Flickr CC: The Rocketeer

You think you can’t make your videos and photos look astonishing? Yes, You can.

Sweden is not only a playground for savvy online music innovators, but a place that also hearts for online creativity, making advanced online video and image editing super simple to use. In Flash. In the cloud. Bye bye heavy downloads and installations.

Jaycut, online video editor, and Pixlr, online image editor, are two Swedish startups bringing cutting egde video and image editing easily accessible to everyone with a browser and Internet connection. One is surprised how fast these editors load in the browser considering their feature rich libraries. Especially Pixlr has been dedicating to offer the fastest loading image editor. I have been testing, and it sure beats its online competitors FotoFlexer, Photoshop.com, Picnik, acquired by Google in March, and Sumo Paint. For those small image quick fixes, Pixlr also offers Pixlr Express, a light version of the editor.

Both Jaycut and Pixlr are B2B white label solutions, yet offering their respective editors free to individuals. Being super focused on delivering the best editing experience, they were early on to acknowledge the importance of fans and a user community for feedback. Pixlr has a very active user community with 60% recurring visitors, which also has helped translate the service to 23 different languages and create user tutorials. Working closely with its users, Pixlr’s has released many appreciated features such as image grabbers for various browsers and a recent neat social sharing feature immo.io.

Video editing and collaboration regardless place or device

With JayCut’s online video editor one can create a movie or a slideshow by adding text, sound effects and smooth transitions. Its newly relaunched community has also focused on the one click social sharing features. Besides from storing, collaborating, and sharing, all content is easily published to YouTube, blogs, or downloaded to iPhone (available in H.264/Mpeg-4, Avi and Flv formats). After having announced its support for Moblin-based ultra-portable devices like netbooks and mobile internet devices (MIDs) last fall, it has also just released an open API to work on.

The one thing I’m currently missing on both JayCut and Pixlr, is the ability to access and upload my content from other services, for example like Animoto does with SmugMug. Pixlr, although, allows image upload directly from URL, making editing my Flickr pictures easy.

Editing as a tool to increase user engagement

Online video is a powerful tool for creating user engagement, and not just in terms of consuming video content. As JayCut’s editor is being used in various brand campaigns (e.g. by Procter & Gamble), it has been able to gather statistics regarding user engagement. On average, a user spends 5 minutes on creating and editing a video. That is a very high number compared to the time spent on regular banner ads, campaign or landing pages. Of course, there’s no magic sauce to create user engagement, but encouraging people’s creativity and allowing them to interact with one’s brand can be very fruitful in building brand awareness and relationships.

So, if you just wish to plug and play, yet have an itch to express your creativity, go and polish up your holidays pictures on Pixlr, upload together with your videos to Jaycut, give your story its own voice – and share it with the rest of the world.

Warning: Don’t try this on your iPad

Paula is online strategist and startup evangelist. She blogs at paulamarttila.com and here at Bub.blicio.us.
Follow her on Twitter: @paulamarttila
Drop her email at paula.marttila[at]gmail[dot]com

by Michelle Lentz

The hot topic on the Interwebs today is Skittles. Go to Skittles.com and you’ll discover that they’ve relinquished control of their web site.

There is a navigation tool that floats and lets you navigate between Chatter, Products, Friends, and more. But each of those goes somewhere interesting: Chatter goes to the Twitter Search page for Skittles (which is also the Skittles.com home page), Products takes you to Wikipedia, and Friends takes you to Facebook. In fact, it seems that only Contact Us takes you to an actual Skittles hosted page.

I’ve read different takes on this all day. I’ve seen people screaming that the economy isn’t that bad and why can’t they hire a web designer. I’ve seen others celebrate the rather, um, ballsy take on a web site. I think I fall somewhere near the middle, leaning more towards ballsy than cheap. I feel like Skittles, in relinquisihing control, has admitted that all of us folks out here on the Web actually have a clue. They’ve taken listening to the consumer to a whole new level. However, I think there needs to be a little more integration of product in there. I suppose you can get that from the Facebook Fan page, with the apps and such, but really – if I’m going to the Skittles web site, I want more information on Skittles (more branding, perhaps) from the company in conjunction with user-generated content.

This type of approach to a web site may fall into the “all publicity is good publicity” category. It seems to have moved past that, but earlier today, the Skittles twitter search was showing some rather crude comments with #Skittles in the text. It currently is showcasing people talking about the web site and or those who are using the Hash Tag for the fun of showing up on the front page. No one is really chatting about the candy. The Wikipedia page focuses on types of flavors, but doesn’t tell you anything really useful about the product. The Facebook Fan page is fun, but again, not useful in a “learn more about the product” kind of way.

The point has been made, repeatedly, that ad agency Modernista did this about a year ago. According to AdAdge.com, however, Skittles is the first consumer product to give this a try. Another quote in that AdAge article struck my fancy (emphasis mine):

An Agency.com spokeswoman said that “Skittles as a brand is all about embracing and empowering the conversation online — just look at the YouTube entries and their Facebook page. Its kind of a natural evolution for them moving in to something like this.”

Now, is that how you think of Skittles? When I think of Skittles, I think of candy that is chewy and turns my tongue colors.   I like Skittles’ approach, but I wonder, would it be more effective if they scaled it back a little and still retained of bit of their own content?

What are your thoughts on the new Skittles site?

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Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
Twitter: @writetechnology, Friendfeed: michellel
Blogs: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net