Guest post by Megan Totka
ChamberofCommerce.com

Twitter can be a powerful marketing tool for any small business. But it’s not easy navigating the fast and furious world of tweets and retweets—building lists, knowing who to follow, and finding conversations that relate to your business can overwhelm even people who’ve been using Twitter for a while.

Fortunately, using Twitter effectively for your business doesn’t have to be complicated. These top 10 tools (brought to you in no particular order) can help you maximize your social media marketing efforts on Twitter, letting you spend less time figuring things out and more time actively growing and cultivating your network.

HootSuite

1We’ve previously recommended HootSuite as one of the best social media dashboards out there for managing your small business social media presence. The top social relationship platform out there, HootSuite is packed with powerful features that help you make the best use of not just Twitter, but all of your social networks.

With HootSuite, you can send and schedule tweets, use tracking streams to find lists and keyword-relevant tweets, monitor all your Twitter extras in dedicated streams, and more. You can also filter your Twitter timeline by Klout score and take advantage of detailed analytics to track performance.

TweetReach

2Want to know how far your tweets are traveling? You can find out for free with TweetReach. Just enter a Twitter handle, phrase, hashtag, or URL and see all the tweets that match your search. This service also offers a more detailed analysis for $20 — great for analyzing a hashtag campaign.

Embedded Timelines

3This tool was integrated with Twitter in September 2012, and it’s one of the best features of the social media network. Twitter allows you to embed tweet timelines on your website or blog that your readers and followers can interact with directly from your site. You can either feed your entire account into the timeline, or customize the feed by favorites, search queries, lists, or hashtags.

The Twitter developer blog explains how to add a tweet timeline to any Web page.

ManageFlitter

4This handy set of tools helps you work smarter and faster with Twitter. ManageFlitter includes analytics, recommended follow and unfollow tools, relevant search tools, and a feature called PowerPost that helps you find the best times to tweet for maximum traction.

Streamie

5A real-time Twitter client and curation tool that runs in your web browser, Streamie lets you cut through the noise by displaying only relevant information from your Twitter feed — just avatars and tweet text. It’s a simplified way to see what’s happening on Twitter in real time.

SocialOomph

6Get more productive with SocialOomph, a highly effective and customizable automation tool for all major social networks, including Twitter. Use this app to auto-welcome new followers — though keep in mind that many Twitter users view this as spam — automatically unfollow people that stop following you, get email alerts when your chosen keywords or hashtags are mentioned, and more.

GroupTweet

7Have everyone in your office contributing to your marketing efforts while you maintain your brand with GroupTweet. You can have staff members tweet under your main account with @names included, or hide individual identities. Each user gets a secure login and password. GroupTweet is free for up to 3 users, and paid plans start at $7.99 per month.

Seesmic Mobile App

8Previously a separate social media dashboard, Seesmic was acquired by HootSuite in 2012. However, the Seesmic mobile app is still available for Android and iOS devices. This app lets you manage multiple Twitter and Facebook apps across multiple devices, and provides monitoring capabilities for mentions and account activity.

Twellow

9A searchable directory of Twitter accounts with hundreds of categories and advanced features, Twellow not only helps you find the best people to follow on Twitter, but also lets you create an extended company profile for other Twellow searchers to view, so you get more relevant followers.

Tweriod

10Maximize your Twitter marketing with Tweriod, a free tool that analyzes your tweets and your followers’ activity, and lets you know the best times of the day to send out your messages. Just sign up with your Twitter account to get started.

Image courtesy of Shawn Campbell

Related

• How to get 1,000 Twitter followers in 30 days (Socialmedia.biz)

• New to Twitter? 18 tips for newbies (Socialmedia.biz)

• Twtrland: Find your nonprofit’s top influencers (Socialbrite)

The post Top 10 tools to get the most out of Twitter for your business appeared first on Inside Social Media.

If you’re a blogger, one great way to reflect on the year’s happenings is to just go through all the posts you wrote for that year. After a trip down memory lane, I put together a collection by category of the most popular and my favorite posts (across all the sites I write for) of 2009.

Personal experiences

Hey PR, bloggers are not tools to be used – There’s a gentle give-and-take relationship between journalists and PR people. But now that bloggers are in vogue, there’s a sense that some PR reps can use bloggers as tools for their clients. It’s obvious and obnoxious. Here’s my personal story of what one PR firm did. Make sure to watch John C. Dvorak lay into me about it on Cranky Geeks (happens at the beginning of the show), and then there’s an incredible Update: Bad PR experience story. PR firm’s client is obtuse.

Social media “gurus” and some bloggers are egotistical jerks – A PR rep made a mistake of ccing everyone on an email. Instead of unsubscribing, or doing nothing, many people on the list decided to hit Reply All and tell everyone what they thought of this woman. Insulting, rude, and the people on the list were well known social media people.

Pepcom: We’d like to invite you to a party that we don’t want you to attend – Pepcom has an 11-year-old policy of not inviting journalists/consultants to their events. Must be full-time journalists. Even though I’ve been attending their events for six years they decided to send me an invite, let me accept, and then uninvite me.

My personal Twitter policy. What’s yours? – So often I see people telling others how to behave on Twitter. I think the issue is do you know how you behave? Do you have a personal policy and do you stick to it?

Social media research is chock full of leading questions – Don’t take a social media guru’s word as fact. Watching Jeremiah Owyang speak at an event I was taken aback by his claim that a Forrester Research study showed fewer than 10% of people trust corporate blogs. Of course they don’t. It’s a leading question like asking if you trust used car salesmen. Jeremiah joins in the debate.

Why I love public transportation and hate HP – I had a bad tech support experience where I had to wait on hold for two hours after I had paid for tech support. The service was fine, but my aggravation was not knowing when I was going to get service. Make sure you also read the follow up HP responds to ‘Why I love public transportation and hate HP’.

Opinions on social media

Why corporate blogging is like selling uncut cocaine – I still don’t understand why companies are still obsessed with the “company-PR agency-reporter-story” model of getting their story seen. That technique cuts your story three times and you don’t know what will come out the other end. If you blog yourself, you get to tell your story. A fantastic example of this is Paul Levy, CEO of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Read and listen to my interview with him at Blogging should be a core responsibility of a CEO.

Social media success doesn’t start with ROI – After appearing on a panel with David Meerman Scott at the Dow Jones in Palo Alto, this subject kept coming up. Make sure you read the comments. Really good debate.

Can we all make #followfriday suck a little less? – I’m so annoyed with the contextless way people recommend each other with the #followfriday hashtag on Twitter. I suggest we add some context to our recommendations. This piece was written before Twitter lists were introduced which is another good way to recommend people.

Get recognized at your next conference by reporting on it – Simply sitting in a booth waiting for people to come to you is not the best way to connect with influencers. Instead, report on the event and interview influencers. The advantages are endless. PDF also available.

Interviews and stories

How one company uses Web 2.0 tools to run and promote their business – This is just a great story of how a company went through every aspect of its business and replaced it with a Web 2.0 tool, reducing costs and improving efficiency.

What are your productivity bad habits? – Video interviews with attendees of the GTD (“Getting Things Done”) Summit in San Francisco.

10 Creative Contests Powered by Social Media – Layer social media on top of a contest and you’ll achieve a whole host of business and marketing objectives for a fraction of what it would normally cost.

12 Inspiring Stories of Successful Social Networkers – Great tales of how people very systematically grew their social network.

5 People Who Broke the Rules of Social Media and Succeeded – Very popular story that caused a lot of people to say, “What rules of social media?” To which I say, “If that’s true, how come there are so many articles about what to do/not do in social media?”

A great quick appropriate response to blogger outrage – This is an excellent case study of how the Transportation Security Administration squashed a blogger’s BS story quickly with video evidence. It shows the need to have a blog in place and a policy to respond to bloggers quickly. If the TSA didn’t have the blog and its policy, this could have been a brand-damaging media nightmare.

Tips, analysis, and how to’s

9 Successful Techniques for Making Money from Podcasting – This is the culmination of a short term project I did where I interviewed 15 podcasters who have successfully generated revenue from their podcast, directly or indirectly. Article includes links to all the interviews.

Worst passwords EVER! Check to make sure yours aren’t on the list – This was just a simple post that I connected with a radio promotion and it became unbelievably popular. The list isn’t even mine and I didn’t publish it. I just linked to it.

20 Expert Tips on Running a Contest Powered by Social Media – Interviews with five contest experts on what you should and shouldn’t do when running a social media-enabled contest.

Free report “Real-Time Search and Discovery of the Social Web” – This is a must-read 20-page PDF for anyone who needs to understand the landscape of real-time search and the revenue and growth opportunities. Download it, it’s free.

Guy Kawasaki’s top Twitter tips for businesses – Guy Kawasaki is popular. Twitter is popular. Tips are popular. Put them all together in a video interview and you get a popular post.

Conferences

The cool and not-so-cool of LeWeb – The “cool and not-so-cool” series from conferences has been very popular for me. This article summed up what I saw was the good and bad of the LeWeb conference in Paris. It includes some other highlights from the Traveling Geeks trip in Paris.

Highlights from ad:tech New York 2009 and Highlights from ad:tech San Francisco 2009 – ad:tech is one of my clients where I produce videos and articles at their events. Here are my highlights from two of their events this year. Both include summary videos of each event.

Comedy

Most Unusual and Unique Online Dating Sites – If you’re only looking for people on Match.com, you’re missing out on all the opportunities to meet people who are into Star Trek and smoke a lot of marijuana. Here are three more bonus dating sites I discovered after writing the article.

The truth behind “I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here” from Frangela – After lunch with my comedian/radio personality friends Frances Callier and Angela Shelton, I asked them to start dishing the dirt on the reality show they had just appeared on. Watch the video interview.

Improv Confessions of a Stand Up or Why Won’t Improv in Chicago Die? – This is actually an old article that I reposted this year. If you’re in either industry, you should read, comment, and complain.

Comedy club imposes laughable rules for performers – The comedy club industry has been flailing for years. The business simply hasn’t been as big as it was back in the ’80s. In an effort to improve the quality of its shows, a club in Nashville imposes some rather strict rules. Here’s a clip of me from my stand-up days.

Creative Commons photo attributions: legalnonresident, thomashawk and Robert Scoble / CC BY-NC 2.0

The post My most popular (and favorite) posts of 2009 appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Here’s my second and final show report from Le Web. We had been led to believe that Le Web was going to be about real-time Web. After the first day, we were wondering when that discussion would begin. But by day two we finally got some discussion on that topic.

Watch the video for a summary of day two, mostly about the real-time Web and also some of my critiques about how the show was handled. But for a full analysis of the event, make sure you read my report, The cool and not-so-cool from LeWeb.

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Here’s my end of day show report for Le Web, the Web 2.0 conference in Paris. I’ve been in Paris for the week reporting with the Traveling Geeks (watch video of us on a train). Watch the video for a quick summary of the companies I saw, plus a quick story at the end about an outbreak Robert Scoble had at the expense of the French entrepreneurs.

Companies and links mentioned in the video.

• Square
• How Dell handles customer service and sales through social media: Interview with Richard Binhammer (@RichardATDell)
• AllMyApps
• blueKiwi
• TicTacDo
• Wikeo
• eBuzzing
• DEZineforce
• Video: Dating tech service Wuiper offers a fun way for people to meet
• DEZineforce
• TrueKnowledge
• Yatedo

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At the Le Web conference in Paris, I spoke with Richard Binhammer, better known as @RichardATDell on Twitter. Three years ago Richard, who was and still is working in public affairs, was told by his boss to start getting engaged in blogger relations. It appears that Binhammer’s move into social media was one of the many responses to the 2005 Dell Hell outburst initiated by social media consultant Jeff Jarvis, who wrote an open letter to Dell complaining about Dell’s customer service. At the time, Dell’s response was, “We don’t respond to bloggers.”

It took this dramatic situation to shake Dell up, but they finally did respond a year later with a full social media presence that’s been valuable for customer service and promoting sales. Binhammer said that Dell’s use of Twitter is responsible for $6.5 million in sales worldwide.

In the video I gave Binhammer a little bit of a hard time regarding his minimal opinion on the HP situation I had that I published here before (“Why I love public transportation and hate HP” and HP’s response). Granted, I caught him off guard and didn’t tell him the full story, but I was looking for a more concrete answer to the procedure on how he’d go around handling a single complaint like mine from someone who is established online. Off camera we talked more about how every incident is different. And I agree, there isn’t one pat answer, but there are procedures to handle things and I’m still eager to know more about Dell’s procedure.

Does your company have procedures on handling negative conversation in the social media space? If so, let us know. What procedures work? What don’t work? Eager for a discussion.

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Go to dinner with the geeks and you’ll get lots of photos taken

Let me set the scene for you. More than a dozen geeks have traveled to Paris for a weeklong tech odyssey culminating with coverage from France’s premier Web 2.0 conference, Le Web. I’m having a hard time trying to determine what the difference is between “Le Web” and “The Web,” but as far as I can tell, it’s soft cheese.

Our group, the Traveling Geeks, has come from all over the world to meet, see new technology, and report about it. Everyone is blogging from multiple locations, but if you want to catch everyone’s coverage, no matter where they write it, just follow the blog Traveling Geeks (RSS).

Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

• “Traveling Geeks” pens look a lot better than they work. I’ve witnessed three run out of ink within one minute of use.
• Connectivity at hotel is horrible. I’m jonesing for a fast connection so I can upload some videos. I’ve got a video of an aging accordionist playing and singing “I’m Just a Gigolo.” UPDATE: I got a fast connection and I just posted the video. Take a look.
• Geeks bring their video and image capturing equipment to dinner. Things normal people wouldn’t dream to photograph will not only be photographed and videotaped, but you’ll have lots and lots of it. Here’s just the beginning of our photostream.
• The doors on the Paris Metro will try to crush you if you don’t get in or out fast enough. Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher was unfortunately our guinea pig for that discovery. Despite all the photos of everyone’s meal and the closeups of the pores on my face last night, nobody got a shot or video of Tom vs. the Paris Metro.

Special thanks to Mobile Globe for sponsoring last night’s dinner. I was privy to a rather cool demo of its mobile application that lets you make international calls anywhere in the world for just 4 cents per minute. Installs on BlackBerrys, iPhones and a bunch of other Java-enabled devices. And another thanks to Mashcast for making that silly video of all us at top.

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It has been one month since the Traveling Geeks kicked off our trip to London and Cambridge with a Tweetup at JuJu in Chelsea. (I was the chief organizer of trip.) From this distance and vantage point, here are a few random impressions:

• I think too much can be made of the differences between entrepreneurship in the UK and in the United States. While it’s true that Silicon Valley nurtures a spirit of innovation marked by the mantra “Fail often, but fail fast” — an axiom that permits experimentation without demanding an immediate return to investors — it’s even more true that the businessmen and entrepreneurs I met along the way have the same fire in the belly — a burning desire to build something of great value.

• SeedCamp was a high point of the trip to many of us, and apart from the well-done, compact presentations, it was fascinating to watch tomorrow’s young business leaders mingle with each other and exchange ideas and contact information. Cross-pollination at its best. Spotify, Huddle, Skimlinks, Zemanta — these are names that may grow into notable consumer brands in the coming years, and Moo arguably already has. (Here’s my writeup; and here’s my video interview with Skimlinks founder Alicia Navarro.)

• Appreciated the free exchange of ideas at the Econsultancy Roundtable, including London2012 director Alex Balfour’s frank take on the give and take between broadcast television and new media at the London Games.

• Enjoyed getting to know all of the geeks better: Meghan Asha, Sarah Lacey, Sky Schuyler, Susan Bratton, Craig Newmark (pictured above), Robert Scoble, Ayelet Noff and especially Howard Rheingold, who rarely travels in a pack despite his book Smart Mobs. See my short video of Howard in front of King’s College discussing the themes of his closing keynote at Reboot Britain, an event that provided a perfect kickoff to the week.

• The Monday morning roundtable with Tristan Wilkinson, Intel UK’s Director for Public Sector, nicely framed many of the week’s discussions, with a thoughtful exchange about a social media literacy gap taking the place of a hardware digital divide.

• I had the good fortune to be seated, during a dinner in one of Cambridge’s historic colleges, next to two fascinating entrepreneurs: to my left, the founder of mobispeech, maker of CapturaTalk (“take a picture, hear the word and understand,” a mobile OCR technology app particularly useful for people with disabilities such as dyslexia and those learning English as a second language). Download a free 30-day trial of CapturaTalk here. I’ve lost the fellow’s name — he didn’t have a business card, alas — but I found his sense of humor captivating. “We practice what we preach and hire dyslexics. Almost everyone on staff. Honestly, proofing our marketing materials has been a problem,” he said with a laugh.

• To my right was seated William Tunstall Pedoe, founder-CEO of True Knowledge, which is about to make a splash in the search marketplace. (Enter a question, get an answer back.) Here’s Renee’s video interview with William.

• Did you know that Cambridge is celebrating its 800th birthday this year?

• I think we were all enthralled by the stunning landscapes throughout our journey, from the fabulous view atop the BT Tower (thanks again to JP Rangaswami for the fabulous dinner) to the historic architecture of Cambridge. Here are my photo sets of London and Cambridge. Is there a more civilized way to top off a business-heavy day of appearances in Cambridge than with punting on the Cam while sipping champagne? I think not.

• An afternoon at Cambridge Consultants proved what I’d long suspected: that Europe is ahead of the United States when it comes to marketplace efficiencies and government incentives to reduce our carbon footprint, as the demo of a green kitchen with smart metering amply demonstrated. (The U.S. needs to play catch-up — fast.) Too, the glimpse we got into the future of wireless medical devices was especially illuminating.

• The technology piece of the trip came off better than I expected, thanks to the generosity of our sponsors (BT, Intel, NESTA, East of England, Nokia, Skype, Pure Digital’s Flip); here’s my debriefing with our tech lead, Sky Scuyler, who made the week go smoothly.

• Another highlight came with a light-night game, led by Susan Bratton, that stripped away social conventions and laid bare some of the secrets we carry with us. Thank you, Sarah, Robert, Susan, Ayelet, Rocky and Paul Carr of the Guardian for a memorable evening.

• Jane Austen jokes aside, Craig Newmark is a very fun guy to travel with.

• Had a rollicking good time at the Guardian podcast with Robert Scoble, Sarah Lacy, the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones and the Guardian’s Emily Bell and Matt Wells. Here’s my writeup.

• We do owe one final shoutout to our sponsors for making this trip happen, in particular Ken Kaplan of Intel (with Christine Ngo also of great help), Roland Harwood of NESTA, Karyn Barnes of East of England International (pictured above with Craig) and JP Rangaswami of BT. We owe you our everlasting gratitude.

• Also a big thank you to my partners in crime, Traveling Geeks co-founders Jeff Saperstein, who brought a welcome calmness to the proceedings, and Renee Blodgett, who produced a big chunk of the media and brought in some needed sponsors at the end.

• I owe a debt to the Malmaison hotel, which shipped the sport coat I left in my room, and to Clare of Econsultancy, who made sure my LP-Micro strobe was sent back across the pond. Now if I could just locate my wits.

Cross-posted to the Traveling Geeks site.

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• Meghan Asha on highlights of Traveling Geeks UK (socialmedia.biz)
• Introducing Traveling Geeks London (socialmedia.biz)

The post Final reflections on the Traveling Geeks trip appeared first on Inside Social Media.

At the offices of Accel Partners a week ago today during the Traveling Geeks trip to London, several of us came away especially impressed by Michael Acton Smith, founder and CEO of Mind Candy, the UK-based company that makes Moshimonsters.com.

Moshi Monsters has become Europe’s hottest online game site (or, if you prefer, social networking site) for the 7- to 11-year-old bracket. The site, which went live a bit over a year ago, has grown by word of mouth to 3 million players, and it’s just now reaching critical mass. After a marketing push, it added another 1 million members in June and likely more than a million in July, with one third of players in the US, a third in the UK and a third elsewhere.

Kids can adopt, dress up and take care of a monster of their choice. Unlike Club Penguin, where you create an avatar, wander around a 3D space and chat, Moshi Monsters “is more akin to a child-friendly social network,” Smith says. “The beauty about monsters is that everyone seems to love them. The guys like the scary zombie, Abominable Snowman type monsters, the girls like the cute ones with bows.”

Some 70 percent of the site’s players are girls. Traditionally girls like to look after dolls or nurture little creatures, and other games and toys — Tamagotchi, Furbys and Neopets — have skewed more female, Smith says.

Related

• Renee Blodgett’s interview with Michael Acton Smith

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One of the real highlights of the Traveling Geeks trip to the United Kingdom last week came when we were treated to “speed dating” session with the top start-ups of Seedcamp.

This, after all, is one of the chief goals of the Traveling Geeks: to suss out young or little-known start-ups hear their stories, and throw a spotlight on the ones that resonate with us.

So we were thrilled when Sherry Coutu and Reshma Sohoni of London-based Seedcamp (Twitter: @seedcamp) arranged for us to meet their top start-ups, both collectively and one on one. Every one had a compelling consumer-facing service. Here are the ones that particularly struck a chord:

Huddle.net

Twitter: @huddle
Email: [email protected]
Site: huddle.net

Huddle.net offers a collaboration, sharing and project tools platform for getting stuff done. Specifically, Huddle provides secure online workspaces where users can share files, collaborate on ideas, manage projects and organize virtual meetings. P&G, Toshiba, Panasonic, Nokia and Unicef are among the customers using Huddle.

In February, Huddle partnered with InterCall, the world’s largest conferencing provider, to provide services to their 1 million-plus customers. And last month BusinessWeek named Huddle one of their “50 most promising startups” around the globe.

Heady stuff for founders Andy McLoughlin and Alistair Mitchell, who gave me a five-minute rundown of the site’s services. While I’ve been impressed by Basecamp‘s recent improvements, I saw enough in my session with Andy and Alistair that persuaded me to try out Huddle in an upcoming project with one of my clients or co-conspirators.

Zemanta

Twitter: @zemanta
Email: [email protected]
Site: zemanta.com

Andraz Tori (pictured at top), CTO of Slovenia-based Zemanta, sat down and gave the company’s six-word pitch: “Zemanta is an author’s best friend.” Turns out that it’s not just a marketing pitch.

I just started using Zemanta today and can see why it’s so addictive. As a blogger on WordPress who uses the Firefox browser, I’m perfectly suited for Zemanta’s services. I had previously come across Zemanta only on other bloggers’ posts and didn’t pay much attention to the link at the bottom of blog posts that would summon up related posts.

But Zemanta offers a slick and convenient way to spruce up your blog posts.It looks over your shoulder while you’re crafting a post (or even an email) and suggests images, related articles, links and tags to use. A simple click and the image or link now becomes part of your post. Zemanta draws from a large pool of available images, many of them carrying Creative Commons licenses. That’s one of the coolest features — mouse over the image and you’ll see its terms of use (generally free).

“I just love Zemanta,” said fellow Geek Meghan Asha. “It’s just cool to be able to have those images right there, all free and legal to use.”

Well put. I’m a believer now .

Spotify

Twitter: @spotify
Email: [email protected]
Site: spotify.com

In my book “Darknet” I wrote about the ongoing clash between the music companies and music fans who just want easy access to digital music. Spotify is one of the first companies to come along with an answer.

Through its simple-to-use interface and licensing deals with the major music labels, Spotify offers music fans instant access to their favorite music. The service enables on-demand streaming of tons of audio content through a free, ad-supported model and a premium paid model. London-based Lastfm and US-based Pandora are two similar music listening services, and SoundCloud is a great way to share music and audio files (see Robert Scoble’s video interview with One of Europe’s brightest startups: SoundCloud).

Scoble has been a big fan of Spotify, and I can see why.

Moo

Twitter: @overheardatmoo
Email: [email protected]
Site: moo.com

I’ve been a fan of Moo cards for years — they’re a staple at Silicon Valley events — but didn’t realize, until founder-CEO Richard Moross laid it out for me, just how many kinds of business cards and stickers Moo offers.

A lot: the company prints of cards a month for customers in 180 countries. Their customer base consists of 40 percent North Americans, 30 percent from the UK and 30 percent from the rest of the world, chiefly Europe. The best part: The cards are completely personalized. In the past, I’ve uploaded 50 different images for a stack of 100 business cards at a cost of about $20. Crazy-cheap.

How do they work that magic? Richard called the process “printfinity” — a proprietary system that lets the company print cards of any kind, with any image, in a scalable way. They’ve applied for a patent on the process.

In the depths of the current recession, Moo has seen a 300 percent uptick in consultants buying business cards. In addition, Richard said, “Lots of people are turning their hobby or craft into a shed business.” You can order as few as 50 cards.

Moo has become one of the fastest-growing print businesses in the world, with “extremely high margins,” Richard told me. “We’re trying to make boring business cards a thing of the past.”

I”ll be ordering my next batch of cards from Moo.

Stupeflix

Twitter: @stupeflix
Email: [email protected]
Site: stupeflix.com

Stupeflix is a web service aimed at people and companies that want to generate videos automatically from their pictures, music and footage. The company uses technologies allowing faster than real time video rendering, as well as the generation of tens of thousands of videos a day using one server only if you’re running a business. The public API that Stupeflix offers to developers is one of a kind in the flexibility and level of control it allows.

See the Box of Tricks blog for Video podcasting made easy with Stupeflix.com.

Other companies that resonated: Skimlinks (a new way to do affiliate marketing — I have a video with CEO Alicia Navarro that I’ll post soon), uberVU (a real-time conversation search engine — I’ve requested an invitation to their private beta), School of Everything (a training marketplace) and Qype (similar in some ways to Yelp, it’s a crowdsourced reviews site).

Related

• Susan Bratton: My impression of UK and Euro entrepreneurs from today’s Seedcamp Speed Dating adventure

• Craig Newmark: Seedcamp at NESTA, part of the Traveling Geeks tour

• Tom Foremski: UK Diary: Tuesday – Guardian Newspaper Media Panel . . .

• Tom Foremski: UK Diary: Tuesday – Back To Soho and Dinner With Agency.com

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BT’s CEO greets the Traveling Geeks from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Here’s a 3-minute video of BT (British Telecom) CEO Ian Livingston I took prior to the gala dinner party BT held for the Traveling Geeks atop the BT Tower in central London.

What’s interesting is not the gracious greeting he gave to the Geeks, but the way in which he described the the culture of Great Britain’s largest telco. He said BT doesn’t start from the premise “that every innovation comes from our labs. It was probably never true, and now definitely isn’t true.” He discusses BT’s propensity “to be open and inclusive, and to try to bring the best from all the world, because we are only a small island here.”

During the dinner that followed, we individually heard about the company’s efforts to extend its open source mobile platform and other efforts that BT is working on.

You’ll hear a couple of questions from uber-blogger Robert Scoble in the video. This was my second video done with a Flip Ultra.

Related

• JD Lasica: The future of television: Social TV

• Howard Rheingold: Will BT let JP create the first open network operator? One scenario for the mobile Web

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