Cloudbrain

If you are a graphic designer living near or around Charlottesville, Richmond, Harrisonburg etc., we are looking for you.  Cloudbrain has a number of upcoming projects and we are looking for one (or more) graphic designers that can help with everything from the creative, conceptual design phase through final layout.  No coding necessary - just hip taste and mad Photoshop skills.  If you are interested, send a link to previous work / portfolio to jobs@cloudbrain.com.  Additional questions are also welcome.

The video below wasn’t created by professional. Its exactly what it looks like: a kid doing cool things on a skateboard and getting filmed by his friends. Watch it. Its amazing.

This kid was just offered his own shown on MTV, doing exactly what he was doing before. No he didn’t spend tons of money trying to meet the right people. No, his dad doesn’t own MTV. They just found him. On YouTube. Doing this.

Coming on the heels of the Anderson PR War, Bokardo has a great article on the difference and implications of private vs. public identities.  What if everyone had to attach their real name to every comment and review they left around the Internet?

That $15 billion dollar valuation doesn’t seem quite so certain anymore.  Google is starting its own open social networking platform with participation from at least MySpace, Six Apart, Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle.  Overnight Facebook became the Internet prom queen wondering if she actually had any real friends after all (while the geeky Google has the last laugh).  Read More.

In other news, if Facebook deletes you, do you really exist at all?

One of the big stories of the last two days:  Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine, got fed up with the amount of unwanted, irrelevant and targeted PR (spam) press-releases he was getting he compiled a list of 300 or so PR people whose addresses he had blocked.  He then published the list of blocked emails on his blog.

Insanity quickly followed.  Three comments were quickly posted on his post fighting over the rightness or wrongness of 1) Sending spam 2) Emails sent to purchased mailing lists aren’t spam or 3) Is it ok to “out” all those people and publish their emails.  A lot of people are upset / angry / embarassed / happy / scared / crazy.  Its all very funny.  Check out this catfight.  Chris’ response to the aftermath is here.

Lesson learned: never ever send out a mass email unless you are absolutely positive that every single recipient will be thrilled to receive and read it.  No exceptions.

A new Facebook application / business idea: SaveAnAlien.com.  The story-line is that a comet is soon going to hit a far off planet (there’s a countdown on the site) killing all 10 million aliens, all of them unique and cute (randomly generated by computer algorithm).  You can save one, unique alien by “adopting” it and moving it to safety in Antarctica (i.e. on your Facebook page).  Your unique and cute alien can then be digitally added to your photos, cared for and printed on t-shirts (that cost $$) (as well as do other cute things that cost $).

I think this is a great use of the viral nature of Facebook and they have a revenue plan built-in that’s not advertising.   Way to go.

Check it out.

Bernard Lunn at Read/WriteWeb has ten great tips for starting a company without taking outside funding.  Of course, the most important tip is have a product that makes money.  “Bootstrapping” or “self-funding” does not mean putting up your own money and risking your family and future.  The strategy is simple:  release a product people want to pay for and grow from there.

I’m not sure I agree with “don’t bootstrap and then take VC funding”.  There are a lot of situations where this could work: expanding into a new market, for example.

I’m a huge believer in charging for something that is worth while.  I fully believe Facebook could have charged all their users and  then taken over the world (a $0.99 text message phone-bill charge to each user to enable viewing of their friend’s pictures would have met little resistance and would have generated an ungodly amount of money).

A recent report by Portio Research is predicting that 75% of the people in the world will carry a mobile phone by the year 2011. We are already seeing reports of how mobile phones are changing societies, cultures and markets in developing areas (see the Indian fishing markets story). In the West, we’ve been living with the changes for a few years and enjoying the new ones. What happens when everyone can reach everyone else instantly? And what happens when the phones become more powerful?

This video is a perfect example of why the movie companies are in big trouble. I am not much of a video game fan (though I did recently buy a 360 and Halo 3 to check out what the hype was), but this video is amazing. The Halo 3 game comes with extremely easy to use movie-making tools that allow players to replay action from a game from any camera angle and to zoom, pan, fly and change angles (just like a real director). The video can then be easily shared and uploaded to the internet.

This particular video is a amazing-videos, fox-news, caught-on-tape clip of players last moments. The fact that the in-game physics create such a realist world is almost as impressive at how easy it was for this player to share his experience with the world.

Why would anyone sit and watch a movie when they could play in the Matrix like this (and share the experience with friends). Cool.

Mixlister is a playlist sharing community. Use Mixlister to create and share a playlist with friends or to invite the public to contribute songs to a playlist you are working on. You can customize playlist page layouts, send playlists as an e-card and embed playlists in your website, blog or MySpace page. Using the Mixlister widgets and tools, you can easily connect the songs and playlists you find online to your personal music collection - making it easy to explore and discover music you never knew you had.