Rodfather Mobile

Here’s another contest that was announced today. No it’s not crude and immature like the one I may be doing.

Utterz is teaming up with SOBCon (Business School for Bloggers) by hosting a contest to create a commercial for your blog. The winner will receive a spanking new Nokia N95 phone.

SOBCon attendees and all website owners alike are invited to submit a commercial for your blog or webpage to the SOBCon Utterz “GET MY MESSAGE” contest. Entries will be reviewed and judged by SOBCon (Business School for Bloggers) attendees on Sunday May 4, 2008 in Chicago and one lucky website owner will win a Nokia N95 mobile phone.

Why Make Your Commercial
This is your opportunity to tell people why they should visit your site AND you’ll get unbiased advice on how to improve your message and drive more traffic. That, and you’ll get a lot of free promotion by being a featured participant in the GET MY MESSAGE Contest.

How Do I Participate?
Make a short commercial for your blog or webpage using Utterz – no longer than 60 seconds and 1,000 characters. Create your commercial using any combination of audio, video, pictures and text. Then, submit your commercial by tagging it “GET MY MESSAGE Contest” on Utterz.

Some suggestions:
- This is your value proposition. In other words, why do people care about visiting your website?
- Use a combination of media. Record some audio, make a video and upload an image – anything goes!
- Keep it short
- Get creative

What Then?
Commercials will be posted on Utterz.com and published to
http://getmymessage.blogspot.com/ so everyone has one place to view them. Before, during and after the event, people are invited to leave replies to each others’ commercials with words of encouragement, praise, or advise. User submissions can be edited based on this feedback right up to SOBCon on May 3 and 4. Please note, only one submission per person!

On Sunday, May 4, SOBCon attendees will have a chance to view everyone’s commercials in work groups. They will narrow the field to a set of 5 finalists based on the lessons learned during SOBCon ‘08. Then, we’ll ask everyone online and at SOBCon to vote on their favorite commercials in real time! The winner walks away with a brand spankin’ new Nokia N95.

For more information or questions about the SOBCon Utterz GET MY MESSAGE Contest or for questions about the Utterz service, email lizsun2@gmail.com and/or sim@utterz.com.

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I’m not sure if I will be entering. It’s good timing since I’ve been messing with video.. but what am I suppose to present? Visit this site so you can watch fishing videos and possibly win a pair of blue nuts?

Link

5×5 Windy Day from Rodfather on Vimeo.

First 5×5 Vignette. It was a very windy day so I took some footage of some plants & trees blowing in the wind.

Shot from Canon TX1 at 720P. The audio had a lot of wind noise even though I turned on the wind filter. It was ridiculously windy though so it was expected. My hat flew off twice during this time.

I did an experiment in post. Edited this with my 800Mhz Fujitsu U810 UMPC using Sony Vegas. While editing, the preview screen couldn’t really keep up but it wasn’t actually too bad editing HD footage on such a slow computer. I’m somewhat glad now that the Canon TX1 encodes to MJPEG. If it encoded to H.264, there would be no way I would be able to edit it since H.264 is so processor intensive.

I ended up encoding the final product to 720P WMV. It took 54 minutes to encode 25 seconds worth of footage.

I doubt I will edit HD footage on a UMPC in the near future, but it’s nice to know it’s even possible.

Download WMV from Vimeo page - 1280×720 30FPS (99MB)

I’ve missed you ShoZu. You were good to me when I used the Blackjack Windows Mobile phone.

Well, looks like there’s a desktop version which is great for those who send videos or photos to multiple services.

It runs off Adobe Air. The interface is simple with only three inputs fields for the title, description, and tags. If you want to add additional services, you need to log in to the ShoZu site and add from there.

ShoZu one-click video and image uploads expands from mobile to desktop | The Mobile Gadgeteer | ZDNet.com

I’m sure most of you have seen the Everyday video where this dude Noah takes a picture of himself everyday for 6 years (and counting?).  Well at least you’ve heard the music in the NBA’s Where Amazing Happens commercials..

Anyway, now you can easily snap a photo of yourself everyday straight to the browser using a webcam with Daily Mugshot.

I’m not sure if I will keep up with this but since I have the Fujitsu U810 with me all the time with its built-in webcam, why not.  Maybe this will be a good incentive to live a healthier lifestyle and not look so much like a chipmunk.

Keeping current with Web 2.0 goodness, they offer an embed code to stream your mug to your favorite social network.

Via lifestreamblog.com

Found a cool video posted on Chris Pirillo’s site.  It’s a tutorial on how to make your live streaming screen look just like Chris’ on Ustream on a PC using WebCamMax.  

This is a great tutorial for up and coming lifecasters who want to include ’stuff’ on the screen.

YouTube - RathofMac WebcamMax How To Video

It seems a bit more stable than yesterday. At least I can broastcast now. We’ll see how this goes. Looks to be very easy and straightforward to set up.
The CPU% load is around 50% when broadcasting on the U810. I would guess similar to ustream.tv.
There’s really not much info on this service. Are they automatically recording everything I broadcast?

Live Inkblogs Demo
Using ManyCams and Utterz.