.

1) The application must provide a simple user experience so that the users can quickly figure out what the application is all about. There should be one or two major workflows in the application and those workflows must be self-explanatory. Although this is canonical for the desktop or web application, but it is especially important for social applications because research has indicated that people usually resist installing new applications. Therefore if they are unable to find instant value of the application, they are most likely to uninstall the application. Vpype is one such social app that has an intuitive workflow for live video streaming.

Maaika Westen interviews Vpype CEO

2) Integrate social plug-in in your application to increase sharing and word of mouth (viral) marketing of your application. Facebook is providing various plug-ins for like, recommendations, comments, etc. Similarly you can get variety of plug-ins for Twitter for posting status messages and viewing communication threads.

3) Make an abstraction layer to interact with social networks. This will help in maintaining the application and will prevent the application from crashing due to change in underlying social API. Although Facebook and other major social networks provide a standard interface (Open Social) to access their services, most advanced services and new features are only accessible via their proprietary API. This API keeps on changing from time to time.

4) Don’t use your servers to store social graph (underlying social relations between people) and other information about your users (like friends, followers, etc.). The only exception to this rule is when the information is used frequently. In this case, use API calls to get this information from Social networks when needed. Most social networks are now providing interrupt based APIs that will automatically post new changes to the ‘social’ application.

5) Create a mock implementation for the social network abstraction layer so that application could be tested and debugged quickly and easily without requiring the Internet connection. All the data for the mock implementation should be stored in local databases. This will significantly reduce the development and debugging time as the mock implementation will operate from local databases and doesn’t require an Internet callback.

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Posted in Facebook, interactive tv, social applications, social media, social networking, social tv, social video, software development, technology, video | Leave a Comment »

Citizen Journalism on Facebook

August 3, 2010

Watch out CNN, Facebook has the power to steal the eyeballs!

One of the most powerful gifts the Internet has given the world is the ability for all of us to become Citizen Journalists anywhere, any time. We all have the power to influence, to report, and to change the world.

When I looked for a definition of Citizen Journalism on Wikipedia, this I what I found:
Citizen journalism (also known as “public”, “participatory”, “democratic”[1], “guerrilla”[2] or “street journalism”[3]) is the concept of members of the public “playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information,”…

The influence of Citizen Journalists continues to evolve. Now with the ability to post pictures and videos on a website in close to real time about breaking news events, we can all get ahead of the curve, and report news as it happens via blogs, YouTube videos or with the help of social media (and now social video) sites like Facebook via a live broadcast.

How Are We Changing the World?
If you want to see the truth about an event, you can usually find a picture or a video. Cameras are everywhere, even built-in to our ubiquitous cell phones. They really are, trust me.

If you look back on any event, even way back (remember the 1963 Zapruder film?), you can find a picture that someone took, or a video. Some of these were unplanned, some were inadvertent, and some of these were spontaneously triggered by the event.

What about Vpype and Citizen Journalism?
We advocate telling your story to the world. If your story is about a current event or news story or a timely viewpoint, you can use vBroadcast to send out your message via a real time or archived video to all your friends and followers on Facebook.

What’s New?
Later this month, Vpype vBroadcaster app will offer an additional feature of uploading a previously recorded video file. This feature will let Bloggers and Citizen Journalists report, share and broadcast their stories to the netizens of the Facebook universe of 500 million plus and growing.

In Conclusion
Vpype vBroadcast app on Facebook can easily and quickly enable not only “buzz marketing”, but something totally different and useful for a wider user-base, namely Citizen Journalism. Facebook has the power to steal the eyeballs from CNN.

Resources and Inspiration
Some of my favorite links about Citizen Journalism that inspire and illustrate its power:
• Definition:
http://vodpod.com/watch/1045921-definition-of-citizen-journalism
• Citizen journalism at war:
http://www.cyberjournalist.net/video-citizen-journalism-at-war/
• CNN encouraged citizen journalism at the time of Hurricane Katrina
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2005/katrina/feedback/index.html
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/techchron/detail?blogid=19&entry_id=48541
• Tools
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Tools_for_citizen_journalism
• Site that support Citizen Journalists
www.allvoices.com
• More about Allvoices
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2009/09/can-allvoices-succeed-as-citizen-journalism-platform253.html

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Posted in citizen journalism, cnn, Facebook, Human Behavior, humanties, interactive tv, social networking, social tv, social video, video | 2 Comments »

Vpype Live: Making Social Video Easy

July 7, 2010

About a week ago, we have refreshed, redesigned and launched our app on Facebook. To make things simpler, we have created a landing page on Facebook called VpypeLive. To get there, here is the link: http://apps.facebook.com/vpypelive

VpypeLive serves as a landing page for Vpype’s suite of Facebook applications and acts as a central menu on Facebook canvas. Once you’re on VpypeLive page, you can make a selection to use one of the two apps, namely vBroadcast (previously known as Vpype Live Broadcaster) or vComedy.

VpypeLive

vBroadcast enables any Facebook user to do live video broadcast to audiences they select. In other words, user can make the shows available to Public, Fans, Friends, or Custom privacy setting. Audience can interact via text chat during the live broadcast. Broadcaster can also record and store the show for later viewing. Furthermore, the shows can be embedded in a Fan Page or a website.

vComedy enables anyone to record and share funny videos clips and share them with the millions of users on Facebook.

To quote a recent USA Today article, More adults watching videos online; comedy trumps news:
“About half of all adults in the USA, or 69% of adult Internet users, have used the Internet to watch or download videos, says a study released today by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Of the 11 types of videos described in the survey, comedy was watched the most by adult users 50% of the sample of 1,005 adults interviewed in June 2009. Comedy also beat news, which was watched by 43% of users. News was the most-watched category in 2007, when Pew did a similar survey”.

To support this trend, we have introduced vComedy – a new home on Facebook for comedy shows. vComedy has been designed to be an ideal platform for amateur and professional comedians to feature their talents. Check out MAD TV cast member Lauren Pritchard discussing the comedy contest on Facebook.

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Posted in Facebook, Human Behavior, humanties, interactive tv, social networking, social tv, social video, technology, video | 1 Comment »

Hey Marketers, Ignore Social Video at Your Own Peril

May 20, 2010

Last week, my colleague, Georgia Marszalek, attended a local BusinessWire event in San Francisco entitled How to Add Video into Marketing, PR and Social Media Programs to Increase Lead Conversion. As you may know by now, Video and especially Social Video is a topic that is near and dear to my heart. We met and talked about some of the points and concepts covered by the speakers.

Video as a Marketing Tool: The Basics
Video is really just another marketing medium. It can be a marketing asset. When deciding on using video in the marketing mix, standard marketing criteria apply.
First, one needs to answer the usual questions:
1. What do we want our video to accomplish? What is the business objective?
2. Who is our audience?
3. What is our call to action?
4. Where is the best place to put our video?

These questions are the same as ones that would apply to the creation of any marketing collateral. There is also the obvious objective– for a video to be successful you need good content. Lastly, to assess whether the video was successful and met its goals, the criteria for measuring ROI needs to be defined.

More about Video ROI
Measuring your video’s ROI can be as simple as taking the cost of the video and dividing it by the number of viewers. This can also get a little tricky. For example, if your goal is to go far and wide, YouTube may be the best. If your goal is to go for more targeted views and turn a percentage into legitimate leads for sales, you may need to be more focused, and look into adding a variety of online placements and resources, and even explore engaging an online syndicator.

Where Social Video Fits
If your business has a Facebook presence and you have Fans or Likers, you can use Vpype Live Broadcaster application on Facebook to do a ‘live’ video broadcast and interactively – on a regular basis to your audience (fans/customers/prospects). You can also schedule your own show before you go ‘live’ and notify others to join you. Furthermore, this allows you to also create an archive video broadcast for later viewing, for those who missed the live broadcast or show.

Social Video

Why Social Video?

To me the answer is: Social Video is authentic, live and interactive. It is an authentic way to engage with customers. With it, you can tell your story.

Getting Started
To get started with using Vpype Live Broadcaster on Facebook, click here. (Note: For new broadcasters, we have an option where you can practice ahead of time and have only yourself or a limited audience as viewers.) To see an example of an archived broadcast, click here to see Oscar-winning producer Barrie Osborne.

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Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

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