Reinvigorate- Be careful you don't get addicted to your Web Stats

How do you collect important stats about your website and its visitors? We use a service called reinvigorate.net, which is in private beta but I am sure most people with a website can use it. It tracks a range of things that I find very useful as well as addicting:

1. I like seeing where our visitors come from and what brought them here. It's funny the random posts that can generate a ton of traffic. IE the create a Simpson's avatar brought hundreds of visitors for some reason.

2. Visitors can come from far away places as seen in Reinvigorates geolocation drop down. Once we saw that we were getting a lot of foreign visitors we included the Google translator to take care of anyone whose first language is not English.

3. One of the most important pieces of analysis for us is the Site Path. How people are clicking around, where they are going and where they stop? That's very important to analyze. We look at popular paths, the most popular pages, how they came to use and how they left us. It's a good thing if you are doing that as well. If you want some help just post a comment below and we can assist you.

4. How much time they spend on your page? You can tell how effective your landing page or message you wrote was at keeping their attention. Reinvigorate will track detailed activity, the duration of the visit (by pages) and the visitors depth.

5. And one of my favorites is Search and Referrer. Here you can see who referred traffic your way, who those visitors were, what pages visitors were referred to, referred searches, and the keywords that were used to find specific pages. Its funny to see what people type into Google and find your pages.

Other important things we learn are what browser the visitor is using, what size screen and overall traffic reporting by day, month and year.

What are you using to track your webpage?

John Mckay, Getty's In house Counsel and former Fired Fed Prosecutor, leaves Getty after 3 months

In an story that caught my attention as a bit of a blast from the recent past. John McKay, the top lawyer at Getty, who just got hired by Getty, has left his position as the top lawyer at Getty Images after less than four months. If you remember, John McKay was the former U.S. attorney ousted in the Justice Department's firings of federal prosecutors. The same firing that led to Justice Department Head Alberto Gonzales resigning who was accused of political bias in the firings.

Not entirely sure why he left but he looks to be going back to teaching in Seattle. Still trying to figure this out though. BUUTTTTT something telling may be that McKay declined to comment further on his experience at Getty, saying it would not be appropriate to talk about matters that could be ongoing legal issues. Yikes or just a smoke screen.

During an Getty interview in May, Jonathon Klein, Getty's CEO, said he offered McKay a job because he wanted "somebody who had broader experience than working as a lawyer in a law firm or working as a general counsel at another company."

If you check out the Wikipedia entry you can see: "On September 17 Jonathan Klein, CEO, Getty Images, announced that John McKay would be stepping down as General Counsel for Getty Images to return to the law faculty at Seattle University where he will pursue a full-time teaching position". This looks like his next plan.

I think Ray Charles said it best.




For more info- Kristi Heim: 206-464-2718 or kheim@seattletimes.com.

Jupiterimages.com offers contributors new rights

Jupiterimages released an announcement calling up its microstock contributors from Stockxpert to the big leagues. JI now allows any Stockxpert members who have been on their network for three the chance to submit their photos to be sold under the Dyanmic Graphics RF brand.

Jupiter acquired Creatas, with Dyanmic Graphics a division of Creatas, in early 2005.

Website Payments Pro Payflow Edition

As you know we have been setting up the payment and shopping cart for the last few days and I wanted to pass on some information that we learned along the process for anyone else who is thinking about setting up a Paypal account on their website. After seeing the Amazon Flexible Payment solution yesterday at the conference and how some other sites were using it to pay users, I'm going to do some more research on that plan as well. I'll let you know what I find out about Moneybookers.

The Pro Payflow edition is a new variation on an old service to Paypal according the customer service rep we spoke to, Nicole. I couldn't find the description and fees for the service on their website but you can find info on the integration and features of the service here at this paypal development forum.

If you are looking for a payment gateway, which connects your online store to your existing Internet merchant account or cuts out that step and acts as a merchant account for you, this is a good option for you, as its not that expensive. It's still not cheap. With this service Cutcaster will be able to:

1. Accept credit cards and debit cards. Plus accept PayPal too (U.S.only which is a bummer because we think we need to set up the Moneybookers account as well so we can pay international contributors. Unless someone has another idea???).

2. We can optimize everyones experience by letting shoppers complete the checkout process without leaving the Cutcaster website. It cuts down on a lot of unnecessary steps.

3. We have one of the highest security and risk management systems.

4. And so far its been sort of easy to integrate into our platform. Payflow Pro is pre-integrated into many shopping carts but we are building our own to meet our new business model.

The hardest part of the whole process is just waiting for the reference transaction to hit your bank account and the amount of time you have to wait to get it set up. I guess that is the ADD in everyone. I suggest setting up that transaction early because that takes a few days as well as fax in your personal identification as early as possible because that takes 3-5 days to clear. The personal ID will not, however, hold up your account going live. Setting up the account is generally easy and can be done in a 3-5 days if you have all your information ready.

BrightQube...

As this article on Microstock Diaries illustrates, this new online tool from BrightQube is a new way to search for images. It's basically like having Google Maps' scan and zoom functionality for what amounts to a map of royalty free images from a few image agencies. The interface feels like something you'd expect to find in a Mac OS and is generally bug-free even though the site is in beta. What we're interested in is if videos (or thumbnails of videos) can be displayed in the same efficient and effective way -- we see no reason why not. I can see them opening up the platform to selected professionals and amatuers that they know who can support and provide niche photos to their licensing marketplace which is now all photo agencies from the looks of things. I'll be watching Lee Corkran's company over the next few months.

Gracey's Cutcaster Promo

Thanks to our friend Gracey for creating the first Cutcaster promo for us out of the goodness of her heart. Let us know what you think and if you want to check out some of Gracey's work check out her blog.




Music Credit: PacDV

Seed Photo: Ferdari (xeizut@morguefile)

Paypal Website Payments Pro Payflow Edition

Does anyone have any experience with this service? I believe it is a pretty new service and differs with their Payflo Pro Edition.

Also for the international readers, does anyone have any experience using Moneybookers? Cutcaster is looking to offer it as an option to submit payments to foreign sellers. Moneybookers enables any business or consumer with an email address to securely and cost-effectively send and receive payments online right there and then in real time. One can use Moneybookers to send money via email, like Paypal, from your credit/debit card or bank account, you can do it online, and you can also collect money via email. I believe this is more for international markets.

Microsoft Investment in Facebook

Microsoft, it is rumored, is in talks with Facebook to make a 10 billion dollar investment into the social networking giant. I'll post more when we hear more but we are asking people over at Facebook if there is any truth to this. Most of you will remember that Micrsoft has a multiyear deal to serve ads on Facebook for something like 900 million dollars. It seems like it is a likely fit. This is reported and according to sources at the Wall Street Journal and Fly on the Wall.

Another Fair Use/Copyright Infringement Lawsuit for Virgin Media

For the second time in as many months Virgin mobile is getting burned for their use of an underage girl's picture in an advertisement in Australia, which they never asked her if they could use. We already covered it once before in this blog. The 16 year old girl had no idea that she was a part of the Virgin campaign until she discovered a photo of the advertisement on Flickr where the original was posted to start. Not only did they not have the proper releases but the girl is underage.

You can see CNN's coverage of the teen's family suing Virgin Mobile for using her picture, posted on Flickr.com, in an ad campaign here as they go over the issues of the Fair Use vs. Copyright Infringement.

Is this just a ploy to get even more media attention for Virgin Media and then pay out a small penalty to the owner of the photo and the girl represented in it. Poeple are now talking about the ad which is a major coup in itself for Virgin Mobile. Also this is the second time in two months. You would think they are not that stupid and would learn their lesson. I think their has to be other motives or they are trying/hoping to redefine how you can use creative commons licensing in commercials works. I wonder where Flickr stands on all this. Here is a link to their Coyright and Infringement policy.

"Yahoo! respects the intellectual property of others, and we ask our users to do the same. Yahoo! has no responsibility for content on other web sites that you may find or access when using Yahoo!’s products or services. Material available on or through other web sites may be protected by copyright and the intellectual property laws of the United States and/or other countries. The terms of use of those web sites, and not the Yahoo! Terms of Service, govern your use of that material.

It is Yahoo!’s policy, in appropriate circumstances and at its discretion, to disable and/or terminate the accounts of users who may infringe or repeatedly infringe the copyrights or other intellectual property rights of Yahoo! and/or others."


Looks like Yahoo doesnt want to touch this issue with a ten foot a pole.

Is Virgin Mobile trying to hide behind Fair Use even when they are using the picture for commercial purposes? And shouldn't they have at least contacted the girl before they used the photo even under creative commons? They did put the URL in the credits of the advertisement but is that enough and is this the future of licensing? All very interesting questions and goes to show you how gray this area of usage, copyright infringement and fair use is. Bottom line: Be very careful with what you upload to the Internet.


UPDATE: Here is a related link from the NYTimes.

Legally using images and videos in your blog

Copyright issues and clearing rights are so important to creating an ethical and secure marketplace. We have covered in previous blog posts what is Fair Use and understanding copyright laws better which you can find here. But that line can sometimes be gray so how do you know what is Fair Use and what can get you in deep water?

From the PACA website:

"Fair Use" doctrine allows limited copying of copyrighted works for educational and research purposes. The copyright law provides that reproduction "for purposes such as criticism, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research" is not an infringement of copyright.

This is a defense to infringement and is limited in scope. We had an interesting conversation with Adam Eland from WallStrip about this type of usage. If how you are using someone else's work qualifies as fair use, it will be decided by the courts, which balances various factors, and is decided on a case by case basis: This is where it can get gray. Guidelines are more commonplace than concrete rules, which is what can make things confusing for people that are not copyright lawyers. Here are some helpful guidelines:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
2. the nature of the copyrighted work; factual or more artistic
3. the amount and substance of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

So remember, when you are using someone else's work always be mindful of how you are using it and please give credit where credit is due. Just a simple shout-out on your page or link back to the author's page. It's only fair.

Hulu, we hardly knewu...

I thought that was kind of funny. Anyway, the cannibalization of online video/image services that I've been touching on for the past couple months (Google Video and Yahoo Photos vs YouTube and Flickr being the two major examples), is continuing along as we learn from Techcrunch that Hulu will have to compete with one of its parent's (NBC) websites. NBC will now offer premium content (The Office, Heroes, etc) on both sites. Why...who knows? Sounds like another company tried to rush into this digital space without thinking about if there was a need for it or if it was actually serving a unique purpose. What site's going to fall next?

Testing Cutcaster

We have begun our testing of the Cutcaster site, clicking around, uploading video, playing the videos and working out the bugs that we are finding. The first time we were able to get video to play on the site a few weeks back brought a huge smile to all our faces. It was a great accomplishment after a year and a half of brainstorming, to writing, to recruiting a team, to actually building it and now we are here. A huge accomplishment to the Cutcaster team and we all needed to pitch in to make it a reality. Thanks.

We are still working on finishing the e-commerce (checkout cart) but that should be done in a few days and then we will work out the kinks and then open it up to a few people outside of our Cutcaster family. We are all really excited, pumped is a better word, at the progress we have made and the response we have gotten. Thanks for your patiences as it has taken us slightly longer to complete the building phase then we thought.

So we are going to begin the alpha testing of the site shortly and are looking to invite a few people to help it out. We are going to have about 500 people testing it out to start and they have been chosen from a list of our people who have signed up, tech people we have met along the journey and a few people we know and trust. The number of invites will depend on how the alpha launch goes but if you are someone who really likes to tinker around on new sites and help build a community/marketplace from the ground up shoot us an email or comment below. We would love to have you on board.

The end of DRM...

Just a quick note from a Techcrunch interview with the CEO of Mozilla Europe. The article doesn't cover online video per se, but there is a pretty interesting quote from Tristan Nitot (the prez) that caught my eye and was actually put in article's headline:

“I don’t think DRM has a future. Treating your customers like thieves is bad business practice. Today the customer is not ‘king’, they are considered thief first.”

He relates a story about his young son being visibly upset by a DRM-enabled music CD which would not play on his older model HiFi.

“It is stupid to think that the key to a DRM system won’t leak. So if it becomes more painful for a legitimate customer to use a product than it is for the pirates then that’s a problem,” he says.

Kind of a bold, sweeping statement, and I'm not sure the reasoning is sound. But interesting nonetheless.

The Professional Scriptwriting Workshop & Clinic

If you are you interested in a Professional Scriptwriting Workshop & Clinic down in the Hollywood, FL area, please let us know. One of our future members, Alyn Darnay from Chaos Films, a production company shooting in Florida and the Caribbean, is holding the clinic in Oct. for four nights.

Video Wars?

Mediapost featured an interesting article discussing what could be the first major signs of an upcoming battle between heavyweight video distributors:

"Just last week, NBC announced it would not be renewing its video distribution partnership with Apple and its iTunes service, and it moved to Amazon instead --while Sony has announced plans to more directly compete with Apple when it comes to video downloading services. Many analysts believe that the video distribution "wars" have only begun, with no clear-cut winner yet to emerge..."

This is pretty interesting for us at Cutcaster because for small video sites (us), figuring out what industry giants to align yourself with is going to become even more challenging, especially when companies get bought out (YouTube) or straight cancelled (Google Video, that bought YouTube). It's going to take some increasingly serious skill to navigate through this emerging industry.

Amazon Web Services- New Contest for Start-ups

Cutcaster is heading next week to Amazon's web conference here in NYC where they will be talking about their different web service products and services. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), for example, is an impressive offering for storage on the internet. Check out these rates.

Storage
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used

Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB - all data transfer in

$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Data transfer "in" and "out" refers to transfer into and out of Amazon S3.
Data transferred between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 is free of charge

Requests
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requests

Storage and bandwidth size includes all file overhead.


They are going to be tough to beat at those rates. We have spoken to a few other companies that do parts of what S3 does and they are not even in the same ballpark. I really love what Amazon has done here. One company to look out for is Nirvanix who just recieved funding and will be a competitor to AWS.

We will let you know how the conference goes and what we think of AWS when we come back.

Also check out this start-up contest Amazon is putting on for companies who are using their services.

Copycat- Yahoo follows Facebook's open invitation to developers

Anyone who is on Facebook knows that new apps are being built and distributed throughout the network at a pretty frenzied place. Anytime we log in to our Facebook page it is loaded with friends who are trying out and reccommending new apps. This started when Facebook opened up their platform to developers. Now any developer could build a facebook app and hope it spread widely. A new buzzword was born: Openness.

BusinessWeek today had a great article on Yahoo's response to this new trend of openess and what they are planning to do in the future following this new principle.

Will this start a battle to see who can open up their platform and source code the most?

Red Digital Camera

I'd love to hear what people think about RED-ONE camera and if anyone is shooting using them. They are not cheap with the RED-ONE coming in at 17,500+. The camera supports all current HDTV and Digital Cinema distribution master standards, from which an NTSC or PAL standard definition version can be obtained via standard down conversion techniques.

Sept. 11th Memorial and Prayers

Some of you may know that a few of Cutcaster's staff work on Wall St. within a few blocks on the World Trade Center and have vivid memories of Tuesday, Sept. 11th everyday as we walk by Ground Zero. It's a chilling, sobering and constant reminder of how fortunate we are to be alive and able to go to work.

Cutcaster wants to reach out to everyone affected by that tragic day and the painful days that have followed and say that you are in our thoughts and prayers. We will never know your pain but you will never leave our hearts and minds.

Culture of Trust at Cutcaster

Developing trust is so important to any leader, especially an aspiring marketplace one like Cutcaster who wants to build strong relationships with people all over the world and from different cultures. Trust transcends culture and bonds people. We must have the trust of all our members and be able to trust them for a successful marketplace and relationship to grow, especially in the business of licensing content. Culture affects willingness to trust, and it is our hope that our members' willingness to trust will shape and define our culture. Trust will be the glue that holds us together in the times of adversity and is one of the most important attributes in a relationship. Trust is built and earned over time, not demanded. So how do you build trust? Always do the right thing, have integrity, exude patience, altruism, fair action, friendship building, clear judgement and constant communication.

Cutcaster's backbone is built on a Culture of Trust. Here are 10 rules we will post on our walls and live by in order to ensure that trust grows to an unbreakable bond in our community.

1. Our marketplace will be the most transparent mechanism on the Internet and we will provide market information for people to make better business decisions.

2. Our foundation for trust will be based in Truth and we will always be honest.

3.Cutcaster and its staff will provide our emails and cell phones for the community so we are easily reachable.

4. Cutcaster and its staff will respond to the community actively and provide feedback in every case. If we don't know the answer, we won't "BS" and will ask the community for guidance.

5. We will publicize on our site and to our competitors the mischievous and repeat copyright or usage offenders. Buyers or sellers, no matter what site they use, will be protected from these spoilers.

6. Popular suggestions WILL be incorporated into the site. We will not make any major changes to the site without actively incorporating user feedback into the project.

7. Cutcaster members will be one of the primary mechanisms for filtering inappropriate, miscategorized or illegally uploaded content.

8. Particpation is always encouraged.

9. Cutcaster will fight to provide strong leadership for the benefit of our users in the industry and listen carefully to what they need and want.

10. We will never waste your time. If we are not the best solution for your needs or we know of a better one that isn't us, we will tell you.


We will be writing more on our core values as we grow. A great relationship will be based on trust and truth and we will never forget that.

Commenting Disabled Unexpectedly

We turned the commenting back on and are sorry for the outage. For some reason the comments on our Cutcaster blog were turned off and we missed a bunch of people who responded at the end of our posts. We are a culture of trust and contribution so we regret if we didn't respond to anyone with the speed and quality of response they deserved. Keep the comments coming and sorry.

Novak Djokovic Imitator and Impersonations- My New Favorite Tennis Player

For those that have not seen Novak play tennis yet, he is pretty spectacular. But the only thing that outperforms his playing is his impersonations of the other top players in the tennis world.

Like we do every Friday, I wanted to post a funny video of some of his impersonations from last nights US Open tennis championships. We need more of this in sports.

Just Joined BlogExplosion

If you don't know what it is, you can click here to learn more. It seems to be a good way to generate traffic to your blog. We will let you know how it works and please let me know your experience.

Tranners - eCommerce within Interactive Advertising equals the Birth of Transactional Banners

Tailgate bridges the gap between marketing and sales by creating a sales opportunity directly within every banner they place on sites. It's one of the coolest eCommerce/advertising product I have seen in online advertising out there. Tailgate proclaims the tradition ad banner dead and I tend to agree with them. They call their transactional banners "Tranners." These "Tranners" can now extend your eCommerce capabilities to everywhere on the net, allowing more people to buy from you in more places without leaving the site they are visiting. Definitely click on the examples on the lower right hand side of the homepage to see how it works and how easy the technology is. Tailgate was developed by Fhlame over in the UK.

Some of the major benefits that I see are-

1. so easy now to buy a product directly on the site that host the ad so no one ever leaves the original site.

2. the barriers/clicks to purchasing now are lowered dramatically i.e. the purchase path is significantly reduced resulting in less drop offs

3. you can leverage a sites PPC and SEO activities

4. you now can get much better acquisitions and reduce CPA

5. this is perfect for any impulse buyer

6. better way to advertise to site visitors in a way that is not intrusive and keeps them on the site they came to visit i.e. you are not forcing them to a 3rd party website just to transact


I would not be surprised if this company is bought up by a larger a network or competitor. It's really one of the most unique forms of advertising and eCommerce in one solution and I think the idea of Tranners, these transactional banners, make a lot of sense from a website owners perspective, the visitors and the seller of the product that is being marketed. I already have a number of ways I'd like to use this technology. Let me know what you think

Royalty Payments for Content at Cutcaster

Royalty Payments have been dropping for some time now as larger agencies are squeezing the content creator’s profitability for their unique content. To begin at Cutcaster, we are proud of the fact that we return a minimum of 40% of the proceeds to the producer/artist and in most cases more.

New Terms and Standards for selling Online Video Advertising

What are the key terms that advertisers need to know when selling online advertising to clients? Here is a summary of some of the terms and standards that are emerging in our industry.

The Ad Unit. The large number of ad units has caused an enormous amount of confusion due to the lack of real creative standards. Here is a simple problem that needs fixing. Advertisers must first understand and then evaluate all the options that are out there as well as educate themselves on emerging standards, which seem to be popping up every month. Some of these might be new and some are tweaks on old standards but examples include but are not limited to the following:

In-stream videos -- pre/mid/post-roll. These, in most cases, are usually accompanied by companion banners.
Direct response banners. These are banners that when clicked, the viewer is directed to a 3rd party website. The campaign is normally paid for on a cost per click, CPC, basis by the advertiser. Typically the targeting is context.
In-stream banners (also known as tickers, bugs or overlays). We have all seen the banners that appear in the player at some point while watching video.
Branded banners- When the banner is clicked a new window pops up, the advertiser is charged on a CPM basis regardless of how many number of clicks there are.
User-Initiated video ads – This consists of a banner that when clicked pauses content and plays a commercial. In this case, the advertiser is charged on a CPM basis for banner impressions, regardless of the number of plays that result from banner clicks. If the user clicks again he is directed to the advertiser's Web site.
Interactive video ads – these are pre and post roll video stream, interactive display ads hope to engage the consumer before moving on to the intended video content. Interactive elements allow the consumer to find out more information without having to leave the site.
Video banner ads – These are not associated with video content but are video ads that play automatically (hopefully muted for those at work or the library) on a page or play when rolled over by a mouse. I personally find these very annoying.
Player skin – There has been a number of players that have popped up that are doing this technique now. They are sponsored ad graphics that surround a video screen. Adbrite has a good example of this.


Different Terms. Due to the lack of creative standards we have now seen multiple business models sprout up as well. Knowing what they are paying for is crucial for advertisers (i.e. CPM, CPC or CPA) and what the payment method consist of—will this be an insertion order with net terms or is this an upfront payment? Can you opt in for a minimum buy or can the advertiser stop a campaign at their choosing – like in a sponsored search? Also consider, how the costs can be fixed and budgeted over the lifetime of the campaign?

Production requirements, Targeting capabilities. Who is going to produce and provide these new videos? Is that the job of the advertiser? What role does file size, formatting issues, video length play in their decision making process? How much information can they provide on the demographics they are looking to reach (i.e. region, zip code, male or female, time of day, etc.)? How targeted can you make the ad based on the above demographics?

Tracking. A major source of confusion for advertisers is who actually hosts and serves the ad – this is compounded by the various vendors and third-party ad servers available. Trust us. So what is the most effective way to track your campaigns performance? It is essential that advertisers find out who delivers the ad and how that company applies tags to track the amount of a video that was viewed, how users interact with the commercial, and then utilize tracking beyond the ad itself so they can determine performance.

Lastly,

Observe and Optimize. This is new for a lot of people and no one can really claim to be an expert. It’s emerging as I type, so it's key that advertisers expectations are kept in check. There is a huge opportunity in online video advertising but there is still a lot to learn and test out. Always track and review your results and never stop testing as my friend Zac at PaidGamePlayer says. Always Review and test consistantly, tweak your message and tinker with your advertising program and the campaign.


Let me know what I missed. Thanks

Masters of Photography

Check out this film school project that was legally put together with permission by the copyright holders. It goes from old to new while set against a great song. It's funny to see how all the younger generations photos stuck to color while the older ones were all black and white. While I am a big fan of color, none of the younger generations gave a shout out to their mentors which I thought we might see. Great slide show and be on the lookout for more.

Google Translator

We have noticed that we are getting a lot of traffic from non-speaking English regions so we have decided to add a Translator on the right hand side of the page to help our non-English speaking friends become a part of the Cutcaster community. Just click on the map that represents your mother tounge and the page will be translated to that language for you.

Let me know how well the pages are translated and if there is a language that you would like me to include. I tried to include all the major ones.

Tips for Video Compression- How to?

Knowing the best way to compress video is sometimes a matter of preference and less dependent on the best way. There are a number of tips that can help you choose what is best for you and your needs. There is no magic solution but MultimediaShooter put together a great list of tips on Video Compression and did it in a very entertaining way. There is a follow up to their work entitled The Dark Art of Video Compression and can be found here.

Here are some useful links as well.

Compressors/Encoders:

The Flash VideoEncoder, which comes with Flash 8 (big$$).
Sorenson Squeeze Multiple output formats with the Suite.
The ON2 Flix Encoders (from $69 - free demos)
The RivaVX FLV Encoder (Free, not available for MAC, no ON2 VP6 codec yet)

And a few more to just to keep you on your toes.

http://www.jeroenwijering.com
http://www.flashvideofaq.com/timetrials/
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/multimedia
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash
http://www.adobe.com/designcenter
http://www.adobe.com/video_encoder.html
http://www.flashvideofaq.com

Interested in the Microstock Photography Experience

Lee Torrens, from the land down under, spends a lot of his time taking great photographs but also enlightening us with some very insightful observations on his website about his experience and thoughts on the blossoming Microstock Photography landscape. He has been in the game for a few years and offers us a great glimpse into what it takes to survive and what sites out there are the best for people like him. Cutcaster learned a lot from Microstock Diaries and so will our visitors so check it out when you get a chance.

Pika Pika- Great example of Light Painting

Cutcaster has been reaching out and recieving a lot of video content. Here is one that it loves which is by Pika Pika out in LA. Enjoy

Here are some other WK Interact Bring Me Back Series

New WK Interact's "Bring Me Back" in my Neighborhood

Everyday, I walked by WK's old piece on the corner of Elizabeth and Prince and loved stopping to check it out. This is a new one that he replaced it with. It's pretty impressive in real life. He has also papered a few doorways around my apt with smaller versions.

Why was YouTube so successful?

It's not something that is often asked, as most people chalk it up to being in the right place at the right time, a first-mover that happened to be a free video site and rode the wave to riches using copyrighted content. This is not an inaccurate statement necessarily, but Joshua Porter on his bokardo.com tries to answer it with a little more clarity. As opposed to being just a matter of luck, he poses that there were some fundamental design features that allowed the viral growth to occur so rapidly and smoothly.....he highlights the following on his site (video sites listen up):

"Primary Video Activities that YouTube Got Right-
Here are three ways in which YouTube created an environment for growth:

Uploading: Everything to Flash video.
Plays everywhere. No platform issues here. YouTube sucks up whatever format your video is in and transcodes it to Flash.

Watching: Videos play by themselves.
The easiest activity is the one most done. Ever notice that YouTube videos play without you doing anything? Talk about making the primary purpose of the site easy…it just happens. I love this.

Sharing: Super sharing features.
YouTube has always had great sharing features. They include the code to share on your blog right alongside the video. Again, you don’t have to do anything for the code to be there. You just copy it, and it just works."

For the record, we here at Cutcaster are not trying to be another YouTube, but these simple points are always important to keep in mind.

DailyMotion gets some real funding...

As announced the other day (you can find the article on Techcrunch), DailyMotion received a $34 million round of funding from Advent Venture Partners and AGF Private Equity. This is good news for video sites, and also interesting because DailyMotion is a French company and this is a pretty big cash injection for a European start-up. Also on Techcrunch, it was announced yesterday that Ross Levinsohn formerly of Fox Interactive Media and Jonathan Miller, the former Chairman/CEO of America Online have partnered with a large hedge fund to create a new VC investment group. This is all good news because given what's happening in the markets now, it's still not clear if the credit crunch is going to impact VC investment as much as people are saying it's going to put the breaks on private equity.