If you don’t already know, and we’re surprised if you don’t, but one of the greatest events in the action sports calendar is descending upon us. What’s the event? It’s the European Winter X Games in Tignes! Like I said, if that’s the first time you’re hearing about it then we’re shocked but we’re also here to deliver you something pretty special.

As European media partners to the European Winter X Games, we’re celebrating the fact that we’ve got the world’s best talent in Europe for a good few days and that they’ll be showing off all over the internet and TV, we don’t want them to be the only people that win something. Sure they might win a medal and pride but who wants that when there’s a chance to win a full snowboarding set up?! Intrigued? Well, read on…

As we know, you lot out there love Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. So much so that we’ve designed a little prize for those of you that interact with us during the X Games through these sites and we’ve even roped in our fellow magazine sites too. Starting Wednesday March 20th the guys from Whitelines, Onboard, SnowboarderMBM and Skiing Mag will be giving away 10 one year’s subscription to their magazines per day to one lucky person, for three days. Not one person for all mags but one person PER MAG. So there’s 30 subscriptions up for grabs! All you have to do on Twitter is tweet a photo, share your thoughts or just generally say something about the X Games. When it comes to Instagram you can upload a picture of you watching the X Games, your disbelief of how good a run was… anything really but there is one condition – you must use the hashtag #XGAMESNOW. Whether you’re tweeting or instagram-ing you need to put this hashtag on it and we’ll be able to pick winners.

But that’s not all!

Aside from subscriptions, at the end of the ten days the editors from the magazines will sit around a large table and argue about which one lucky git will be able to take home ‘the big prize’. The big prize will be:

TTR x Nitro Snowboard
Onboard x Union Bindings
Onboard x 686 Jacket
Onboard x Level Gloves
Whitelines x 7-9-13 Shoelace Belt
Onboard Tee
Whitelines Tee
Onboard x Neff Beanie
Whitelines Beanie
Onboard Sub
Whitelines Sub

Not bad eh? All for sending a tweet of a picture with a hashtag. But it doesn’t stop there!!
That’s what the guys at the magazines are giving away but there’s also the people that are huge Facebook lovers too! For everyone that fancies winning this huge prize:

Onboard x Head Snowboard
Onboard x Union Bindings
Onboard x 686 Jacket
Onboard x Level Gloves
Whitelines x 7-9-13 Shoelace Belt
Onboard Tee
Whitelines Tee
Onboard x Neff Beanie
Whitelines Beanie
Onboard Sub
Whitelines Sub

All you have to do is visit the Mpora page on Facebook and make sure you enter – for all you people who are already fans, you just enter your details on our comp page and you’re there. For those of you that aren’t friends with us on Facebook (and shame on you for it!), just ‘like’ us and then enter your details. It’s as easy as that! Hopefully you’ll be the one walking away with this huge swag we’ll be giving you.

Don’t forget to check in on Mpora though as we’ll be getting highlights and exclusive edits from Tignes as the Winter X Games kicks off!

Tweets about “#xgamesnow”

Now is the time to rejoice my fellow iPad users! Along with our new iPhone app we’ve created a brand new iPad app too and it’s live on the App Store right now! Similarly to the iPhone app it’s been made to work faster and look a lot better while still delivering you the best action sports videos right into the palm of your hand… providing you have a hand big enough to hold your iPad in without dropping it like an eel covered in vaseline. Went off on a slight tangent there…

Anyway! It’s new and fucking brilliant. Go get it on your iPad now and enjoy yourself!!! Need a link?
HERE’S A LINK FOR YOU! Now you can download the app. Feel free to share it around with people but even more importantly, what do you think? Good? Bad? Ugly?

Let’s start with the most important thing – the player.

Above is a picture of the new player and you may have noticed it’s slightly different to the old one. It looks a lot better (that might be a personal opinion though)! As you can tell, I’ve added some cool presentation arrows so I’ll start at ‘Like’ and work clockwise for you…

Like – Head over to this button and you’ll be able to show your mates on Facebook that you like it or Twitter. Whatever floats your social media boat.
Embed – For all you embedding nutters out there, you can embed our videos. Click on this button and you’ll get a standard embed code OR, for those of you who are adventurous, you can change the dimensions of the player to fit your site!
Fullscreen – I’m sure you’ve understood this already but if you hit this button, the video will go into fullscreen mode.
Timeline – We’ve changed up our timeline slightly so it looks a bit smarter. It might look like it takes up a bit of the screen in that photo but when the video is playing and your mouse isn’t moving, it’ll minimise.
Sound – Well this is where you control the sound! Slide it from left to right and the sound will go up and down. Couldn’t be simpler. Click this button to mute the sound if you hate noise.
Play/Pause – Either hit play to play it or pause to pause it. It’s a never ending party!
3 Second Rewind – We’ve let the button return to our player! We used to have a 5 second rewind but we’ve opted for 3 second rewind on our new player so you can watch that trick you like over and over.
SloMo – This works amazingly with the 2 second rewind. Hit slomo and everything slows down so you can see exactly how they did that trick.
HD Button – If the video is in HD, you’ll have option to watch it in HD. Just hit the HD button and we’ll do the rest.

For you special lot out there that use Google Chrome or Safari as your web browser then there is a screenshot option. When you hit pause on a video there will be another icon that appears above the HD button. This is a screenshot button! Hit this and it’ll get rid of every button within the player so you can take a screenshot. You can move forwards and backwards through the frames using the arrows on your keyboard to get the right shot and then screenshot away!
If you’re a Firefox user or an Internet Explorer user then you won’t see this feature. Sorry!

So what else is new? Well, we’ve tidied up the site, made everything a bit easier on the eyes, changed the colour, used new fonts… the usual stuff. This time though, we reckon, it looks pretty f*cking good. You may notice the layout of the videos and photos are a bit different but I don’t want to give everything away! Here’s a hint though, one thing I haven’t spoken about is related videos which shows up at the end of a video. Give that a try, we’ve changed that too!

If you get into any problems or you don’t like something, or anything like that, then let us know! We’d love some feedback!

The photo above might not look like much but trust us, it’s definitely worth updating! It won’t cost you a penny and you’ll have the best action sports footage in the palm of your hand. Now, if you don’t have the app already then you’re missing out! Head over to the App Store and download this piece of wonder now!

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/mpora-video/id516605417?mt=8

If you haven’t heard about Pinterest then you must have been hiding under a social media rock somewhere! It’s basically a website where you can pin things you like – an internet based pin board if you will. You can go to a site, hit ‘Pin It’ and it’ll be posted onto your profile. You can put these things under different categories known as boards and people who follow you will see what you like/share. Similar to Twitter, you can follow other people’s profiles and see what they like/share. I know it sounds like a fairly rudimentary social site but once you start pinning you won’t be able to stop! You can also repin something that we’ve pinned to your own profile (providing you like it of course) so that people who follow you can see what you like as well!
If you follow us on Mpora you’ll see our latest pins of videos and photos on the site as well as the latest blog posts and competitions! Standard stuff really but just another great place to find out some great content from Mpora!

Come check us out – pinterest.com/Mpora

Avid followers of the Mpora blog (I know there’s thousands of you out there) may remember that I posted up some info last Friday about the event Whitelines were holding to break the record for the World’s longest snowboard rail ride. Did they do it? Well…

After a long day at the Milton Keynes Sno!zone several people managed to hit the 55m mark and we thought that was about it. We were losing hope, losing time and not only that but we were starting to get a bit cold. It was at the point where we were going to call it a day until Calum Paton stepped up to the rail and made everyone’s jaw drop. He didn’t manage to complete the whole rail but he was on there for a staggering 78 metres, which smashed the previous record by 10 metres! He got his name on a certificate from the observers for the Guinness Book of World Records and padded his wallet with a nice £1000.

If you fancy reading the full write up from the guys at Whitelines then check out their post here. And don’t forget to keep your eyes on Mpora for when we get the final edit!

Photo: Dan Medhurst

Day in day out the MPORA team are being blown away by the work of young action sports filmmakers, whether it’s a highly polished promo vid of a local rider or a rough cut, in your face skate session from the streets. In fact, so impressed have we been that we’ve taken a number of talented youngsters on as freelance filmmakers and a lucky few on full-time.

Bradley Dove-Dixon is one such filmmaker. Having got involved in motocross through his dad’s race team, in April of this year he picked up a Canon DSLR and pointed it at a few motocross bikes. Check out the result:

Foxhill feat. Bike It Cosworth Wild Wolf Yamaha

With the multitude of new technology out there, there’s little to stop you from having a go yourself. And if you do think you’ve got what it takes, whether you’re new to the game or have a back catalogue of edits, get them up on MPORA and get your work seen by the rest of the action sports community.

If you’re particularly confident and you think you’ve got what it takes to produce videos on behalf of MPORA and our core sites, send a sample of your work over to the guys below.

James Renwick (james.renwick@factorymedia.com): BMX, MTB, MX, Surf
Kel Verbiest (kel.verbiest@factorymedia.com): Snowboarding, Ski, Skate, Wake, Kite

Like I said, the Mpora nerds are knee deep in ethernet cables, html code and the odd breakfast burrito to make sure that it’s back up to speed as quickly as possible. By all means try to upload but if it doesn’t work then don’t say I didn’t warn you! I’ll be shouting out on our Facebook and Twitter when it’s back up and running so follow me over there. If you have any problems then ask away over there as well but for now, just sit back and enjoy the videos we have.

As Douglas Adams would write: DON’T PANIC

The most important thing to us lot working on Mpora is you guys. We need to make sure that you’re watching the best videos and enjoying them with at least 90% enjoyment. But we realised that there’s plenty of you out there that enjoy a good ride/shred/skate/surf or anything in between but might not be getting the best deal for it. So, taking all of that into account, we decided to build Mpora Gear.

Wondering what Mpora Gear is? Wonder no more! Mpora Gear is our new site that enables you guys to find, compare and share tens of thousands of action sports products. The website includes advanced user reviewing capabilities and the functionality to compare, and buy directly from, some of the world’s best online retailers! So, in short, we’ll put up thousands upon thousands of products which you’ll be able to review if you wish and we’ll deliver you the best price for the product.
First sports up on the site will be MTB and Road Cycling but the winter sports loot will follow shortly after it in 2011.

If you’re thinking that this sounds pretty sweet already then you might be interested in this next bit of news I’m about to tell you. You could become an Mpora Expert! I might need to explain this a little bit but it’s a pretty nice gig. If you apply you could join our team (which is already in its hundreds) of Mpora Experts to review, test and discuss the latest products on the market. Once you’re part of the team we’ll send out a welcome pack with some freebies inside AND we’ll send you out some free gear to keep you riding throughout the year. Interested – join up here.

So, that’s pretty much it. Best gear, cheapest prices, find out what they’re like before you buy and there’s a chance you could be testing the new stuff. If you want to keep ahead of the crowd on this then sign up to the Mpora Gear newsletter and you’ll receive all the latest news on the launch, exclusive offers, latest product news, latest tech advice, how-to guides, product videos and a whole lot more!

We’re quite excited about this at Mpora HQ so get ready for something VERY special!