Apex is proud to announce that “Weird Al” Yankovic’s Know Your Meme episode was just announced as a nominee for the 2010 Streamy Award for “Best Guest Star in a Web Series”!
In promotion of The Essential “Weird Al” Yankovic, we looked for some of the best ways to get Al in front of an audience that loves him, and Rocketboom’s Know Your Meme was exactly that. We approached them about having Al as a guest star (something they’d never done before), and they loved the idea. The episode quickly went viral, gaining over 1.3 MILLION views in one week!
Obviously, huge amounts of thanks to KYM’s Kenyatta Cheese, Jamie Dubs and Elspeth Jane for making this into such an amazing promotion (as well as highly informative!). The 2010 Streamy Awards will be held April 11th.
I won’t speak for all of Apex here, but I’ll say that I’ve been pretty pumped to check out the sequel to one of the best videogames to come out in recent years, Bioshock. It’s rare that a game is able to draw upon such a varied background - 40s art-deco, the philosophy of Objectivisim, and.. uh… hulking murderous underwater-suit wearing monsters protecting zombie-like little girls.
With that in mind, we’re happy to announce that Sony Legacy is releasing the soundtrack to Bioshock 2 to digital retailers on February 9th. Comprised of pop and jazz tunes from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, the soundtrack makes for an excellent introduction to the mood and tone of the underwater city of Rapture.
You can check out clips from the soundtrack, as well as other selections inspired by Bioshock 2, on Rapture Radio (iTunes link) where they’re broadcasting from the in-game location of the Kashmir Restaurant, counting down the days until New Year’s Eve, 1959.
As we’re starting up a new year and a new decade (okay, technically the new decade starts next year, but who’s counting?), we’d like to say thanks to all of our great clients and partner sites we’ve worked with in the past year. We couldn’t do what we do without you guys.
We’ve put together a few highlights from 2009 in the video below, and we look forward to an even better 2010.
That was quick! Fresh on the heels of the LaLa purchase, Apple apparently has plans to put iTunes on the cloud. No more downloading iTunes or songs. Users will be able to simply login and start buying/listening to music.
It’ll be interesting to see how this works out with AT&T. They recently starting whining about people who’ve purchased unlimited data plans for their iPhones using lots of data. iTunes streaming content sounds like a lot of bandwidth to me.
One of Google’s new announcements has to do with personalized search results. As Google continues to gather more and more information on its users through its various products, it’s going to start returning search results based on your previous internet activities.
This is really interesting and where Google and Facebook become competitors more so than Facebook and MySpace. The direction Facebook is heading is that of an information hub for everything your social graph does and thinks. This includes solving the same problems people have traditionally used search engines for.
Shopping online? Why search through Google when you can mine your social graph through Facebook. Google can personalize your search results based on your previous activities but that only goes so far. Facebook represents word of mouth, the most powerful and influential part of the decision making process. The real value in search is based on the information gathered not only about your own habits, but the habits and opinions of your friends - those people that impact your decision making offline as well. Google can certainly get this information but Facebook can do it so much better.
EMI joins Vevo just in time for the site’s launch (thanks MediaPost). Vevo makes a lot of sense. MTV’s been out of the scene for years. Before Joost died, music videos were their most popular content. Music videos also represent some of the top videos within YouTube - who coincidentally, are powering Vevo.
I think with YouTube’s involvement, this has a real shot at being a success. Yes, I know that “content is king” but that’s only half the story. The other half is communication. That’s what really matters. If it was just content, TV and newspapers would still have the thrown. It’s about building content into a social experience.
The way Vevo is really going to take off is by allowing people to use the same functionality within Vevo that they have in YouTube, Facebook, Digg or any other site doing well online right now. Vevo needs to make it super easy for people to share content through their social graph, embed videos within their own pages and blogs, access music on their mobile devices and create conversations around content through commenting, rating and embedding.
Historically, the labels don’t have such a good track record when it comes to allowing this. We’ve worked many a project here at Apex where our clients have disabled embedding on their YouTube channels. That kind of desire for control will bury Vevo before it takes off. We’ll see what happens…
UPDATE: See??? This is what I’m talking about! Boxee knows how to do it right (everything right, except for their party. By the time I showed up, the place was over capacity and I couldn’t get in. Thanks guys.) - Boxee Unveils Public Beta, ‘Boxee Box’ Hardware. Read the part about content recommendations from friends.
Apex don’t do nothin’ for free. Most of the content on this blog has something to do with our clients. So to comply with the FTC’s new blogger rules, consider this our disclosure that we’re open to being bought.
Vevo, the Hulu of music videos is launching on Tuesday. From what I hear, it’s a great site, very easy to use and a very intuitive user interface. As popular as music videos are across major video platforms, I certainly expect this to do well.
The one thing that could really bring this down are the labels themselves. With Hulu talking about subscription fees, I’m sure the record labels are already thinking about the same thing here. What everybody needs to remember is that music videos serve in a promotional capacity. They can certainly be a source of revenue but but music videos still need to serve their primary purpose - to act as an advertisement for an artist and their music. We’ll see what happens.
I was very sad to learn of the death of the Crunchpad. I had been following it’s development and was excited about the opportunity to eventually buy one. However, the he-said-she-said between Michael Arrington at TechCrunch and Chandra Rathakrishnan at Fusion Garage certainly is entertaining. It’s a nerdy (ie - awesome) version of Fox reality television.
Chandra will be holding a press conference Monday to explain his side of the story. I have no doubt that Michael will respond in kind. Here’s to next week’s episode!
