They will provide previews, predictions and talk about major current events as well as answer questions from viewers. Football season is not far away, so watch 4th Down and find out which teams and players to watch out for this fall.

Stulberg has a very impressive resume, he is represented by both Corbis and Getty images among others, he is a contributing writer for Shutterbug Magazine, he teaches digital photography and Photoshop at UCLA Extension, the Julia Dean Photo Workshops in Venice Beach & the Art Wolfe Digital Photography Center in Seattle. He is also co-author of The Digital Photographer’s New Guide to Photoshop Plug-Ins. From Microsoft, Newsweek and the New York Times, to greeting cards, calendars and book covers, his images are used internationally. His photographs are in collections all over the world, including on permanent display in the United Nations and the new UCLA Medical Center, with prints displayed in over 60 patient rooms.

Join us at 1:30PM Pacific time at http://smibs.tv/live

VideoLobby

Hi I’m Peter Urban from Smibs. We are excited to announce that our most recent software product, VideoLobby has just launched. We were one of only ten companies chosen to demo new real-time web products at the Real-Time CrunchUp in San Francisco last Friday. We were gratified to be recognized for the hard work we’ve put into creating our software. I’d like to give a big thanks to our team who really worked hard to make this launch possible.

VideoLobby is the next big step forward in independent video broadcasting!

VideoLobby is for video broadcasting what Blogger is for text-based blogging. VideoLobby allows people and companies to create a professional looking, custom branded, live web tv show and integrate it into their website within a few minutes and without any technical knowledge.

See a video overview of VideoLobby!

Article from TechCrunch

Edmonton Journal Article

In the past, if you wanted to broadcast your own show you needed to use a video streaming service and then get a web development firm to add the video to your site and if you wanted any other kind of features such as live commenting or archiving, you’d have to pay to have them implemented as well.

With VideoLobby, you can present your online TV show, either live or prerecorded in a clean and professionally branded template that integrates seamlessly with your website. You simply sign up for a free Smibs account, set up your show and your first episode and you are ready to roll.

Another major benefit is that VideoLobby offers real-time web integration. Your viewers can now have conversations via twitter and Facebook right on your show page which is great service to your viewers and simultaneously helps to promote your show throughout the social web.

Finally, viewers can ask questions while the episode is running live and the host can answer the questions during the show in real time.

Hope to meet you soon on at www.videolobby.com!

The Smibs Team

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE

The first thing I wanted to change was our code versioning system. Our office has been using Subversion (SVN) as our code repository for a couple years now. It’s done the job well, and has saved our butts on more than one occasion, but there were a few things I didn’t like. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I like moving around when I work; hitting a coffee shop in the morning, or taking my laptop to the local bookstore on a hot day. Subversion forced me to always have an internet connection to commit changes or make new branches. As a result, I would perform larger commits, or have branches pulling double duty, which is far from ideal. Further, setting up and maintaining the permissions with ssh and multiple developers is quite a pain on Subversion.

A few of our developers have used Git for some open-source projects, and we all quite liked it. We’ve been talking about changing for months, but we couldn’t justify the effort until we had to re-install everything anyways. We decided to use Gitosis to manage the Git server, setup the permissions, and manage users (good tutorial here). This proved to be fairly simple. I then imported all of our previous projects with git-svn with some help from this post. Next, our system was configured to send out a summary e-mail every time a developer pushed a change. Finally, I modified our deploy files so the servers read the code from our new Git server rather than our old SVN server. The entire process was completed in under two days.

While many of us had used Git before there was still a learning curve. I found a very useful guide called “Git Magic”. It starts off with the basics that all developers should know, but moves all the way to “Git grandmastery” in chapter 7.

Final thoughts:

Git has more of a learning curve than I expected, and is more complicated than Subversion — but it is so much more flexible, that I think it’s worth it. You can really use it however is best for you. For some developers, it won’t be much different than working with svn, but I’m really appreciating the differences. I read an interesting analogy comparing clones, branches, tags, etc. with multiple desktops, windows and tabs. The more options available, the longer it will take for a person to come up with the best system for them, but once they figure it out, they can really fly.

I would love to hear your thoughts on Subversion vs. Git (or any other systems you recommend for that matter). Why do you think one is better than the other?

Finally after weeks, perhaps even months, I can eat and sleep comfortably once more. Finally I can go throughout my day and not break down into a blubbering mess due to critical levels of mental anguish. Finally I can drive from point A to B without having to pull over on the side of the road and contemplate the meaning of my life. Finally… I know what the “August 5″ campaign in Edmonton signifies.

Metaphysical life-altering experiences aside, Edmonton’s Southgate mall recently finished an interesting marketing campaign to generate some buzz about their grand re-opening after substantial renovations. Featuring new stores, new physical outlay and a “new feel,” Southgate created a marketing plan to gain new shoppers and align itself as a legitimate competitor to the monolith that is West Edmonton Mall. How you ask? By simply posting signs around the city that said no more then “August 5″.

Southgate's re-opening campaign had Edmontonian's wondering: "What the heck is happening on August 5th?"

Teaser marketing campaigns (definitely not something new or indigenous to Edmontonians) play off of and manipulate the innate human characteristic of needing to understand what is going on. By strategically providing only small pieces of information regarding the actual event/product, advertisers hope to stir up the most powerful marketing tool: word of mouth. In this case, mission accomplished. After only weeks of seeing the signs around the city, I heard numerous mentions of the campaign from all kinds of sources, ranging from newspaper and radio to simple banter between friends. People were agitated by knowing absolutely nothing about something they drove past every day and as a result they spread the campaign around the city for Southgate (at no extra cost).

Probably the most documented case of teaser marketing in recent memory was the 2007-2008 campaign for the movie Cloverfield. Movie advertisements featuring only a shaky camera and a single passing glance of a gigantic monster attacking a city caught people’s attention, but by not mentioning a movie title, release date, or any sort of information that would help the viewers figure out what they just saw, the advertisements caused everyone in the theatre look at each other and wonder out loud “what was that?” They added to this fantastic viral campaign with a website that gave out almost less information then the movie previews but featured videos and puzzles alluding to a post-apocalyptic world, creating more hype towards whatever the hell it was that advertisers were planning on releasing.

The catch to teaser marketing is that with added hype comes higher expectations. After toying with their emotions (as my fragile psyche would suggest) the consumer expects to find a light at the end of the tunnel that really blows them away. Anything less than that and the promoter can face anything ranging from apathy to resentment, severely damaging any hype they had created. Cloverfield did amazing out of the gates, but kind of tapered off by leaving some people expecting more explanation from the promoters as the storyline didn’t finish on a solid note. Southgate attempted to add to their re-opening by hiring performers but, from what I’ve gathered, the event left a few people saying “that’s it?” The teaser campaign can be an incredibly effective tool at drumming up publicity, but due to the hightened expecations a promoter needs to sit down and determine if their product is worthy of the hype.

Tease me all you want, but you’d better have something that’s worth my sanity.

As the dust settles on another “successful” Rexall Edmonton Indy, its attendees are left to nurse hangovers and sunburns while its promoters are left to reflect on the successes and fallbacks of the event. While the race draws annual crowds of well over 150,000 people, the Edmonton portion of the Indy circuit continually reports losses. Why is this? The event is nearly sold out every year, corporate support is strong, thousands flock to the city to attend, yet the race is predicted to lose anywhere between 1-3 million dollars. With low sponsorship numbers and even lower television ratings, what can promoters do to ensure the race continues in Alberta’s capital city? I don’t know the answer (if I did I would have a drastically different job title) but I think a place they could start is by learning from their drivers.

Over the Indy weekend I had the pleasure to spend some time with Canadian driver Alex Tagliani behind the scenes while he prepared for the race and I was absolutely blown away by how hard these athletes work off the track to make sure they still have a ride on it. The economic downturn has hit auto racing, a sponsorship dependent activity, perhaps the hardest of any North American sport and with less money to go around, drivers that become complacent have found themselves without a team to race for. Tagliani, who drives for a small race team, has had to rethink the way he goes about securing sponsorship and think of new, more cost effective ways of drumming up publicity and funding. So much so, that in a July 20 Edmonton Journal article Tagliani “estimates he’s spending about 90 per cent of his time raising money, and just 10 per cent driving.” Be it utilizing social media to boost attention, tireless work with clients and sponsors, or spending weeks ahead attending local festivals and contests, Tagliani not only increased his chances of finding a full time racing team next season but also created new racing fans, which benefits the entire sport.

Like any business, the Indy’s success depends on the performance of the entire crew. With shrinking sponsorship streams the entire industry must enter the pits, get retuned, and strategize for the laps ahead. On that note, I’ll wave the checkered flag on this string of puns and leave the forum open for discussion. What else can the Indy, or any business for that matter, learn from the way drivers secure their own sponsorship and deal with partners, clients, and supporters?

Over a year ago in a blog post I discussed what makes a great user interface. I questioned Facebook’s big interface switch and I held up Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn to its standard. Looking back, everything I discussed feels relevant but also somehow remarkably out of date.

When I surf the web now I’m not just thinking about interface, I’m conscious of my experience. I think this subtle shift in terminology captures the gradual evolution of the web towards fun, user friendly spaces that encourage collaboration and community.

I found this user experience Honeycomb on Flickr. There are probably a lot of different matrixes to try and explain the new user experience phenomenon, but I think it comes down to one factor: resonances with our daily lives.

The “Machine is us” video taught us that users drive and therefore are the content of the web. If anything has changed its that now the user driven experience of online platforms, tools and methods of communication are fostering change in our real life experiences too. Social media has connected people online in an incredible way – real people, real issues, real-time. What happens on the Internet is a product of our lived experiences, and in turn our activities online ripple outward into the world.

So, what I think about now is what the next generation of user experience innovation will be. Videos, blogs and streams of updates are currently giving websites a tangible, interactive look and feel. Its not just click-ability and interest-factors that are providing value any more, its spaces that foster conversations and that appeal to the relevance of user’s everyday lives.

Now that we, the general public, are more in control of how web giants generate user interface and experience simply through the communication of our wants and needs – where do you think our passion for dialogue and engagement will lead the web?

I want to think about this question and write about websites currently providing unparalleled user experience, and then brainstorm about the kind of experience I’d love to see created online in the future.

Image Courtesy of Flickr user A-dit-ya. I love Creative Commons licensing.

So we couldn’t help following the string of TechCrunch stories over the past couple days releasing confidential Twitter company information and strategy on their blog. TechCrunch was e-mailed the info by a hacker who managed to answer the password safety questions of one of the Twitter founder’s gmail account. Yikes.

TechCrunch’s actions are highly controversial, and everyone is up in arms about whether or not posting the stolen info is wrong. TechCrunch didn’t do any stealing themselves, but many people still contend that chosing to act on the news tip was unethical.

To be honest, right now we are completely undecided. We see arguments for both sides.

We want to know what you think?

With all of this said, I googled Chahal and it seems he has a kind of playboy, ego, consumption-addict image which was a bit of a disappointment…who knows what he is really like…and honestly, I could care less really. The book was a good read, especially if you are like us here at Smibs, a tech start-up.

Some other reviewer comments:

“While success like his is often attributed to luck, Chahal’s story, like that of many immigrants, is more one of sacrifice … it was years of hard work, persistence and faith, along with the support of his family, that brought his financial rewards–not chance.”–San Francisco Chronicle

“Chahal is a prodigy, a successful entrepreneur, and a writer. His story is remarkable and we think it is a prime example of what can be accomplished with a little motivation and ingenuity. Young Hollywood wants to know what this young man can’t do!”–Young Hollywood

Book image courtesy of Amazon