Recently, we launched Videoblast.it. An easy way to share a favorite moment within a video! With Videoblast.it you can create a unique customized page with your video and comment. You can even control the specific time your video will start! After you create your videoblast go ahead and share it with the ones you want. Post it to your Skype chat, email it, or share it with your facebook friends and twitter followers.

Now you just have to follow 3 simple steps to make your Videoblast and share your favorite moment within a video.

1. Enter your Youtube url in the white box right on top. Not sure about the url? Click the blue link to transfer to Youtube and pick your video.

2. Decide when you want your video to start. Although this step is not necessary, the core excitement from a Videoblast is when you capture that exact moment within a video. You can test if you picked the right time by clicking the “Test Time” button and previewing your videoblast in the small screen on the right!

3. All done with the video? Add a comment that you want to attach. The comment will be shown at the top of the video when the video is played. Finally you have the opportunity to put the right title to the video you are sharing!

If you have any comments or suggestions contact us and let us know what you would like to see!

Last week, I was interviewed by Kit Seeborg for a post in Slideshare‘s Blog about Sustainable Life Media’s channel.  Here’s what I had to say:

We recently caught up with Nikos Sarilakis, Online Marketing Manager for Sustainable Life Media, the leading producer of sustainable business conferences and educational events. We asked Nikos how Sustainable Life Media’s events benefit from having a SlideShare channel.

One way Sustainable Life Media helps companies grow is through conferences and seminars. How do you use your SlideShare channel to support these events?
At SLM, slideshows and videos are among the most valuable content we create. We want to store them, publish them, share them and then embed them in our website as broadly as possible. SlideShare is a great platform to ensure widespread viewing of this content. We post videos from conferences, slide decks from our speakers’ presentations, press releases, brochures and many other digital media. SlideShare is one of the best tools to promote our conference, increase our brand awareness and have digital content that gets a viral push in social media.

With 76 slidedecks and over 100 videos, you’ve assembled a lot of content. What is your process for managing content additions to the channel?
We try to upload everything we designate as free in order to get more views and target a broader market. Of course we upload only the content that we think is interesting and valuable for our community. We have common thumbnail designs for every conference. It is a dark grey background for the SB’10 Conference, and yellow for the SB’09 Conference. By this we try to create groups (visually) and maintain consistency. The other good thing about SlideShare is that we can make some of the videos or slideshows private and embed them in restricted access pages in our website. By this we can protect our valuable content but also sell it through our website.

Does having a SlideShare channel affect your attendee registrations or your ability to get top-notch speakers?
SlideShare affected our visibility and our brand awareness a lot in the last year! It also helps our speakers and contributors to get better visibility and build their own personal brand identity. This year we are going to use the SlideShare PRO plan in order to get more targeted leads for our conference.

How do you use your channel to help market the events?
This is one major use of SlideShare for us. When you want to attract customers to your restaurant you let them try some of the appetizers for free or you give samples. This is what we are trying to do in SildeShare. We let our audience try out the conference experience by viewing some of our presentations. This was always a successful method of selling and SlideShare helps us do our sampling.

Our number one presentation is our Sustainable Brands 2010 Conference brochure with more than 4000 views and 150 downloads. I’m not surprised by this. It is a very informative and nicely designed brochure that we uploaded only 1 month before the event. I’m sure we would have many more views if we would have done this 4 months earlier. Then we have some presentations from well-known brand names (such as Pepsi and Nestle Waters), featuring stories such as the Sun Chips packaging debacle. Usually best practices and success stories of popular brand names get the most views.

What best practices would you recommend to other companies using their SlideShare channel with their events?
Every day we learn how to use SlideShare more effectively. What we do and we think works best is to upload as much valuable content as we can, tag them correctly, keep a consistent design, branding and messaging, and share them in the right channels with the best tools. If content is interesting it will have results!

View it on Slideshare’s Blog

This is the new Twitter! I’m really excited about the new design, logo, features and UI of the new Twitter. It seems that you cannot manage multiple accounts (maybe they will add this later) but the new design is really good. You can now view pictures, videos and other media in your streamline.

What I see is that Twitter cannibalizes its partners. Tweetmeme lost many users after Twitter launched their own ‘tweet’ button. Now, users don’t have to go to Youtube and Twitpic but view the media files on twitter.com.

Anyway, take a look on the amazing video that they created! I want some of these blue paper birds!

The new Twitter design will be rolling out slowly to everyone. Some will get it tonight!

You can learn more about the new Twitter, here.

There are few services that I love to use. One of these is Mailchimp. It’s a great Email Marketing platform that you easily use and have fun! It’s the company that when you send an Email campaign, it tells you: “Great Job Nikos, have a banana!” These are some of Freddie’s (the chimp) messages that I see every day on my screen.

Anyway, the reason of this post is a video that they posted today on their blog. They talk about the story of “Rudy”, an Email Marketing guy who spams people in order to satisfy his boss. For you that are working in the email marketing (or you want to know more about that) take a look:

Mailchimp has also a Blip.fm account where you can subscribe and listen to their music selections. Good job guys!

Flought, a really fun project, was the winner of this idea. You can find more about the teams that participated, here.

These are some of the pictures that I took during the event. The Startup Weekend took place at the Kicklabs Offices, a very cool place! (Look at the pictures)

It’s one of these times that you find a website that you like. You add it in your bookmarks, you watch all its videos, you buy the book and you even buy one of its notebooks. The 99 Percent is not about ideas.. It’s about making ideas happen. It started in 2009 as a conference and now is a website with videos, articles and tips on how to make your ideas happen.

The creation of 99%, which was launched with our inaugural conference in 2009, sprung from the belief that, as creative professionals, we often focus too much on idea generation and not enough on execution.

There are several inspiring videos on 99%. Seth Godin talks about quieting our fearful “lizard brains” to avoid sabotaging projects just before we finally finish them. Jack Dorsey talks about Twitter’s success and Threadless founders say: The Do-First Work Ethic. Take a look on the 99% latest videos.

Stop thinking and start making this brilliant idea come true!

For one more year, O’Reilly and UBM Techweb co-produced a very successful conference on May 3-6 in San Francisco,CA. One of my favorite presentations was the one from Drew Houston (Dropbox) and Adam Smith (Xobni) with the title: “From Zero to One Million Users” This is their presentation:

Many great keynote speakers and some of them were: Tim O’Reilly, Ben Huh (I Can Has Cheezburger), Ge Wang (Stanford University, Smule), June Cohen (TED Conferences), Kevin Lynch (Adobe Systems Incorporated), Rashmi Sinha (SlideShare, Inc.) and my favorite Steve Blank (Stanford/Berkeley/Columbia) You can view all the keynote speeches here

Photos from the event:

For the last four years, Twitter makes no money. Today (Tuesday 13, 2010), Twitter announces its Business Model! Promoted tweets are coming in your Twitter feeds even if you use a Twitter client (third party application). Twitter can analyze your tweets, keywords, searches, followers and lists and serve you targeted ads! 

Promoted tweets also have the potential to scale revenue quickly for the company, backed by $160 million in funding from a coterie of elite VC firms including Union Square Ventures, Institutional Ventures Partners, Benchmark Capital and Spark Capital.

The promoted tweet is one of three streams of revenue Twitter will have available, including a data fee from search engines indexing Twitter in real time, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, and the coming “professional accounts.” Professional accounts will include the ability to have multiple users on one account — much like some of the clients such as CoTweet do today — plus a dashboard that shows what’s happening with a brand on Twitter and integration with promoted tweets.

(AdAge.com)

This is what @biz Stone wrote on Twitter’s Official Blog just an hour ago:

Q: What are you launching? What are Promoted Tweets?
A: We are launching the first phase of our Promoted Tweets platform with a handful of innovative advertising partners that include Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America — with more to come. Promoted Tweets are ordinary Tweets that businesses and organizations want to highlight to a wider group of users.

Q. What will users see?
A. You will start to see Tweets promoted by our partner advertisers called out at the top of some Twitter.com search results pages. We strongly believe that Promoted Tweets should be useful to you. We’ll attempt to measure whether the Tweets resonate with users and stop showing Promoted Tweets that don’t resonate. Promoted Tweets will be clearly labeled as “promoted” when an advertiser is paying, but in every other respect they will first exist as regular Tweets and will be organically sent to the timelines of those who follow a brand. Promoted Tweets will also retain all the functionality of a regular Tweet including replying, Retweeting, and favoriting. Only one Promoted Tweet will be displayed on the search results page.

Q. You said, “first phase”; what else do you have planned?
A. Before we roll out more phases, we want to get a better understanding of the resonance of Promoted Tweets, user experience and advertiser value. Once this is done, we plan to allow Promoted Tweets to be shown by Twitter clients and other ecosystem partners and to expand beyond Twitter search, including displaying relevant Promoted Tweets in your timelines in a way that is useful to you.

Q: Is this what you said we would love and would be awesome?
A: While we are excited about the platform in general, there are several specific aspects of the launch that we are delighted to highlight. Since all Promoted Tweets are organic Tweets, there is not a single “ad” in our Promoted Tweets platform that isn’t already an organic part of Twitter. This is distinct from both traditional search advertising and more recent social advertising. Promoted Tweets will also be timely. Like any other Tweet, the connection between you and a Promoted Tweet in real-time provides a powerful means of delivering information relevant to you at the moment.

There is one big difference between a Promoted Tweet and a regular Tweet. Promoted Tweets must meet a higher bar—they must resonate with users. That means if users don’t interact with a Promoted Tweet to allow us to know that the Promoted Tweet is resonating with them, such as replying to it, favoriting it, or Retweeting it, the Promoted Tweet will disappear.

Q. Anything else to say?
A. This is a new thing and we expect to iterate to make it better. We’re really excited to get it out to you and look forward to getting your feedback.

This is a cool idea. It’s a brand new website that was launched 10 days ago. In Rentalic.com you can share your guitar, camping tent and iPod dock with others and get some money. Do you need some speakers for your party this weekend? Don’t buy them.. Just rent them for just few dollars.

About Rentalic.com:

Rentalic Inc. is a privately held company based in San Mateo, California. We provide an innovative web platform that enables person-to-person renting between friends, family, and communities. It is an online marketplace where owners can post items or services to rent out and borrowers can rent items or services they need. By offering a wide assortment of products and services that are conveniently located and cost effective, Rentalic.com provides a high value service to everyone!.

It’s very new and has few staff there but get there and support it! It;s a great idea that let you rent, share and be green!

Follow them on Twitter and Become a Fan on Facebook!

It was about time to see a Social Media campaign coming from the number one refreshment drink in the world. Coca-Cola Company, one of the top global advertisers (mostly in Print and Broadcast media), is going to use Social Media to promote the happiness message around the world. Three guys from Germany, Belgium and Mexico are going to travel around the world visiting 206 countries, where Coca-Cola is sold. They will have cameras, laptops and other gadgets in order to post in Social Media websites the happiness of people around the world. Expedition 206 will last one year and the team will start on January from Madrid, Spain.

Coca-Cola will track the campaign through Facebook fans and friends, Twitter followers and website pageviews. Clyde Tuggle, senior VP-global public affairs and communications says: “The challenge that we put to the communications team was to think about the social and digital media space as a new venue for driving good public relations for the company. The team, which has typically worked in the space of print media and broadcast media was suddenly challenged to go into this new media space and come up with an idea to expand our brand.” (AdAge)

Follow @x206 on twitter and become a fan of their Facebook page.

The idea of traveling around the world is not unique. Let’s see how this campaign will go..