Ravi’s Rants

Yet another incredible presentation from Seth Godin.

I can’t seem to get enough of what he talks about…

Uncanny!

I got “Presentation Zen” delivered in the mail last night from Amazon.

And someone tweeted this Garr Reynolds video of “Authors at Google”…

If you don’t know what a “Mashup” is, fret not.

You’re now going to witness one of the greatest “mashup” tools ever developed…

Full story: Introducing Ubiquity

If you’ve ever wondered about the power of influence that videos - even free ones - can have in selling commercial products, look no further.

Recently, I was on the receiving end of this power, as I shelled out about $3,200 to buy a Yamaha Motif Keyboard - thanks(!) to two powerful videos on YouTube.

I’ve chronicled it in my rather new blog, MotiFreak.com.

My “Video Unit” link wasn’t available yesterday when the announcement was first made.

Was able to see it today.

“Linked” my Adsense account with my YouTube account.

Got the confirmation from Google in a few minutes (they do warn that it could take up to 12 hours).

Created my “player”, got the code.

The ads load asynchronously, and they seem quite on target from the other sites I tested so far.

Way to go Google!

I found this amazing site yesterday through one of the feeds on LinkOverLoad.com. Awesome video coming right up…

Animoto basically turns your pictures into a fantastic MTV-style video, with some great soundtracks available on their site for free, or you can use your own audio - with your pictures almost flashing in rhythm to the beats of the soundtrack, with some great-looking special effects.

When I signed up, uploaded my pictures, picked a great-sounding track they had on their site (for free) and tried to create my video (remember, their software supposedly creates all of this in an automated fashion), I got this very friendly error message:

Hi there,

We’re sorry to inform you that we have experienced an error in the
production of your recent video, “Beautiful People”. Rest assured, we’re
on the case and we’ll have it rendered as soon as we can–but, depending
on the complexity of the issue, it could take a little time.

We’ll email you the moment it’s ready. Thanks for understanding!

…

That didn’t bother me, as they are still in beta, and still hammering out the rough edges. What did surprise me, is that they promptly sent me this email the next day:

Hi there.

We’ve finished your video, so it’s time for you to go take a look.
Head to:

http://animoto.com/play/…..

We hope you like it! Give us some feedback when you get a chance to
let us know what you liked and how we can improve. Remember, no two
Animoto videos are ever the same so keep making videos and see what unique
pieces you can generate.

…

I excitedly clicked over, and was simply blown away by the results (see video below).

Remarkable idea, great (almost perfect) execution, instantly viral! Pass this along…

Video from Animoto.com

We all knew this day would come, but I had been more curious about the type of video ads that would show up: would they be pre-roll (first show the ads, then the actual video)? Would they be post-roll (after the video) or some kind of pop-up (probably not, knowing their Adsense policy about pop-ups)?

Well, it appears that Google is going with overlay ads on YouTube. I am yet to see an ad on YouTube, but I will update this post when I find one.

Watch this hair-raising video that shows a herd of buffaloes trying to fight a pride of lions, trying to snatch a baby calf away from the jaws of 5 lions and 2 crocodiles!

Will the baby calf survive? Make sure you have nerves of steel before you watch it.

I hope this fight inspires you to fight valiantly - against all odds - against whatever adversity you may be facing in your life right now.

Ravi Jayagopal
Author, “No Business Like E-Business”

• Creating an e-business…
• Learning a new skill…
• Being the best at what you do…
• Building something worth building…
• Creating something worth creating…
• Saying something worth saying…
• Doing something worth doing…

All of these take plenty of time - and effort.

It is very easy to just look at the end-result of other people’s successes, ogle at their fortunes, and forget (or conveniently ignore) the painstaking path they had to take in order to get there.

Life is very much like the video you are about to see.

It takes inspiration, vision, persistence, creativity, and most importantly, quite a bit of perspiration too…

Now go create your Purple Cow, Raving Fans, Fanatical Support, Positively Outrageous Service, Mona Lisa - or whatever else you want to call it.

Doesn’t matter what the name is. The idea is to do something remarkable.

Ravi Jayagopal
Author, “No Business Like E-Business“

• Backdrop and Shower curtain from Wal-Mart: $18
• Tripod from Sears: $30
• Expensive, Wireless Headphone (with “compander circuitry”) that sounds like crap: $100
• Cheap-looking, Wired Headphone that just works: $20
• Pink-shade Table Lamp: $10
• 100W bulb (that you need to keep switching off between takes because the lamp-shade says it can handle only 40W): $2
• CyberLink PowerDirector: $90
• Getting great feedback from (rather kind) friends and family who enjoyed your spirited attempt: Priceless!

Ok, I finally gave in to my alter ego (”Wilson”) and started a channel on YouTube.

Had a lot of fun creating the videos. Here’s what I ended up learning (and buying), in order to make a half-decent video:

• Ventriloquism is 60% “funny script”, 30% “sense of humor and timing” and only 10% “mouth-not-moving skills”
• You need to have a decent back-drop (read, your computer desk in the background really sucks). So, got some fabric from Walmart for $6, an extra long shower curtain for $12, and walla - bearable background for my videos! I just placed the shower curtain on the front edge of my book shelf - so didn’t even have to bring out the screwdriver (or my drill) - and no nails were hurt during the hanging of my backdrop.
• Need a tripod - so got a 66″ tripod (~ $30) from Sears - ordered online and picked up the same evening in-store. The 3rd-party merchant I found on Amazon that was selling the 70″ tripod I really wanted, said it would take 3 weeks to ship. I wanted it like, er, “yesterday”. So, 6 inches short, sure, but got it in 3 hours flat.
• You need more-than-good-enough sound. My spanking new $100 wireless headphone bought-just-for-this worked like crap. Went back to my old $20 wired, brandless headphones that I bought from Staples 4 years ago, and the sound is like 10 times better (see difference in sound between video #1 and #2 below). So all you really need is a half-decent mike - don’t splurge on the microphones, unless you have the $500+ ones.
• Need good video editing software - have had PowerDirector for a few years now - have edited a few home videos and stuff. Paid for an updated version - it kicks butt and has pretty much everything a non-power-user would need. Very happy with PowerDirector (~ $90) so far, but I have a feeling I will be outgrowing it sooner than later (especially, when I think of doing, say chroma keying (the green-screen stuff).
• Of course, you need a camcorder (I have an old, big-ass Sony), and the cable to connect it to your computer (faster if you have a FireWire port).
• The regular lighting in your room is no good. So I borrowed my 8-yr old daughter’s pink-shaded table lamp (without her permission, and got yelled at later) and set it up on a chair next to me during the shoot.
• If you have PowerDirector (PD) installed, it automatically prompts to be launched when you plug your camcorder in. Just put the camcorder in “Play” (VTR) mode, and hit the red “Record” button in PD, and it starts recording right away. Once you finish recording, hit “Stop”, save the file, edit it (very intuitive interface) to add sound effects, transitions, trimming out bad takes, etc
• PD v5 has a cool new “Create File for YouTube” feature - where it will create a slightly low-res Windows media file (.wmv) that has a smaller file size compared to MPEG’s (given YouTube’s 100MB limit), and will even upload it directly to YouTube (provided you’ve logged in previously, of course)
• Create a new YouTube account with the same name as your channel (because you can’t change the login later).
• Create and upload the video directly from PD.
• Wait for like at least 2-3 hours before you can see it live (used to be live within just 10 minutes as recently as 6 months ago!)
• Any changes you make to your channel (description, change to template, colors, etc) will take anywhere from 10 minutes to a few hours to take effect.
• Wait for it to go live, spam your friends and family, and publish the video on your site or blog

Before launching on this venture, I had performed ventriloquism only once - I had learned it a few hours before my daughter’s b’day party a couple of years ago. So, “amateur alert” ahead

Episode 2: Terrorists and 72 Virgins ($20 headphones)

Episode 1: Wicked Wilson - Woman On A Plane ($100 headphones)

The channel home page is: YouTube.com/WilsonTheWiseOne

To be notified of videos as they are added, please subscribe to my channel at the above link.

Ravi Jayagopal / YouTube.com/WilsonTheWiseOne

From the Wikipedia:

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution protocol. The protocol was originally designed and created by programmer Bram Cohen, and is now maintained by BitTorrent, Inc.

BitTorrent is a method of distributing large amounts of data widely without the original distributor incurring the whole of the corresponding costs of hardware, hosting and bandwidth resources. Instead of the distributor alone servicing each recipient, under BitTorrent the recipients each also supply data to newer recipients, thus significantly reducing the cost and burden on any given individual source as well as providing redundancy against system problems, and reducing dependence upon the original distributor.

From AP: BitTorrent to Launch Movie, TV Downloads

Bram Cohen on the BitTorrent Entertainment Network

BitTorrent main site

As a follow-up to my original lusty iPhone rant, I decided to scour the web for a closer look at the iPhone.

The hype is dying. Real people have used it, some have heard about real people using it, but everyone definitely has something to say about it. So go on and see if you can cut through the hype yourself.

Here come the critics:
Between Scoble and Kidrosky, they’ve got a few valid points:

From Paul Kidrosky:

1) The touchpad. How do you operate a touchphone in your pocket, or under a table by feel at a meeting? You scoff, but you’d be amazed how often that is how business emailing happens. …
2) The closed system. Is Apple serious that it won’t let third-party developers build software for the thing? If so, and put simply, the device will fail. A closed-box consumer electronics mentality will work in music players, but the future of mobile devices is as a platform, and that requires…
3) The Cingular relationship. While every wireless carrier has its haters, Cingular has more than most (both for its service and for its Edge network). Tying up exclusively to Cingular forces some of the loudest among the digerati to wait for an unlocked iPhone before they can begin touting …
….

From Robert Scoble

6) Battery is only up to five hours and is not replaceable (if you play video). …. Watch a video and your battery is dead. Now your cell phone is dead too. So, you won’t want to watch a video on a plane flight with this thing like you would with your iPod.
7) It’s Cingular only and GSM. That automatically keeps more than half of Americans from considering this and for the rest of the world? They are laughing about the iPhone now.
8) The camera sucks. It’s a 2megapixel device without flash, without zoom. Nokia’s newest cameras…
9) No GPS. …

From Seth Godin: Inventing a new cell phone

Here’s a few things a reinvented cellphone might be able to do:

* Let me leave voice mail for groups of people all at once.
* Let me initiate conference calls with groups of people with just one directory entry.
* Let me call friends based on where they are at a given moment.

iPhone trashed by Robert Scoble and others:

Comedy: iPhone being used as a universal device - for doing, er, everything!

Two nerds:

iPhone quick demo:

Steve Jobs presenting a closer look at iPhone:

More links:

Pogue’s Posts: The Ultimate iPhone Frequently Asked Questions

From Engadget

The Uber Geeks: iPhone misconceptions corrected

- Ravi Jayagopal

What would happen if Microsoft were to design the iPod packaging?

Really witty, self-deprecating video, apparently made by ….. Microsoft employees!

- Ravi Jayagopal

The machine is us…

Digital Text is no longer just linking information…

HyperText is no longer just linking information…

The Web is no longer just linking information…

The Web is linking people….

And you also thought that the crazy hand-waving, screen-manipulation stuff Tom Cruise did in Minority Report was just computer-generated special effects.

Just wait till you check out (below) Jeff Han outdoing Tom Cruise with the multi-touch displays.

The cool thing about Apple is not that they put one of these displays in the iPhone - it is that Apple simply had to be the first to bring it to the consumer. In spite of the big players like Nokia and Motorola and Sony, why is it that only Apple can blow people away like this? Is it great technology? Or simply great marketing?

Yep. It’s final. Apple = Uber Cool. Even if I don’t own a single Apple product!

Be it in your career or in your business, do you similarly strive to boldly go where no man has gone before?

Continue reading…

FTP stands for “File Transfer Protocol”.

It is what you use to “transfer” (or upload) files from your computer to your web site - and vice-versa.

To make it easy for you to learn how to use FTP software, I have created a video tutorial, available at this link. It is about 2+ MB in size.
So, too bad if you are on dial-up (sidebar: if you are still on dial up, then I can’t help you - in fact, no one can!)

The video will redirect to my site WebmasterInABox.net at the end. I’ve also used a cool, royalty free sound-clip from the web. Let me know what you think of the video, so that I can make more (and better) videos.

Click here to launch the video.

- Ravi Jayagopal

You’ve probably heard of Guy Kawasaki.

I first heard about him in the context of something to do with Apple (the company). The next thing I knew, I was furiously reading his blog and soaking up every interview he gave.

In one of his interviews, he talks about “Guy’s Golden Touch“, which in essence is: "What Guy touches doesn't necessarily turn to Gold, but what is Gold, Guy touches".

Just today, I found this piece of treasure. A smashing key note address, where he talks about “The Art of the Start“. While he mocks MBA’s and Microsoft much to everyone’s amusement, he never digresses from the practicality of business and marketing.

I always knew he was witty and hard-hitting, but not like this!

Enjoy…

He’s the man who is believed to have invented the word “Viral Marketing idea virus”, among many other powerful marketing concepts like “sneezers”, “worldview purple cow” and “Permission Marketing”.

The author of six bestsellers, including Permission Marketing, an Amazon Top 100 bestseller for a year and a Fortune Best Business Book. His newest book, All Marketers Are Liars, has already made the Amazon Top 100 and has inspired its own blog.

Seth’s own Yoyodyne, an interactive direct marketing company, was acquired by Yahoo! in 1998. He holds an MBA from Stanford, but his street-smart-marketing is hard-hitting.

In this video, he gives a presentation at Google! What an unbelievable honor! Don’t miss this one - it is about 48 minutes long, but his extraordinary insights and his unusual angle will knock your socks off.