Here’s a peek at a campaign MTV recently built for the new JBL-Roxy line of headphones. It uses Minivid to power a UGC contest and is backed by a spread of great prizes from JBL and Roxy.

Minivid made an appearance on the Rachael Ray show this holiday season as a fun web technology to help beat the winter blues.

Heather Cabot, Yahoo! Web Life Editor: “This actually allows you to animate your own show, so you basically get to create your own cartoon,” she says. “You can add your own face, you can add captions, you can add music, you don’t need to be a techie to do this, anyone can do this. It’s free!”

Minivid now has the seal of approval from both the MPAA and a top daytime talkshow. Sounds like time to start your campaign

Visit London is running an cool promotion right now — make a Minivid (of your dream vacation) and win a trip through the heart of London’s music scene (also available in Spanish and French). Even if you don’t win the trip, take the opportunity to share some memories from a recent vacation you took to the big city.

A couple other cool campaigns will be launching soon and we’ve got a big new product announcement coming. Stay tuned.

Having taken the unusual step of re-locating from San Francisco to London, the merits of the city are often on my mind. To risk offending residents of both locations by boiling it down to a sentence: the valley is better at encouraging you to take the leap and build something while London is better for selling things.

The up and downsides of each place are substantially more nuanced, and I’ll try to do it some justice soon. In the meantime though, I just wanted to point out a couple local (well, local to us) companies doing great work with live music, video creation, and social monitoring. And if you’re an entrepreneur hoping to join the growing ranks of global London startups, Seedcamp applications are open (I’ll be there as a mentor — let me know if you’ll be around).

And since the last office picture we posted prominently featured a living room, here’s a quick shot of part of the space we now share with Songkick and some other cool companies.

As you can see, we’re one areca palm closer to being able to seal the windows and never go outside again (although the weather has been quite nice since… Thursday). But until we get our hands on about a hundred more of them (to create a biodome and enjoy the fabled 20% productivity boost), the coffee machine will have to tide us over.

A quick note to highlight a cool Minivid campaign for Sony’s Year One. If you’ve ever dreamt of saying something witty to Jack Black while in ancient Rome, then today is your day!

Sysomos’ Inside Twitter report has sparked some good discussion regarding tweeting robots and the disproportionate output of the top five percent of users. But tucked at the bottom is a bit of great (and arguably more interesting) data on how we’re currently marketing through Twitter.

Twitter is clearly important to us as a group — marketers are 50x more likely than the population at large to have passed the lofty mark of two thousand friends. However, while listening can help us catch bad PR and keep an eye on key influencers, we’re still falling short spreading positive brand sentiments beyond our [relatively] tiny groups of followers.

When a real, live customer gives our brand, product, or service an enthusiastic thumbs up, we are too often the only one paying attention. Most of our customers don’t hear a thing. We are leaving huge amounts of marketing value on the table by failing to properly leverage these quieter (but equally powerful) voices. A thoughtful Amazon review creates value for months while equally thoughtful tweets have an unfortunate tendency to fall where nobody is there to hear them.

If making better use of social highlights is something that’s been on your mind, we’d love if you would drop us a note or comment with your thoughts as we get ready to move Stream into beta.

Custom faces.  A long requested feature for Minivid, and it’s about time we brought it to you.  With just a couple of clicks, you can now use your webcam or a photo to place you and your friends’ faces on our many Minivid actors.  And because we figured Rob wouldn’t mind a few more days of sleep deprivation, Minivid is now integrated with SmugMug to let you have your animation take place anywhere you desire.  Like Paris.

And yes.  Laurence really is that heroic.  Go to http://www.fuzzwich.com and let’s see some new faces.

Yesterday afternoon our extremely handsome and talented Art Department sauntered into the main work area, stroking his mustache and grinning widely at the rest of the team.

After striking a pose reminiscent of the great sculptural works of antiquity, he announced that all human-type actors in the Minivid library now have a set of facial expressions which can be applied to them.

These new actions can be accessed via the “Faces” tab at the top of an actor’s actions list (see fig 1.1 below).

Now you can make them laugh and cry at your leisure!  Toying with someone’s emotions has never been easier.  We can’t wait to see what our users make with this addition.

Enjoy!

::End of Transmission from Team Habit Global HQ::

Oh Boy!

So for you boys and girls out there that haven’t quite found your way through the magic door into animation land, Webmonkey.com has put up a rockin’ tutorial that covers the basics of Minivid. If you’re still stuck at the threshold – interested in animating, but not sure if you can – this tutorial shows you exactly how easy it is to make a cool animation.

Thanks Webmonkey! We love you guys as much as we love ice cream. And, oh man, do we love ice cream.

Until next time, remember kids: coffee grinders are not for putting in microwaves. (that’s what bad, 80’s hair metal CDs are for)

Sometimes you just gotta dance.  Or give flowers.  Or pull out a huge automatic weapon and rabidly fire away. Thanks to the hard work of Rob (programming) and Laurence (art),  Minivid just got a really exciting upgrade.  When speech bubbles and movement just aren’t enough to express your creativity, the Minivid cast now has a plethora of animated actions (get it?)  to really liven up your animation.  Check out the action centric Minivid below.

Actions work very similarly to speech bubbles.   Select an actor, press the   button,  and choose the most enticing action.  Just like that, the action is added to your Minivid and will playback right on cue!

We’re really excited about the options actions bring to the Minivid table.  And even more so, as always, we are really looking forward to the creativity and genius of the Fuzzwich community to take actions in all kinds of unique directions.

So stop reading and take action!
Don’t leave without some satisfACTION!
Be sure to create a thermonuclear reACTION

Ok. I’m done.  Really.

Have fun!