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We spent a few days last week at SXSW. We met a lot of interesting people, ate a lot of BBQ, listened to some great music and heard about some very cool things that people are doing on the web and with social media. Here’s David Hertog being interviewed by Adriana Gascoigne of Bub.blicio.us at our booth.
Be the first to comment on this post!We got some really exciting news this weekend. Liftopia, the nation’s first online marketplace for discount ski lift tickets and alpine resort activities, announced last week that they closed their Series A funding. This is really terrific news for the guys over at Liftopia as they build out their business.
We’ve worked with Liftopia’s co-founder Ron Schneidermann and the Dotcom Cowgirl to get The Lodge live (Liftopia’s KickApps powered community). The site looks great and is starting to get a steady stream of new sign ups.
Congrats to Ron and Evan at Liftopia!
Be the first to comment on this post!Today YouTube announced that they’re releasing a set of APIs that will enable KickApps publishers to more tightly integrate YouTube with their KickApps community (read about it here and check out our case study on Google Code about this here). With our integration through the APIs, your site’s members will be able to easily grab relevant and compelling video from the YouTube library and feature it on your KickApps site. This ability to leverage the world’s largest user-generated video library will open up a new world of content for your site and will ultimately drive greater levels of engagement. Remember, you’ll have the same moderation and media management capability as with any other content that’s uploaded to your site.
The other thing we’ll be doing with the APIs is to enable direct and easy uploading to your branded YouTube channel (if you have one). This turns YouTube into a distribution channel for your site and will drive YouTubers that are interested in your specific content to your site. Just as we’ve made syndication of your site’s content extremely easy through our ‘one click’ functionality to social sites like MySpace, Facebook, Blackplanet, and others (in addition to the usual embed code), this adds another layer of convenience and ease of use to your distribution strategy.
This new functionality from YouTube is completely inline with our mission of driving down barriers for publishers seeking to create highly engaging social experiences on their sites. We’re extremely excited about being the first white label platform to have been invited by YouTube to join the new program. Look for more news shortly as we complete our testing and go live.
UPDATE: Mashable’s coverage of the YouTube announcement and about KickApps’ integration here.
2 CommentsKickApps is hosting a webinar at 2PM ET on March 19, for anyone interested in learning about how to deploy a successful social media site.
John DeMarchi, former GM of VIBE Media’s (the leading urban lifestyle publication) web business, and Gary Lewis, CMO of VIBE Media Group, are pioneers in utilizing social media to drive audience growth and engagement, and revenue creation. VIBE Verses, an online ‘American Idol’ for aspiring Hip Hop performers and fans, is one of the world’s most successful social networks that was created as part of an existing website.
Join John and Gary in a webinar to learn about best practices for implementing a successful social media deployment. Here are some of the things we’ll cover:
- Learn about how VIBE created a full feature social network and user-generated content site in 3 weeks that grew to 90k members in a matter of months.
- Generating revenue from sponsors and advertisers, and earning ROI on your social media in a matters of weeks.
- Understanding how to harness the power and virality of social media and partnering with large social networks like MySpace to drive engagement on your own social media site.
The webinar is scheduled to run for an hour with plenty of time for Q&A.
You can sign for the webinar here. Hope to see you there.
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