Though it’s but a baby in the app world, Vine is already making brands, advertisers, and especially media industry members chomp at the bit for some 6-second looping action.

The latest to join the herd is Marvel, who has posted a six-second teaser trailer for its upcoming “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” TV series. For those who were fans of the Avengers and other Marvel films, this should be a sweet little Sunday afternoon treat. But if it doesn’t satisfy, have no fear. A real teaser, one that lasts longer than 6 seconds, will debut tonight during ABC’s Once Upon A Time.

It’s interesting to see how brands are managing to pack a full trailer, some of which can last up to three minutes or so, into a six-second Vine. Most recently, the producers of the new Wolverine movie released a teaser for the film on Vine. That, just like this Marvel teaser, used the quick-cutting nature of the app to show tons of action and very little plot.

However, it’s worth noting that Agent Phil Coulson, a character from the Avengers who was thought to be dead (as noted by The Verge), appears within the Vine, giving a hint at what to expect in the series.

Interestingly enough, Vine seems to appeal to people both inside and outside the movie industry. Tribeca Film Festival loves the app so much that it started a #6SecFilms competition to see which creative producers could come up with the best possible Vines. It was a smashing success.

Even advertisers are thinking outside the box, with a new web app called VineTune looking to create awesome, interactive music videos for artists based on matching lyrics in the song with hashtags on Vine. Pretty neat, right?

This is far from the end of seeing brands use Vine, but as more and more jump on the bandwagon (and the difference between a consumer-made Vine and a brand-created Vine becomes more and more apparent), it’s worth wondering how Vine plans to treat advertisers and brands.

As you may notice, there’s a huge difference between Vines that are clearly made within the current restrictions of the app, and something like the Wolverine or Marvel teaser, which is obviously on a more professional level.

Check out the teaser Vine below:

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Less than a month ago, Tribeca Film Festival opened up a sub-competition within the festival for those of us with a knack for brevity: the Tribeca Film Festival’s #6SecFilms competition. Partnering with Twitter’s new darling and video-sharing app Vine, TFF made a call for submissions from filmmakers who’d like to use the Vine platform to be featured on TribecaFilm.com, along with a nice cash prize of $600.

Today, TFF has narrowed down its submissions to a short list of 40 submissions from all four potential categories, including Series, Auteur, Animate, or Genre. Finalist submissions will now go before the panel of expert judges, including Penny Marshall and “King of Vine” actor Adam Goldberg, who’s made quite a name for himself on the video-sharing network.

Vine launched back in January to much fanfare, offering users a new way to share video. The app lets you create six-second, looping videos of various clips strung together. It’s a lot like Instagram for video, and it’s clear that advertisers are chomping at the bit to leverage the platform.

So far, we’ve seen an ad agency out of the UK create VineTune, a way to promote music artists by building a music video out of Vines hashtagged with words that correlate to the lyrics of the song. It’s a hoot.

We’ve also seen a Battlefield 3 trailer using Vine, and a much more high-quality Twitter-fied trailer for the forthcoming Wolverine movie, which makes you wonder if there’s some sort of unannounced VIP access brands can tap into.

Though most of the interesting initiatives around Vine have been brand-centric, Tribeca Film Festival’s #6SecFilms competition truly centers around users and creators.

It’ll be quite interesting to see how additional brands and organizations try to leverage the fast-growing social network, but in the meantime, feel free to peruse a few of my favorite submissions that made the short list, or check out the full short list here.

#AUTEUR

#GENRE

#SERIES

#ANIMATE

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Marc Ruxin is CEO and co-founder of TastemakerX. Follow him on Twitter @ruxputin.

If you went to SXSW 20 years ago, you would have been there to see and discover new music. You worked at a label or publishing company, or perhaps you were a journalist or PR rep. Sure, there were locals and college kids swaying next to you at the shows, but in the end, SXSW was an industry event where bands were discovered, signed and given a chance to break out. There were no cell phones. There was no social media.

Buzz was entirely old-school word of mouth. There was no Pitchfork or BrooklynVegan or Hype Machine. There weren’t countless photos and tweets flooding the universe with directional information. There weren’t massive compounds across the freeway like those from Fader or Spotify, mostly just the venues up and down 6th street and a few other streets. There was no aggregated crowd wisdom. You had to stand in front of a band and use your eyes and ears to have a sense for whether the band was happening. You’d have to look around the room and read the faces of the fans in the audience to see what kind of reaction the music elicited. Yup, the old-fashioned way, when tastemaking wasn’t crowd-sourced, but a skill you either learned or inherited.

There was no aggregated crowd wisdom.

Although the first films showed up at SXSW in 1994, the film fest picked up steam a decade ago, and is now a steady and lower decibel buzz that extends for the duration of the festival. And although I am a film nut, I rarely have the time to see many films. I did see the star-studded slacker romance Drinking Buddies, which seemed a near-perfect choice to play in Austin. The films are appropriately and largely American indies or documentaries focused on young hipster types or iconic American documentary subjects. The lines are long for most buzzy screenings, but unlike Sundance or Toronto or Cannes, SXSW isn’t a buyer’s festival. It’s more a low-key event for film fans and a fun place to premiere a film.

Flash forward 20 years. Music almost feels second fiddle to what SXSW has become. The world has changed dramatically. The label ecosystem has been decimated by a combination of incompetence and the inevitable evolution of technology. Indie film has been largely relegated to Netflix and Amazon; fewer and fewer screens play indie films and for increasingly shorter runs. Technologists are a new breed of rockstar: Elon Musk ~Thom Yorke, Daniel Ek ~ Dave Grohl, Jack Dorsey ~ Bono. Tech companies also have band-like counterparts: Jawbone ~ Radiohead, Uber ~ Alt-J, Airbnb ~ Mumford.

But in the end, as much as technology has democratized so much of our lives, it has also eaten SXSW.

But in the end, as much as technology has democratized so much of our lives, it has also eaten SXSW. What began as a music conference/festival has become a carnival of hype and ambient noise. Tech companies large and small slog it out on the streets of Austin trying to break out or expand their lead. There are panels throughout the week that very few people seem to attend, and parties that almost nobody seems to be able to get into. There is free shit everywhere. GroupMe still buys grilled cheese for people with the app on their phone (thanks, Microsoft). Other companies ply attendees with food, booze, energy drinks, stickers, T-shirts, free pedi cabs, and music. It is an endless sea of noise, and it rolls out like this for the uninitiated.

In the event that you question the magnitude of the real battle for consumer attention, SXSW is an exaggerated ground zero for understanding the intersection of technology, youth culture and the evolution of media.

On Friday, the techies invade Austin. The locals vacate and rent every available room in the city on Airbnb at increasingly egregious prices. Thousands of companies compete for press on the blogosphere, with the hopes of becoming the next big thing (although it has been quite a few years since Twitter and Foursquare broke out and they didn’t really launch at SXSW). And those companies that have already broken out throw increasingly outrageous parties, fighting hard to seduce an A-List crowd. It’s a big hipster schmooze filled with old guys trying to stay relevant and young guys dreaming of becoming rich old guys that somehow managed to stay relevant. There are VCs, brand marketers, PR folks, engineers, biz dev guys, legit celebs, and Internet celebs dining at food carts and sampling $20 club sandwiches at the Four Seasons.

This lasts until Tuesday or Wednesday when the nerds leave and the real hipsters and music tech nerds arrive to do essentially the same thing but with endless amounts of epic live music, prioritized wait lists, and endless venture-funded boondoggling. Great bands play everywhere from Stubbs to a tiny stage in a restaurant. This year bands on a meteoric rise like Alt-J, Lord Huron, The Joy Formidable, St. Lucia, Foxygen and others played 10 times over a week and often three times a day. But this is a different SXSW. Everywhere there are phones in the air capturing photos, video, tweeting, checking in, texting. In the air there is a sea of Vine, Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, Path, Snapchat, and a bunch of other smaller apps like TastemakerX, Soundtracking and Songkick focused on music.

But when the dust settles, there is no more vibrant a microcosm for observing the modern age than SXSW. Culture, technology, food, film, art all displayed at a hyperbolic scale. Music and film have been massively disintermediated by technology, and in a sense music and film now compete with social media, social games, and the Internet broadly for time. But in the same breath, technology has now enabled musicians and filmmakers to create and distribute their art to a global audience at a significantly lower cost and with very little friction.

SXSW used to be about music, but now it seems to be about everything and nothing at all. Like the occasional trip to Vegas, the first 48 hours are great. But at 48 hours and one minute, you feel like you need to leave immediately. And like the indie bands you used to love until they got too big and commercial and you lost interest, SXSW is all grown up. It’s not the DIY mecca it used to be, but then again occasionally there is that band that grows up and still remains relevant and cool, and in that way perhaps SXSW is kind of like Radiohead.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Vine has steadily made waves ever since its launch in January. First it was a porn scare, and then it was widening growth against competitors like SocialCam and Viddy.

And throughout it all, we’ve watched stars like Adam Goldberg vine their hearts out. But with today’s announcement that Vine is powering a new 6-second film contest for the Tribeca Film Festival, the app has most certainly graduated into a new tier of awesomeness.

The contest is called #6SecFilms Vine Competition, and it’s a “mini festival just for Vines.”

Just in case you’ve missed the past two months, Vine is a new app from Twitter that lets you record six-second looping videos (like Gifs) which you can then share with friends on Twitter, Vine and Facebook. Contestants can shoot and enter as many vines as they want in the competition, as long as they’re within the following topics: #Genre, #Auteur, #Animate, and #Series.

The panel of judges hasn’t quite been solidified, but director Penny Marshall and “King of Vine” actor Adam Goldberg, whose made quite a name for himself on the video-sharing network, have both confirmed.

When you’ve finished shooting your submission(s), share them on Twitter with the hashtags #6SecFilms and your topic (#Genre, #Auteur, #Animate, or #Series), and be sure to follow @TribecaFilmFest on Twitter.

Vine’s growth has been solid, according to recent reports, but we can’t forget that most people are hesitant to be creative in new forums. In a recent conversation with 4chan and DrawQuest founder Chris Poole, he explained that many people feel very nervous when creatively approaching a blank slate.

The same may be true for Vine, but with promotion from other creative outlets such as the Tribeca Film Festival, Vine and it’s easy-to-use UI should squash those fears.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We all know that LeVar Burton has famously played a space traveler in the hugely successful Star Trek: The Next Generation series, but nowadays he is spreading the word that human travel beyond our solar system may actually become a near-term reality for people who aren’t actors — or even astronauts.

As a member of the advisory council of the 100 Year Starship project, Burton is a champion of the idea that we can make human interstellar travel capabilities a reality within the next century.

We had the chance to catch up with Burton this week at South By Southwest in Austin, Texas and talk to him about 100 Year Starship, which he discussed in a panel at the festival. It was also great to be brought up to speed on his other initiatives, such as the Reading Rainbow iPad app. In the video embedded above, you can hear Burton tell us how tech concepts that were purely fictional back in the TNG days are now realities, why it’s important for technology and art to be brought together, what he really thinks of Google Glass (and how it compares to what Geordi La Forge wore), and more.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Some Facebook page owners have complained that Facebook’s News Feed algorithms make it difficult for them to reach a large percentage of their fans organically. But the social network’s latest tests may help pages reach a new audience of people who haven’t yet become fans — without paying for ads.

Tenthwave PPC Strategist Teddy Quinn today found Facebook organically suggesting a post from a page he doesn’t Like because the post was about another page he does Like. In this example, Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, a page Quinn is not connected to, mentioned Portugal. The Man., a band page Quinn does Like. The post was not sponsored, but it did include an option to Like the Bonnaroo page.

This type of story is similar to the “Recent Articles About” module that highlights articles about topics and people that users Like, but instead of leading offsite to a news source, this new feature promotes content from Facebook pages.

News Feed used to be a place to see stories from friends and pages that users explicitly connected to, but that’s changing. In Facebook’s latest redesign, organic posts from pages that users aren’t connected are included more frequently in the stream. For instance, the Following feed, which includes posts from pages users Like and public figures they follow, also includes posts from pages that a user’s friends Like.

In the music feed, we’ve seen posts suggested because they come from pages similar to pages a user already Likes.

In both cases, Facebook offers a conspicuous “hide” button so users can indicate whether they prefer not to see this type of content in the future. The social network seems to be testing how often users might want to see posts from pages their friends Like or pages that might be similar to those they’re already connected to. This could be part of the way Facebook determines what type of ads to include in the feeds and at what frequency. For now, sponsored posts are not eligible for the new feeds, such as music, following, photos and others, but these tests could provide insight into how users respond to suggested content.

Another thought is that Facebook is intentionally including more organic page post suggestions to train users not to think of News Feed as being a place for only posts from friends and pages they Like, but a means of discovery for relevant content, whether it’s posts from pages they haven’t yet Liked, articles on third-party sites, suggested events, upcoming concerts, recently released albums or any number of new modules Facebook introduces. If the social network includes these types of stories organically, paid advertisements in the feed don’t seem so out of place.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Festicket, the UK site that aims to make booking and attending a music festival akin to the experience of purchasing a package holiday online, has raised $680k in a new round of funding.

Its new backers are the French early-stage fund Kima Ventures, Jacques-Antoine Granjon (CEO of vente-privee.com), London’s #1 Seed and Playfair Capital, and the New York-based VC firm Windcrest Partners.

Festicket says the new capital will be used to further develop the platform and extend the range of products that it’s able to offer, as well as to bolster sales and marketing, including key hires, and to accelerate its plans for European expansion.

Founded in early 2012 by Zacharie Sabban (CEO) and Jonathan Younes (CTO), Festicket wants to make attending festivals as easy as booking a package holiday. Users browse the curated directory of music festivals and, in a single purchase, can book a festival package — tickets, transport and accommodation — therefore eliminating much of the pain associated with attending festivals, which often involves dealing with multiple providers and a disparate itinerary. By consolidating this process, the broader aim is to open up the festival market to an even wider audience.

Partnering with more than 40 top music festivals across Europe, the startup makes money by taking a 20 percent commission on each part of the packages it sells (i.e. tickets, accommodation, transport, extras). It claims an average basket price of around €290, and says it has 27,000 active members of which 73% are from UK, France and Germany.

In addition to its consumer-facing site, Festicket has recently added a B2B element to its strategy by deepening its partnerships with festivals by offering packages directly on their official websites via a white-label version. It’s already helping to power the sites of the UK’s Camden Crawl festival, Denmark’s open air festival Roskilde, Monegros Desert Festival in Spain, Gnaoua in Morocco, and OFF Festival in Poland.

Prior to today’s newly announced investment, Festicket was funded by friends and family to the tune of £70k (~$105k), bringing the total raised by the London startup to approximately $785,000. Meanwhile, #1 Seed’s Raj Ramanandi has joined the company’s Board.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The TV news soundbite is about to get a lot shorter.

NowThisNews, a New York-based startup that’s looking to reinvent video journalism for the Facebook and smartphone era, is hitting SXSW with an exclusive channel on its mobile app plus a six-second startup pitch competition using Twitter’s Vine.

While we haven’t really covered the company before, NowThisNews is the brainchild of Huffington Post co-founder Kenneth Lerer, former Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau, and Bedrocket founder and CEO Brian Bedol. They’ve assembled a veteran team of journalists who have held senior positions at ABC News, CNN, Washington Post and The Huffington Post with $6.5 million in funding from investors including Lerer Ventures.

The startup’s basic premise is this: because smartphones and tablets are eating into the time people otherwise spend watching TV, the old cable and evening news formats just don’t work. On top of that, news spreads in a different way — through social networks like Facebook and on Twitter.

Clips have to be short (as in less than three minutes) and super-catchy so they grow virally. Here’s an example that’s about the history of the SXSW conference itself.

With a little more than 20 editorial employees, NowThisNews is pumping out 18 to 25 videos a day on everything from U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East to the death of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez to a Cribs-like video on what it’s like to live on the International Space Station.

The iPhone and iPad apps have been out for about five months, but the company isn’t sharing stats on the number of users they have or the number of viewers they have per day yet, said social editor Drake Martinet. The company’s reliant on more than the app for viewership though.

“I would say there are three big buckets for us,” Martinet said. “There are obviously the app users. Beyond that, there’s referrals from outside sites and then replays on social channels like Facebook.”

The teams that make these NowTheseNews clips are lean. At SXSW, they’re putting two small production teams on the ground with two dedicated VJs. The goal is to help establish more of a tech audience beyond coverage of politics and entertainment. That ties into NowThisNews’s goal of reaching the 18-34 demographic that is tuning out of traditional broadcast or cable news coverage.

“SXSW gives us the opportunity to showcase our incredibly agile teams that can make beautiful videos on the fly and publish that content out to mobile devices,” said managing editor Katharine Zaleski, who came to NowThisNews from The Washington Post.

They’re launching a six-second startup pitch contest using Vine and the hashtag #6secondpitch and covering the Startup Bus competition that hatches new product concepts on a roadtrip to Austin ahead of the festival.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Congress could learn some lessons from Silicon Valley. Extreme partisan gridlock over the federal budget is inching the country closer to drastic spending cuts, known ominously as “the sequester.” Yet, members of Congress used to be far more agreeable back when they weren’t occupied with four-day weekends raising cash in their districts and, instead, could spend time face-to-face with the colleagues at bi-partisan family BBQs.

The extraordinary benefits of face-to-face communication convinced Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer that the company needed to eliminate telecommuting to repair her own beleaguered organization. Congress should follow Mayer’s advice and spend more personal time with their colleagues.

“To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side,” declared a leaked internal Yahoo memo. “Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home.”

The science of distance-based communication corroborates Mayer’s instincts. During experimental trust games, business consultant and University of California Professor Judy Olson found that face-to-face communication far outperformed calls, video conferences and chats. Our finely tuned ability to read people unconsciously places a premium on facial expressions and intonation. A disembodied voice can’t inspire trust.

President Bill Clinton once recommended that Congress ditch the new practice of weekend fundraisers to get back to its more cooperative roots. Back when Republicans and Democrats used to attend family picnics with one another, he recalls, “They got to rest, they got to see their friends, they got to meet with members of the Senate and both parties and talk through issues.”

In a more endearing example, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor told a crowd at the Aspen Ideas Festival that she used to break partisan gridlock in the Arizona state legislature by inviting people over for dinners. “We used to have pot-luck dinners at my house and I’d fix ‘em chalupas and we’d get some beer,” she reminisced, “it would be a good chance to get acquainted and make friends. And, believe me, I could get enough votes on most of the legislation that we had to pass.”

But, the spike in fundraising pressure soon overwhelmed the (relatively) collegial D.C. culture, dramatically reducing the number of voting days and committee meetings. The result has been an inability to pass Congress’s most important bill — federal budget — perpetually leading the nation to the edge of crisis, and potentially causing serious cuts in defense and social programs.

Unlike a tech company, Congress gets rehired regardless of its past performance. So while it doesn’t have to adopt the practices of high-performing companies, perhaps it should anyways.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard is now available for viewing on YouTube. The entire one and a half-hour movie just premiered in Europe and is also available for download on the Pirate Bay.

You can also buy a copy here.

The movie details the story behind the Pirate Bay, the beleaguered torrent website that has become the target of nearly every copyright enforcement group. It follows the lives of the TPB founders, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm. It premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival today.

The film was funded by a successful Kickstarter campaign as well as a bit of money from the Swedish government. Watching it seems like a great way to avoid going out into the coming snowpocalypse.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch