Записи с меткой «audio»

La Merc? Festival Of Barcelona

Towards the end of September Barcelona begins to limber up for the largest event on its festival calendar, La Merc?, a celebration of the city’s patron saint «Mare de Deu de la Merc?». The festival heralds the end of summer and the onset of the autumn months. The festival is a real big deal for the people of Barcelona and the still temperate weather means that, in true Mediterranean fashion, must of the fun takes place outside. There’s a massive amount to do whilst the festival is on with events popping up all over the city and over 3000 artists and performers on display with over 500 activities to watch or take part in. The festival has a long and proud and first took place in 1902; today it’s a fantastic blend of tradition and innovation.

You’d really need to write a novel to keep on top of everything that goes on at La Merc? each year so, we’ll just have to settle for some highlights. We start with one of the oldest traditions; the human towers or «Castells» are a real must-see, sometimes as much as ten stories high they’re a fantastic display of teamwork, agility and balance.

A recurring theme throughout the festival is the celebration of fire and one of the most exhilarating experiences of La Merc? is the «Correfoc» (the «Fire Run») where costumed fire-breathing devils rampage around the streets in a colourful pyrotechnic display. Kids absolutely love this sort of thing and audience participation is a big part as the devils chase after those foolish enough to get in their way. Another favourite of the children is the «Dragons and Giants» procession which starts in the Plaza Real next to Las Ramblas.

Foodies and wine lovers shouldn’t feel left out either as there is no shortage of indulgence in those areas. Food and wine shows run throughout the festival showcasing local produce and allow you to try and buy the best that Catalonia has to offer.

Festivities aren’t just kept on the ground either, La Merc? also celebrates the sky with static hot air balloon flights, kite displays and other aerial exhibitions taking place throughout the festival on the city’s beaches. Other areas around the city to look out for are the Centro de Cultura Contemperanea de Barcelona where you can view street theatre, Moll de la Fusta which will be giving centre stage to numerous circus acts and Plaza St Rei where various dance troupes and performing artists will be vying for your attention. There’s also a museum open day where many of the city’s museums and galleries can be entered free of charge including the Picasso museum, the Museum of History of Catalonia, the Maritime Museum and many more.

The culmination of the festivities is called «Piromusica»l — the finale involves music and a huge fireworks display choreographed together for an amazing audio-visual experience. A big named music star is usually brought in to play the finale and 2005 saw local singer and composer Pep Sala having the honour of closing out La Merc?.

For tourists La Merc? offers a perfect opportunity to see Barcelona at its best — it’s a colourful, vibrant spectacle which offers something for all age groups and all tastes. It also offers visitors the perfect opportunity to see more of this wonderful city.

How to Make Money Through the Power of Your Voice

Copyright (c) 2009 James Roche

Fact: You will sell more when people know, like and trust you.

Fact: People trust you when they feel connected to you.

Fact: Your voice can reach out and connect with people more powerfully than your written words.

The power of sound can’t be underestimated…especially in your marketing. Your voice tells a lot about who you are. When people hear your voice, they connect with you at a much deeper level than if they just read your words.

That’s why integrating audio into your marketing helps you convert more visitors to sales. I’m about to show you how to use your voice in your marketing to increase conversions, generate more sales and grow your list.

For all the ideas below I recommend you use an inexpensive service called Audio Acrobat. Here are the three key ways to leverage your voice to make-money:

1. Use Audio on Your Website Landing Page

Your website is your gateway to connect with people. But most entrepreneurs miss this huge opportunity to develop trust. Instead of a static, boring landing page why not add an audio message from you? It’s like welcoming people into your home — greet them with enthusiasm.

Ask yourself what the single most important objective is for your landing page. What do you want people to do? Because your landing page needs to direct people to take some sort of action, like signing up for your Ezine or Special Report. Here’s a sample of the message I use on my landing page.

«Hey there it’s James Roche, The Info Product Guy calling in from beautiful Fort Lauderdale, Florida and if you’re looking for information on how to create info products and a marketing strategy that makes you money, you are in the right place. I’d like to give you FREE instant access to a couple things here. The first is my free Special Report — it’s called «3 Simple Secrets to Creating Info Products that Make You Money.» And I also want to give you a FREE subscription to my bi-monthly ezine that I publish. It’s called, «Info Marketing (…without thinking too hard!)» It’s got tons of great tips and strategies for you and your business. Just enter your name and email in the boxes below and I’ll send you all the details within 5 minutes via email.

So fill that in and click the button that say’s «Claim my report now» and I will see you on the next page.

I’m looking forward to giving you information that will change your business and change your life.»

2. Record Your Client Coaching Calls

If you’re a coach or consultant you can record all your client sessions and offer it to them as an added bonus. It’s a huge value to your client because they don’t have to take as many frantic notes during the call. It’s good for you because you can now offer an info product customized for each unique client.

For this service I recommend, Audio Acrobat it’s easy to record calls. As you start the call, place your client on hold and dial into your Audio Acrobat account (You don’t need two phone lines.) After the call simply go online to your account and a link to download the phone call is sitting there waiting for you. Finally, email this link to your client — it takes less than 3 minutes total.

3. Deliver and Record Teleclasses to Make Info Products

Just like you can make custom info products for your individual clients, you can also make info products for everyone by recording your teleclasses. Use the same method as above, except this time use a group conference line. Deliver your teleclass and within minutes you have the audio ready for you to sell online. It’s so fun!

When delivering a teleclass I recommend you stand up. You want your energy up. In fact, if you exaggerate your voice to be extra happy…the amazing thing is, it sounds normal in the recording. (And likewise, if you sound normal on the teleclass, you’ll sound dull on the recording.)

The power of your voice can make-you-money…IF you know how to leverage your voice the right way. Break the cold, distant barrier of the internet and reach out to people with the warmth of your own voice. As a final resource for you, if you have the ability to edit your own audio recordings you can add music to the front and back of every call.

How to run a conference call

With the new innovations more people are working from home, or working from the road.  All of this work is done through the internet and through the phone.  And a lot of times people don’t know how to run a phone conference.  Trust me; I’ve set in on a lot of those meetings.  So, I decided to write some steps that will help with organizing a phone conference in a more structured way.
Send out the agenda before the meeting
The key to an effective meeting is an agenda — this applies to any kind of meeting, not just a conference call. Make sure you send out the details of the call in number in advance, and make sure it stands out, so the participants will not miss it.  If you using Outlook send out meeting using the tools that are built in, it will help you track and be aware of who is attending your meeting, and it will do all the work for the participants for them by filling in their calendar slot with your meeting.

If the conference call is a regular status update, ensure you also send out the meeting notes from the previous call.  In that case the first item on the agenda should be checking in with people up for the actions they’ve agreed to be responsible for in the previous meeting.
Introductions and details
At the beginning of the call introduce any newcomers to the rest of the group and invite them to spend a couple of minutes describing themselves and their role on the call.

Next, ensure everyone has a copy of the agenda. I suggest recording the conversation, so later one you can hire a transcription services company to transcribe the entire conversation. This serves two benefits: firstly, everyone will be more careful and accountable for what they say, and secondly, a single set of meeting notes will be distributed after the transcription of the meeting is complete.
Finally, lay out the rules for interaction on the call. Because it’s audio-only, the usual cues we use to indicate that we wish to take a turn at speaking are not present.  Since you recording the call ask people to say they name before they speak so it is easier for the transcriptionist, and your notes are clearer. Clearly it’s unrealistic to expect people to stick to the interaction rules for the duration of the call, but laying them out at the outset will help ensure things run quickly and smoothly.

Keep it short

Studies have shown that people start to suffer a number of unpleasant side-effects after holding a telephone receiver to their ear for longer than about an hour. In any event, forty minutes is about the limit of most people’s concentration span.
If you find the call is starting to drag on beyond an hour, it’s a good idea to wrap things up and continue at another time. If you find this is a regular occurrence, it may be an indicator that you need to revisit the agenda, or possibly split the group up into separate, more focused groups. A particular time-waster is having engineers and businesspeople on the same conference call. A better way to handle this is to have three shorter meetings — one with just the engineers, one with the businesspeople, and one with single representatives from each group to present the results and take any feedback to the next department meeting. Remember practice makes perfect, so get on the phone and schedule some meetings.

Interview Transcription

Recorded taped interviews and transcriptions are two sides of the same coin, many believe that a transcription is a back office task, but in actual it is an effective document of authenticity, in which every spoken word of the interview is documented in precise detail.

There are two forms of transcriptions of an Interview, one which is realistic where the pauses or repetitions are included and the other where it is not, meaning the irrelevant things are edited and corrections in grammar are effectively done.

Interviews may be between a celebrity and a moderator, a policeman and a criminal, an employer and an employee, a marketing team conducting surveys over the telephone; basically it is an interaction between two or more people.

And many people would be wondering, why would anyone require a transcript of an interview, since the audio of which is already available, consider this and review the importance of a transcript. There was a police officer who was in the process of filing criminal charges against a criminal, and based on the testimony of two key witnesses, the interrogation reached a stage where the criminal had no choice but to accept to the crime he had committed, and this confession of the accused was recorded, and to give authenticity to the confession, if a transcript or a text confession signed by the criminal was not made available to the court, the entire effort of the police officer in getting the conviction in the court will not materialize.

The other instance that also will need to be mentioned here, is of a student in the process of presenting research material on Oral History, the audio interviews based on his research was of 16 hours in length, and after editing the portions not relevant to the research a transcriber could format the transcript to seven pages only, and thanks to the transcriptions, it made reading them more interesting rather than listening to them for 16 hours.

The conclusion one can draw from these two instances is never make compromises on getting transcripts of the audio recordings, you never know how important they will matter at some stage.

A spoken word is not a sparrow. Once it flies out, you can’t catch it.

How Image Editing Companies Like Sbl Faced New Year

New Year has arrived with new hopes slowly germinating from the debris of last year’s shock of economic recession that has shaken the world with its raging flames.

Though the fiery hands has mildly stretched and touched SBL, we have managed to rise up imbibing the spirit of the phoenix because the foundations of SBL are built not with stones, but with untiring endeavours of its people, the SBL fraternity. We, at SBL, nourish the moral fiber in all our staff that is stronger than strength itself.

SBL has a strong foothold in the IT enabled outsourcing industry with its services ranging from GIS, Graphics, Software and BPO. With leading edge technology and innovative solutions, we deliver results that exceed the expectations of our clients round the globe.

SBL Geomatics, the GIS division, with its timely technological updations, is smoothly running in track providing accurate and judicious geospatial services and solutions to the clients. Queries on digital mapping, photogrammetry, remote sensing, network analysis and CAD have been skillfully dealt with by our experienced professionals.

SBL Graphics, our image editing division, houses a pack of experienced image editors, who deal with all the image editing works such as clipping path and image masking to photo manipulation, photo restoration and 360 degree panoramic creation. Quality is the hallmark of our graphics division.

SBL Software, our software division, is experienced in IT consulting and development services to offer suitable solutions to support the software needs of external and internal business units. Using cutting edge technologies and methodologies, our analysis and development is performed with changing business needs in mind.

SBL BPO, our BPO division, with its offshore services provides its clientele with an untiring support of dedicated business personnel, sound infrastructure, and innovative technology. KPO, Data processing, Transcription, LPO, Engineering, Document management, Back Office services, Video and Audio Tagging Services being our main services, SBL also caters to other outsourcing services like, Web Designing, Insurance outsourcing, Accounting and Real Estate outsourcing.

The recent financial chaos could slow down some of the outsourcing efforts in the short-term and might even continue to make a negative impact on some providers. But in the long run, outsourcing industry will climb uphill as clients round the globe strive to reduce operating costs, avoid unnecessary investments for new technologies and facilities, concentrate on more strategic and core business activities, and leverage their increasing supply of efficient global resources.

SBL and its outsourcing services has now become recession-proof and our outsourcing services help our clientele to improve performance in up markets, to reduce costs in down markets and to remain competitive.

Though businesses still go through challenges with their outsourcing endeavours, in general, the results have met or exceeded expectations which has facilitated outsourcing to become an obvious business tool regardless of the economic and market conditions.

Article by Rarima.N.S

SBL