Final Call for Participation

As you know we’ve been calling for Private Beta Tester Singups, and at time of writing there are only 136 places left out of the 600 allocated spaces. We will be closing our signup before the end of the week, so if you’re interested in participating in the exclusive private beta, quickly let us know by visiting our signup page and drop us your email address. This may very well be your last chance to be one of the first people to try out our brand new toys.

And also, our biggest thanks to our friends for blogging about us. What’s on the horizon is going to be exciting, can’t wait.

As you’re no doubt aware if you’ve been following this blog, voovees.com is currently a public site where everyone can make some basic dialogue changes to pre-made animations, and while ZenCub3d’s technology doesn’t currently have an active role in this, other than as the engine of choice to make these animations off site, that will change.

Voovees Phase 2 Coming Soon, Baby!

The current voovees.com is regarded as our ‘phase 1′ on our development vision, and with ‘phase 2′ looming on the horizon, we are granting users to a very limited, very exclusive close-beta sign up. First come, first serve.

While I won’t go into the details, I can tell you right now that ‘phase 1′ and ‘phase 2′ are VASTLY different.
Placing is very limited, so be in quick.

Sign yourself up at:
http://voovees.com/phase2signup/

When the private beta period starts, all of you that signed up with be notified how to get your beta user accounts.
After the private beta stage started, new user accounts will be obtained by invitation only, so it’s better to sign up now if you get the chance.

Once again, the sign up link is at:
http://voovees.com/phase2signup/

Current ZenCub3d and/or voovees.com phase 1 users do not automatically get entry into the closed beta, so it’s essential to sign up.

EDIT: due to popular demands, we’ve doubled our initial allocation from 300 to 600, and they are still going fast, so be in quick.

We’ll tally up the votes and soon make an announcement on the winners.

Our frequent users ‘redoptick‘ is probably the user that made the most number of pickup-lines (professional pickup artist?), who even made a 4 part series within those entries. Ah, always entertaining.

We have over 70 entries so far, and among ourselves we’ve had several laughed-out-loud moments in the office just looking at them.

Click on top right link to view all parodies for that story

You can now access to all the parodies made for a particular story by clicking on the top right link from the frontpage, just in time for you to decide who want to vote for huh?

We invite everyone to go see all the pick-up line entries, and vote on whether you like them or not, even if you are not making pick-up lines yourself; if you did make an entry, invite your friends to come on and vote.

Go for it before the time runs out!

Voovees.com Pick-Up Line Competition

It was more intended to be a local competition that we’re running here in the always sunny Christchurch, New Zealand, the main cash prize being $100 in New Zealand currency, but since there are no rules against international entries, I don’t see why people around the world shouldn’t share their, perhaps local flavors of pick-ups, as I’m sure, guys failing to impress beautiful girls in public are truly experiences shared across the globe (well, perhaps less so in some socially-restrictive parts of the world, but you know what I mean). If you’d win as an international entry, well then, maybe you’d like some NZ currency for the next time you visit NZ, or we can PayPal you to equivalent value in your nominated currency (roughly US$74).

We already have some really funny entries up on the site, so what are you waiting for?

We’ll soon tally up the data in the background, and make an announcement on the winners.

Voovees.com presents: Twilight 48Hour Parody Competition #1

I hearby announce the first ever Voovees.com Twilight 48Hour Parody Competition begins!

Over the next 48 hours, all the parodies that you, the registered user, make of the Twilight Parody vol.1 and vol.2, will be eligible for prizes!

The single parody, out of all the parodies made from both scenes, with the highest view count, will get to choose from a range of prizes. Also, the entry with the highest overall rating, will also get to choose from a range of prizes. Even if you just register to enter by making one remix, you still might get the chance to win the limited 5 lucky draw prizes. For the details about the prizes and rules, see competition rules.

The clock is ticking away even as you read this, so get to it! Start making twilight parodies!

Also, please help us spread this contest, you can get blog / tweet / shout at the top of your roof, get as many of your friends to enter! It’s something fun to do anyway. You can get the banner from this link, and link to the competition rules page where the big count down clock is, post them everywhere!

voovees.com, where you as a user can replace existing dialogues from various animations, and add your own twists to it.

Following the philosophy among tech startups that, “Release Early, Release Often“, “if you‘re not embarrassed by the first release of your product, you‘ve released too late “, we want to put something out there as soon as the gist of where we plan to go is glimpsing through, even if that means the idea of letting people have the chance to exercise their criticisms on virtually everything makes the hair in the back of our necks stand up.

Even at this early stage, and even if just among ourselves, we are having lots of fun making parodies and spoofs with it. We hope to see yours own customized parodies and spoofs published up there too.

The site will be periodically updated with new animations that you can remix, and we certainly are making small incremental changes to make using the site more fun and entertaining. Your suggestions and constructive criticisms will only help us in creating a better site for you.

On a slightly different note, over the last few months of “stealth mode” development, I’ve been asked many times what the fate of ZenCub3d would be, that many people misses the quirky small animation engine. Amidst rumor and speculations thus far, I can confirm to you guys right now, that the core technology behind ZenCub3d is being repurposed for the next phase of what voovees.com will become.

We will be putting the ZenCub3d project on-hold indefinitely.

Yes I realise that sounds like cooperate-speak for “we’re not going to be working on that project anymore”, but quite frankly that isn’t the case.

The technology behind ZenCub3d is evolving, and the development is still very much alive, but it has changed into something different enough to ZenCub3d that we don’t consider it the same project anymore. Many things considered, we decided that it’s about time that we go back into stealth mode again (or at least a semi one), and focus our full attention on this successor of ZenCub3d.

This new project retains many quirkiness that many of you have come to expect of ZenCub3d, and if you like ZenCub3d you won’t be disappointed. For all of you that have downloaded, tried, played with ZenCub3d, we thank you and hope that you enjoyed the experience; especially for those of you that have provided bug reports, feature suggestions and helped out in the community, or even made cool videos and spread them around, we’ve learnt alot from you, and to me that’s the greatest gift of all, and you have my deepest thanks.

We hope that all of you will stick around, we’ll still be active in our forum, and post on this blog from time to time. All the tutorials that I promised to write I’ll still work hard to fit them into my schedule. Feel free to come by to our forum for a chat.

The current beta release of ZenCub3d (Oct 2008) will still be available for download over the next 2 weeks, after that we’ll be taking down the link. More news and details will follow about the new project, so keep watching this space.