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Clinton asks supporters to vote for official campaign theme song

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hillary.jpgHillary Clinton is getting the 2008 voting started early, posting a video on YouTube in which she urges her supporters to cast their vote for her official campaign theme song.

“I hope people from across the country will go to my website and vote for the song they feel best represents our message of change and their hopes for a better America,” Clinton said. “And I promise to leave the singing to the professionals.”

Here are the choices:

City of Blinding Lights – U2
Suddenly I See – KT Tunstall
I’m a Believer – Smash Mouth
Get Ready – The Temptations
Ready to Run – Dixie Chicks
Rock This Country! – Shania Twain
Beautiful Day – U2
Right Here, Right Now – Jesus Jones
I’ll Take You There – The Staple Singers
Write-in Candidates

Whatever the winning song will be, she promised not to sing it in public.

Originally posted on May 16, 2007 @ 10:58 pm

socialDragon brings content providers and advertisers together

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SocialDragon Inspired by the Chinese tradition of putting relationships first before business, a startup online social network called socialDragon connects passionate online users with advertisers looking for “slice of life” videos.

A good demonstration how socialDragon works came from Ephraim Schwartz of InfoWorld:

A personal video of a white-water rafting trip might be tagged as “vacation,” “rafting,” “adventure,” “river.” The number of tags and the names are left up to those who upload their content. A potential advertiser — a travel agency, for example — can use socialDragon to create an ad campaign around a theme such as “rafting adventure” and search through the user created tags for relevant content.

Moreover, the power of buzz or word-of-mouth marketing is believed to be the key to reach younger viewers, who remain cynical against traditional advertising. Recently, pioneer YouTube started sharing revenues to its popular channels that helped create large audience base for the company.

Understand that socialDragon is more of an online business rather than a social networking site, wherein everyday users can easily set their price tag for every personal video uploaded. Now that’s what I like to call mixing pleasure with business!

Originally posted on May 12, 2007 @ 10:31 am

Joost gets $45 million to accelerate expansion

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joostbeta.jpg

Joost, the world’s first broadcast-quality Internet television service, announced that five selected parties have collectively invested approximately $45 million in the company. Each party invested in a minority percentage of the company. This funding will enable Joost to accelerate product development, global expansion, localization, and service offerings.

Joost is powered by a secure, efficient, Internet platform that enables premium interactive, advertising-supported, video experiences while providing copyright protection for content owners and creators. Joost can be accessed with a broadband Internet connection and offers content to viewers for free.

“This funding represents a tremendous vote of confidence in Joost’s platform,” said Janus Friis, co-founder of Joost. “We’ve carefully selected these investors from a variety of interested parties, as they are best-in-class in their respective arenas and bring unique assets to Joost that will enable us to significantly accelerate growth and development of the Company.”

Index Ventures, a leading European venture capital firm, which invests in impactful technologies that have global reach, led the round with Sequoia Capital, the premier venture capital firm in the world. Sequoia Capital has been the first investor and business partner in companies that make up 10% of the NASDAQ’s value. In combination, Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital bring unrivaled expertise and alliances in Europe, Asia and North America.

Originally posted on May 10, 2007 @ 7:45 am

YouTube taking a bow to the king?

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Vissani Meeyo, a spokesman for the Thai information ministry said that YouTube is likely to remove all video clips seen as insulting to Thailand’s king, thus paving the way for the ban on the video sharing site being lifted.

The site has been blocked to Thai users since early April, when clips showing digitally-altered images of revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej began appearing.

Thailand’s army-backed government had considered suing YouTube over charges of lese majeste – insulting the monarchy – a serious crime that carries up to 15 years in prison.

Originally posted on May 11, 2007 @ 9:35 am

Mixercast launches user-generated media network

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MixercastMixerCast announced that it has signed licensing deals with known content providers to allow its users to legally combine professionally-produced videos, music and images with their own content and hyper-syndicate the rich media mashups on the Internet. Instead of broadcasting pre-packaged channels of content through a traditional media network model, MixerCast makes it easy for consumers to create, distribute and remix content from a variety of sources by using a rich set of editing and publishing tools, ad-infused and product- placement-ready templates, and open access to a large library of studio content. Users can monetize their creative work by proactively adding advertising into their MixerCast content packages as they virally spread across the web, which are then tracked by a robust set of built-in measurement systems.

“With the debut of MixerCast, people now have an easy way to fuse their own content with legal studio content and create custom Web channels, movies, music videos, photo galleries or personal RSS feeds. It’s like having your own personal broadcast station with access to high-quality licensed content so you can create context and a much richer experience,” said Jennifer Cooper, MixerCast CEO, who recently left Yahoo! to co-found and lead the company. “Our vision is to drive the next big wave of syndicated content and advertising on the Web. It’s no longer about simply serving up ads based on search keywords. With MixerCast, highly-engaged users mix, monetize and network their interactive productions. Users can also include licensed, branded content when they share or post their Mixercasts via email, their favorite sites or blogs.”

Originally posted on May 8, 2007 @ 2:56 pm