Natural/organic supermarket chain Whole Foods Market, is launching Whole Earth Generation, a video podcast series dedicated to raising environmental awareness among young people.
The podcast project is beginning with a search for six “fresh-faced personalities” aged 8 to 17, to be auditioned as hosts of this green-themed series. Children from all over the United States and Canada are invited to try out for the online series, premiering today and running through April 29.
“We are excited to celebrate Earth Month with this series … about eco-friendly actions and how they can make a difference,” said Heather Kennedy, Senior Coordinator of National Marketing for Whole Foods Market. “So many shoppers tell us they have learned how to be more environmentally conscious by listening to their kids. We hope this program takes that trend to an even broader audience via the Internet.”
Topics on the podcast series will address topics generated by “Generation Y and Z,” (which we guess means kids and young adults). Highlights of the series will include interviews with celebrities and peers, ideas for a sustainable future, cool green products, and how to convince skeptical families and friends that green is the way to go.
The Whole Earth Generation youth host casting call kicked off a couple days ago on YouTube. Additionally, in-person casting calls will be held throughout the month of March in some of the chain’s stores.
Submissions can be uploaded to this spot on YouTube, or youngsters ages 8-17 can show up at one of the Whole Foods Market stores on the designated audition date in New York, Chicago and Austin, for auditions.
Six winners — three from the YouTube entries and three from the in-store auditions — will be selected.
“The six young hosts will be the on-air personalities with the charge of engaging their peers and showing that tweens and teens can really influence how we protect our planet,” said Kennedy.
UK mobile developers Coolgorilla have launched the London Travel Guide, a free travel guide specifically designed for iPods, iPhones and mobile phones.
The London Travel Guide packs over 400 pages of info, along with interactive features, onto your portable media player. The guide is designed to be regularly updated, so you can have the most up to date information about each attraction, including entrance fees, phone numbers and websites.
iPhone and mobile users can simply click on the phone number of the attraction to call them up, or use the website link to go directly through to the attraction’s site to find more information.
Coolgorilla designed the iPod version to be downloaded as a podcast via iTunes and the iPhone and mobile versions have both been optimised so visitors can access the information over the handset’s web browser.
“A recent road trip through California got me thinking about how we could improve on the traditional, paperback travel guide” said Roy Forsdick, Managing Director of Coolgorilla. “By using the content rich features available on iPods and mobiles we can help travelers get the most out of their visit to London. Also, since software isn’t exposed to the same reproduction costs as hardcopy publications, we can distribute the guides for free!”
Coolgorilla is already working on similar travel guides for a number of other cities including Paris, Barcelona, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, due to be released later this year.
The company plans to make money from the travel guides through advertising deals.
A prison in the Philippines is using podcasting to share information about the jailhouse “paradise”.
The Bureau of Jail Management and Penology in Bonuan Gueset, Dagupan City, The Philippines, is now podcasting, a first among jails in the Philippines. The goal of the podcast is to disseminate information on the activities of and their projects via the Internet.
The podcast was created with the help of an inmate that wanted to use his time in jail productively. The inmate helped put together the prison’s home page and podcast at Googlepages.
By offering a podcast, the prison hopes to let busy people and the visually impaired keep up with the prison’s activities.
According to the prison, “Bilangguan man ay paraiso din sa patakarang maka Diyos at makatao (A prison is also a paradise with Godly and human policies).”
An Apple patent reveals that the company is working on a podcast aggregator that would dynamically collect the news that you are interested in and deliver a personalized news podcast, according to a report at AppleInsider.
In other words - Apple wants to be your news and information station.
The system would allow you to:
Subscribe to and personalize a podcast with software like iTunes;
Select news segments selected from a variety of categories; and
Automatically download the personalized podcast to your Apple TV, iPod or iPhone.
The custom news show could consist of a 5 minute segment from CNN on the day’s national news, a 5 minute segment from a local news station, and a 10 minute segment on sports highlights from ESPN.
In addition to offering mainstream content, the iNews service may let you integrate other podcast content:
“Upon selection of the custom button, a user can be assisted with another dialog screen to create a category of content, namely, media content, that is to be included within the custom podcast.
For example, the user may request to receive sports highlights from the weekend during the NFL season regarding specific teams or teams in the Eastern division. As another example, the user may desire to receive statistics regarding games played during the past week in the NFL.”
Once you select the playlist of content that you’re interested in, Apple’s servers would request the latest podcast content from content creators, stitch the segments together and then deliver the personalized podcast to iTunes or other podcast software. As part of this process, Apple could insert targeted advertising dynamically.
Most marketers believe that television advertising has become less effective in the past two years. As a result, marketers are interested in exploring new ad formats and new forms of video commercials, according to the the latest TV & Technology survey conducted by the ANA (Association of National Advertisers) and Forrester Research, Inc.
Highlights of the study include:
Sixty-two percent of marketers believe television advertising has become less effective in the past two years.
Close to half of the advertisers surveyed have already started to experiment with new ad types to work with DVRs and video on demand (VOD) programs.
Advertisers are eager to try new ad formats, including ads in online TV shows (65 percent), ads embedded in VOD (55 percent), interactive television ads (43 percent), and ads within the set top box menu (32 percent).
Eighty-seven percent of respondents said they intend to spend more on Web advertising this year.
Media agencies are getting better at helping clients deal with new media. Only 28 percent of respondents reported that their media agency is ill-equipped to address the changes in TV advertising, compared to 47 percent two years ago.
Creative agencies did not fare as well, with 47 percent of marketers indicating that their creative agency was still ill-equipped to help deal with changes, a slight improvement from 55 percent of marketers two years ago.
MTVannounced today that on Super Tuesday it will have 23 members of its citizen journalist Street Team ‘08 covering it:
Our enterprising citizen journalists will be on the ground, at the polling stations, caucus sites and candidate rallies, bringing you up-to-the minute news as it happens. The candidates aren’t going to be stopping on Super Tuesday, and our reporters won’t stop either.
Their real-time reports will be streamed live all day on MTVNews.com and ChooseOrLose.com, and throughout the day, MTV will break into regularly scheduled programming to showcase news featurettes and live reports from our Street Teamers (whom you can meet here).
“Young people are taking hold of the political process like never before, and are clamoring to share and react to the stories as they unfold on the campaign trail in real-time,” said MTV President Christina Norman. “The Street Team’s Super Tuesday coverage will be hyper-focused on the issues and stories that matter most to our audience, empowering them to experience the day’s historic events in a whole new way.”
Armed with Nokia N95 mobile devices, laptops and video cameras, our embedded reporters will be bringing you the action from the 23 states holding primaries and caucuses on Super Tuesday, and you will be able to follow along with an interactive map on MTV News’ and Choose or Lose’s sites. Each Street Teamer will also be blogging throughout the day on ChooseOrLose.com. An innovative application, provided by Flixwagon, powers the mobile-broadcasting technology by allowing anyone with a capable 3G phone to stream live video to the Internet and store it for later viewing.
Revision3’s slate of video podcasts, including Tekzilla, The Totally Rad Show, Web Drifter, XLR8R TV, and The Digg Reel, is taking to the skies with Virgin America, according to a TechCrunch report:
The Revision3 shows will be viewable on Virgin America’s seat-back entertainment system throughout the cabin on flights to New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Las Vegas, San Diego and Seattle. This is a big coup for Web-based video, and Revision3 in particular. The Revision3 shows will sit right alongside options for in-flight movies and satellite TV, exposing its brand of videos to a captive audience. And why not? On a six-hour flight, people will watch anything. This could help Revision3 win more fans, and expand its Web-based audience, which already watch 4.2 million videos a month. The shows will run with the original ads.
In October of 2007, Virgin Americaannounced that it has entered into an exclusive partnership with Boing Boing TV to deliver inflight daily video reports.
Revision3, the video podcasting network launched by the guys from Digg, has introduced a new weekly show, The Digg Reel, that offers 15-minutes of highlights from the highest-rated videos on Digg for that week.
“There’s so much crap out there, it’s great to have the Digg community filter out the best, but no one can watch it all,” said Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback.
You can preview Digg’s crap-free, but NSFW, Digg Reel below.
Writer’s Guild of America members plan to launch Strike TV, an Internet fund-raiser to help members affected by the strike. Set to launch in February, the online channel will feature original video shows created by working professionals in the TV and Film industry.
“Strike TV videos will not be about the strike,” according to the Web site. “This is a chance for writers to do what they do best–be original and tell stories. These shows will be self-funded and owned by their creators.”
WGA members including showrunners, staff writers and screenwriters have expressed interest in participating in Strike TV. “One of the goals of Strike TV is to demonstrate that these kinds of creative ventures can be done on the internet under union jurisdiction,” according to the Web site. (more…)
Former Microsoft blogger and Naked Conversations author Robert Scoble has announced that he’s leaving podcasting startup PodTech to take a newly created position at Fast Company:
First of all, thanks to John Furrier, James McCormick, and the entire PodTech team. I grew a lot over the past year due to the opportunities they gave me and that turned into hundreds of interviews on ScobleShow.com.
Wednesday (today) Rocky Barbanica and I are moving to work for Mansuetto Ventures. They are the producers of Fast Company and Inc. magazines. What will we be doing? Helping to build a new, interactive, online video community called FastCompany.TV which will open on March 3.
Mansueto Digital President Edward Sussman today announced the launch of FastCompany.TV, a new online video network. Scoble will serve as Managing Director of the site, which is slated to launch in March.
Scoble’s daily video series, ScobleTV, will be featured on FastCompany.TV. Scoble’s current video show receives about one million views a month. Scoble will also bring his popular blog, Scobleizer.com, to the Mansueto Digital network of sites, which includes FastCompany.com, Inc.com, IncBizNet.com and IncTechnology.com.
“I decided to join up with Fast Company because I wanted to work with a brand well known for covering innovation and technology in an authoritative, provocative manner,” said Scoble. “And I’m excited that the Mansueto Digital websites are innovating in the social media space themselves.” (more…)
Natural/organic supermarket chain Whole Foods Market, is launching Whole Earth Generation, a video podcast series dedicated to raising environmental awareness among young people.
UK mobile developers 
Former Microsoft blogger and Naked Conversations author Robert Scoble has 
