Santa On Demand: New Tech from the North Pole
November 13, 2007
Virtual Online Greetings Allow Santa to Make Surprise Visits to Young and Old

DENVER – This holiday season, Santa Claus is going high-tech with the help of MakeBeliever Productions. For the first time ever, anyone can e-mail a video of a real-life Santa Claus saying nearly anything you want him to.

Customers can create a highly customized MakeBeliever virtual greeting (V-Greeting) by visiting Santa's 21st-century workshop at www.MakeBeliever.com. Visitors simply type in the custom text they'd like Santa to say, and MakeBeliever's proprietary technology puts the words right in Santa's mouth. 

Then, with personalized input from the customer, MakeBeliever creates a Flash video file and delivers each V-Greeting straight from the North Pole directly to children, family, spouses, friends or colleagues via e-mail. 

"As a parent, there is something truly magical about seeing my children experience Santa Claus," said MakeBeliever co-founder David Wallace. "Picture your child's surprise when Santa greets her by name, knows how old she is and knows what she wants for Christmas. MakeBeliever makes that happen and creates a special Christmas moment for both parent and child."

MakeBeliever’s V-Greetings represent an entirely new category of online greetings that fill a void in the Web 2.0 marketplace by offering the flexibility, realism and value that are missing in traditional animated e-greetings. MakeBeliever’s text-to-speech, lip-synch technology builds on the same technology used in a number of popular consumer video games including Activision's Spider Man 2. 

Longtime friends and entrepreneurs David Wallace and Ted Taggart co-founded MakeBeliever after they shared similar experiences when taking children to the mall to see Santa Claus. The mall Santa simply knew nothing about the kids coming to see him.

“We knew there had to be a better way to personalize a visit with Santa,” said Taggart. “After all, isn’t he supposed to be watching the kids all year round? What followed was our idea for MakeBeliever – if both children and adults love Santa, and Santa loves everyone, shouldn’t we offer everyone the opportunity to connect with Santa on a more personal level?” 

Believing Santa was not just for children, MakeBeliever also features a series of personalized V-Greetings designed for husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, friends and colleagues. If someone in your life has been extra nice or extra naughty this year, MakeBeliever’s V-Greetings provide a truly personal, delightful and often hilarious way to tell them so.

As part of its commitment to sharing the holiday spirit, MakeBeliever has teamed up with the Children’s Cancer Association, a nonprofit organization that brings the joy of music, the magic of wishes and the power of compassion to seriously ill children and their families nationwide. For the next year, a portion of MakeBeliever’s profits will help support children and teens with serious illnesses. MakeBeliever will also provide the association with personalized V-Greetings for children. 

MakeBeliever offers V-Greetings for young and old alike, and its V-Greeting Wizard TM interface is easy to use. The gift lasts beyond this Christmas as a downloadable video file that can be saved to a hard drive, burned to a CD and viewed again and again for years to come. At prices ranging from $5.39 to $9.99 per video, MakeBeliever’s V-Greetings are this season’s most affordable and accessible gift. 

For more information, drive your virtual sleigh on over to www.MakeBeliever.com. Stay tuned for future V-Greeting offerings from MakeBeliever.

Sample V-Greetings are available at: http://www.makebeliever.com/public/cards.aspx?categoryId=2&action=samples.

A MakeBeliever V-Greeting tutorial is available at: http://www.johnstonwells.com/clients/makebeliever/MakeBeliever%20FINAL.htm.
 
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