9 posts tagged “partners”
Our friends at Moo have some cool new products, contests and deals for you to check out.
StickerBooks: Buy 2, Get 1 Free
Buy two StickerBooks, and get a third FREE!
It's never too early to start your holiday shopping, especially when free stuff is involved. These stickers are the perfect little seals to put on your holiday cards or packages. You could make stickers from photos of your family, then tear off a sheet and mail it to your loved ones. Or, create personalized stickers for stocking stuffers or party favors. Read more about StickerBooks.
To take advantage of the offer, simply make three StickerBooks over in the Vox Moo store, and on the payment page enter this code: voxstickerpromo This offer ends at midnight (London UK time) on Sunday, November 4th.
Moo Postcards
Just a few weeks ago, Moo added Postcards to their array of customizable offerings.
Available in packs of 20, you can choose a different image for the front of every card: either upload or import your own images, or choose images from one of their many designers. The back of the cards can be customized with a choice of colors, fonts and layouts.
Super-Duper Holiday Card Competition
When you upload your own holiday card design, you'll be entered for a chance to win $2,000 and you'll also contribute to an awesome community card store which opens on November 1st.
MOO will donate $1 to Médecins Sans Frontières for every pack of Holiday Cards sold. Read all the details about the Super-Duper Holiday Card Competition.
You can make some cool Moo stuff using photos you've already uploaded to your Vox -- just head to the Vox Moo store to get started. Did you enter the Holiday Card Competition? If so, leave a link to your entry in the comments.
- Krissy
We've added some new partners to help you do cool stuff with your Vox:
- Smilebox offers fun ways to share your photos & videos. Create animated scrapbooks,
photobooks, slideshows, and postcards by choosing among their designs and music
and adding your own captions. Once you are done, email your creation or post it
to your Vox. Check out the Smilebox demo.
- QOOP turns your Vox photos into prints, posters, photobooks, calendars, postcards, mugs and more. You can even use their Blogprinting solution to turn your Vox into a book.
About that free* stuff I mentioned: QOOP's offering
every Voxer ten free
4"x6" prints of your favorite photos. Just head to the Vox landing page on QOOP and
click the top left box that says "Prints". (I tried out the process yesterday and found out that QOOP works best with photos of 150 dpi and above, but you should refer to their FAQs about Photo Prints and Images and Resolution for their official guidelines.)
When you're finished with your order,
enter in the coupon code "Vox10free" to get your free 4"x6" prints. *OK, when you add the cost of shipping they're not totally free, but it's just $2 to have them shipped via USPS.
All this talk of photos makes me sing this song by The Kinks.
- Krissy
We've got some more great news in Vox's ongoing partnership with Showtime.
This American Life: Special Vox-Only Promotion with Ira Glass!
It's been a few months since we announced This American Life's home on Vox, but this week we have an exciting new update.
Each week, the This American Life group posts a theme or question that coincides with the next radio (or TV) episode and asks group members to tell stories around that theme. The idea is to use audio, video, words, drawings, images, anything you want, to share your story and comment on the stories told by other Voxers.
The This American Life group just announced Ira's new mission:
That's right, Ira's talking just to us. Read this week's assignment and then listen to Ira's message to Voxers. For some of Ira's great pointers on storytelling, check out this video where he lays out the building blocks of how to tell a story."He's going to be recording special promos for you, the Vox group, each week, in which he'll describe the upcoming radio episode and give you your assignment. We're hoping you'll accept the challenge to create your own work, and publish it to this group."
New Showtime Series: Meadowlands Contest
Everyone in the new Showtime series Meadowlands has something to hide. Do you?
Meadowlands focuses on a family trying to escape its past by moving to a new neighborhood to start a new life. It appears to be a suburban paradise, but the Brogan family soon realizes that it's not so easy to escape the past. You can watch the first episode at Sho.com right now. Meadowlands premieres this Sunday, June 17th at 10pm ET/PT.
Speaking of secrets, if you're willing to confess one of your secrets you could get the chance to win $5,000. Just record yourself telling a secret and then upload the video to your Vox. Be sure to post it to the Meadowlands group as well. The final step is to hop over to register for the Meadowlands Secret Sweepstakes.
You can grab the Meadowlands theme for your Vox, and join the group to keep track of everyone's video secrets!
-- Krissy
We're sending out a big congratulations to our friends over at the Columbia and RCA Demos blogs. Since they announced just three weeks ago that they're only accepting new music via Vox, over 1000 artist blogs have been created!
Indieboy posted about it on the RCA and Columbia blogs, saying:
More important than the quantity is the quality of music that is now within our community, and you are all recognising that, commenting and communicating with each other and helping showcase each other's talent.
I have already started presenting unsigned acts from the community to the labels with positive responses, people within the labels are also listening to your music and circulating it.
See what Sony BMG UK Chairman Ged Doherty has to say about the partnership with Vox:
But perhaps the real congratulations should go out to all the musicians who have taken advantage of this opportunity. Having this kind of access to and response from A&R staff at a record label is invaluable for artists. If you're an artist yourself or have any aspiring musicians in your friends and family, be sure to tell them to get a Vox blog and add the Columbia and RCA Demos blogs to their neighborhoods!
If you'd like to check out some new music and show your support, browse the Columbia blog's neighborhood and RCA blog's neighborhood to check out all the artists.
-- Krissy
Last month we introduced you to a new Showtime series called The Tudors. Today we’re excited to announce that Vox’s partnership with Showtime continues with a program that many of you already know and love: This American Life!
It’s likely that you know the radio show - it’s been around since 1995 and airs on over 500 public radio stations around the country - or maybe you’ve tuned into their weekly podcast. Hosted by Ira Glass, TAL is primarily a journalistic non-fiction program, although it has also featured essays, memoirs, field recordings, short fiction, and found footage. The mood of the show ranges from gloomy to ironic, from thought-provoking to hilarious, and each half-hour episode explores a single theme or topic through the unique juxtaposition of first-person storytelling and whimsical narrative. (Hm, sounds a little like Vox huh?)
The first episode of the television series premiered on March 22nd, and future episodes air on Thursdays at 10:30 PM ET/PT. Head over to the Showtime website to watch the first episode for free.
The fine folks from TAL have set up a blog for This American Life, as well as a This American Life group as a place for you to talk about the stories and themes in each week's episode. And it's a way for you to share your own funny, surprising, dramatic, true stories with the world. Each week they will put up a theme or question that's central to the next episode of the TV show, and will ask you to share stories that explore that idea. The themes relate to the TV version of This American Life, so they'd love to see you tell your tales in video clips, but feel free to use audio, images or the written word as well.
The current theme is “my way”: stories about people
who stubbornly defy conventional wisdom, with mixed results. Read this post,
watch the clips, get inspired, and then
share your stories in the TAL group.
-- Krissy
As Vox has grown and added new features, the team faced the challenge of keeping it easy to use while making it more powerful. After much testing and gathering of your feedback, we just rolled out the new and improved site navigation today.
Many of you opted in to become beta testers (any Voxer can participate, just follow the directions here) and have been testing the new site navigation since late February. Based on your feedback, we tweaked the site navigation in the following ways:
-
Increased font size for the top links (Messages, Compose, Invite links)
- Made the Compose link more prominent by moving it above Home
- Added links to Edit Profile and Neighbors List
- Added more spacing between the menu items
- Changed the drop down menus to only expand when you mouse over the arrow
- We spruced up the design by removing the white lines and styling it some more (In response to the constructive feedback of “It’s kind of ugly”)
- We've added more colors to choose via our color picker! We also included an "old school" variation for those who want just a white bar.
The team spent a lot of time on this redesign to achieve better organization and, as one user put it, to “place everything within easy grasp.” Now, as we build out more features and evolve the product, this new navigation gives us more room to grow.
We hope you like it, even though it might take a little getting used to. The best way to share your feedback on new features is to participate in our beta testing. If you have questions or feedback about the new site navigation, tell us by clicking on the Feedback link.
More New Themes!
We have four new themes in this release.
This American Life by Showtime, Houston Cityscape by Tiffany, Cartographer by Dana Saylor & Eggs and Bacon by Julie Kurylo.
Additionally, based on the results of our informal poll, we've started working on more minimalist/simple themes for Vox. And all you expectant parents will be glad to know that an upcoming Vox release will feature some themes just for you!
And yes, that means our partnership with Showtime now includes the new series This American Life! Read all about it here.
-- Mena
SonyBMG Music Entertainment UK has just announced that starting April 2nd 2007 it will no longer accept demos from new artists on physical formats such as CDs for consideration by the company’s Columbia Records or RCA Records labels.
In fact, the only way RCA and Columbia Records UK will accept new music or demo submissions is via Vox! How cool is that?
We think it’s very cool to see entertainment companies embracing the multimedia aspect of blogs, and the way that Columbia and RCA UK are embracing Vox is exceptional. They explained it like this:
“We don't want demo CD's anymore, that's what part of this is about. It takes ages for you to do, they get lost and it's a waste of plastic. Register your blog and be part of our on-line community. You will be directly connected to us and everyone else who's in the community. That's the other reason for this, the artist community being closer to the labels they want to be involved with.”
Here's how it works: Anyone who signs up for Vox through this Columbia landing page will automatically be added to the Columbia Demos blog’s neighborhood. New Voxers will be added to the RCA Demos blog's neighborhood when signing up via the RCA landing page. If you’re already on Vox, you can add either or both blogs to your neighborhood.
The A&R staffers will peruse RCA's and Columbia's neighborhoods to check out new stuff, keeping an eye out for songs and videos that get a lot of comments and [this is good]s. You don’t have to be from the UK to be signed, but they are going to focus primarily on finding UK-based acts.
If you’re in a band, sign up for a Vox blog and get heard. If you have friends in a band, now’s the time to tell them about Vox. If you’re interested in the music industry or music in general, surf around the neighborhoods of Columbia and RCA to hear what’s brewing.
Check out the RCA Demos blog and the Columbia Demos blog for lots more information!
- Krissy
One of the things we like about the new generation of web applications is not only how they allow people to interact, share information, and build relationships -- let's call this the "social media" aspect -- but also how they are built to work together with other web apps.
We've talked about it before -- "Vox plays well with the services you already use" -- which you can see with Vox's integration with YouTube, Amazon, Flickr, and more. We're glad to see that more and more services are playing well with Vox too, including a service called Clipmarks which lets you save bits and pieces of web pages that you visit and ultimately republish those "clips" on your blog.
Clipmarks just launched their Clip-to-Blog feature with support for Vox built right
in. It's this kind of app-to-app relationship that makes things better
for everyone. Bloggers who may
not have the time to post original material as often as they'd like now
have the option to share their filtered, edited "clips" with friends,
family, or the world.
Talk around the water cooler today is bound to include yesterday's Super Bowl. Whether it's the game itself, the musical performances or the much-hyped commercials, there's something for everyone to ring in on.
Vox's video partners, YouTube and iFilm, each have their own coverage of the commercials from yesterday.
iFilm does an annual Commercial Bowl where they capture, organize and feature the best-of-the-best Super Bowl commercials. You can check out Super Bowl ads from 2002-2007 and a collection of this year's ads.
YouTube is letting you vote to rank your favorite commercials from the big game. The winner will be featured on their home page on Tuesday.
Vox's integration with iFilm and YouTube lets you easily add videos to your blog. Just click on the "Videos" button either in the Compose or Organize screens, then click on the IFILM or YouTube tab. With YouTube, you can search on your favorite commercial's URL or on some of the video's tags.
What were your favorite Super Bowl commercials?
