The international sport fashion brand hummel recently launched Playstadil.com. Here they challenge their customers to compete with videos for sneakers and a spot in their international spring fashion campaign.

The campaign is a great example of the flexibility you get with 23 Video. First thing you’ll notice is the custom background and header, followed by the link colors. But it’s the details that really made us excited. Notice how the player has been redesigned to include elements from the background graphics as well as the hummel-inspired player button. This is exactly what 23 Video is all about. To help out with the technical parts of the site hummel turned to 23 Video partner Re:, so we called Asbjørn Poulsen to get some more insights on how they customized 23 Video to fit hummels needs and give them a visual online presence.

Control related videos

“The Open Upload function was essential since they wanted to make a video competition for their customers and followers. Next was the rating and comment possibilities as they are very interested in feedback and interactions from the viewers. Distribution through Facebook and Twitter was also very important as they’ve build a great presence there,” says Asbjørn Poulsen and adds that the embedding provided an easy way for hummel partners to be part of the project.

However, those features are all out of the box and easy to implement, so the real challenges for Re: was to include more pages and figure out a way to control the related videos in the player.

“It was important for us to control the related videos in the player, so we worked on the categorization a lot and made a tagging system that hummel can use to control how the videos relate to each other,” says Asbjørn Poulsen.

The possibility to get your fingers deep into the code and control even the smallest details is exactly the reasons why Re: keeps recommending 23 Video to their customers.

“23 Video is great to work with. Most clients require features that 23 Video have out of the box, and the possibility to customize everything makes it easy for us meet specific needs. This means we can get a project up and running in no time. On top of that the extensive analytics adds important value and feedback, which is really important when you are experimenting with video online. I simply can’t point to another platform that includes all those features and possibilities at such a low price level,” says Asbjørn Poulsen

The spring winner has just been announced on Playstadil.com and are now playing in theaters, but the competition continues online with the possibility to win sneakers and a fall cinema spot for the next winner.

Video drives traffic, and more traffic increases the number of webstore checkouts. This is, in short, the idea behind the newly launched WebTV station from Scandinavias largest online soccer store Unisport.

The main content is a featured Unisport show with a charismatic host who explores new soccer equipment like boots and balls with enthusiasm, historical facts and a critical eye to details. A combination which often spark great debates and discussions in the comments from an enthusiastic community of soccer fans. The Unisport team also plans to create product videos of all their products to improve the buying experience in their webstore.

(Video in danish)

“Our goal online has always been to entertain and inform our customers with news, stories, rumors and reviews of our latest or upcoming products. So video is a natural next step for us, because it grows an audience among our customers and increases traffic and activity on our website,” says Filip Domagala from Unisport.

Mobile videos reaches a young audience

Unisport made their first video experiments with Vimeo but quickly realised their needs for an alternative platform.

“Our viewers are between 7 and 17, so we love the iTunes integration and the fact that videos are available on mobiles. And on a more pragmatic level I’ll have to highlite the flatrate price policy,” says Filip Domagala, who’s looking forward to explore the video feedback included in 23 Video.

“Right now we have no idea whether our video has the right length or format. But with the playthrough percentage and the other 23 Video analytics tools we’ll now get feedback, so we know what works and what doesn’t. This gives us an opportunity to improve our productions,” says Filip Domagala.

As far as the soccer fans in 23 are concerned the analytics will reveal that the Unisport production team nailed it pretty damn well allready. But since our analytics tool can’t predict the number of plays just yet, I guess we have to wait a couple of month to see if we’re right.

I recently read an interview with the “punk rock mathematician”, Tom Henderson, and found myself thinking a lot more than I regularly do when reading articles about teachers.

His teaching methods are weird and crazy, but highly enjoyable for those who attend them. Usually, teaching methods described as “cool” and “hip” make me cringe and feel sorry for everybody unlucky enough to attend that lecture.

But to understand how Tom Henderson teaches, he makes three points:

1. Punk rock is founded upon not knowing how to play your instrument
2. He has no idea what the problem with math education in the US is.
3. Math knowledge also exists as a performative concept

First things first. In an argument with his high school girlfriend – who was very much into punk music – he made the claim that punk is founded upon people not knowing how to play their instrument.

Which is true, but not the point. Being in a punk band, and being terrible at playing your instrument, is all about performing on a stage. Instead of pointing fingers at those who can’t play, one should focus on acknowledging the courage they have for getting up there and living the dream.

This changed his worldview completely, and what his teaching style is now founded upon.

When asked what the problem with math education in the US is, he has no idea. But what he knows is that many students’ approach to math is wrong. It’s all about showing the steps, getting an A for answering correctly and knowing the books inside out.

Essentially, it’s about not knowing anything, but still being able to answer the questions posed in the tests. What if math was more about the path towards the solution, and not just handing in an answering sheet? What if math was more like punk?

Math must also be about the performance – just as punk music is. If he has to climb the chair and desk to show the progression of a graph – he climbs and climbs and climbs. The visual element of math becomes real and the ridiculous bunch of letters and graphs becomes an interesting problem that should be solved.

Why do we blog this?

Besides talking about teaching, Tom Henderson actually touches upon a point that’s essential in the fundamentals of 23. It’s always been about building tools for people who want to express themselves, without the need to learn to operate the instruments usually needed to do so.

It shouldn’t be a hassle to set up a website that you can upload pictures to – it should be accessible to everyone looking for a way to show off what they stumble upon every day. That’s where 23 Photo Sharing comes in.

If we take it even further, we find the purpose behind making 23 video. Five years ago, a couple of guys started something called YouTube (you might have heard of it) that kicked off a video revolution. Every minute, 20 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube. Every single minute. It’s an unbelievable resource of education material, music, humor and cultural artifacts.

Yet, if you were an organisation looking for a possibility to have your own site, own domain and own relation to users you’d pay a premium price. It’s not unheard of that you pay €30,000 just to get started, and you never really knew the end price if you want extra modules and features.

We figured that if you take the best of both worlds – the ease of publishing a video to YouTube with the options of customisation from the premium retailers – interesting stuff could happen.

Now we’re seeing all kinds of creative uses for video; campaign sites, intranets built around video, video archives in municipalities being activated, kids talking about their schools etc.

It doesn’t take you months and months of preparation to start a video site, and it certainly won’t cost you tens of thousands of Euros.

To us, it’s all about taking the punk approach to video – it doesn’t matter if all you have is a Flip or Kodak Zi8 or whatever. What matters is that you have something to say and start performing!

We have a scheduled service window tonight between 12.30am and 1.30am for both 23 Video and 23 Photo Sharing due to some software upgrades. This will result in the web services becoming unavailable for a short while, but we expect a maximum of 10 minutes of total downtime.

Update: The maintenance was completed at about 12.50am (CET), and everything is back up after 9 minutes of downtime. We know you were all holding your breath in anticipation, but it’s alright to relax now.

We’ve always known that our friends at Umbraco knew how to make a killer open source CMS. But their movie making and acting talents surely caught us by surprise. This is by far the most sophisticated corporate video production we’ve seen at 23. What a classy way to announce a new hire.

Can’t wait to follow the Father, the Earl and the Duke on their North American adventures in their next episode….

A crashing snowscooter, tips on how to prepare your skis or skates, and the everyday troubles of parking a mini-van. The Danish athletes at the Olympics in Vancouver are using 23 Video to bring the audience closer to the games than ever before.

The athletes were already engaged in their preparations in different places around the world, when Team Danmark got the idea of having them videoblog, but that didn’t stop the project. The athletes simply received a letter with a small video camera and a few lines on how to record and upload. The result was a number of videos providing detailed insights into the preparations leading up to the big opening ceremony in Vancouver last Friday.

After the games have started the video site continues to bring the audience close to the athletes in Vancouver, but the site now also serves as a way of distributing the content to the media. Team Denmark has allowed several jounalists access to the videos, and news sites like the Danish Broadcasting Corporation have started to embed the videos directly on their site.

Several of the athletes also publish the videos on their personal webpages. Like Sophie Fjellvang-Sølling who has published this adrenalin kicking helmet recorded video of a training run including a crash:

And Jonas Thor Olsen who’s testing 32 pairs of skis before his olympic debut later today:

We spoke to Team Danmarks head of communications about why they chose 23 Video for their video site?

“The cool thing about 23 Video is how easy you can adjust it to fit your needs. Every time we get a new idea for the project, it turns out to be possible. And it doesn’t matter whether it relates to integration with our own website, to our Facebook fanpage, or to the possibility for people to share videos or comments,” says Søren Willeberg from Team Danmark.

23 wishes the 18 Danish athletes the best of luck and encourage you all to check out their videos and become a fan of their Facebook page. Their attitude and dedication surely deserves a medal.

Yes, the inevitable iPad post has hit the 23 blog.

Obviously we’re very excited about the iPad – not only because Apple introduced a new product (we are dedicated, naïve fanboys here at the office), but because the shape of the device itself is interesting for us. After it was introduced, our internal “digital watercooler” – Yammer – was red hot with posts from 23-employees discussing which version of the iPad would be the best purchase. Not if we should buy it, but which one.

The “tagline” of 23 is “The Visual Sharing Company”. We like things that are communicated visually and our products reflect that. We already have tight integration between 23 Video and other platforms such as podcasting through iTunes and RSS, directory listing in Boxee and an iPhone/Android-optimized site (try accessing http://video.reboot.dk on your iPhone/Android). The integration with other platforms is essential for sharing video with customers who want to access the content in their own way.

With the introduction of the iPad on Wednesday, we saw a new potential for our customers to reach out and create compelling experiences for their customers. After all, video already looks good on the iPhone, but it will look absolute stunning on the iPad with a screen size four times larger than the iPhone.

So tell us, what are some of the things you look forward to seeing the most on the iPad?

This is one of my favorite photos of the year. Taken by andjohan of mr. Moltke after our joint Christmas party with our friends from Socialsquare.

At 23 we’re always excited to see new features being made available to web users, and luckily the developers of Firefox, Safari and Chrome all seem to be pulling in the same direction. The most recent beta version of Firefox includes support for file drag-and-drop, and we thought we’d give you a preview of how this would work for uploading photos to 23.

So, if you’re using Firefox 3.6 beta 4 (or higher…) try dropping some photos onto the 23 site in your browser. In the upper right-hand corner you’ll see that you’re photos are being uploaded to your photo sharing account — and a simple progress indicator is showing you how far along the upload is.

If you drop files into the browser while you’re browsing an album, a tag or a photogroups, the uploaded photos will be automatically added to that album/tag/group.

Obviously this feature is experimental at the moment, but hopefully we’ll be able to expand support as Safari and Chrome add support for this standard in their browsers.