Stage Two's blog

Former Boxee Contest Winner Joins Stage Two

Melody — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:18:04 +0000

Hi everyone! I’m delighted to announce that I’ve joined the Stage Two team for the summer. Some of you may remember me from the lively competition boxee put on for us alpha users in January. Four winners – Jeremy, Nate, “Pox”, and I – were sent to Las Vegas to promote boxee at the CEA i-Stage booth at the 2009 International CES. After spending time with Stage Two and pitching boxee for four straight days, I realized that consumer tech marketing combines my passion for new technology with my creative skills into the perfect marriage. Not long after recovering from CES, Andrew called me up to offer me a summer position at Stage Two. Needless to say, I packed up Drake and Esteban (my Macbook Air and iMac, respectively), and moved to San Francisco earlier this June.

So here I am now, an act in the circus, juggling classes at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and work at Stage Two; luckily for me, I’ll be constantly learning valuable lessons from two environments that I love. I can’t wait to get hands-on with boxee again, and I must admit that the opportunity to work with Veronica Belmont and Cali Lewis – two women I have always admired – at last week’s boxee event made my inner fangirl squeal. But what really excites me is directly contributing behind the scenes to companies that I already love as a consumer, like Pogoplug and 12seconds.tv. As for boxee, I’m re-entering their world at an amazing stage of their growth!

If I’ve learned anything throughout my education and my short time in the business world, it’s that if you’re offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, then take it! It was a bold move to leave Los Angeles and plant myself in the Bay Area, but after just two weeks, it’s already been well worth it.

Unbearable anticipation finally ends: boxee to reveal winners of app dev challenge

emily — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 01:56:55 +0000

Busy tomorrow? You are now. boxee is announcing the winners of its app developer’s challenge at a bangin’ event at the Mezzanine in San Francisco. With doors opening at 6pm, the event will be hosted by glam gamer and all around tech-guru Veronica Belmont. The judges for the dev challenge include Veronica Belmont, Chris Pirillo, Cali Lewis, Ryan Block, and Avner Ronen. A 46″ Sony Bravia XBR9 will be awarded to the lucky Judge’s Choice Award winners for each of the three categories (video, music, photos). The competing devs for each category also have the chance to win the People’s Choice Award, which consists of a Drobo and 4TB of storage from Seagate. Voting is open until a minute before midnight tonight, so go to the boxee blog to get your votes in!

Want more? boxee also has huge announcements to share about the Windows launch, new partnerships (we can’t say with who, but trust us… it’ll knock you out), and the long-awaited boxee beta version.

If you’ve tried your hardest and still can’t make it to this boxee event, fear not! There will be a live stream of the entire evening thanks to justin.tv.

Remember to RSVP here and we’ll see you at the Mezzanine!

Now Recruiting A Few Good Interns

emily — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 19:10:54 +0000

Now that we’ve moved into a new office, we’re looking for a few amazing “interns” to support our team this summer. We need project acrobats who are wise in the ways of the force, college students with fresh ideas and crazy stamina who are ready to put their communications courses to work in a real environment. In short, we want people who are willing to do almost anything and learn the the ins and outs of influencer marketing and media relations.

This is a fun industry where no two days are the same, so you’ll have the chance to get your hands in different types of projects and master a LOT quickly. Our team is dynamic, young and fiercely competitive (you’ll see that in office Fooseball or Left 4 Dead matches), but we know how to enjoy ourselves while getting a lot accomplished.

Each intern will support two account executives on anywhere from 2 to 6 accounts, but should be flexible enough to adapt to new projects as needed. This internship is unpaid, so we highly encourage students to apply and coordinate with their college for course credit.

Qualifications:

Able to work within dynamic start-up environment
Fast learner and self-starting with impeccable organizational skills
Extremely strong communications skills, especially written
Strong academic standing
Good understanding of consumer technology (video, mobile, etc) with a genuine interest in new trends in tech, media, and culture
Good understanding of new media, including bloggers and social networks (e.g. you ARE the Twittersphere)
Confident and articulate, yet brilliantly creative
Brownie points to gamers, bloggers, torrentfreaks, pop culture geeks (extra bonus points if you can source the quote: “her?”)
Work hard, play ball, listen, and learn
Be professional, all the time
The rest will be determined and crafted around the individual

Our office is in North Beach, close to several MUNI stops, great restaurants/bars, and fine entertainment establishments.

If you’re interested, e-mail us:

a resume
a short bio
why you think this is a good fit for you
your favorite blog? Be honest - we don’t mind that you check out Perez or TMZ.com, but we hope it’s not all you read!

Any emails without all 4 of the above will be ignored, and probably marked as spam. Feel free to let us know if you have any questions. Otherwise, we look forward to hearing from you.

Client News: 12seconds adds new levels of Twitter integration

David — Thu, 28 May 2009 16:03:16 +0000

12seconds.tv made a big announcement today. Twitter account holders can now register for a 12seconds account using just their Twitter credentials. Their Twitter username and password will let them login to 12seconds and start posting and sharing videos. This is only a couple of weeks following 12seconds integration of Facebook connect. In addition, @ messages and DMs will now appear in your 12seconds feed, making it easier to carry on your conversations with text or video.

12seconds is well poised to be the video status platform - it’s the easiest way to share short videos. With the new iPhone coming out soon (with video capability) people will want a good way to share short videos between iPhones, and across Facebook, Twitter, and other services. 12seconds is the perfect tool for this.

As always with 12seconds, we opted for a blog post rather than a traditional press release. Nothing about 12seconds is traditional. :) The news coverage of the announcement is below, and we will update as stories appear.

Client News: Pogoplug Makes Easy Even Easier

emily — Wed, 20 May 2009 16:00:25 +0000

Since Pogoplug has been in the public eye, reviewers and customers have said how easy it is to access your external hard drive through the web. In fact, reviewers like USA Today’s Ed Baig and Andy Ihnatko at the Chicago Sun-Times commented that the hardest part of setting up Pogoplug is typing in the 26 character ID code during registration. For what this little box does, that is amazing.

But today, Pogoplug is announcing new updates that make this simple product even better, faster, stronger (do it!). They’ve added Search capability to their iPhone and web applications and sharing is now faster and more personalized. They’ve also included support for a plethora of new operating systems for their drive app. And these are just the tip of the iceberg.

This Friday, Pogoplug pushes out 3 additional updates! To complement their search function, they’ll add a sort feature that lets users sort by name, size or file type in both ascending and descending order. They’re also tacking their number one complaint (that cumbersome ID code) by adding an auto-discovery feature that automatically finds the Pogoplug ID code during registeration. And for all of the Boxee fans, Pogoplug’s new Media RSS feeds can be used as a media source to access media on your home hard drive can be accessed through the Boxee interface.

For current Pogoplug users, these updates will take place automatically (in fact, some already have). New users will get their Pogoplug updates as a part of the regsitration process. And all updates are free, just like their service. Not bad, Pogoplug!

TuneUp Now Available For Apple Retail Customers

andrew — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:09:33 +0000

We’ve called TuneUp the ‘must-have’ plug-in for iTunes for a while now… turns out others agree. As of this morning TuneUp’s iTunes plugin to quickly correct missing song info, find cover art, list upcoming concerts, and present web content relevant to any playing track (wow that’s a mouthful), is available at Apple Retail Stores and at Apple.com. As a DJ myself, the software has been a godsend for organizing my huge music collection. Additionally I’ve loved the fact that cover flow is now practical on my iPhone.

Today, over 250 Apple stores will start selling a retail-packaged version of TuneUp for $29.95. Additionally, both the retail and online versions of TuneUp now include numerous user interface enhancements and feature
improvements as we mentioned last week.

And if Apple selling TuneUp doesn’t convince you it works - listen to this… since launching the product in the summer of 2008, TuneUp has amassed over 200,000 registered users in over 150 countries, and cleaned more than 125 million songs. Stats like these enabled TuneUp to become the #1 most downloaded iTunes software from CNET’s popular site, Download.com.

So what are you waiting for - go to your nearest Apple store and get your copy (or start downloading now at TuneUp Media).

Client news: TuneUp Gets a Makeover

Jeremy — Fri, 15 May 2009 19:57:13 +0000

TuneUp Media is the maker of the TuneUp Companion for iTunes. What is it? Only the most essential add-on to your digital music collection ever. It “automagically” cleans up all the messed up metadata and cover art in your library. That’s right - no more weird question-mark symbols in cover flow, no more “Track 01s” from “Unknown Artists” and no more dual (or triple or worse) entries for “The Beatles” and “Beatles, The”. TuneUp does other wonderful things to your iTunes experience as well, but we’ll let you go explore to see it in action (you can get started for free!).

The company announced today they have a brand new fresh look and feel to the software that complements iTunes. For existing users, no new download is necessary, the upgrade will happen automatically.

Client News: Big numbers in Face.com’s first 30 Days

David — Thu, 14 May 2009 16:00:09 +0000

Last month Face.com launched Photo Finder, a facial recognition app for Facebook. Today they’re issuing a “30 Days Out” announcement which includes some pretty amazing / “holy moly” stats in terms of the number of photos scanned and the number of faces identified - and that’s given only a few thousand users in Alpha! The big deal about Face.com is being able to discover photos of yourself or your friends that you might have never even known about. The app launched last month, and in their first 30 days, with only a few thousand initial users, Face.com scanned more than 400 million photos, and identified / tagged more than 700,000 faces!

Given the magnitude of Facebook’s photo storage (15 billion photos), the buzz around facial recognition (Apple, Google Picasa, etc.), and the incredible technology they’ve built, we think Face.com is going to do some amazing things. They’ve already off to a good start (400 million photos…)

As they’ve done in the past, Face.com is issuing their news via blog post (linked above.) Several publications have written about the news, we’ll keep a running list below, and update throughout the day.

Pogoplug’s Strategy for Responsible Business

emily — Tue, 12 May 2009 18:01:56 +0000

The instability of the economy has created a lot of fear when it comes to business. People’s budgets are tighter than ever, so when considering purchasing the newest gadgets on the market, new questions are being asked of our tech startups. When they first launched, Pogoplug was greeted with some tough queries that were a challenge to answer. Many reporters and customers asked, “What happens if Pogoplug goes out of business?” While most big companies point to their track record and funding to quell those fears, Pogoplug decided to go along with their innovative instincts and create a brand new solution.

Today, Pogoplug has put their source code in an Escrow account and in the event of their bankruptcy, the code will be published on SourceForge. This strategy leaves the community stakeholders in charge, so that programmers, companies and community organizations can have complete access to rebuild and maintain the necessary servers to keep Pogoplugs working.

Pogoplug made this announcement through a post on their blog, which you can read here. A few members of the press and blogger community have picked up the story. Here’s what they have to say:

Client News: Pogoplug named PC Mag’s Editors’ Choice

emily — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 01:02:13 +0000

With their first wave of reviews out of the gate, Pogoplug has been getting some great attention from the press. Today, we got word that PC Mag not only wrote up a review of Pogoplug, but gave them their Editors’ Choice Award. Congratulations Pogoplug for a job well done! You can check out the whole article here or here’s our favorite part:

“The Pogoplug makes setup a breeze, and using the device couldn’t be easier. Beyond that, the open API may well result in useful functionality extensions. This clever unit is well worth its $99 price tag (though I suspect that considerably more units of it would be sold if CloudEngines can get the price down a bit). The Pogoplug is a great start for CloudEngine, and it’s worthy of our Editors’ Choice award.”

-Mario Morejon, PC Magazine