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I recently was looking at a friend’s pictures taken during a stroll in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park and was reminded of a horrible production day back in the 90’s.  I had been working as a production supervisor for an ultra low budget film with ultra high budget aspirations (don’t they all!).  We had a top name cast that wanted to work on this indie project and a, how can I put this, well, a lightly seasoned film crew supporting the project.

As is often the nature in small under-funded projects, I was wearing multiple hats and was stretched very thin.  On one production day we were set to shoot in Griffith Park, a sprawling, scrubby and hilly parcel of Los Angeles with winding roads and walking paths.  The assistant directors and location managers are generally the ones in charge of communicating the time and place of shooting days to the crews.

General practice is to have a map attached to call sheets distributed well before wrap so that everyone knows where to be the next day and what time he or she is due in.  On this particular day, the assistant directors had decided to move the base camp for shooting but had only managed to notify half the crew.  When I arrived on set, half the crew was in another location setting up and putting us an hour behind schedule on what was already a day with more to shoot than hours in which to work.  The 2^nd AD in charge of setting up base camp wasn’t working on fixing the problem and tried to blame our old friends Someone and Somebody.

Production should be fun and on the good days it really is fun.  On days with massive communications breakdowns, it’s no fun at all. How great would it have been to have a set of tools like Market7 that would update and automatically email the entire crew of the location change?   The cost savings alone would have been great but it would have also saved a few people their jobs that day.  To schedule a demo of Market7, contact us at sales@market7.com .

While PC Magazine has its roots in the consumer PC hardware/software market, it also publishes an excellent business-focused blog that highlights the latest innovative software and hardware, news, research, etc., geared toward biz users. A little while back, we spoke with PC Mag’s Samara Lynn and showed her video.Market7.com. She was impressed with its features and functionality and posted a brief overview on the site over the weekend.

Market7 makes it easy for anyone to collaborate on video. Keep checking back for news on the work we’re doing on that front!

In the beginning, we communicated with each other through grunts.  Life was OK.  Eventually we developed language and life was better.  Then the written word, the printing press, and the telephone evolved and life was better still.  In our lifetime, some smart people invented e-mail so we could respond when it was convenient and life was great… until someone developed a feature called Reply All.

My favorite Reply All story occurred when I was with Hewlett Packard.  Every once in awhile the HR department would send a note to the general list for the Colorado part of the company and some busy cubical dweller would hit reply all to tell the 10,000 people she had some problem and couldn’t be at the meeting on Thursday.  To which another dozen people hit reply all to tell her not to reply all. Which resulted in a few hundred more people replying to all that replying to all to not reply to all is idiotic and at some level post-modern.  Usually at this point HR sent another note out telling the employees that continuing to reply all would result in a write up since it was causing problems with the mail server.

Incredibly, Reply All has become the de facto system by which companies collaborate on projects.  Why would we use such a clunky, outmoded, gaff prone system for mission critical work and revenue generating project communications?  I’d have to say first it’s an easy way out.  Everyone already has Reply All on his or her computer.  But it’s even more the result of not being aware of better alternatives.

So here we are in 2010 an Market7 offers a better way to collaborate and communicate on projects.  By being web based anyone can be offered access to the projects without installing any software.  It’s easy to use, easy to set up and designed specifically for improved communications and efficiency.   If you’re already using it, you know life is now better.  If you’re thinking about it, sign-up free at www.market7.com/free and allow your life to get better too.

Inspiration for Market7 came from involvement I had in production of marketing videos for another technology company. Producers would complain to our company that we didn’t put in enough preparation for them to be adequately prepared for expensive shoots, we’d complain to them about the lack of clarity on how to provide feedback about video content spread across multiple files, and our engineers and marketers would argue about not-quite-right verbiage already committed in the footage. The situation screamed for a better way, so Market7 has emerged, and it also screams for parody treatment and today Scott Adams obliges.

A few releases ago we enabled people to provide their Google Calendar credentials when for when their availabilities are checked in scheduling Market7 events. We now extend that to Microsoft Outlook users too.

Here’s how someone can indicate Outlook account from Market7 My_Profile page:

And here’s how the personal calendar data (from either Google Calendar or Outlook) shows up when scheduling an appointment (the gold color is the appointment being scheduled, and the teal is pulled from someone’s personal calendar (and the darker blue is from other Market7 events)):

Back in February, we put up a blog post (User Generated Content Most Often Wrong For Enterprise) that featured the snarky “A Viral Humdinger” that playfully chided the seemingly growing number of companies relying on low-budget, user-generated content to communicate with their various audiences.

A couple of months later, we talked with FierceOnlineVideo editor Jim O’Neill about expanding the blog post into a full-blown article that took a look at the history of the introduction of new media in the enterprise, some mistakes made along the way and why those same mistakes shouldn’t be repeated with video.

Jim gave us the green light to write and Fierce recently posted the article, penned by Market7 CEO Seth Kenvin. Check it out here and start raising the bar on video production today!

When I used to produce and production manage video, I’d hire hundreds of crew members and contract with dozens of vendors.  Eventually I got to the point where I established relationships with certain crew and companies and they became my preferred production team.  After ten years producing, I had a great set of resources to call on for each project.  Unfortunately, there were two crew people who always came on board that I could never get rid of.  They had odd names.  One was called Somebody and the other was Someone.  I never did meet them in person, but they were always around.

Once I looked out onto the set at wrap and saw the security guys were no longer around.  I called over the 2^nd Assistant Director who would normally know what was up.  She informed me that Somebody told them they could leave early.  I of course asked who, only to be told again, it was Somebody.

Another day the caterer was short ten meals for us.  I know how many I had authorized on the call sheet so it was a mystery as to why we were short.  Well, apparently Someone told the caterer the wrong head count.

These two trouble makers were responsible for many rumors also.  Someone once told the crew they would be having a short day.  Somebody, on another occasion told the crew we’d be working a 20 hour day.

It sure would have been nice to have web based collaboration tools like Market7 in those olden days of the 90’s.  If we had such tools, the crew, the security guys and the caterer could all see the website for the production and would know that Somebody and Someone were wrong about almost everything said.