We are often asked “how can I increase the marketing potential of my technology postings?” While the easiest answer is to ensure the project description and technology opportunity are written with marketing in mind, one of the things we often suggest is to include marketing documents or media – such as photos, video and slide presentations – if you have them. While it’s not a perfect fit for every project, using media is a great way to set your technology apart, and let the person searching see the bigger picture.
Currently we offer the ability to upload most file types as a Product, so you could just allow end users to download media directly from your posting, but a few members are going one step further to embed media directly into their Flintbox projects, with fantastic results.
Organizations including the C4 and Univalor are pioneering using embedded media in Flintbox. Here are two great examples of how these members are utilizing free online resources to market their technologies.
University of Western Ontario (a C4 member) has embedded a TV interview with YouTube into Snowmobile Rear Suspension.
Univalor has a great example of using SlideShare to imbed a PowerPoint presentation in Interpolation Algorithm for Data Processing in Video & Imaging Solutions.
Two resources to highlight are video sharing sites like YouTube or Google Video and slideshow hosting sites such as Slideshare. These sites offer a bit of code you can use to embed media (videos and Powerpoint presentations respectively) into Flintbox or other web sites.
Want to learn more? Read on to find out how you can start using these sites to create new dynamic content on Flintbox.
Video
Uploading video online is pretty straight forward. All you need to do is create a free account on YouTube, Google Video, or one of the many other online video sites and upload your file (check out the site help for file types and tutorials). YouTube and Google Video both provide a small snippet of code for you to take and embed in another website. Paste this code into your Flintbox project, save your page, hit preview and you can see how it will look to the end user.
With the example above from the C4, the University of Western Ontario had a segment from the local news about their Snowmobile Rear Suspension technology, and used YouTube to include it in their Flintbox post. Since being published in March 2007, it has consistently been one of the most viewed technologies on Flintbox every month.
Please note: The recommended size for video or photo uploads is width= 385, height= 320.
PowerPoint
Have you presented one of your Flintbox technologies at a conference? Does the associated researcher regularly speak about her work? Why not include this PowerPoint presentation directly into Flintbox. Slideshare is another free tool that allows you to publicly share your presentations online. Like the video sharing sites, Slideshare offers a piece of code that can be used to embed your presentation, and you can follow the same steps in Flintbox to include slideshows into your projects. Slideshare also offers another neat tool called Slidecasting that lets you add a podcast (or an MP3 file) to presentations, something that would be great for demos or more involved commentary about the research.
The Univalor project mentioned is newly posted this month, so only time will tell if it becomes a hot technology on Flintbox, but the presentation provides excellent context and direct examples of the benefits of this research.
Hopefully this post gives you some new ideas for using Flintbox, and gets you thinking about even more ways you can use other resources with our site. If you have any questions about how to use any of these tools, don’t hesitate to email us at support@flintbox.com.
(One final note, the use of HTML is only available to our Group Members and not to our individual Pro Account members).
Thanks for featuring my efforts Lindsay! A C4 product also utilizes SlideShare Virtual Historian. And our OSRM uses Slide.com. At Slide.com you can arrange images into a ’slideshow’, customizing the display area, slide transition, and even adding sound if you so desire.