Integration with Ditto

FargoTube’s relationship with Ditto Music is developing and taking shape very nicely, as evidenced by Ditto Music’s new website, which we designed, and which went live last week.

The website is exciting for a couple of very important reasons. First, it’s the next step in the integration of FargoTube with Ditto Music’s metadistribution service. Tracks uploaded to Ditto are getting onto FargoTube in about 24 hours. Ditto gets huge numbers of new tracks every day, so we’re looking forward to a lot of new music and new artists on FargoTube in the coming weeks.

The uploading process is pretty simple for both sites, which makes them both a dream come true for musicians who are handling the business end of their own careers. It takes about 10 minutes to sign up for Ditto and upload a track. My colleague uploaded one Friday afternoon and it was live on FargoTube by Saturday afternoon. Voila!

The second big thing is that Ditto’s new site shows the degree of personalization and customization that FargoTube offers. We’ve emphasized repeatedly that FargoTube is not just another online music store. It’s a platform for creating a social network, a fan site, and a fully developed custom website, all of which turn great music into financially sustainable careers. We’ve also demonstrated that with the websites we’ve developed and launched in recent months for Coles Whalen, the Swon Brothers, Anthony Snape and several other artists, but the Ditto site reaches more musicians in a single fell swoop.

Those websites are available at a range of different levels of customization, sophistication and price points, as we first discussed in January. Musicians and other artists can create their fan sites within FargoTube — or “tubes,” as we also call them — on a completely free basis, using customization tools available on FargoTube.com. For $24.95 a month, an artist can choose a similar format but with custom page design.  A fully customized tube with multiple pages and an online store is $249.95 a month. That range of services — from a sleek, customized and free direct-sales channel to a competitively priced, fully developed website — is a really big deal for artists, for their fans, and for F3 Technologies and its shareholders.

On a separate but related note, it sounds like our services and our partnership with Ditto are creating ever more buzz in Nashville, “Music City, USA,” where Ditto recently opened its North American office and where a large number of FargoTube users are based. Ditto’s new website and its integration with FargoTube can only fan that buzz and continue translating the buzz into growing amounts of music for fans, growing numbers of fans for musicians, and growing numbers of paying subscribers for musicians and FargoTube. FargoTube’s subscriber count hit 800 last weekend and is closing in on 900.

Stay tuned for more. It’s definitely coming.

FargoTube’s growth curve

FargoTube has added users and subscribers at a quickening pace since its launch last summer. Growth has accelerated particularly strongly since early last week, when we completed and launched Dittomusic.com for Ditto Music, a popular metadistribution service with offices in Liverpool, U.K.; and Nashville.

This chart shows FargoTube‘s growth since early December:

As we mentioned in a press release last week, Dittomusic.com is integrated with FargoTube.com, which means we’re getting a substantial portion of the songs flooding onto Ditto. Moreover, that flood is growing and we’re aiming to increase the percentage of Ditto users who also use FargoTube.

We’re also confident that latest artists joining FargoTube will serve as effective word-of-mouth advertising as other artists have, particularly once fans and other artists see the custom websites and custom video/music tubes that we can develop for them.

Letter from CEO Frank Connor

Good morning my fellow shareholders,

On behalf of myself and our impassioned team here at F3, I’d like to thank you for your continued support of our emerging technology company.  2011 has set us off on a frantic pace to achieve seven key objectives to better position the company for success in the near future.  Specifically we set out to:

1. Update the FargoTube business model to include monthly fees for use of our professionally designed and custom themes.
2. Update the FargoTube platform to allow increased monetization options by allowing customers to set pricing options for the streaming, downloading, and renting of all media types.
3. Complete the new Ditto Music digital distribution platform to 1. Increase the amount of music and video content to FargoTube and 2. Increase the number of users using FargoTube as their straight-to-consumer fan site presence.
4. Integrate Ditto Music’s distribution capabilities into FargoTube to enrich the ecosystem of services we provide to the music industry and greatly enhance the revenue generating capabilities of the FargoTube platform.
5. Update the Interaction pricing model to generate greater interest across the board for all customer types.
6. Completely automate the payment and on boarding process for our Interaction product and re-tool and re-launch the Interaction website to take advantage of this completely automated process.
7. Launch a new technology to complement and enhance the design capabilities of all of our major platforms.

I am happy to announce that we are on target to meet or launch all seven of these key objectives by the end of April.  As a whole the company has positioned itself very well over the past 15 months and I feel we are in the early phases of a major surge in company growth.  In the last two weeks alone the company has added roughly ten new customers to the FargoTube and Interaction platforms and we expect to be able to announce major milestones in the expansion of both platforms in the weeks to come.

The next few months will also show investors and customers alike some new innovations the company has been working on as well as some investments the company has made in an effort to establish long term stability and revenue growth.  The company will continue to execute its business plan to go after the $67.6 billion music industry and 300,000 home owner associations and 100,000 churches nationwide.   As the company’s largest shareholder I am extremely excited about the current state of our company and the continued revenue growth we’ve shown over the last several quarters.  With our objectives met and several new revenue-generating products coming soon to the marketplace I continue to expect revenue to grow steadily in the quarters to come.  As such I continue to hold and maintain my position in what I believe to be one of the most innovative companies in the world.

Sincerely,

Frank Connor

Chief Executive Officer
F3 Technologies Inc.
Frank@F3Technologies.com

F3 executive discusses Interactive Defense in interview

In an interview with Tony Golden of the Shareholder Development Group today, Chief Operating Officer Paul Campbell gave an overview of the Interactive Defense System, its business plan,  its market opportunities and its revenue streams.

He went into more detail on IDS’s sales strategies, including geographical synergies, how we focus on regional clusters of police departments and our plans to expand our sales staff.

Paul discussed F3’s Interaction Community Systems HOA-management platform with Tony earlier this month. Paul and Senior VP of Business Development Stephanie Miller have each talked with Tony about F3’s FargoTube entertainment platform.

F3 exec discusses property-management platform in interview

Tune in to hear F3 Chief Operating Officer Paul Campbell and Tony Golden discussing advances in our Interaction Community Systems online communications and management application for homeowners associations and churches.

Paul explains how we’ve refocused Interaction‘s business model to expand our marketing outreach: automated registration and online demos in order to reach out to churches and individual HOAs in a manner that’s both more convenient for them and more cost-effective for us. This will also allow us more time to target property-management companies, thus reaching “not 100, but 1,000 or 10,000”  HOAs, as Paul put it.

Example management dashboard

Paul and Tony discuss the key function we’ve introduced for management companies: the ICS management dashboard. A dashboard is sort of a internal home page — the first screen that you see after logging into an online platform, which gives you an overview of all the functions available to you. I saw mine in WordPress after logging on and just before clicking through to create this post. F3 developed the management dashboard with input from property managers who want to get a more thorough and immediate understanding of what’s happening and what needs to be done in each of their HOAs.

ICS’s new automation, new marketing focus, new dashboard coincide with new payment processing capabilities and an updated and newly redesigned website. Please check it out after listening to Paul’s interview if you haven’t done so already.

Why F3’s revenue is growing

We’re thrilled at the revenue growth of nearly 50 percent in the fourth quarter (QoQ basis) that resulted from new Interaction clients and new FargoTube users.

As we mentioned in a press release this morning, this is in line with the forecast we gave on a conference call in December and it reflects the value that customers see Interaction and FargoTube.

Now with nearly 700 subscribers, FargoTube has expanded even more swiftly since the end of the fourth quarter, thanks partly to our partnerships with other companies whose business models are transforming music and entertainment industries. That growth will be reflected in future revenue and earnings reports as we integrate more completely with these partners.

Shareholder Development Group interviews F3’s COO, Paul Campbell

Chief Operating Officer Paul Campbell talked with CEO Tony Golden of the Shareholder Development Group earlier today. Here’s a link to the interview.

Paul discussed the web of partnerships that we have created as an ecosystem of profitability for FargoTube clients. Through these partner companies, FargoTube offers a range of tools that help artists to monetize their works, including live performances, video and music recordings, and high-definition still images. As Paul described in the interview, we use the word “ecosystem” to mean “a collection of complementary products and services that, when they come together, enhance each other … a way for the artists to create sustainable careers.”