Something sexy, a find from the wine rack, a tech toy, a good book or a classic movie are perfect last minute gifts.
Something sexy and boldly daring – just get the sizes right and share more than a laugh or two. This clip is priceless.
The subscription to Wine Spectator is fine, but cuddling up with a new favorite wine is better yet. Here are two great choices.
She can be one of the first to own a kindle -with a book of course… consider Midnight in Madrid for its exotic locations and art theft storyline.
A classic movie is thoughtful, and you will have to pick something that she will like. In Primal Fear, she gets to look at the handsome Richard Gere and you’ll get to cheer for Ed Norton.
The modern day love letter does not require you to hire a writer and a producer. If you customize the title for her, add her favorite song, dress up her picture, and mix in one funny video you are an original.
About Mashup Arts
Mashup Arts is the “Mashup Card Company.” Our website was built for social networkers who want to share video ecards and photo ecards by mixing their personal content with free Internet content. We encourage individual and community creativity. The application offers options to customize ecards so they better reflect your style or brand. You can also create group ecards for your office, team or school. We help people to play with photos, videos, text and music to create unique and memorable cards. The flexibility and search options are suited for our diverse cultures. Check out what our community members have made for your Birthday Cards, Weddings, Christmas and the Holiday Season, Valentines, Chinese New Year, Diwali, or your favorite charity event.
Christmas and Santa are trending topics on twitter – it’s the fastest moving stream on the net, and the crowds are on top of everything. Downtown at Facebook, shopping plans and sick jokes are trending at our semi-private parties. It’s a mix of Hollywood and the neighborhood.
How we exchange insults and greetings varies by generation, and most of us will use a couple of methods this year. Many people will opt for Facebook messages and personal ecards this season, in part because it is green, but mainly for the convenience. With over 100 million electronic greetings to be sent in December, what are the new choices this year?
At the top three sites, 123Greetings, American Greetings and Jibjab there are professional studio cards, with more animation that ever before, and a trend to put your pictures into the card. These personal touches mean a lot for these “once a year” greetings.
2009 is a year when the sharing of personal videos and pictures really took off. Every day, hundreds of thousands of videos are uploaded to YouTube and over 80 million pictures to facebook. With all this publishing and sharing, you can expect to see more amateur cards this year, as people decide to tell their own stories and remix funny content.
“This year you will see many more combinations of personal videos and pictures mixed with free Internet content, said Shaun MacDonald, CEO of Mashup Arts. “The trend is to embellish your own pictures and add music, and then share seasonal Webcam and YouTube clips – especially funny videos.”
In the new decade, everyone will be carrying around a powerful camera and camcorder embedded in their smart phone, and sharing much more personal content in their greetings and tweetings. It will not replace professional studios, as there will be even more professional content to go around, especially videos. The studios and our community content will live side by side as they do in the twitter, Facebook and YouTube neighborhood’s today.
Bringing Social Networking to the Greeting Card Market
Mashup Arts, announced the launch of its Holiday and Christmas ecard service designed for video and photo lovers of all ages. The new online service helps people create their own custom cards with multimedia tools. The opposite of mass market cards, these greetings can be highly personalized by embracing the diversity of the visual Internet.
The idea is to start with photos and designs from the community, and then mix in free Internet content from sites like YouTube and Flickr. People can also add their own pictures, music or videos so their greetings really feel “home-made.”
“With so much creativity being shared on the Internet, we feel there is huge market for a new class of greetings where talented people share their ideas, and anyone can mix in their favorite content,” said Shaun MacDonald, CEO of Mashup Arts. “The key is to help people get started, and for that, we have built a model with templates, simple design tools, community sharing and artist attribution. If we can catch the wave for sharing and remixing content with shared workspaces, we will create a new segment in this market.”
The social community stands in contrast to the classic studio model, where you shop for cards and sign them. This new model allows people to be creative with simple on-demand search and design tools, so they can mash up titles, photos, videos and music to match their personal style.
Users can import their photos directly from Facebook. Cards that are made public can be browsed for ideas, and reused in whole or in part as people create something new from something old. The ability to mix in multiple videos and photo slide shows is unique in the market, and this is of particular value for people interested in creating team, school, group or family cards.
Free to use, the ecard service will make money through premium value added modules for printing, DVD’s and storage, as well as enterprise services for companies to bolster their brand promotions.
The technology platform is a thin web based application with a flash interface for rendering videos, images, music and text. The workspace environment was developed in PHP and AJAX, with numerous technology API mashups like YouTube for videos, Flickr with a Creative Commons API for photos, CCMixter with a Creative Commons API for music, and Picnik for photo editing. The greetings are assembled on the fly from their discrete elements. This is to enable remixing so images and videos can be shared within the community, and it reduces storage by avoiding content duplication.
About Mashup Arts
Mashup Arts is the “Mashup Card Company.” Our website was built for social networkers who want to share video ecards and photo ecards by mixing their personal content with free Internet content. We encourage individual and community creativity. The application offers options to customize ecards so they better reflect your style or brand. You can also create group ecards for your office, team or school. We help people to play with photos, videos, text and music to create unique and memorable cards. The flexibility and search options are suited for our diverse cultures. Check out what our community members have made for your Birthday Cards, Weddings, Christmas and the Holiday Season, Valentines, Chinese New Year, Diwali, or your favorite charity event.
To view the video’s associated with this press release, please visit the links below:
The other day I discovered that you can send video ecards privately to friends with Mashup Arts!
Now I can share both invites and costume ideas, inspired by the “hot witch hat” from a Flickr search. Check out this Mashup Card with sexy pictures and a YouTube video:
Since then, my friends have been sharing our favorite costume and makeup ideas for halloween by adding our photos and video’s to the same ecard. Yes, some of our costume ideas are a little risque, but that’s not a problem if I set my card to private and share it only with my friends.
The collaborative module enables a web based “shared-workspace” … along the lines of Google’s Wave application. With Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and CCMixter music modules, the social cards can take on a life of their own.
You can use and re-use any of the Mashup Arts’ community cards, or simply create new cards with your own content. It is the perfect web app to mark a wild wanton occasion like Halloween.
The Thanksgiving harvest spirit is universal, and we are kicking off the season with the Moon Festival or Mid-Autumn Festival this weekend. It is celebrated by Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese on October 3rd which is a date that parallels the autumn and spring equinoxes, when the moon is stuffed full and beaming round. Tom Waits would say it “poked a hole in the night sky.”
The Canadian Thanksgiving is around the corner, October 12th while the American Thanksgiving is November 26th. Both are marked by Football rivalries and family turkey dinners. I am looking forward to the traditional Detroit and Green Bay match up.
The celebrations have long marked the end of the harvest season. In some countries like Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines, it is also referred to as the Lantern Festival, and the people decorate and display a broad range of lanterns, including my favorite, sky lanterns.
While it is a time for families to come together, it is also a time to reach out to family and friends. There maybe someone you had been planning to call for some time. Here is a good excuse to wish them well, and perhaps look up at the same moon from miles and miles away. If you wish to send along something special, the free video and social ecards at MashupArts.com are a clever way to craft a family card or a social card for all your Facebook friends and family. You can send them individually, or you can invite others to collaborate and add in their own pictures and video to the mix, creating a Google Wave like expression.
