As far as American Greetings goes, their mobile video ecards work like this.  First you go to their mobile video ecard site.  Next you select an ecard.  And then you enter the mobile phone number to send it to.  Click send and you’re done.  American Greetings claims it will work with nearly all major carriers.  As far as cost, they are currently offering a yearly plan for just $15.99.

Here’s one note though: The mobile video ecards displayed on American Greeting’s site are Flash, so iPhone users might be out of luck.

We’ve done very well and our business continues to grow which is exciting… but this article isn’t meant to toot our own horn.  Instead, I’d like to introduce what I feel is the most important word companies and individuals interested in success need to know – kaizen.

The Kaizen Blitz

The word kaizen, which rhymes with dry pen, literally means incremental or continuous improvement.  Many “lean thinking” organizations practice something called kaizen events which essentially consist of a small group of people coming to together for 3 to 5 days as they “blitz” an area of their business in hopes of making it better.

Done right, kaizen blitzes are extremely powerful.  I’ve personally seen 80% productivity increases take hold in less than 4 days.

More Than An Event

But, I’m guessing many of you work alone or in very small teams, so the kaizen event may not be as applicable to you as it would to a company of 5,000 employees.  Does this mean kaizen is an irrelevant concept for you?  Absolutely not.

In fact, kaizen is much more than a rapid improvement initiative.  Kaizen, taken in the right spirit, is a way of thinking and working that challenges the idea that we’re as good as we can be – or need to be.  The kaizen mindset forces us out of our comfort zone and demands we ask a simple question, “How can we do it better?”

4 Kaizen Ideas for Web Video Producers

So how does this relate to you, the web video producer?  How can you practice kaizen?  Here are 4 tips I’d like to propose.

1. Learn something new each week. If you go through an entire week without learning at least one new skill – even a small skill – you’ve missed a major opportunity.  So, do your very best to learn something new each and every week.
2. Tidy up.  One of the “foundations” of lean is something called 5S which is a method of creating a clean and orderly workplace that exposes waste and makes abnormalities immediately visible.  Done right, 5S will drive your personal productivity through the roof – guaranteed.  Here’s a free video to introduce the 5S concept if you’re interested in learning more.
3. Benchmark others.  Every TV show, commercial, or Hollywood blockbuster you watch offers the perfect opportunity to benchmark and learn from professionals.  Keep a notebook beside you and jot ideas down as you see them.  In a few weeks you’ll have a plethora of excellent tips and tricks you can use in your videos.
4. Polish an old video.  If you’re anything like us… every video you produce gets a little better.  As such, those videos you produced 2 years ago might benefit from a little TLC.  Go back through them and make enhancement.  Improve some of those key frames, use the new After Effects skills you just learned, or improve those hideous lower thirds that make you cringe every time they appear.  In short, make something you’ve already done better.  That’s kaizen!

What do you think?

I am always interested to learn how folks in other industries view the concept of kaizen.  So, I’m curious, do you practice a form of kaizen already?  If so, how’s it working?  If you don’t practice kaizen, do you think you could benefit from it?

About the Author: Ron Pereira is the managing partner of Gemba Academy LLC.  He’s been teaching people about kaizen and other aspects of continuous improvement for more than 15 years.  He can be reached at academy at gembaacademy dot com.

Apple claims Flash is old, buggy and a battery hog.  They called Adobe “lazy”.  Apple critics claim Apple just wants to control the user experience by forcing people into the iTunes store so they can make money.  They call Apple “control freaks”.

Whatever the case, the facts are crystal clear.  The iPad does not…and will likely never…support Flash.  And the overwhelming majority of multi-media content on the web is Flash.

Flash is the Achille’s heal of the iPad.  And Adobe and HP have just gone straight after it with the unexpected preview of the HP Slate.  What is it?  It’s a tablet device about the same size as the iPad.  It has a touch screen.  It runs Windows 7.  And it fully supports Flash.

In fact, the main focus of the HP Slate announcement was Flash, Flash and Flash.  Unfortunately for HP, the Slate won’t be available until later this year.  That gives Apple the advantage because the iPad will be available in a few weeks.  But really the purpose of HP’s announcement was to make potential iPad buyer’s pause and think before laying their money down.

And if you watch their videos below, I think they may have succeeded in doing just that (even if they did go a bit overboard about Flash):

Kickerstarter is a web site where you can post your project.  If people like it…and like you…they can make small donations towards your project.  In return, you give them some type of freebie (related to your project) back.  Get enough people to make enough small donations and you can get the funding needed for your project.

It’s a lot like a PBS fundraiser where people make donations and in return they receive a coffee mug or whatever.  Except it’s all done over the Internet.

Of course there are some rules.  You have to specify an exact deadline for your project and the exact amount of money you need.  If you don’t get enough pledges or you don’t meet your deadline, you get none of the money.  If you do meet those things, the money is yours (minus a 5% fee that Kickstarter takes).

Long and short, it’s a very interesting way to get certain projects funded…based entirely on the generosity of people you don’t even know.  To learn more about Kickstarter and how it works…along with seeing live projects seeking and receiving donations, click here.

Right now, YouTube is only captioning new video uploads where the audio contains English language.  And the transcription is done using Google’s voice recognition software.  This is the same software Google uses to transcribe voice messages in Google Voice.  If you use Google Voice, you know how inaccurate this voice recognition software can be…and it will be the same with videos on YouTube.  But as Google software engineer Ken Harrenstien said “…it’s better than nothing”.

If you want to try the new auto captioning service out for yourself, you’ll need to upload a new video to YouTube.  Then click on the closed-captioning icon in the player to watch the video with captions.

The end result is that web video statistics are lagging far behind the statistics anyone can easily obtain for regular web pages.  But things are improving.

Popular video sharing site Vimeo has introduced an advanced statistical package called PlusStats.  With this new package, you’ll be able to tracks advanced statistics for your videos like loads and plays by geographic region or web site, how many people watched your video from beginning to end, playback quality of the video and more.

The catch is that PlusStats is only available to Vimeo Plus members, who pay from $10 a month to $60 a year, to be Vimeo Plus members.  In any event, their new advanced statistical package does put them ahead of the game when it comes to their major competitor, YouTube.

To learn more about the new PlusStats from Vimeo, click here.

Here are the top 10 brands on the web, the number of unique visitors and the number of hours spent on site per visitor, for January 2010:

Facebook -  7:01 hours average time on site…116+ million unique visitors

Yahoo! – 2:29 hours average time on site…137+ million unique visitors

AOL Media Network – 2:14 hours average time on site…87+ million unique visitors

MSN/Windows Live/Bing – 1:50 hours average time on site…116+ million unique vistors

Google – 1:26 hours average time on site…153+ million unique visitors

Fox Interactive Media – 1:23 hours average time on site…63+ million unique visitors

Apple – 1:18 hours average time on site…68+ million unique visitors

YouTube - 1:02 hours average time on site…99+ million unique visitors

Microsoft – 41 minutes average time on site…98+ million unique visitors

Wikipedia – 15 minutes average time on site…64+ million unique visitors

While it’s obvious Facebook is the clear winner for visitor time spent on site, how does Facebook compare, in terms of traffic, with the other top social networking sites?  Well, here’s a rundown of the numbers from December 2009:

Facebook – 100+ millions unique visitors

MySpace – 50+ million unique visitors

Twitter – 20+ million unique visitors

Classmates - 15+ million unique visitors

LinkedIn – 13+ million unique visitors

To see the full Nielsen reports, click here and here.

The company originally raised around $2.5 million from private investors, however, they failed to secure another round of financing so the business went up for sale…on eBay.  Their eBay listing had a minimum starting bid of $500,000 (with a reserve).  After 7 days, they received zero bids and the auction closed.

Most pundits believe their minimum bid price was way out-of-bounds.  While SesameVault did not disclose their revenue, they stated they have around 100 paying customers at anywhere from $49 to $199 a month, or in other words, not nearly enough revenue to justify even the minimum starting bid.

They’ll likely get scooped up by someone at a discount price…not for their small customer base, but for their technology…so if you have a pile of cash that you’re willing to gamble (um, I mean invest), there is a commercial video hosting platform for sale.

Users may also select photos from a royalty-free library provided by Fotolia, as well as adding background music provided by AudioMicro.

You are free to use any videos you create with Flixtime for both personal and independent commercial use.

Here’s the rub though. Flixtime already has one very popular and firmly established competitor…Animoto.com.  The main difference between the two, at this point, is that Animoto charges $250 a year if you want to use your video slideshows for commercial use.

If you don’t want to pay that and would like an alternative, Flixtime may fit the bill.  You can check out Flixtime by clicking here.

Sony’s as-yet-unamed concept camera is about the same size as portable point-and-shoot still photo cameras, however, it can use interchangeable lenses.  And it can shoot HD video too.

The important part here is interchangeable lenses.  That’s because by changing to a zoom or wide-angle lens, you can instantly change the look of any shot, add depth-of-field and give your video a film-like appearance.  Of course you can do that already with DSLR cameras that shoot video…the drawback is these cameras typically cost anywhere from $900-$5,000…and the individual lenses can run from the hundreds to thousands of dollars.

Sony appears to be solving these cost issues with their new camera.  But the bad news? It is still a concept camera, with currently no further information or even a release date available.