Shiny Media

OK it's only the London Churches 7 a side tournament, not the Premiership, but world domination has to start somewhere.

This year the Pies side really excelled themselves for a bunch of mainly thirty and forty something Ginster guzzlers, playing five, winning two, drawing two and losing just one. No mean feat when the opposition is all twenty years younger and much faster.

You use your camera to shoot video. You use your phone to shoot video. You may even be capturing the world in high definition. Now's the time to get your footage working for you by entering our competition and scoring a great prize.

We have teamed up with Visual Networking experts, Cisco, to offer shedloads of cool prizes and all you have to do is show us a video that illustrates 'My Video Life'.

If you are a UK tech start up there's really only one place to be this week and that's on the Web Mission trip to Silicon Valley and San Francisco. Over the next few days reps from twenty or so UK companies will be networking like crazy, bashing the ears of top US VCs and meeting the odd web 2.0 superstar. I have managed to sneak along for the ride and will be blogging the event both here and on TechDigest.

It's an impressive list of companies too with some you will be familiar with, like video experts Coull and innovative music site Slicethepie , alongside some that are new including edocr which bills itself as the YouTube for web documents.

It'll be fascinating to watch all these companies swapping investor stories and comparing notes on business plans and even more interesting to see what the Americans make of it all. The trip formally kicks off on Saturday night with a cocktail or two in the Clift Hotel on Geary Street.

Btw if anyone fancies meeting up for a quick beer or breakfast to talk Shiny things (I am here until the 25th) email me on ashley@shinymedia.com

Here at Shiny Media we have always held the strong belief that the future of the web will be video-based. So even as far back as 2004 we were choosing .tv domains for what in those days we text only blog sites.

Shiny has also been a major player in the development of online video in the UK. In the last two years we have shot and uploaded to our sites over 1000 videos- much more than any other UK publisher.

We have now reached a pivotal point in the evolution of online video with viewing figures rocketing, imaginative new shows appearing on an almost daily basis and the migration of video advertising from TV to the web. We have also seen an explosion in the number of consumers creating their own videos with YouTube alone hosting almost 80 million clips.

In the US eMarketer Inc. predicts that the number of online video viewers will rise to 190 million by 2012 and will only start to tail off as Internet use reaches saturation level at nearly 90 percent of the population.

We are also convinced that video is going to permeate almost every aspect of the web which is why we have decided to partner with Cisco to undertake some research into how consumers engage with online video.

Cisco has coined the term Visual Networking to explain how consumers will be using web-based video not only as an entertainment tool, but also as the most important way of communicating.

At Shiny we completely buy into this view of the future. For example we are very excited by the concept of Telepresence, which has the potential to transform the way in which we communicate with each other.

Cisco also sees Visual Networking as the next chapter in the story of Social Networking. It believes that online communities will provide the engine by which consumers will discover video online. So instead of using traditional search engines, people will find new content through recommendations from their friends.

Over the next month or so look out for the questionnaire and competitions we are going to be running on our sites. The results will not only illustrate what our readers currently think about visual networking, but how they see it developing too. It should be fascinating.

Ok, so we are actually number three. But ahead of us are two huge TV corporations - one of which we actually help fund - who spend millions of pounds on video content every year. We spend less than the cost of five minutes of EastEnders each year on YouTube vids yet are still not too far behind them.

Over the last few months we have averaged over a million views of our gadgets, fashion, games, green and footy vids and the number of subscribers is rocketing too. In fact we have twice as many subscribers as Gordon Brown's YouTube channel and an awful lot more than the massively hyped WebCameron, both of which you can find here.

As well as taking  advantage of YouTube's recently announced monetisation program we are  working with a variety of brands on our videos. For example LG has just finished a four month sponsorship of our Shiny Fashion TV videos as well as working with us on a media talent competition. We have other sponsors lined up who we will be announcing shortly.

I have always felt that there was a massive opportunity for Shiny to pair our quality written content with videos presented by the same writers. It is great to be able to read someone's words and then see them in action talking about their passion. It looks as if our readers/viewers feel the same way too.

Anyhow here's our latest YouTube star, Gary Cutlack, in action, and Zara and here Wi-Fi T-shirt. If only David Cameron was into batteries...

5:31pm: The lovely Georgia has won our presenting job - she's got true Shiny style, complete with making fun of the way she fluffs her words! True Shiny presenting... And the editing job was won by Richard. Again, his editing was tres Shiny, and he's all about delivering great work fast. And they're off to Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress, so look out for their work.

5.30pm: The results are in. Who's it going to be?

5pm: Time for the results of the second challenge! All the videos are dead polished, which makes me wonder if Shiny Media willl dump their older long time video wife for this younger funkier model... Luckily I signed a pre-nup.

4.15pm: Chris has decided that we have to channel Simon Cowell and Sharon Osborne in our judging (which is perfect because I have stupid hair and he has high waisted trousers).

3pm: I've just had a little chat with everyone and checked on pastry consumption. Everyone seems to be getting on like a house on fire, and they're fine for pastries. Good news.

2pm: Having completed the first bit of our quest, everyone's now going off to record their second video. It's all about proper reviewing this time around, so we've given them a full two hours to make the video and edit it together to a final fabulous product.

1.45pm: Everyone has put together lovely packages, and there's lot of smart editing to disguise the fact that they've only just picked up the phone. That's how we roll here at Shiny Media...

1.30pm: OK. Everyone's put together their first video package and we're about to settle down with the popcorn.

12pm: The directors are now busily editing together their packages, and the presenters are trying out the phone. There's loads of specs, so luckily there's lots of lovely features to talk about. 

Well Shiny has left the building and the gadget-fest that was CES 2008 is now history. Yep our crack team, myself included, had an amazing time in Vegas and are already arguing about which hotel we are going to stay in next year.

Our coverage was amazing with Techdigest and Shiny Shiny between them racking up almost 500 posts in a week. If you are in a rush there's a great list of the 50 hottest products here. We also shot around 80 videos which, in the space of a week, pulled in a fantastic 585,000 views. That makes us more popular than a few TV channels we could mention.

If you want to read the coverage go here and here. For more videos (this was my favourite product at the show) go to our YouTube channel.

There really is only one place to be in the first week of January and that is not hanging around a semi-deserted, freezing cold London listening to people moan about how long it is to their next pay day. Nope the place to be is of course in sunny Las Vegas for the world's biggest and most exciting consumer electronics show CES 2008.

This year you won't be able to move for Shiny staff - we have seven bloggers out in the city - who'll be posting all the latest news, getting hands on with the coolest new gadgets, doing strange things with video and generally having an amazing time.

So if you'd like to say hello, please get in touch via here.

Ashley

Day two of Le Web 3 and it's time to give the latest raft of internet start-ups a hard time. Over 30 companies were invited to do an 'elevator pitch' - a kind of Dragon's Den but without the pantomime - and most of them, it seemed, failed to impress the judges including renowned blogger Robert Scoble and venture capitalist Saul Klein of Index Ventures.

In many instances, there was a suspicion that they weren't even solving a real problem, but simply showing off some neat looking technology that had little value in the real world. Presentations were generally unprepared, they weren't very slick and they also seemed talk an awful lot about how great they were without actually showing the product at any point (I did wonder how Shiny Media would fare if we were asked to do our pitch to venture capitalists again!)

Basic questions were left unanswered (such as how is this even going to make money) and while a lot of them seemed keen to let everyone know about how cool their technology was, they didn't actually spend much time showing the technology. As Robert Scoble pointed out:

"Don't talk about the team. Show us some sex appeal. Wow us. It's like dating a girl. Make sure you have a story to tell to nail your pitch," said Scoble.

Highlight of the afternoon so far was the bunfight between Emily Bell of The Guardian Unlimited and controversial 'Cult of the Amateur' author Andrew Keen - the Floyd Mayweather and Ricky 'Hitman' Hatton of the Web 2.0 world.

Whereas Emily believes that the internet is generally a good thing for established media organisations, Andrew believes user generated content and social networking generally is undermining traditional media.

Round one = Emily Bell gets off to a great start with lightening quick comments. "We would be more and more irrelevant if we didn't let people interact."

Round two = Andrew Keen fights back. "Guardian is a very valuable resource. Unlike other sites it doesn't allow kids to spew their crap and their journalists are paid."

Round three = "Internet is a fantastically vibrant right of reply. Your history follows you around. It needs to be an iterative process" (Emily Bell)