Participant Media announced today that it will take its Social Action campaign for Disneynature's upcoming motion picture OCEANS on the road with the SAVE MY OCEANS TOUR (www.savemyoceans.com). In conjunction with the opening of the film, the tour will visit a cross-section of college campuses nationwide with a series of events that celebrate our collective passion for the oceans and educate students on what they can do to help protect them. Those universities tentatively set to participate include the University of Colorado, University of Florida, San Diego State University, George Washington University, University of California Berkeley, University of Hawaii, Arizona State University, and University of Southern California.

(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20100303/LA64140)

At each campus, the SAVE MY OCEANS TOUR will present a live OCEANS CONCERT, featuring a combination of nationally and locally known musical acts, including Slightly Stoopid, LMFAO, G. Love & Special Sauce, and Pepper with many more to be announced; an OCEANS ART INSTALLATION displayed in the center of each college campus; and an advance screening of OCEANS either on campus or a nearby theatre, depending on each school's technical capabilities.

The SAVE MY OCEANS TOUR is part of Participant Media's Social Action campaign for OCEANS, which recently launched online at www.savemyoceans.com, and is designed to provide information about the various issues currently affecting our oceans as well as solutions and actions that people can take every day, from supporting national oceans policy to modifications in the types of fish they eat or household cleaning products they use.

"Participant is proud to be joining with Disneynature in support of this important and powerful film," said John Schreiber, EVP of Social Action for Participant. "OCEANS exemplifies the type of entertaining and socially relevant films with which we are proud to be associated, and we look forward to SAVE MY OCEANS as a vehicle to raise the visibility of both this issue and the film."

A companion book, A Participant Media Guide: Oceans The Threats to Our Seas and What You Can Do to Turn the Tide, will be available on April 13, 2010, from PublicAffairs Books.

The SAVE MY OCEANS TOUR is being produced by The Marketing Division (www.themarketingdivision.net) in connection with The Surfrider Foundation (www.surfrider.org), a non-profit grassroots organization dedicated to the protection and enjoyment of our world's oceans, waves, and beaches. In addition, the SAVE MY OCEANS TOUR key art was designed by Studio Number One, founded by Shepard Fairey.  All tour stops will be sponsored by Emergen-C (www.emergenc.com).

About the Movie

Disneynature, the studio that presented the record-breaking film Earth, brings OCEANS to the big screen on Earth Day, 2010. Nearly three-quarters of the Earth's surface is covered by water and OCEANS boldly chronicles the mysteries that lie beneath.  Directors Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud dive deep into the very waters that sustain all of mankind -- exploring the harsh reality and the amazing creatures that live within.  Featuring spectacular never-before-seen imagery captured by the latest underwater technologies, OCEANS offers an unprecedented look beneath the sea in a powerful motion picture that unfolds on April 22, 2010.  "See OCEANS, Save Oceans" is an initiative in which Disneynature will make a contribution to The Nature Conservancy to save coral reefs in honor of every guest who sees OCEANS during opening week (April 22-28, 2010).  For more information, visit disney.com/oceans or become a fan on Facebook: facebook.com/Disneynature.

About Participant Media

Participant Media is a Los Angeles-based entertainment company that focuses on socially relevant, commercially viable feature films, documentaries and television, as well as publishing and digital media.  Participant Media is headed by CEO Jim Berk and was founded in 2004 by philanthropist Jeff Skoll, who serves as Chairman. Ricky Strauss is President. Participant exists to tell compelling, entertaining stories that bring to the forefront real issues that shape our lives.  For each of its projects, Participant creates extensive social action and advocacy programs which provide ideas and tools to transform the impact of the media experience into individual and community action.  Participant's films include The Kite Runner, Charlie Wilson's War, Darfur Now, An Inconvenient Truth, Good Night and Good Luck., Syriana, Standard Operating Procedure, The Visitor, The Soloist, Food, Inc., The Informant! and The Crazies.

SOURCE Participant Media

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OneStopPlus.com, the exclusive online destination for curvy women looking for the best in plus-size fashion, announces the launch of its PlusSizeFashionWeek.com.  This interactive website went live on March 1st, 2010 with virtual 'front row seats' to the best show in fashion for the 62% of American women who are size 12 and up.  PlusSizeFashionWeek.com will feature inspirational videos, the latest in fashion, accessories, swimwear and lingerie trends and personalized advice in a body language that speaks to real women.

Similar to its parent site, OneStopPlus.com, PlusSizeFashionWeek.com will feature the preeminent names in American and European plus-size fashion, including Woman Within, Roaman's, Jessica London, AVENUE, Ellos and Taillissime.  And with editorial on everything from well-known fashion models to interviews with the beauty specialists and stylists who make the looks happen, PlusSizeFashionWeek.com is the newest online fashion magazine for plus-size women.

According to Nancy LeWinter, editorial director of OneStopPlus.com and creator of Mode Magazine, "PlusSizeFashionWeek.com recognizes and applauds the buzz surrounding plus-size fashion and, as the experts in the category, OneStopPlus.com is taking it a step further by combining the inspiration of the runway with the approachability of the real way."

In line with its philosophy, OneStopPlus.com has created an interactive experience for its customers as never before, including a unique mobile texting offer. PlusSizeFashionWeek.com is a technological innovation that seeks to incorporate virtual runway styles into a mainstream platform by allowing consumers to learn, interact and shop all at once.

About OneStopPlus.com®

OneStopPlus.com® is the world's first and only web-mall for plus-size women and big & tall men.  The OneStopPlus.com® philosophy for plus-size women is reflected in every aspect of its website. The look and feel is upscale and the collections are not considered simply as clothing, but fashion. Plus-size women now have the same fashion choices as their size 8 counterparts, with access to everything from the classics to what's right on the mark in terms of the latest trends. Featured on this website include leading designs in American and European plus size fashion from Woman Within, Roaman's, Jessica London, AVENUE®, Taillissime and Ellos.  OneStopPlus.com is a Redcats USA brand.

About Redcats USA

Redcats USA is a dynamic, multi-channel, web-driven home-shopping leader, with numerous well-known brands in its portfolio: AVENUE®, Woman Within®, Jessica London®, Roaman's®, KingSize®, BrylaneHome® and BrylaneHome® Kitchen sold on OneStopPlus.com®, The Sportsman's Guide® and The Golf Warehouse®. Redcats USA offers a wide range of value and quality driven merchandise categories, including men's and women's plus-size apparel, home and lifestyle products, and sporting goods/outdoor gear.  Redcats USA is a Redcats Group company.  For more information: Redcats.com.

SOURCE OneStopPlus.com

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Fan Appz, a leading developer of social media marketing applications, today announced the launch of a new, low-cost subscription service that helps small to medium-size businesses (SMBs) engage, grow and monetize their fan base on Facebook® Platform.  Fan Appz Professional gives any Facebook Page admin the ability to create and distribute brand-specific polls, quizzes and promotions that fans can enjoy and share with their friends to extend brand awareness and drive traffic.

Fan Appz Professional is ideal for SMBs and local businesses.  With just a few clicks, anyone can quickly install Fan Appz's integrated suite of marketing applications and begin creating custom Top 5 polls, quizzes, gifts, coupons and promotions that engage users.  More importantly, Fan Appz applications provide a built-in mechanism for viral marketing: Each time a fan takes a quiz or participates in a poll, they can publish their responses to their Facebook stream, exposing a whole new set of people to the company, brand or person in a fun and engaging way.

Key features and benefits of Fan Appz include:

• Delivers a complete and easily customizable toolset of social media marketing applications for just $50 per month.
• Enables businesses to better understand their fan base so they can continually learn and improve their marketing.
• Insulates businesses from the continual change of the underlying social media platforms.

"Most businesses and brands have only scratched the surface of how they communicate with their fans – there is a huge potential for people to harness the collective passion of their followers," said Jon Siegal, Founder and CEO of Fan Appz.  "Fan Appz gives customers an accessible and affordable way to spark user engagement and extend viral sharing and social competition, while delivering a compelling way for brands to solidify and monetize their relationships with fans."

A wide variety of businesses, brands, organizations, athletes and celebrities currently use Fan Appz including the NBA, NBC Universal, Hulu, Relativity Media and digital marketing company, Molotov.

"Fan Appz is a critical part of our digital marketing strategy," said Darrin McAfee, SVP Digital Marketing at Molotov, a leading digital marketing firm for brands, celebrities and comedians such as George Lopez, David Spade, and Jeff Dunham.  "Fan Appz has helped us virally grow our clients' online fan base through its integrated application suite. In a recent promotion for a client's TV series, Fan Appz achieved a 50% conversion rate, resulting in more than 30,000 fan sign-ups and over 12 million brand impressions."

Based in Santa Monica, CA, Fan Appz is led by founder and CEO Jon Siegal, an early pioneer in the area of technology-enabled CRM and marketing.  Siegal was previously a VP of Sales at Siebel Systems, where he helped grow the company from $40 million to $2 billion in annual revenue.  The Fan Appz Board of Directors and Advisors includes current and former executives from Gap, Inc., Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette, Brillstein Entertainment Partners, Siebel Systems, Business.com, as well as present Directors at Open Table, Avon Products, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, and Salesforce.com.

Facebook Platform is a development system that enables companies and developers to build social applications for Facebook.com and around the web with Facebook Connect, where Facebook's more than 400 million users can interact with them.

About Fan Appz

Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Santa Monica, CA., Fan Appz helps businesses, celebrities, musicians, athletes, public figures and brand owners engage, grow and monetize their social network fan base through an integrated suite of applications and tools.  Fan Appz is privately funded by a successful group of business executives and entrepreneurs who are dedicated to creating powerful and customizable tools to maximize viral engagement online.  For more information, please visit www.fanappz.com, or Fan Appz on Facebook at www.facebook.com/FanAppz.

Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook, Inc.

SOURCE Fan Appz

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Investors and entrepreneurs will be able to dramatically reduce the costs and time involved with financing a seed round company – and move more quickly toward bringing their product or service to market – thanks to new documents created and made available online by Ted Wang of Fenwick & West. The documents were developed with input and insight from dozens of entrepreneurs, attorneys, venture capitalists and investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Baseline, Charles River Ventures, SV Angel (Ron Conway), First Round Capital, Harrison Metal Capital, Mike Maples, Polaris Ventures, SoftTech VC and True Ventures.

The documents, located at SeriesSeed.com, have already been used to help fund several companies. Andreessen Horowitz, which was formed last year with the intention of aggressively funding innovative startups, will start using the documents to accelerate its mission of bringing cutting-edge technology to the marketplace as efficiently as possible.

"At the seed stage, the goal is to help an entrepreneur turn an idea into a product," said Ben Horowitz, General Partner of Andreessen Horowitz. "The legal documents to do a seed round should be a lot less complicated and cheaper than those for a major round of funding. We think Ted's work is a great start towards that goal."

The Series Seed documents were created because, for a number of reasons, the amount of money to launch a startup has been drastically reduced; a new category of seed investors have emerged to fund this stage of a company's growth. However, the financing documents that lawyers were using were from a past era when it took several million dollars to fund a company.

"A hundred pages of documents for a million-dollar investment doesn't make sense," noted Wang. "We wanted to create a simpler and standard set of documents that would be acceptable to both entrepreneurs and investors. They are short, so they reduce costs; we put them on the Web so that they're transparent; and they preserve essential rights and protections without favoring any one party so that entrepreneurs, Venture Capitalists and angel investors will not need to change them."

Startups Blippy.com and Civic Solar have already used the documents, and Wang said he is hearing from more Venture Capitalists and entrepreneurs every day who are using them. "We hear from our entrepreneur friends that our seed round cost half as much and took half as much time to close as theirs did," said Ashvin Kumar, CEO and Co-Founder of Blippy.com.

The participation of firms like Andreessen Horowitz and investors like Ron Conway are key to the open-sourced documents' adoption. If the documents gain widespread acceptance, Wang hopes they will "tip" and become the de facto standard for seed rounds.

The SeriesSeed.com documents consist of a Certificate of Incorporation, Stock Purchase Agreement, an Investor's Rights Agreement and a Term Sheet. The site will be open to feedback, and Wang considers them 'living documents' – if there are comments or emailed suggestions that make sense, he will incorporate those changes and users can subscribe to the site's RSS feed for updates.

A full description of the documents and their rationale can be found at www.SeriesSeed.com.

About Andreessen Horowitz

Andreessen Horowitz was established in June 2009 by entrepreneurs and engineers Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, based on their vision for a new, modern VC firm designed to support today's entrepreneurs. Andreessen and Horowitz have a track record of investing in, building and scaling highly successful businesses. Andreessen Horowitz is based on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California.

About Fenwick & West

Fenwick & West provides comprehensive legal services to venture capital firms and to technology and life sciences startup clients of national and international prominence. The firm has more than 30 years of experience crafting innovative solutions to the business challenges that arise at the intersection of technology and the law. Fenwick & West clients value our attorneys' deep industry experience and understanding of their technologies. Startup clients include Amyris Technologies, Chegg, Facebook, Linden Labs, Quantcast, Silver Spring Networks, Twitter, and U.Stream. The firm produces the quarterly Fenwick & West Venture Capital Survey which details venture financing trends during the prior quarter. Fenwick & West has been ranked by American Lawyer Media and Global Securities as one of the top 10 IPO issuer's counsel in the United States and was recently ranked by Corporate Board Member as one of the top 5 corporate law firms in the San Francisco Bay Area for publicly traded companies.

SOURCE Fenwick & West

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• Fiesta Movement Chapter 2 kicks off with 20 teams of two agents each bringing the new 2011 Fiesta to life through missions inspired by Ford's new small car

• Missions will be centered around where the teams live, with agents tapping into their local communities to help execute and promote missions

• The 2011 Ford Fiesta goes on sale this summer offering projected best-in-class highway fuel economy of 40 mpg, 15 class-exclusive technologies and personalization, all in a small car package

Ford's Fiesta Movement, a social media initiative designed to create excitement about the new Fiesta, put the new small car on the minds of thousands of people nationwide. It is now moving to its second chapter, this time enlisting 40 people to tell the story of Ford's newest car in 16 cities across the country.

Culled from more than 1,000 applications, Fiesta Movement Chapter 2 consists of 20 teams comprised of two agents each. Their mission will be to redefine the way Fiesta is brought to market by interacting with consumers online and offline, while bringing Fiesta to their communities.

"This was a natural progression from the first phase of the Fiesta Movement," said Connie Fontaine, Ford Brand Content and Alliances manager. "Chapter 2 will still be rooted in social media, but this time the content will also live offline and find its way into new mediums. Fiesta needs to clearly be the star now as the agents share their work within their communities and beyond."

The first Fiesta Movement generated more than 6.2 million YouTube views, more than 750,000 Flickr views and nearly 4 million Twitter impressions. The Fiesta Movement also set a Guinness World Record for the most attendees at a tweetup during the Fiesta Movement Awards Celebration in West Hollywood in December. This unprecedented event brought together 1,149 Fiesta Movement agents and Twitter friends.

Telling the story, locally

Agents will complete a series of missions, where they will compete in challenges locally that leverage the best of their communities, allowing them to open the discussion about Fiesta through social media and beyond.

After completing a challenge, agents will produce and place the creative content online at www.fiestamovement.com, where followers also can keep up with their favorite agents. The best content will be recognized based on online consumer interaction and consumers' opinions about the agents' work, and will be amplified in local media and events as well as through a variety of national mediums.

One of the missions is called "Show the World UR Personality," where agents will design their Fiesta wrap, working with designers to create a wrap that fits their team's personality. Their personalized Fiesta will be delivered to the agent team, and the best wrap, as voted on by the fans on www.fiestamovement.com, will later be available to consumers. Additionally, the winning wrap will be integrated into a future national Fiesta display.

Followers of Fiesta Movement Chapter 2 will play a pivotal role in this adventure, by checking in with their favorite agent team, snapping a picture of the content they saw on the streets or commenting on what the agents post to social media sites.  

"Essentially, the agents will be introducing Fiesta to their communities, with local culture driving the content they create," said Fontaine. "There will be unique opportunities for consumers to actively engage and follow along with the agent teams in their area."

Agents were selected based on entrepreneurial spirit, strong, continued local connections, social vibrancy and creative vision. The agent teams are located in major markets, including Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Detroit, Philadelphia, Boston, Denver, San Diego, Dallas, Houston, Seattle, Orlando, Phoenix, Atlanta and Miami.

Fiesta has it all – and more

Going on sale this summer, the all-new Ford Fiesta features an expressive, vibrant design, sharp reflexes, and a global track record that will redefine U.S. small car customers' expectations. With 15 class-exclusive technologies and a projected best-in-class highway fuel economy of 40 mpg, Fiesta brings efficiency and convenience together in one package.

Fiesta is designed to be versatile, personal and adaptable. In fact, Fiesta is expected to deliver best-in-class convenience and connectivity with Ford's segment-exclusive SYNC® voice-activated communications system, as well as an expressive color palette and available graphics.

Already more than 6,000 consumers have made reservations for the Ford Fiesta – half of them from non-Ford customers – and more than 100,000 handraisers are showing an interest in the new fuel-efficient car. Customers can place their order for the new Fiesta today through their local Ford dealer.

About Ford Motor Company

Ford Motor Company ( F), a global automotive industry leader based in Dearborn, Mich., manufactures or distributes automobiles across six continents. With about 198,000 employees and about 90 plants worldwide, the company's automotive brands include Ford, Lincoln, Mercury and Volvo. The company provides financial services through Ford Motor Credit Company. For more information regarding Ford's products, please visit www.ford.com.

SOURCE Ford Motor Company

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