American Idol: We came, we saw, we fliered.

The last time we blogged about hitting up the American Idol audition line, we thought we had seen it all.

Here's a short recap: San Francisco's Cow Palace. 6,000 people standing, singing, and screaming in line. Sleeping bags, pillows, security guards, and hundreds of parked cars.

We had such a successful marketing outing that we decided to try and go to all of the American Idol auditions. We crunched some numbers, compared calendars, called contacts, drew up battle plans and came to the following conclusion: we would be able to make it to Phoenix (Arizona), Salt Lake City (Utah), and Jacksonville (Florida).

So we did the following: ordered up another 15,000 fliers, booked flights and hotel rooms, (through priceline where we got some killer deals), and put our running shoes on.

Phoenix and Salt Lake City, were both great successes and having done three cities, we thought we had the whole fliering thing down. We knew how many to take, how long it would take us to pass out our supply, and when to go from passing out to people to placing our fliers on cars. We knew our stuff; or thought we did.

Then came Jacksonville. Wow, what a city. It took everything we knew and blew it out of the water. Up til now, the biggest turnout we had seen was probably 6,000 people. Jacksonville was at least 15,000; there were people everywhere! Every previous time we had passed out pretty much every flier we had, give or take a few hundred. In Jacksonville, we came home with empty pockets. Not one flier was left between the two of us.


Now that it's said and done, we were very happy with our marketing efforts. We reached the exact demographic we were after and got some serious branding done. The bottom line is we will see you again next year American Idol!

New Features!

Now that the contest section is up and running, we took some time to add a few features that our users had suggested...ok, demanded.

MySpace Promotion Tools
We would like to direct your attention to our new animations that you can use to let your friends on MySpace know about your Taltopia account. Here is what they look like:











You can find the codes for these by clicking on the "Promote" button on profile pages.

Sorty By:
This new feature gives you full control over what shows up when you click to browse one of our many categories. Now when you are browsing through a section, you can choose to sort by votes, views, upload date, and alphabetically. Click here to take it for a spin!


Sponsored Contests
Our contest section has really been taking off! We are currently offering tons of great prizes including cash to Guitar Center, a Studio Art Case Set, gift card to Victoria's Secret, an iPod Nano, and autographed gear from "All Time Low":



Thanks for tuning in, and as always, remember to claim your fame!

Allen and Anthony Learn How to Flyer

1. 6,000 people standing in line to audition 8am
2. 60 people standing in line to audition at 8am

Can you guess which one was American Idol and which one was America's Next Top Model?

No, no it's not what you think. Well, actually it is. The Fresno audition of Top Model, had a poor turnout. Even though this was a little disappointing, we were still able to promote Taltopia.com to a very targeted group of models who really wanted to make it in the industry.

American Idol was a little different. By a little, I mean a lot. We arrived to the scene around 2am to see how the line was coming along. Again, we were met by the stern face of disappointment. Only 50 cars were in the parking lot. We decided to lay low for a few hours hoping the situation would change.

Then it happened.

Hundreds of cars started pouring into the Cow Palace parking lot. By 5am there were close to 1000 cars parked with singers jumping 0ut to get in line.

It was time for action. Allen and I stepped out fliers in hand and started to go to work. Cars continued to come into the parking lot, while those who had finished were leaving. After we had finished with the cars, we took a more personal approach and started handing our super awesome fliers (seen below) to talent as they were walking past.

I am happy to report that we passed out all of our fliers and have ordered another 5000. See you at the next audition American Idol!

Taltopia.com Road Trip!

We recently found out that America's Next Top Model is having auditions on Saturday July 12th in Fresno, and that American Idol is having auditions from Tuesday through Thursday the following week in San Francisco - you know what that means....road trip!

We decided that it would be a great opportunity for us to educate (flier) the aspiring talent who will be attending these open auditions about the valuable resources available for them on Taltopia.com!

We will drive out of LA this Friday afternoon and head for Anthony's hometown of Fresno, CA. To save on cash, we will be crashing at Anthony's parent's house and will get up bright and early on Saturday morning to head out to "Island Water Park" which is where Top Model auditions are being held. After that, its off to San Francisco on Monday night for three more fun-filled days of passing out fliers. Here is what the fliers look like:




On a side note, we wanted to let you all know that we saved alot of money by booking our hotel on Priceline.com We were looking for a cheap hotel near Cow Palace (the convention center near SFO where the Idol auditions are going to be held) and decided that we wanted to spend only $90 a night. Neither one of us had used Priceline before, so we decided to give it a shot - not only did we get a room for $90, Priceline upgraded us to the 4-star Sheraton Hotel (a $250 value). Priceline Negotiator rocks!

Check back for updates from our trip!!

SCHEDULED DOWNTIME: New Servers ;)

Scheduled downtime: Tuesday, July 8th 2:15-3pm PST

In our continued efforts to make Taltopia.com very scalable and redundant (tech terms which mean "able to grow big" and "safe from crashing") we decided it was time to invest in some professional grade computing power. We've been getting by until now with the single server that we built with our own hands. For all you techies out there, this means that we have been running our operating system, database, encoder, media files, and anything else you can imagine on one machine...yikes!

We would like to now introduce you to the new machines that will be running the show:

3 brand new Dell 2950's! Here is what they look like:

These computers are monsters, they are load balanced, Dual Quad Core Raid 1's and 5's, 4 Gig's of Ram, and Dual Ethernet Gigabit Cards. Below is a Prime 95 test for 12 hours(basically running the CPU's at 100% for 12 hours to make sure that Dell didn't send us duds)

We have been setting these up in our office for some time and will be delivering them to our host on Tuesday night, so the site will be down for a few hours. Thanks for understanding!

It's Finally Here!! Taltopia.com's Contests!!!!

Wow. Starting off the blog with a "wow" may be dramatic, but it's well deserved. After months of talking about contests, we finally did it. No, your eyes are not deceiving you, you read correctly dear talopia-ites.

Contests have arrived.


You might be wondering, "What does it mean for me, your average taltopia user?" Well, average taltopia user, this means that you can now win prizes and famebucks just by creating or entering contests.

Contests are broken down into two main categories:

1. Sponsored
2. User Generated

Sponsored contests are generated internally. What this means is that we partner up with companies, studios, casting agencies, etc., to bring you contests where you can win awesome prizes. Currently we have an MTV casting seen here , a digital camera for photographers seen here, a chance for models to sit down with a scout seen here, and a gift certificate to Michael's Arts and Crafts seen here and other great stuff to come that you can take home. Check it out here.

User Generated contests are created by you, our fantastically cool users. You create the title and description, then set the requirements, entrance fee and duration. It is totally controlled by you! After you create your contest you can invite people to join, and the entrance fee they pay gets placed into a prize pool. For example if you created a contest with a 5 famebuck entrance fee, and ten other people joined, then the winner would get 50 famebucks!! Check our User contests here.

We hope you enjoy the new section on our site, it can be accessed via the new tab, and on the front page.

Janice Dickinson, Paul McCartney, and the Smart Car?

What does the Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency, Paul McCartney, and the Smart Car have in common? They were all somehow tied-in to the green carpet event that we were invited to attend last night at the House of Petals in West Hollywood. The event was titled the "Green with Envy Fashion Experience" whose purpose was to raise awareness about the environment, help fight global warming, and to discover new ways of enjoying an eco-friendly lifestyle.

The green carpet event was hosted by Janice Dickinson and featured models from the Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency, including CC Fontana who you can see here. There were also some great organic foods and beverages.

We had the pleasure of meeting Paul McCartney's mother and sister. For those of you who are too young to know who Paul McCartney is, you might know him from a little garage band called THE BEATLES! It turns out that Paul's sister runs a website which provides management tools for up and coming bands and musicians. We spoke about potential partnership opportunities and are setting up a meeting - look out for some news of this in the future.

(photos courtesy Wm. Marc Salsberry)