‘Cross The Breeze

Although it seems like this is pretty much a creative idea, and nothing quite real today, I like it immediately. Good out-the-box thinking from the researchers at the BBC. Imagine how this could bring a totally immersed movie experience into your living room. Or think about gaming, COD4 to name a one for instance, now that would be absolutely amazing.

[Via David Bausola]

Berlitz did it again and I hadn’t noticed until this week. One year after the classic viral video ‘What are you sinking about?‘ they seem to have created a few new funny virals a couple of months ago. If you haven’t seen them yet (like me) then be sure to take a look, there’s pretty funny.

Thanks to @netlash and @Andhi I quickly received another 2 variations on the same theme: Tide & Camelia.

[Via Adverblog]

A couple of months ago I talked a bit about a show called Animals which Ricky Gervais did as a stand up comedian… about animals. I had this 10 minute piece (still one of the best parts) from the show and I thought it was just hilarious. Unfortunately I only had these 10 minutes and not more, as I really wanted to see the whole show once.

Yesterday by searching a bit online, I found the full show (cut up in 9 pieces) and I tell you, if you want to start this new year with a smile, watch this. It’s brilliant, it really is.

My initial idea was to highlight a few jokes in this post, but that is never going to work the way it should be. So here are the 9 parts, I’m sure you’ll like it… even when you’re French or Swiss :)

Animals (Ricky Gervais): Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8 and Part 9.

The last video for LeWeb3 have been uploaded and so they’re now all available for your viewing. I’ve already written up a little report of my experience at LeWeb3, here are my highlights in video:

Panels:

• Web2.0: The Dark Side (moderated by Laurent Haug)
• Bringing social to software: radical change is coming. Are we ready? (moderated by Marc Canter)

Keynotes:

• Persistent communication and it’s impact on begin social (Evan Williams)
• Why books and school lectures still exist (Hans Rosling)
• What is social about design (Philippe Starck)
• Evolving entrepreneurship (Martin Varsavsky)
• Internet pollution and how to stop it (Jason Calacanis)
• New and improved biological methods for data transfer (Yossi Vardi)
• Turning the tables: what happens when the users are in charge (Doc Searls)

I’m pretty sure Janus Friis, Joi Ito and June Cohen’s talks were interesting as well but I missed them at the conference so I’ll have to catch up on those myself first. These videos and others are obviously also available here.

I think it’s fair to say that I’m a frequent traveler as I spend some time in a plane a few times each month. That said, every time I’ve entered a plane I start reading a book or the newspaper and won’t look up for anything else than food, drinks and the notice that we’ll be landing soon. The last thing I’ll pay attention to is the safety video or instructions given by the flight attendants. Been there, done that… and it’s boring.

Funny enough, today I did watch a safety video… and that wasn’t even in a plane. When I saw this post from Karl Long I figured I’d follow his advice and watched the new Virgin America safety video. It’s like Karl says, even if we’ve all got accustomed to the fact that some things - like safety videos - can only be boring, Virgin America proves us wrong. Together with the agency Anomaly they made a difference and it results in the fact that I actually got interested in checking out the Virgin offering next time I have to book a flight. Kudos!

Technorati Tags: virgin, america, safety, video, anomaly, instructions, fun

The Blue Monster Show: now this might become interesting. I’ve got as much information as you about what this is going to look like (that is after watching this video) and probably nobody really knows. To some point, that is part of what made the Blue Monster so interesting to me so far, the fact that you never really know where it is going. Apart from the fact that it is a good conversation starter for better conversations about Microsoft and where the company is going.

Here’s the video announcement of Loic Le Meur and Hugh MacLeod on Seesmic, since that’s where you should be able to find the “Blue Monster Show”. As Hugh states, the Blue Monster isn’t really owned by anyone, which is good. I know that many benefit from it, and that’s maybe even better.

And Loic, if you read this, thanks again for the Seesmic invitation but I haven’t had time to record anything on it yet… but I’ll get to it ;)

Technorati Tags: gapingvoid, bluemonster, seesmic, socialobject, stormhoek

I’m planning on doing a longer review of some of the recent updates on Live Search, Windows Live Spaces and a few other services but this was something that I didn’t want to hold back until then. This video shows a new feature in Live Maps that combines the 3D view with the Birds Eye view. Both were available for a whole range of cities (unfortunately not a lot of 3D for Europe) but also I was wondering how these 2 would combine in 1 view. The video does a great job bringing that to live though, check it out:

I think this looks really great. Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft.

[Via LiveSide] 

Technorati Tags: windowslive, maps, virtualearth, microsoft, searchification, birdseye, 3d

You can’t handle the ads.

I’m thinking I should start a whole new category of little viral videos that make fun of advertising somehow. I’ve collected quite a few here over time. I’ll list them all up in a few days in case you missed some - all classics. Here’s the latest addition:

[Via Beyond Madison Avenue]

Technorati Tags: advertising, viral, madison avenue, good men, creative, film, movies

… I want to be so far removed from the day to day business that I need a crane to pull my bloated head out of my ass!

Brilliant, some of these kids do say the darnest things ;) I’m not sure if this is an oldie or something new, but I hadn’t seen it before and liked it so here you go. Check out this ad for Monster.com.

[Update: The buzzing bees commented that it's about a year old]

[Via Buzzing Bees]

Technorati Tags: monster, monster.com, viral, video, advertising

It was no real surprise that this was coming, but it’s still interesting to see how every video service is trying out different kinds of advertising on and around their videos. I honestly expected it to happen earlier as we all know the daily costs for services such as Youtube are quite high and there’s little monetization just yet.

The solution that most services seem to bet on is the advertising pre-roll: showing a short ad before you see the video you actually chose/came for. Also here are some differences as some have a pre-roll for every video while on MSN Video for instance this is based on time spent on the site. So regardless of how many videos you watch, you’ll only get a pre-roll every 3 minutes. It’s interesting to see how ads are not tied to pageviews anymore although also this model will continue to improve. (disclaimer: I work for Microsoft)

Another solution is the advertising that shows as a partial overlay on the video. VideoEgg has this for a while now and it is also what Youtube introduced on their service not so long ago. After user complaints they made this an opt in for content owners since many weren’t happy at all. It would be interesting to find out how many content owners opted in for this.

And since online video is so popular, it attracts other types of advertising especially when people share videos. Google just introduced their Adsense Video Units which is basically a way of embedding video into your site/blog with ads surrounding it. People who do embed this can make a bit of money (similar to AdSense) but they could have done with a little bit less ads I think.

A last type of advertising with video that I found just recently is the Wildfire Network. It’s less related to advertising before and during online video, but I thought it’s still somehow part of this discussion. Basically it’ll pay bloggers to post videos on their blog, and it’ll show it’s a sponsored entry. Pay-per-post for video basically and I guess the whole pay-per-post discussion applies here as well.

Anyway, will any/more of these solutions attract advertisers? I guess we’ll have to wait and see. I remember back in 2001 or 2002 (I still worked at Kinepolis Group, which is a cinema operator) we changed all online movie trailers from Quicktime to Flash (which back then was hardly used for video). At the same time we introduced the possibility of adding a 7 second commercial before each movie trailer and I always found it weird we were never able to sell that to anyone. And cinema advertising was big part of our business remember. Curious to see if that changed today, 5-6 years later.

Wait and see.