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Veodia Newsletter - April 2009

Hello,

Welcome to the April edition of the Veodia Newsletter. We wanted to share an insightful Forrester report with you, as well as new features and improvements to the Veodia service.

Veodia's service is better than ever

As you know, Veodia allows you to create high quality videos, directly from your browser. Recent improvements include:

• Updated player now supports 4:3 and 16:9 wide-screen playback
• Improved HD playback performance, using progressive download
• Dedicated video encoding for uploading of screen recordings, and 'Fit to window / Actual size' options during full-screen playback

Now, every trial user can record high quality videos (640x480) directly, as well as upload HD videos.

Get started with the Veodia Studio today.

Updated player

• 4:3 and 16:9 wide-screen playback
• Improved HD playback, using progressive download
• 'Fit to window / Actual size' options during full-screen playback

Vote for Veodia

We are a few votes away from winning this year's Webware 100 award.

Please support us and vote for Veodia!

Get the Forrester report -
Tap The Potential Of “YouTube For The Enterprise”

Learn how SUN is leveraging Veodia's service to empower the SUN Learning Exchange.

Download the report - in the newsletter
(available during April)

Stay connected

We are listening to your feedback and working hard to improve our service and to bring you more value.

Follow our updates through our Blog and on Twitter @veodia.

Thank you,

The Veodia Team

Updates to Veodia's service

Few updates were released today by the Veodia team.

The Veodia player is now using progressive download,
as well as seeking capabilities (while downloading):
 
In addition, the full screen mode supports     'fit to window' as well as 'Actual size',
which provides the best viewing experience, especially for screen recording:

Many additional changes to the back-end, ensuring great performance.

:-)

The Veodia team.

Veodia is Supporting SAP Developer Network - "You and your 30 seconds!" Initiative

SAP Developer Network (SDN) grow to 1.6 million members strong. Craig Cmehil (member of the Community Team and SAP Evangelist) started an initiative to bring SDN members closer together.

You and Your 30 Seconds!

"...I'd like anywhere from 30 seconds to 10 minutes from you (audio or video) telling me, who you are. Maybe you play an instrument, wrote a book, were/are a DJ, ran track? Who are you? For many of you this community has become an extension to your working environment and so your fellow coworkers are now wondering, "who are you?"..."

Veodia is happy to support this great initiative and invites SDN members to register for a free trial account.

Craig:

Good luck!

Vote for Veodia - Webware 100 (2009) Award

Hello,
Veodia won the 2008 Wevware award last year and we are very excited to be nominated this year as well.

Please vote for us!
 

2009 is going to be an amazing year for Veodia and we would like you to take part in it.

We cannot share too many details right now, but it is going to be BIG!

;-)

Thank you for your ongoing support.

The Veodia team.

New features at Veodia

Today, we've pushed some really cool stuff out that I'll discuss in a bit but most importantly we pushed it during the day with zero downtime. How did we do that? Well we're running in the cloud and we've built our platform to be clonable into mini independent clouds we call "Cloudlets". These cloudlets can run different code and are completely self sufficient and segregated. This means that while our users are using say Cloudlet #A, we can test new features on a Cloudlet #B. When we're ready, all we have to do is flip a switch and all our users are now pointing to Cloudlet #B, instantaneously. Some of the immediate benefits for our Enterprise customers are improved SLA and increased security since content flowing inside Cloudlet #A can never be accessed from Cloudlet #B in the eventuality of a security breach.

On Friday, Etay will be showing a demo and talk about our "Cloudlets" approach at the conference "Whose Cloud is it anyway?". Watch our blog for some live footage.

So now, what did we push today? Well, we've pushed a couple of things.

1. HD Video
   Yes, you can now upload 720p or higher videos and we'll encode them at super high bitrate. Oh and we'll also encode them at lower bitrates so you can still play them on your iPhone. So how do we compare? A few weeks ago, CNet Josh Lowensohn posted a report on which HD video service was the best. YouTube received the highest score for quality. So we've decided to try our new HD support with the same content they used. Look at the result we got. Our first attempt with no optimizations at all got us as good as YouTube in our opinion.
   Go to fullscreen to really enjoy the HD.



If you're experiencing troubles with playback, please click here.

And here is the YouTube video (make sure to switch to HD)


2. Support for Screencast Upload
   Have you ever tried to upload a screencast to say YouTube? Your high resolution screen capture looks crappy because YouTube optimizes their encoding parameters for Video content. Well we've listened and you can now upload Screencasts to Veodia and they will look just plain awesome. Check this one out in fullscreen:
   
   Here is the YouTube version:
   
   
   
3. High Quality Video Recording
   Ok you have the latest webcam, a DV Camera or even a HD Camera that outputs in wide screen. Well you can now record it in High Quality @ 640x480 30 fps directly within the Veodia Widget if your hardware and bandwidth allow it. You can even stream it Live! Look at the sample below of a small video I recorded today with a Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000. Go to Fullscreen and toggle between NQ and HQ to see the difference.




Finally, this HD video was recorded using Scott's Flip Mino HD camera when we actually flipped the switch today:

If you're experiencing troubles with playback, please click here.

-Sylvain

Veodia is Presenting at "Whose Cloud Is It Anyway?" Roundtable

Etay Gafni, Veodia's VP of Products, will be presenting at TechCrunch's Roundtable & Meetup, "Whose Cloud Is It Anyway?" this Friday, February 27th. He will be demonstrating Veodia's capabilities and discussing what is unique about how Veodia leverages cloud computing.

We hope you are able to attend!

The Team that Plays Together...

Part of building a great company is fostering a culture that establishes trust and synergy among employees. On Thursday, Veodia took trust to new heights, literally—we went rock climbing!

Rock climbing and team building are perfect compliments to each other, illustrating (in a really physical way) some of the principles that lead to any successful endeavor—namely trust, communication, collaboration, teamwork, and support.

Those who were new to the sport relied on the more experienced team members to teach us the basics—how to wear the harness, tie the ropes, and communicate the commands that we’d need—and during our climb, we received guidance on positioning and which route to take; all while knowing that we were safely tethered in case we lost our footing. When it seemed like we were alone on the rock wall, wondering if we could make it to the top, the enthusiastic cheers and encouragement from our team motivated us on to accomplish our goal.

This is exactly what a good team does on a daily basis at the office: We support each other through difficult projects and challenges, work together to accomplish goals (even when they seem out of reach), and trust and respect that our knowledge and collective commitment will result in our success. That, plus we celebrate all of our successes—whether it’s launching a new release, pushing a product upgrade or even climbing a rock wall—together as a team.

Here are some pictures of our rock climbing—Enjoy!

Benjamin and Matt going vertical!

Sylvain's Spider-Man imitation

Rose tries a tough grade (5.10) with Matt's coaching

Here I am (completely afraid of heights) getting to the top with Scott's help

Jose is making it look easy!

Izumi B.

Updated Messages in the Veodia Studio

In the recent update to the Veodia Studio, we added user messages to improve our user's experience.

Below are some examples.

Generic issues:

Trying to view a video that was deleted or not found:

 

Issues with the service or servers: 

Trying to view a private video:

And my favorite one, using a photo taken on one of our many late 'release' nights - working on the solution in the background:

We hope that these messages will improve the experience of our users (in the rare chance the user would actually see them, due to a problem).

Enjoy,

Etay

Transparency: More than a Buzzword

I’m a fan of comic books and so when Spider-Man hit the silver screen, I was there. Now, whether you’re a fan of the comic, movie or even premise (a radioactive spider bite, huh?), comics can offer some simple, guiding truths. Who couldn’t quote Ben Parker’s “with great power comes great responsibility?”

Jeremiah Owyang’s recent blog post about James Andrews misguided tweet got me thinking about this quote, and the whole issue of transparency and social media. It’s an interesting post and the comments provide a lot of viewpoints from both sides of the fence. It’s definitely a tricky situation.

From the boardroom to the U.S. Government bailout plan, there’s no denying that the demand for transparency has changed the dynamics of interaction and this is only bolstered by the tidal wave of social media. Twitter, blogging and social networks have become some of the most pervasive and influential forces today, ushering in new modalities of communication with far-reaching effects that extend to even our own government. Government agencies are blogging, the SEC issued blog guidelines for material disclosures and began using Twitter for information updates and Barack Obama is being called the first social media president.

And for every success story, there’s the “un-success story” about the lack of transparency and wielding the power of social media for evil (okay, I’m being dramatic…not evil, but definitely inappropriate). John Mackey, the Walmart/Edelman debacle, McDonald’s fake blog, Sony’s rootkit, Microsoft and Wikipedia, and the list goes on of examples that fly in the face of the whole concept of transparency.

When it comes right down to it, the key is deciding how you treat transparency: as a buzzword, a strategy, a weapon/shield or a value. At Veodia, we treat transparency as a value and support this value throughout our organization.

In today’s world we are more connected than ever—access to information, insight and actions is lightning quick and global—and with this great power comes a great responsibility.

Izumi B.