Introducing F3’s newest online solution — Website Tournament!

We hope you’ll take a few minutes to check out Website Tournament, our new online solution that brings together talented website designers and potential customers in an open, transparent market designed to deliver optimal results to both.

A business or other customer seeking design services posts a description of the site to be designed, its purpose, and a target prize amount. Designers who have registered on the site – free of charge – create and submit mock-ups. The customer chooses the winning design and pays the designer. Our revenue comes from a percentage of the customer’s prize award.

As an added benefit for both F3 and Website Tournament customers, we can follow-up the design service by hosting and managing the websites for a low monthly fee of just $149.99, including a number of monthly updates. It’s a value-added service comparable to those we’ve introduced for FargoTube and Interaction Community Systems since late last year. Another value add is that customers can opt to load completed website designs onto F3’s proprietary Ascend website content management system for a low monthly fee of $39.95.

Our CEO Frank Connor developed Website Tournament designed and developed Website Tournament after seeing how difficult it is for a small business to purchase high-quality custom website design services at affordable prices.

Several dozen page designers from at least 12 countries have already registered on Website Tournament. The platform ranks designers according to customer satisfaction, the number and type of trophies a designer has earned and other measures of feedback.

Designs not chosen remain the property of the respective designers. We can work with designers to find alternative paths to monetize those designs, for example by promoting select designs as templates in a new website theme store.

Welcoming Kwan and B-Rock

Kwan Straughn (left) and Baron "B-Rock" Agee

Friday was a fun and exciting day at the F3 office. We welcomed Baron “B-Rock” Agee and Kwan Straughn to the F3 team. They’ll be leading FargoTube’s expansion in urban music — particularly here in Atlanta, whose hip-hop scene has come to rival New York’s and L.A.’s in the last few years. Kwan and B-Rock are based here.

B-Rock was part of the hip-hop act B-Rock and The Bizz that put the single “Mybabydaddy” at the top of the charts in 1997 and the phrase “my baby daddy” into popular lingo. But his and Kwan’s experience in the music business goes far beyond that, as detailed in our press release on Friday. They’ll be introducing FargoTube to the hundreds of other musicians, producers and managers they’ve worked with in their 20-plus-year careers.

As you probably know, FargoTube has artists in all genres, with an especially strong concentration of country musicians. So I’m thinking about setting up sort of a friendly in-house competition: By this time next year, will FargoTube more country musicians? or more hip-hop musicians?

“Your Crash” makes big splash on FargoTube

We’re taking a couple of minutes here to highlight Kurt Scobie, whose video “Your Crash” has been one of the most popular on FargoTube in the last few weeks. In this video, Senior VP of Business Development Stephanie Miller tells me a bit about how Kurt came to Fargotube.

“Your Crash” is a great song and a great video, so we’d love for you to check it out. Kurt said the song was inspired by the struggles of Hurricane Katrina victims.

Will police wake up to social media?

The Cobb County Police Department robocalled me a few minutes after midnight to tell me about a 12-year-old who went missing after last being seen at East Cobb Middle School, about two miles from my house.

I’m assuming that the call was at least targeted to people who lived within a certain distance from the school, or within its attendance area, and I hate to criticize any effort to find a missing child, but this didn’t strike me as the most effective or efficient way to do it. The boy had been missing for about 10 hours, and there wasn’t any indication that he was in imminent danger. Rightly or wrongly, midnight robocalls annoy people, and may even feed into a “Boy Who Cried Wolf” dynamic in which people begin to ignore even useful alerts.

The Interactive Defense System allows a police department to send out targeted alerts based on residents’ addresses and preferences such as text message vs. e-mail vs. automatic voice call. Residents choose the method of delivery and the phone number or e-mail address to be used, so each message has a substantial chance of triggering a productive response.

IDS is built like a social-media platform, and alerts are just one of its many functions, of course. Had Cobb County police been using it yesterday, they could’ve disseminated a photo of the boy instead of relying on the extremely rough description “blue shorts and white shirt” that I half-heard as I was rubbing my eyes in the wee hours.

It looks like the 12-year-old boy who went missing yesterday afternoon was safe and sound early this morning. Whether or not the robocalls helped in this particular case is anybody’s guess.

Videocast company update

In this linked video, F3 Technologies, Inc.’s officers give a range of updates on F3 the company, on its individual software platforms — including expanded revenue models — and even on a new product that we aim to roll out in the next few months, Website Tournament. We look forward to posting more videos like these occasionally. Please feel free to share them via e-mail, social media such as Twitter and Facebook, and especially via your own channel on FargoTube.

Videocast on Friday

F3 Technologies expects to put out a videocast on Friday in order to give you an overview of recent progress on multiple fronts, and to update you on our strategies for our software platforms. We expect to post the video here.

Thank you all for your continued interest in F3 Technologies. We always welcome your questions and concerns at chris@f3technologies.com, frank@f3technologies.com, paul@f3technologies.com and stephanie@technologies.com.

FargoTube’s new gig on Gig Launch

FargoTube is now advertising a gig on Gig Launch: A band can pay $5 for a shot at winning a free custom-designed tube on FargoTube. We’ll chose five winners from among the bands that throw their name and their five-spot into the hat.

This is a cool promotion that introduces FargoTube to more Gig Launch users and, via this blog post and a link on FargoTube, also introduces Gig Launch to more Fargotube users.

You may remember our February announcement about our partnership.  Gig Launch is an Australian online booking agency that helps bands land performance gigs: A venue posts a gig, or a concert or festival with multiple gigs, and bands compete to win the spot(s) by submitting their recordings. The FargoTube gig works in a similar way:  A band pays $5 to throw its name in the hat, Gig Launch and F3 split the revenue from the entry fees, and FargoTube gets some great new musical talent. The custom tube is a $300 value over the first year.