All quiet on the Adimade front..

So you may have noticed that things have been a little quiet on the Adimade front for a while now. Well let me explain...

After running a couple of test projects (the my planet ads & Anything-aide projects) we certainly learnt a lot about the do’s and don’ts of running UGA campaigns. It was quite an eye opening experience and we were very impressed with the variety and number entries we got having done very little in the way of marketing the new site. The learning curve was indeed steep and whilst running it took up a fair amount of our time, it really didn’t cost us that much to get the site up and running and then fund a couple of our own test projects.

Alas, after speaking to a few companies and really looking closely at the value proposition we decided that we would put Adimade on hold for a while to work on a couple of other projects that had come up. 12 months down the track we are now working on other ideas and not really thinking much about Adimade.

A friend that I hadn’t seen in a while asked me the other day how Adimade was going. I explained that for the business to really push forward it would take a lot more money and time than Nat or I had to put into it. He said “well that’s fair enough, it was worth a shot” and indeed it was. Developing, building and running Adimade (even for the short amount of time that we did) was a pretty valuable experience even if it wasn’t a very profitable one. Were we to go to a market research company and ask them to conduct a study on how many people would create content for it, how businesses would react to the idea, etc it would no doubt have cost up the same if not more. This, in my view, is the great thing about the web. For a few grand we were able to build a site, test a concept and learn a hell of a lot about how it would work. For me this worth far more than the money we spent and far more than any course we could have taken in “how to create a web 2.0 business”.

So whats the future for the site? Well for now we will leave it up there, if people want to stumble across it then the content will still be available. As far as the future for UGA goes, I can see a great deal of promise despite the fact that we are walking away from it to a certain extent. Every week I seem to see a new product launch with a website with some kind of UGC element. The model that seems to be taking hold is individual product sites rather than the a single entity like Adimade but that’s ok, as long as there is an opportunity for average people to show they can make great content and get paid for it I’m happy.

So for everyone who has contributed, thank you kindly and hopefully we will be back with a brand new hair brained scheme in the not too distant future 

My Planet Winner - Save Earth by Tshaar

Despite everyone raving about the success of Earth Hour, we all know that the real focus was on Adimade's My Planet Ad's project that wound up this weekend. After some great entries we are happy to announce the winner for the 2008 My Planet Ad's project was "Save Earth" by Tshaar!




Comment on the video here

So congratulations to Tshaar for being voted the best video and $500AU will be on its way shortly.

We want to thank everyone who put in a video for the project and appreciate the time and effort people went to to get the message out there. We hope to run a few more charity type projects in the near future so keep your eye on this here blog for news..

Wildcuts decides to share the winnings

After announcing the winner this week we got an email back from Wildcuts (creator of the winning entry) which we certainly did not expect. His idea? To offer $250 each to the 2 other videos that he thought deserved to share in the winnings. So I asked him to do a guest post for the blog to explain what he wanted to do..

Hey fellow adimades!

I've been invited by Nat and Jake to write some guest blog text about a certain issue....
No, no, not the low ball voting thing or the fact that someone called me a tard in one of the comments.... No, this is a place of creativity and it should be a positive experience for everybody. Not about winning and loosing but about the freedom to let creativity flow.
Now, I'm participating together with my crew in such contests since last summer (I mean the last European summer :) We did about 11 of those clips and won with 8... The price money we've won goes to a project funding pot for "our" big project - a lord of the rings style fantasy film. We are far away from shooting this as a feature film but meanwhile the pot is filled enough to do a short film this year.
Technically by voting for my films and now for my entry "Ballsarade" you all became supporters of this project (including the adimade founders who actually pay the bill :) Suporters of my work and my dream. And I thank you all for it. But more than thanks - I honor this. And I don't just want to grab the money and be off, especially not here since this is a very fresh project with a not so fluent start.

So, before this will get an old fashioned speech about social values and positive thinking I'd like to come to the point and this is: I will sponsor two runner up prices from my price money. One price for the "real" film I liked most in this competition and one for the the animation I liked most. I discussed the idea with Jake and Nat and they liked it too, so here are my winners:

$250 AU go to jgreschner for "Hyperade"
This clip has it's weaknesses, but I look beyond the surface and see a great potential. Having a story and dividing a story into scenes, reassembles those scenes again to tell the story is a difficult task.
$250 AU go to scovers for "Superawsomeade"
Slapping together something with some 3D software is easy, but this kind of animation needs skill, patience, discipline and preparation - exactly what you need to make film.

I saw more talent among the other entries, but - as every jury - I have a personal taste, so don't be too disappointed that I wont sponsor 10 more prices ;) Just make more films! As I will do and maybe one of us will shoot a big feature film some day. I hope this will be me :)

Cheers
Markus (wildcuts)

Wildcuts (among others) had noted the lack of second or third prizes in this competition to us as being something they think would help the project but I cant say we ever expected he would offer up his own prize pool make this possible. So a big thank you to Wildcuts, im sure the creators of the other 2 videos appreciate it and we wish him the best of luck in production of his short film.

And the winner of the Anything-aide project is....

Well I know you're all anxious to know the results of Adimade's Anything-aide project so I wont drag this out for too long..

The Anything-aide project has been Adimade's first foray into the world of User Generated Advertising and we want to thank everyone for putting together some great videos. As you're no doubt aware this project didn't go as smoothly as we would have hoped but never the less it has been an invaluable learning experience and we are hard at work putting in place measures to make our next project much more video creator friendly.

So after counting up all the votes I am pleased to announce the winner as voted by their fellow video creators is....(drum roll please)

Ballsarade entered by wildcuts!

To view the video go here.

So congratulations to wildcuts for his work on the video, an early entry that has weathered the storm and come out the clear winner as voted by the other entrants (round of applause). Wildcuts walks away with a cool $2000 and the knowledge that his piers voted his video the best of the bunch.

To everyone else we want to say a big thank you for the great work, you all did a super job and we really appreciated you supporting something that hopefully will one day be a viable way for budding film makers to fund their film making ventures.

Anything-aide project now closed

For anyone who has been following the Anything-aide project you will be well aware of the... lets call them...umm.."learning curves" we have been going though with our first beta project, but I'm happy to say that the project is now closed and we have had quite a few entries (probably more than I initially expected with is great).

We had to change the voting process mid project (something Nat and I were very relucant to do but figured it was needed to make for a fair and just project) so in the next couple of days the video creators will be receiving an email from yours truley asking for their votes on what video they think should win. Interestingly we had a few entries come in with just hours to go on the project which raised an interesting question in regards to gaming the project.

If I was going to try and game this project how would I do it?

1. If i were unaware of the change in the voting system I would enter my video with a few hours to go then spend the next few hours using an IP spoofing tool to get my 50 votes all of them 5 stars. Sure its a couple of hours work but for a couple of grand it would be worth it.

Obviously we became aware of this possibility (as did a number of the other video creators that emailed me to highlight this gaping loophole in the system) and thats part of the reason for the change in voting system.

2. If I was aware of the new voting system and already had a video in the project I would upload a few last minute videos under various aliases in the hope that I would be given multiple opportunities to rank my video the highest and hopefully win the project.

I appreciate the effort that the last minute video creators put into their submissions so I will include them in the list of videos that can be voted on by the video creators BUT to ensure we have a fair competition we have decided that these last minute entries wont get a voting ballot.

Dont get me wrong, I am by no means pointing fingers here, I just want to make sure that nothing untoward takes place in the project (god knows we have had enough "learning curves" as it is).

So WELL DONE to everyone who has put in a video for the first adimade project, I will be sending an email to the video creators in the next day or so to gather up the votes and in a weeks time (hopefully sooner if everyone gets back to be quickly) someones gonna be a $2k richer.

Cheers,

Jake.

P.S - For all the international entrants you will be happy to know that the Australian Dollar is trading up around 94c to the USD so if your in the US the prize money has actually gone up quite a bit since the start of the project.

Startup Carnival - Adimade

Vishal Sharma of VS Consulting Group has put together the Australian Startups Carnival. The online (web based) carnival is all about learning new ventures started/surfaced in IT, Telecoms, Green Tech, Media, Web2.0/Social Networking in last couple of years. Vishal has done a great job of getting people organised for their submissions and organising CeBIT Australia as the major sponsor!

Many people might know Vishal from his coverage of web2.0 startups in 2006 for Readwriteweb which has been almost the definitive guide for Australian Web 2.0 companies.

Today, Adimade was featured on the Startups Carnival site that went through a bit of a Q&A. So it is definitely a bit long winded thanks to my good self (Damn those opinions!). If you want to check it out you can visit by clicking the link here : Adimade on Startups Carnival.

A big thanks to Vishal for putting this all together. It's great to have people who are continually going out of their way to build and help maintain the new business community in Australia, particularly in the Web 2.0 space.

Just for the record, a few of my fav companies featured on the Startup Carnival are:

• Vquence: Vquence's business is in Social and Online Video aggregation and metrics.


• Greenairfares.com - is a site which sells airfares along with a carbon offset, based on the details of the flight.


• Me2mobile self-service portal that allows ordinary users to produce interactive mobile applications.

Change to Anthing-aide judging

They say you learn from your mistakes and for the past few weeks we have learned a hell of a lot about what we are trying to do with adimade.

When Nat and I decided to raided our bank accounts to kick off adimade with a $2000 "user votes" project we never really envisioned that people would go to such an effort to sabotage other videos on the site. It turns out that people will go to great lengths to win a couple of grand (or more to the point help their friends win a couple of grand). In the month and a bit that the Anything-Aide project has been running we have seen a surprising amount of people voting 1 star for what we see as perfectly good video entries. Having spoken to most of the video creators that have entered the project I get the impression that they are not to blame for this but rather friends/family/etc thinking they are helping by low-voting everyone else's videos.

Anyway, after a few emails back and forth with the video creators we have decided to change the judging system for the winning video. Hows its gonna work is like this; Each video creator who has made a clip for the anything-aide project will be asked to rank the top 10 videos they like the best from 1-10 (excluding their own of course). We will tally up the results and the highest scoring video will be awarded the prize money. Basically this means that the winning video will be decided by their piers rather than by the current system.

It sucks that we have to change the rules mid project and under any other circumstances we wouldn't have done this but after speaking with all the video creators the general consensus was that something had to be done to make the project fairer.

So thats the state of play..

Cheers,

Jake.