We have a new site. Check it out at memelabs.com.

Don’t worry — we’re still blogging. We’ve combined forces with our parent company Invoke Media and created what has been deemed the best blog on the Internet. (At least, the best blog on the Internet, according to my mom.) You can subscribe to receive our blog updates here.

What else can you find us? Well you can follow our Twitter updates, subscribe to our YouTube channel and like us on Facebook!

We’ve been working hard with new clients, seen some great success with past contests and are currently running a couple of hot contests.  Here’s the 411:

Current contests:

1.  The YOUR PBS Video Contest

This video contest is currently closed for submissions, but is an open-range for voting.  After a bit of a slow start, we’re thrilled with number of video submissions, comments and votes the PBS Video contest has seen.  In total, there have been a total of 60 video entries, 240 comments, and 5977 votes to date. WOW.  The grand prize announcement is set for next week: One lucky winner will be heading to Austin for a behind-the-scenes view of insider-only previews of upcoming PBS programs. If thats not amazing enough, there is also a chance that the winning video will be airing on PBS.  Be sure to check out the current video leaders: “Jeramiah Mayhew – My PBS” and “Online To Explore.” Tell your friends and vote for your faves.

MINImemes:
A minimeme brings memelabs to the masses with turnkey-based competitions designed and administered by the company.

2. Victory Poker
Think you’re the next Victory Poker Pro?  The Grand Prize for this contest includes a fully furnished condo on the Las Vagas strip, $100K of tournament buy-in cash, a new car, new watch, and more. Maybe it’s beginners luck, but this recently launched minimeme contest already has 10 video entries and 215 votes. Submit your own video to win today!

3. Deb Yearbook Video Contest!
Whether you rock the street, the beat, or plan to rock this world, Deb Shops (www.debshops.com) want to see it!  For this video contest, show your best stuff in any or all of three categories pulled straight from your yearbook – Most Talented, Best Dressed, and Most Likely to Save the Earth! The prize for the “Most Talented” is a trip to NYC to see a Broadway show with Broadway Producer and Actor Ron Sharpe (includes airfare, one night hotel, 2 Broadway tickets, and $500 spending money).  The “Best Dressed” winner will win a wardrobe for every season!  Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter ($500 for each season), and a personal style consultation with Jay McCarroll.  If you win Most Likely to Save the Earth you’ll receive $1,500 to use in support of your own idea or project.  On now until June 28, 2010.

Closed:

Get Schooled

Ever wanted to ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange?!  In this essay contest, one lucky winner did just that, on April 28 in celebration of Financial Literacy Week.  Submitters nominated a student or teacher who they believed had gone above and beyond in math education.  The contest was  hosted by Viacom and by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Coming soon:

Memelabs & Facebook, together at last!

Facebook, you’ve heard of it right? The behemoth of a social networking site continues to grow and grow – and so does memelabs! Just imagine: running an entire video contest in Facebook!  Your users are already there, the ability to share with your current contacts is easy and advanced search results help target specific demographics.  The amazing memelabs dev team is working hard to make the marriage of memelabs and Facebook a successful one – allowing people to enter the contest through Facebook and easily sharing contending videos with their friends on their own Facebook pages. If you would like more information on this hot new feature, please contact us.

Check out this meme-licious list compiled by Greg Rutter (his second, btw).  This list is pure gold, listing all the clips that make watching hours of online video so, so worth it.

You’ll notice that individuals aren’t the only ones contributing viral videos to the internet, but brands are also taking flint to stone, igniting memes across the interweb in an attempt to gain notoriety amongst their advocates online. The growth of online video marketing can be seen particularly by the number of brands who have a YouTube channel. For example, fifty-nine percent of U.S. companies in the Fortune Global 100 have YouTube channels compared with 52% in Europe, 35% in Asia-Pacific and 33% in Latin America.

Our staff favourites from Rutter’s list include both user generated content as well as brand advertising. We want to know which ones are your favourite and if you have one that isn’t listed.

Staff favourites include:

06) Autotune The News
– @d1337
30) Otter’s Holding Hands
– @kateleg
52) Slap Chop Rap
– @quikness
Not included) Old Spice Commercial: The man your man could smell like
– @6oz

If you’d like to know which others are worth watching, or how memelabs can help your business with video marketing contact us at info@memelabs.com.

Well, it’s halfway through the month and it’s time you showed off your progress in person! Join us at Dip Your Upper Lip and tell us about your man-scaping plans. Our wonderful friends at The Diamond (6 Powell Street at the corner of Powell & Carrall in Gastown) will conjure up cocktails and canapes from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm on Thursday, November 19th.  Plenty of inspiration and official Mo’ swag will be circling. And Momositas, the men need your support. Come enjoy an extra frothy cocktail and dress that upper lip!

Not sure how to style your mo’? Event partner Dermalogica will be on hand to provide “shave-mapping” consultations, mini-treatments, and other goodies.

Memelabs has been enlisted by the Movember Foundation to help raise awareness for the cause by hosting the global Movember video contest, which you can read more about in the Vancouver Sun. It’s time to reinstate an under-appreciated facial accessory to its rightful position of glory. Accordingly, we’ll be floating around the room, cameras in hand, documenting your mo’ progress and mo’ stories.

RSVP HERE: Vancouver Tweet Up

We look forward to seeing you on the 19th. Don’t forget to share your Mo’ videos at http://memelabs.com/movember!

For any additional inquiries or information regarding sales please don’t hesitate to contact us:

Email: info@memelabs.com
Phone: (604) 484-8902

You like us, You really like us!

Photo Credit: Dustin Sacks SillySoft Games

All kidding aside, we’re all super excited to have won the New Media BC‘s People’s Choice 2008 Award for Best User Generated Content or Crowdsourced Content Site. Nadia and I had an incredible time at the Awards Ceremony and Gala – as you can see in the pictures. We were extremely honoured to be nominated for this award and ecstatic that we won.

We couldn’t have done this without you – as it is the People’s Choice Award – so Nadia, myself, and the entire team at memelabs would like to give you our most sincere thanks for making memelabs what it has become today and for getting your vote on to help us win!!

We were up against some excellent competition and want to congratulate the following teams for the excellent work they have done. We were honoured to be competing against you.

• BussPass: Travels in Urbanity
• Changeeverything.ca
• Dare to be Digital: The Online Learning Challenge
• NowPublic.com
• Planetwide Media: Speed Racer Comic Book
• Protagonize: Story Writing Community
• Strutta
• Zeros 2 Heros: The Peoples Publisher

Photo Credit: Phillip Jeffery on Flickr

I also want to congratulate all of the other nominees and winners at the awards.

• Best Digital Animated Short: PSYOP, for Coca-Cola “Happiness Factory, the Movie”
• Best Digital VFX: Ubisoft, for Assassin’s Creed
• Best Game (Console/PC): Metanet Software and Slick Entertainment, for N+ on Xbox 360 / XBLA
• Best Game (Casual): Acronym Games, for Rocketmen: Axis of Evil
• Best Mobile (Game): The Saints, for NavBall
• Best Mobile (Application): CellMap Inc, for CellMap
• Best Digital Campaign: Rainmaker Entertainment and Zeros2Heroes Media, for A ReBoot ReLaunch
• Best Digital Score: Clicktoy Interactive Inc., for The Meadow
• Best Do-Gooder site (Social Change Initiative): smashLAB, for DesignCanChange.org
• Homegrown Award (Best BC-based Venture): smashLAB, for MakeFive.com

We’ve been nominated. Memelabs is up for ‘Best User Generated Content Site’ for New Media BC’s annual PopVox awards. This year, there are 11 categories in which companies were nominated. We’re really excited that memelabs has been recognized and we are up against some great companies.

So this is where you come in. The winning company is chosen by popular vote. So give us a vote and spread the word to your friends, family, and pet dog! Create a user account and vote for us here. The voting process is more than a bit convoluted, so I’ve broken out the steps for you below or if you already have an account, just follow this link. We know you all are great at rallying the troops for votes as we’ve seen the spectacular results you’ve gotten for your videos. Now we humbly ask you to do it for us. Cheers.

1. Click the register icon in the upper right-hand corner
2. Fill in your user name and email
3. Check your email and click the link in your confirmation email
4. Return to the site and login
5. Click ‘Gallery’ in the top level menu
6. In categories, click the box labeled ‘Usergen Content Site’
7. Scroll down to Memelabs and click on the title.
8. FINALLY, you can vote by clicking the VOTE FOR ME button

Memelabs gets some great coverage in this article. She profiles two of the contests that we are currently hosting – The Little Penguin ‘Pick-up Project‘ and GardenState Life ‘Expect the Unexpected‘. Go check it out, it’s a great read.

We have refocused the homepage from the latest videos to more prominently showcase our active branded video contests. We currently have four video contests active – Gallery Furniture, Garden State Life, the Little Penguin, and our newest contest that we’ve just launched – Texas Instruments Vision for Voice. Check out the contests, take a look around, and let us know what you think about the changes.

**Update: Dario told me that I need to inform you all that these pics were all taken from my iphone that work gave me for Christmas

This was the first year that I’ve attended Northern Voice and I have to say it’s the best conference I’ve been to. I was only able to make it to the Friday sessions or MooseCamp (thanks to Boris Mann for letting me come to the Friday even though the tickets had sold out well in advance) and I’m still kicking myself for forgetting to buy a ticket to the Saturday sessions. After a dazed and confused call to the office asking them to Google maps some directions as I was beyond lost trying to navigate my way around UBC, I managed to find the venue. It was at the UBC Forestry Science Center on Main Mall (and unlike the name implies Main Mall is not a main street, hence the frantic call to the office for directions – have I mentioned that I love Google Maps).

The day started bright and early with more than a couple of bleary eyed attendants who’d had too much fun the night before at the Tiki Dinner. Once caffeine had been imbibed and people started to perk up, we started the day with some human graphing. Questions were shouted out and we formed orderly lines – as Canadians are apt to do – that corresponded to each participants answer. It was really interesting to see where people fell in relation to the questions – they ranged from when you started blogging to how many times do you link out in your blog posts.

Once the games were over, Boris started the morning scrum to plan the sessions for the day. I really loved how Northern Voice handled the organization of conference speakers. On the conference wiki, anyone could sign up to give a talk on the subject of their choosing and if you missed this opportunity to sign up, you were able to announce your topic at this time. As Boris shouted out the session topics, anyone who wanted to attend a given session raised their hands and time slots and rooms were given out accordingly. From this we planned our day and were off to the first sessions.

The first session that I went to was “Being a Blogging Network Backed Blogger” presented by David Peralty from Splashpress Media, this session strayed off of the initial focus and became a discussion on how to monetize a blog. I was sitting with Tod Maffin of the CBC in this session and he was keeping a twitter count of the number of times that ‘monitize’ was said during the presentation – we counted 14.

Instead of going to the next session like a good conference goer should, I decided to play hooky with Phillip Jeffery and Beth Snow (who wore the best knee high boots in the place) and I grabbed a Venti extra hot non-fat vanilla americano misto (I dare you to try and say that 3 times fast) mmm tasty.

The next session was “Using virtual collaborative spaces in a heavily-managed, locked-down world” presented by Bonnie Johnston. This was a discussion on problems encountered in heavily regulated environments and the solutions that people who have worked in these environments have come up with. My partner in crime in this session was Phillip Jeffery pictured to the left.

We were then off to a much needed lunch break – my caffeine high from the morning Starbucks jaunt was beginning to wear off. We dined on tasty sandwiches and I stole borrowed Beth’s computer and updated her twitter feed to tell everyone that she was eating tasty cheese morsels for lunch – this took 3 twitter updates in total. Lunch also gave me a chance to scope out the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) laptops that were at the conference. They were even more awesome in person than they are on the internet, I love their shrekesque look and the idea behind them.

After lunch I stopped by the Photocamp session and learned more in 20 minutes about photography that I’d learned since I got my first digital camera. My favorite bit from this session was Rachael Ashe’s – light painting. This process allows you to take absolutely breathtaking pictures.

The last session of the day for me was the one that I was looking forward to the most. It was Megan Cole‘s “Social Media Mecca“. We were to meet in one of the smaller rooms, but there were so many of us and the weather was more than unseasonably awesome, that we moved the session to the grass courtyard. It was great to meet some many other Social Media Marketers in Vancouver. With the sun shining upon us and a couple of dog blankets hastily pulled from cars, we got a really good conversation started on the state of social media in Vancouver and ways in which to create a trusted community of social media marketers in Vancouver. I think that this gathering will be the first amongst many in the future.

I didn’t make it to Saturday, but from everyone that I’ve spoken to and from what I’ve read, it was another fabulous day. Read more about Northern Voice here and see some great pictures here. I’d like to thank Boris and all of the volunteers (who were decked out in awesome sheriff badges) for all the hard work that they put in to make this conference the phenomenal success it was and I can’t wait till Northern Voice 2009 when I will ensure that I have tickets to the whole darn thing.