By now you’ve surely noticed that we’ve made some big changes to the site. We pushed our latest release (code named Chili) out to jumpcut.com very early Saturday morning. We’re very excited, and we hope you enjoy the new features.

Why Chili? Well, there’s a sandwich shop just down the street where we almost always eat lunch, and the Jumpcut special is a cup of chili, gyros and a bottle of Orangina. That’s quite a combination; eclectic, tasty and oh so satisfying - kind of like Jumpcut.

Back to the good stuff. We’ve got some great new features. We’ve listened to your feedback and have made it much easier to get started making movies. We’ve also updated the look of the site and have deemed it very attractive, we hope you agree.

So, what’s in the Chili?

Multi-File Flash Upload: It’s an alpha version, so be careful! Select multipile files to upload at once and then let the Uploader automatically make a movie. Apply styles and go. Very easy, indeed.

Enhanced HTML Upload: Automatically makes a movie.

Explore: Blog view for movies, enhanced tag navigation, popular movies and active users on the right

Movie Page: Complete UI overhaul, My Movies, In This Movie, Remix History, AJAX info & tag editing

Post To Website: Publish movies directly to your blog, MySpace or other sites, and quickly share movies via email. Access via the Movie Page.

In addition to these new features, we’re also running several promotions that are a lot of fun. Check out our Groups section for even more.

CurrentTV: This is why they invented camera phones. Current TV wants to put your mobile video on television and pay you for it! Shoot some footage with your mobile device and submit it to this group. If your short is chosen by Current, you will get paid $100 and your video will be piped into 28 million homes via cable and satellite TV. Have an opinion on something in the news? Obsessed with street fashion? Pull out your phone, point, shoot and upload here at Jumpcut.

The San Francisco Marathon: RunSFM (www.runsfm.com) and Jumpcut want hear your story. Go to the San Francisco Marathon Group and tell us why you run. For yourself? A charity? We want to know your cause. Once the event is over, return to share your photos and videos with the thousands of people making the journey across the Golden Gate on Sunday July 30, 2006.

Stay tuned in to Jumpcut this week for more announcements.

Chili my soul.