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Catch Our Webcast of Magic: the Gathering Pro Tour Philadelphia!

Posted Sep 2 2011 by in Aaron Booker, Webcasting, Wizards of the Coast with 0 Comments

The entrance hall at the Philadelphia Convention Center

Our fearless leader Aaron Booker is on the road again, this time stationed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to provide IT and webcasting services for the Magic: the Gathering Pro Tour tournament! Magic is a nearly two-decade-old collectible card game played by thousands of people worldwide, sometimes with thousands of dollars of prize money on the line. This Sunday’s tournament is sure to be extra-exciting, because the gurus behind Magic are rolling out a whole new gameplay format that promises to level the playing field.

To watch the webcast, head over to this page on Sunday, September 4th by 11am EST. Here’s a handy way to find out what time you can tune in in your time zone:

  • Los Angeles: 7:45 a.m.
  • Chicago: 9:45 a.m.
  • New York: 10:45 a.m.
  • Rio de Janeiro: 11:45 a.m.
  • London: 3:45 p.m.
  • Paris: 4:45 p.m.
  • Berlin: 4:45 p.m.
  • Rome: 4:45 p.m.
  • Moscow: 6:45 p.m.
  • Tokyo: 11:45 p.m.
  • Sydney: 12:45 a.m. Monday

Remembering Jim Locke

Posted Aug 24 2011 by in SBS with 0 Comments

When we lost Jim Locke this month, we lost a pillar of the SMB community. Jim was a great man, who never ceased in his efforts to grow the community and develop strong relationships with vendors and SMBs. Jim was the president of IT consulting firm ResultWorx, and received the SBS’er of the Year Award for his work with SMBTN.

Jim leaves behind his wife Marilyn and son Brian. Following Jim’s vision that Brian go to college, SMBTN has set up a fund to allow Jim’s SMB community friends to contribute to Brian’s college fund. To learn more, go to http://www.smbtn.org/JimLocke.htm

Below are some moments in Jim’s life which we captured on tape. Please join us in remembering Jim.

Why You Can’t Afford Not to Have Captions on Your YouTube Videos

Posted Jul 22 2011 by in SEO, YouTube with 0 Comments

These days, every SMB wants SEO to boost their ROI so they can make an IPO and eventually, one day, STFU and BBQ on a warm, sunny beach somewhere. But what we’re all finding is that it’s not that easy. As Google and Bing continually re-structure their search algorithms, some time-tested strategies break down, and some new strategies emerge. The important thing, as the plethora of new social media experts know, is to ride the tide between consumer activity and technological advancement – to pay attention to what’s being searched for, and how those searches work.

Recently, YouTube added the Caption & Subtitles functionality to all YouTube videos. It’s simple to use – you just type out a plain-text file of everything that’s said in the video, and upload it to YouTube. But here’s the exciting part – YouTube’s given us yet another SEO opportunity, in addition to titles, descriptions, and keywords: your video can now be found by searching for a phrase present in the subtitles.

And the potential SEO benefits are only one reason to add captions to all your videos – you never know who your next client will be. Perhaps theres a deaf business owner in your city right now, who desperately needs better IT support. Maybe they’ll search and find you, and maybe they won’t – but if your video has captions, the chances are better that they will.

So don’t waste another minute! You spend time and energy thinking of the right keywords and phrases for your website, why not spend a little more writing out some subtitles? I think I’m going to get started right now.

Varvid Facilitates Webcasting at WPC 2011

Posted Jul 12 2011 by in Varvid Team, Webcasting, WPC with 0 Comments

This week’s Worldwide Partner Conference in Los Angeles is not only the biggest IT industry conference in the world, it’s also an event rich with ideas, opinions, and innovations. Of course, not everyone can make it to California for a week out of the office. Fortunately, Varvid, in partnership with the Microsoft Partner Network and Mimecast, is here to facilitate a whole week’s worth of free webcasts that boil down WPC’s big announcements and insights into three round-table discussions each day.

You can tune in to all the shows at the Microsoft Partner Network site, at our sister site Varvid.tv, or on Facebook.

Here’s the schedule:

MONDAY

1pm – 1:30pm ~ Feat. Mary Jo Foley, Ray Wang, Kelvin Kirby, Patri Salonen, Mark Drapeau, and Angus Fox ~ Hosted by Katlen Tillman

3pm – 3:30pm ~ Feat. Peter Sandiford & others ~ Hosted by Aaron Booker

5pm – 5:30pm ~ Day in Review ~ Feat. Judy Kolde, Eric Ligman, Birger Steen, Dux Raymond Sy, and David Saele ~ Hosted by Katlen Tillman

TUESDAY

1pm – 1:30pm ~ Winning with the Cloud & A World of Smart Devices ~ Feat. Angus Fox, Justin Pirie, Anders Tolle-Schulz & others ~ Hosted by Katlen Tillman

3pm – 3:30pm ~ Evolution of Microsoft Partner Network ~ Feat. Dave Seibert, Ro V. Kolakowski, York Hutton & others ~ Hosted by Aaron Booker

5pm – 5:30pm ~ Day in Review ~ Feat. Liza Sisler, Balz Wyss, Eric Ligman, Stuart Williams, Anders Trolle-Schulz, and Peter Bauer ~ Hosted by Katlen Tillman

WEDNESDAY

1pm – 1:30pm ~ TBA ~ Hosted by Katlen Tillman

3pm – 3:30pm ~ Seeding the Cloud ~ Feat. Harry Brelsford & others ~ Hosted by Aaron Booker

5pm – 5:30pm ~ Day in Review ~ Hosted by Katlen Tillman

THURSDAY

1pm – 1:30pm ~ TBA ~ Hosted by Katlen Tillman

3pm – 3:30pm ~ Peer-to-Peer Partnering & WPC 2011 Wrap-Up ~ Feat. Arlin Sorensen & others ~ Hosted by Aaron Booker

Meet the Hosts

 

Aaron Booker is the co-founder and President of Varvid, a video production company dedicated to helping IT professionals leverage online video for their businesses. Aaron has over thirty years of experience in the industry and prides himself on staying abreast of developments and happenings in the IT world. Aaron hosts webcasts at 3pm daily. Follow his tweets at @aaronbooker.

 

 

Katlen Tillman is a digital marketing professional whose collaboration-centric approach has led to successful outcomes time and time again. Katlen hosts webcasts on behalf of the Worldwide Partner Group at 1pm and 5pm daily. Follow her tweets at @katlen.

HTG Launches New Peer Group for Companies with 50+ Employees

Posted Jun 7 2011 by in Arlin Sorenesen, ConnectWise, HTG Peer Groups with 0 Comments

HTG has done it again. Longtime friends of Varvid, HTG has always led the way in bringing IT professionals together in peer groups to discuss issues, solve problems, and act compassionately. Now, HTG is launching a new kind of peer group: HTG50+ powered by IT Nation. HTG50+ is engineered specifically for IT companies with more than 50 employees.

“Larger firms have distinct advantages as well as challenges in strategic planning, finance, corporate culture, human resources, marketing and business development,” said Arlin Sorensen, founder and CEO of HTG Peer Groups. “At a time when our industry is evolving rapidly, HTG50+ powered by IT Nation, backed by the expertise of ConnectWise and the support of colleagues, provides these members with all the benefits of the peer group model.”

What makes HTG50+ even more distinct from its predecessors is its meeting structure: The CEO-level executives will meet quarterly, and twice-yearly the HTG50+ peer group meetings will be attended by the member companies’ whole management staff, rather than a single representative. This new model of peer management team to management team interaction will create a more effective way of transferring ideas between companies rather than expecting one person to carry all the ideas back to their team for execution.

Also in recent HTG news, Cisco, Intel, and Varvid have joined HTG-V1, HTG‘s first peer group for vendor executives, which was formed in early 2010.

The Internetageddon Approacheth – In the Meantime, Let’s Make Good Video

Posted Jun 6 2011 by in SEO, Varvid Team, VENUE Packages, Video Delivery with 0 Comments

The year 2012 is prophesied to be our last. But for those with their ears to the ground, a different sort of apocalypse looms, and a couple of great blog posts over at ReelSEO in the past few days are truly signs of the times. The first, which breaks down Cisco‘s recent Visual Networking Index, tells us that global bandwidth use is increasing at a frightening pace. It’s increasing so quickly, in fact, that many analysts think the rise in online video consumption will eventually break the Internet. Just look at these graphs:

Clearly, we don’t have much time. Fortunately, film writer and director Steve Stockman has stepped forth and written a book of of tips and tricks for making video worth watching in the precious moments we have left – Video that Doesn’t Suck. In his post at ReelSEO, Stockman laid out some great starting tips. Here are a few of his suggestions as they appear in the ReelSEO article:

1) The Audience Comes First.

Think about your video in terms of the experience it’s going to provide for them. If it isn’t going to take them on a fun, emotional ride, maybe your project should be a memo instead. Give the audience a good time and they’ll love you. And vice versa.

2) Keep Your Video Short.

That movie trailer you hated because it showed you the whole movie? Two minutes and thirty seconds long. Your favorite Superbowl TV spot: 30 seconds. Average time spent looking at a web page? 15 seconds. A sales video longer than 3 minutes? Unless it’s for Victoria’s Secret and directed by Martin Scorsese, don’t even think about it. Take the length you intuitively think your video should be, and cut by 2 thirds. That makes your ten minutes sales video about 3 minutes. Which will still be too long if it isn’t great.

3) Bad Sound, Bad Lighting, and Bad Photography Will Kill You.

It’s disrespectful to ask your audience to suffer through dark scenes, hollow, echoey audio, or brain-hurting camera bounces. Worse: they’re instant tune-outs. If it looks bad on camera’s little screen, it won’t get better when you look at it later. Cut it from the finished video.

Here at Varvid, we’ve always held that video – particularly video for businesses – should not suck. That’s why we try to provide all the essential tools our clients need to make great videos – videos that potential clients and business partners will want to watch. With our VENUE packages, we’ll handle the editing, music, graphics, and social media integration. We’ll even train you to abide by Steve’s suck-less rules with our webinars and online video tutorials. To learn more, follow this link or call us at (360) 738-7168.

Equus Launches New Comprehensive Managed Services Solution

Posted May 26 2011 by in Managed Services, Varvid Partners with 0 Comments

At the recent Autotask Community Live! event, Equus Computer Systems officially launched its new Complete Managed Service package. In addition to the staggering lineup of outside vendors contributing to Equus’ offering, Equus is incorporating its own long history as a hardware supplier by including a Hardware-as-a-Service component. This new, totally comprehensive solution makes it possible for channel partners to provide a single monthly price for hardware, software, and services, with zero investment. We at Varvid are proud to say that Equus has chosen to include us, along with Kutenda, as part of their E-Marketing offering.

According to their press release, the Equus Managed Service Solution includes a web-based e-commerce portal that allows partners to custom-configure any and all of the products and services provided by Equus. Not only will all configurations be displayed with the monthly price and suggested retail price, but the portal will also show users their recurring revenue profit, summarizing the profit potential of their entire service offering to their clients.

Other channel heavyweights included in the offering are Level Platforms for Remote Monitoring/Management, Live Virtual Help Desk, Reflexion for Web Security, Exchange Defender for Email, Intronis and Symform for Backup, and an as-yet-unannounced Network Operations Center component.

How Keywords Influence Your Video’s Rank in Universal Search Results

Posted Mar 25 2011 by in SEO, Video Delivery, YouTube with 0 Comments

In a recent post on the ReelSEO blog, Jeremy Scott wrote about ways to get your videos seen on the first page of universal (Google, Bing, non-site-specific) search results. Using data from a study performed by Manny Rivas and the aimClear team, Jeremy identified three major factors influencing video rankings:

  • Video upload platform
  • Ranking factors within the platform
  • Keyword Intent

Those first two bullets are easy to understand, and easy to use. Essentially, videos uploaded to YouTube have a better chance of showing up in a Google search than videos uploaded to DailyMotion, MetaCafe, or even Google Video. Even in Bing searches, 38% of videos retrieved are YouTube videos, beating out Bing‘s 37%. For maximum universal search ranking, host your videos on YouTube. That second bullet point means that the better your video ranks in your platform’s internal search engine, the better it will rank in universal searches.

The third bullet point is the really important bit: Keyword Intent. In their study, aimClear identified three categories of keywords: Informational, Navigational, and Transactional. The keywords you use in your video’s description and tags determine which category the search engine places your video in. Informational keywords are phrases like “learn,” “how to,” “history of,” or “what is.” They denote an educational or instructive video. Navigational keywords direct readers to other parts of the web, and they usually appear as a website address, brand name, or brand description. Finally, transactional keywords, as the name implies, are words like “buy,” “cheap,” “sale,” or “free.” According to aimClear’s study, informational keywords rank nearly three times better than navigational and transactional keywords combined.

aimClear's Keyword Intent data

So pay attention to your keywords. Be deliberate in the word choice of your titles and descriptions so that your potential viewers will not only see your video on their results page, but actually feel compelled to click on it. Avoid transactional keywords and the temptation of slick, snake-oil-salesman phrases.

Or you could let us handle it. Not only will we handle the equipment supply and editing for your next web video, we’ll handle the uploading (to YouTube, naturally), tagging, and posting of the video to your social networks. If you want web video to work for you, you want VENUE. Watch the video below for more information.

Aaron Booker on Comcast Business Class Internet Service

Posted Mar 9 2011 by in Aaron Booker, Testimonial, Video Delivery with 0 Comments

Varvid.com founder Aaron Booker talks about Comcast Business Class Internet. Comcast Business Class Internet offers Varvid the fastest way to upload and download videos for their clients. Varvid uses Comcast’s 50/10 connection which gives us 50 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload speeds – fast enough to make sure our videos are where they need to be, when they need to be. Comcast Business Class Internet is the most cost effective way for small businesses to get high speed internet.

http://www.business.comcast.com/
Comcast Blog

 

Varvid at ASCII 2011

Posted Mar 3 2011 by in ASCII, Event Coverage, Managed Services with 0 Comments

IMG_9878

Times are good for tech right now, and Varvid is there to document every step of the way. Last week we went to ASCII 2011 in Los Angeles. ASCII is the premier SMB tech industry event, featuring guest speakers, expert panels, and unparalleled networking and partnership opportunities.

We shot some interviews, we shot some testimonials, and most importantly, we shot YOU, the partners! If we took a headshot for you at ASCII, look for it on our Flickr page.

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