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.

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.

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.

Shareholder Development Group interviews Sr. VP Stephanie Miller

F3 Technologies Senior Vice President of Business Development Stephanie Miller just finished up her interview with the Shareholder Development Group. It’s posted at OTCvoice.

Stephanie discussed FargoTube‘s strengths and why musicians and other artists are using it in growing numbers.

On the road again

Back from Austin, three days in the office to review and follow up on South by Southwest, and then back on the road again, this time to Nashville. Chief Operating Officer Paul Campbell and Senior VP for Business Development Stephanie Miller drove up to Music City, USA, for two days of meetings with strategic partners and potential partners for FargoTube.

They moved forward on a nice promotion with Ditto Music, one of our top partners. Ditto just expanded from Europe to the U.S. with a new office in Nashville, and its marketing push includes a “Battle of the Bands.” Stephanie, Paul and Ditto co-founder Lee Parsons hammered out details of FargoTube’s participation. For starters, the top three bands will win their own customized tubes — fan sites — on FargoTube. FargoTube partner GigLaunch, a booking agency and clearinghouse, is also contributing prizes, as is Music2Q, a FargoTube partner that helps musicians in licensing their works to films and television programs.

On Wednesday evening, Paul and Stephanie took in a performance by — and met with — the Swon Brothers, new FargoTube users from Oklahoma who were touring last week. More news on Zach and Colton Swon as they continue to tour and record — and to post their tracks and videos on FargoTube.

F3 also met with others, including a publicist who is both using and promoting FargoTube in her own business.

All in all, the sales team had a short and sweet trip, and is following up with some breath-catching before hitting the road again in the near future.

South, southwest, and several other directions

F3’s trip to Austin for the South by Southwest festivals was quite productive and successful.

Our goals in attending were to make contacts in the film and music industries in our ongoing push for new strategic partnerships for FargoTube, to create interest among bands, labels, artist managers and filmmakers who will use the platform, and to learn more about their needs. We exceeded our goals, and we expect several of the relationships to bear fruit over the coming months as FargoTube gains partnerships, entertainment content and subscribers.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the festivals was the film component. As you probably realize, the bulk of FargoTube’s artists and users are in the music space, and the SXSW Film Festival, in the early part of last week, was our first major opportunity to introduce FargoTube to filmmakers and get their feedback. We talked with several dozen filmmakers in documentary, short-form and serials, including many whose emphasis on social-media marketing makes FargoTube an ideal platform. In the course of our conversations with filmmakers, we discovered that a couple of FargoTube’s capabilities are even more important than we had realized, and we intend to focus more of our marketing efforts on these features.

We met with quite a few entertainment-industry companies that are potential partners in fields ranging from music distribution and management to order fulfillment to manufacturers of branded merchandise. Conversations with many of these are continuing this week and beyond.

Lastly, we continued to learn more about the music industry, both in individual conversations with industry people and in the 10 or so discussion panels we attended. One of the most interesting for me was a panel on pricing strategies, which covered loss leaders and cash cows, single-track versus EPs versus full-length albums, and discussion of how ticket sales and music sales can drive one another. Another panel focused on the changing role of managers in a world where artists are expected to handle their own online social networking.

All in all, it was a very successful week, and we’ll look forward to telling you about the relationships that grow out of it as they come to fruition.

The view from Austin

The four of us have had a very busy week in Austin, Texas, where the South by Southwest music, film and interactive festival runs through Saturday.

We’ve met with a stream of musicians, managers and agents, filmmakers, venture capitalists, app developers and others in the entertainment industries. The response seems to have been pretty good. I was on my feet for nearly the entire seven hours between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m., giving FargoTube demonstrations at our trade show booth. The trade show continues through this afternoon. Frank, Paul and Stephanie have been attending two or three discussion panels every day, and “speed dating” with potential partners from entertainment and investment industries.

The fun continues tomorrow morning with a breakfast event before the trade show reopens.

More detail when we catch our breath…

Newly automated sign-up process for ICS

Homeowner associations, property managers and churches can now create online communities in Interaction Community Systems with just a few clicks, thanks to a major update to ICS that live earlier this week.

We expect the automation to encourage more groups to create communities and begin using ICS. Moreover, this frees up time for F3 Technologies staff to focus on expanding the reach of all of our platforms, for example FargoTube and its potential to help musicians and other artists to develop their careers.

We included a few more details in the press release we put out this morning.

The update has been in development for several months and in intensive testing for a couple of weeks. We’ve added several new features along the way. All of this amounts big benefits — for ICS users, potential users, and for F3 Technologies.

Yet another positive article on IDS

The Interactive Defense System is generating more news coverage, this time from 9-1-1 Dispatch.

The magazine published this article after editor Gary Allen saw earlier news coverage and asked me a few questions via e-mail. It gives a concise overview of IDS’s features and it serves as a great introduction to our platform for the police chiefs and police communications specialists who read the magazine:

IDS is a set of on-line applications that provide community alerting, crime mapping, home watch scheduling and other features that are easily accessible by anyone with an Internet connection.

… The Dunwoody (Geo.) police department was an early adopter of IDS, and officials there say a wide range of city residents are using the IDS features. DPD officials credit IDS with the recent capture of three suspects after they were profiled on the Web site.

A big thank-you to Mr. Allen and 9-1-1 Dispatch!

Early-stage buzz like this is helping to generate interest among other police chiefs in the Atlanta area and beyond. As we mentioned in a conference call yesterday afternoon, IDS is being offered free of charge to the first three to five police departments that adopt it. We’re seeing increasing indications that these police chiefs’ foresight — along with the resulting news coverage — will help to bring in paying customers in a matter of months.

Note: an initial version of the 9-1-1 Dispatch article mistakenly identified F3’s partner in IDS as “Noble Ventures, Inc.” In fact, the corporation’s name is “Noble Heroes, Inc.”

 

Up into the Attic

We’re continuing to upload music to the Eddie’s Attic fan site on FargoTube. As we announced earlier in the week, Eddie’s Attic is now using FargoTube to sell recordings from weekly performances and as a fan site.

Eddie’s Attic is a highly respected venue for musicians. It’s relatively small and intimate, which makes it especially good in a region that has more than its share of acoustic and folk musicians, and plenty of singer-songwriters. It has played an early role in the success of several well known musicians, including Sugarland and John Mayer.

We expect the weekly uploads to be popular among fans who miss a Monday and have to download, and among audience members who want recordings of their favorite tracks from the evening.  Moreover, the relationship will introduce FargoTube to  hundreds of the South’s best unsigned musicians, who represent a key market for us.

The music continues next week when we upload the music from Monday night’s performance. Stay tuned.