Archive for the ‘Mashup Arts’ category

Three Love Songs from Storytellers of our Time

February 12th, 2010

The Valentines that you will remember years from now will have nothing to do with the gifts you bought or received. You will remember who you were with, and the time you shared together.

Most couples will tell you that their best times came when they had little or nothing. They may remember a love letter they wrote, but probably cannot recall the flowers, jewelry and any other physical gifts.  The love letter maybe a lost art in a world of texting, but truth be told, most of us look to our musical hero’s for inspiration – for it is the one art that can really transport us back in time. Today’s hero’s are more likely to be played on YouTube than heard on the radio – so we put together a Valentines Mashup Card with a few Love songs that we feel have well stood the test of time.

First up, Bruce Springsteen’s powerful  “If I Should Fall Behind” is not so much a classic declaration of love, as it is a song  that speaks to our sense of caring for our true-love, in spite of our own human frailties.

“We said we’d walk together, baby come what may,

and in the twilight, should we lose our way,

If as we’re walking, a hand should slip free,

I’ll wait for you, If I should fall behind, wait for me.”

http://www.mashuparts.com/ecard/87285285/Three-Love-Songs-for-You

Second, and humor me here, but the poet “Leonard Cohen” was on to something with his “Chelsea Hotel” and this 1988 live reference to Janis Joplin. In this clip he uses the variation “younger men.”

“She said she preferred handsome men, but for me she would make an exception.”

Finally, a little John Hiatt with “Have a Little Faith in Me” from his breakthrough album “Bring The Family.”

“When the road gets dark, And you can no longer see, Just let my love throw a spark, And have a little faith in me.”

We wish you all a Happy Valentines, and wish you luck in finding your very own someone to love.

The Jonas Brothers leads the 10 Most Popular video clips added to Mashup Video Ecards this Christmas

December 23rd, 2009

The Jonas Brothers rendition of Feliz Navidad with thousands of fans singing along in Mexico has been a popular YouTube addition to Christmas Mashup Cards. Comedy clips are the most popular and fastest growing YouTube search category, and we have been enjoying the community picks.

The staff favorites are “Mr Bean presents a ring to his GF”, and the “Cher Christmas Fireplace”, which features the wonderful storytelling of William Conrad. The “Mom is Santa” clip is hilarious with its sexual innuendo. Here are the top 10:

1. Feliz Navidad – Jonas Brothers
2. Mr Bean presents a ring to his GF
3. Jeff Dunham – Achmed Jingle Bombs
4. Cher Christmas Fireplace
5. Family Guy – Asian Christmas
6. Mom is Santa
7. MattRach Christmas Songs
8. Larry the Cable Guy Christmas Carols
9. Victoria Secret Holiday Commercial
10.Christmas Light Show – Amazing Grace

The most popular song this year has been We Wish You a Merry Christmas, with multiple versions of the song. The most popular cover, shown here, is a red seasonal ornamental photo from Flickr Artist Gesika22 which has been shared and reused in different cards.

The most popular collaborations have been family cards, often using the newspaper template to tell a story and share recent photos and slide shows. Fans have been using the new picnik module to add seasonal bling to their photos, like red hats and stockings, or frames of holly. Merry Christmas Everybody, and Seasons Greetings to all.

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.

Mashup Arts Launches a New Video And Photo Greetings Service Just in Time for the Holidays

December 1st, 2009

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.”

embedded by Embedded Video

“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:

embedded by Embedded Video

The International Buzz for the new Video & Photo Ecards at Mashup Arts

October 27th, 2009

Our world is getting smaller, and here in Toronto we can certainly see its multicultural mixes on the streets and in the shops. Most people in this city come from another country and culture, with much of our recent growth coming from Asia, the Middle-East, and Latin America.

Over the past week, we unexpectedly received reviews from The Times of India’s big publication, the Mumbai Mirror; Geekismo in Italy; and yesterday Baixaki of Brazil. I’ll share with you a few excerpts here, along with a Video that a new American user put together and shared on YouTube.

The Mumbai Mirror writers made a photo ecard and got the concept quickly. “Make your own custom ecards by combining pictures from various social networking sites with text and music. www.mashuparts.com lets you make animated, video, or just plain picture ecards with just a few clicks. The site is free to use and even has premade templates that you can use to make your cards.”

In Italy – the Geekismo writers wrote [translated for you] “MashupArts is a very valuable service that will allow us to create an E-card to be shared on various social networks, or to download and send via mail….. It is an intuitive and comprehensive service, with which you can actually deliver some good work. Try it!

From Atlanta, Michael Melvin created a combo photo and video ecard to share the award winning success of his recent movie, Broken. He then took the time to make this YouTube video that smartly showed off many of the features of our site. Thank you Michael and your Illumination team. We wish you all the best. I added a mashup here so you can see Michael’s clip.

The writers at Baixaki.com.br in Brazil took the time to test the application, and wrote a excellent review including describing what a Mashup meant [translated for you]: “The expression means “unite”, “join”, “mix”, and this is exactly what you will do with this ‘creator of virtual cards’ to send to your friends and family.” The article compliments the integration with Facebook and YouTube. “The Mashup Arts is a service highly interactive and simple to use.”

We look forward to more bithday ecards, a season of family Christmas and Holiday cards with photos and videos, and of course Halloween ecards. Most of the community ecards created on the site have been made by women and shared by women, so do not be surprised if you see a little more style and grace this season.

Making Occasions Social

June 10th, 2009

Building Social Cards together with friends at Mashup Arts:

Have you ever received a greeting card from ‘All of Us’?  You know, the ones where every one passes around a pen and frantically signs it before you come through the door to the choir yelling ‘surprise’?

You’ve probably also seen some of your friend’s photos or videos posted to their Facebook or Myspace page and scrolled through the litany of comments about someone’s fashion choice, silly expression or compromising position.

Whether it’s offline or on, friends converge to share well wishes, opinions and to add their two cents to a story.

Online it’s easy to send around photos or get messages to people, but we noticed there really isn’t a place where friends can come together to add photos, videos and comments to create collaborative graphical stories.  We created Social Cards so friends can work together on a birthday card, to commemorate a great vacation, or simply to create graphical stories everyone can contribute to.

What is always so surprising is the creativity of our users.  We’ve seen people bring their friends together to make a touching get well Mashup Card, a detailed ‘birthday times’ newspaper card that chronicles all the famous people born on the same day, and others sharing content to celebrate Britney Spears’ rollercoaster career.

Take any Mashup Card you create and click on ‘Social Card’ to start inviting your friends to contribute. You can set the timeframe you want your friends to contribute their content by, and even preset a date and time the final Social Card will be sent to the recipient. Once your friends receivetheir invitation to contribute email they can start adding photos, slideshows, videos and even comment on other content that has already been posted.  As the creator of the Social Card, you’ll be able to make the final edits and send it off to its destination.  After the card is sent, the conversation continues, because the recipient can view the card, and add their own comments.  Also, anyone can share a Social Card on theirFacebook page.

We hope you like our Social Cards. If you have any questions or feedback, please drop us a note at feedback@mashuparts.com