General :: Thinking Home Business | Practical Tips For People Who Work From Home

As Australia recovers from devastating floods and fires, business owners and entrepreneurs face a daunting task of first surviving, then re-building.

Melbourne-based business entrepreneur Jennie Armato and nine of her colleagues have put together a dynamic online event to raise funds to help get entrepreneurs back into the game.

Return from Adversity – Flood Relief Fundraiser for Entrepreneurs will be on Facebook, from 11 am to 1 pm AEDST.

People joining the event will hear from some leading Australian entrepreneurs and from business owners now recovering from the recent disasters.

There will be 18 speakers including Pete Godfrey, Pat Mesiti, Aussie Rob, Leela Cosgrove, Cathie Denehy, Rach Bermingham, Lyndsey Baigent, Steve Brossman, Shelley Taylor-Smith and Jennie Armato.

Entry to the event is by donation – a minimum of $20 – via the Red Cross EveryDayHero site.

Suzie Cheel interviewed Jennie Armato in this video.

Here’s the link again.

And here’s a social media release you can share around on the social web.

Testing the online movie-making tool Xtranormal

This morning I had a direct message (DM) on Twitter with a link to a YouTube video advertising a Superbowl-related service. I clicked through out of curiosity and watched the short video.

If you watch that, you’ll notice the credit that comes up at the end for Xtra Normal, with the intriguing tagline “If you can type, you can make movies”.

I tried it out.

Signup was easy and free.

The interface and the various pre-fabricated scenes, avatars and so on reminded me a bit of Second Life (who ever talks about Second Life these days? Is it still there?) but at a really basic level.

I proceeded to type in a conversation about a topic that has been buzzing along in a forum on LinkedIn, viz. how can you tell if someone is a real social media expert.

Out of a bunch of quite bizarrely attired avatars I chose a couple of conservatively dressed types who looked more like humans than the avatars in the football item above. The result will not will me any prizes. It’s corny, not easy to see or hear, and I am including it here just to illustrate.

No matter what I did I could not get the avatars to the front of the scene as they are in the football item.

So there is a lack of flexibility in being able to mix and match avatars and settings.

No doubt a more skilled user would do something much more interesting and I’m inferring from the text accompanying the exhortation to download the desktop version that it may be possible to be more creative with that. But I looked at the resource specifications and decided I did not need the aggravation of my computer possibly seizing up or slowing to a crawl.

There is a link from the Xtranormal site for uploading to YouTube, but after following the instructions and trying several times, I gave up.

Verdict. Interesting, and I really like the idea of telling stories in novel ways like this, but at this stage Xtranormal is not a good use of my time.