Another example unrelated to the above image: In September, we’ll be running a trial with a good sized wireless carrier in Latin America that has a user base in the few million user range. Not huge but likely “right sized” for our current server infrastructure.   The trial runs for two weeks to 10% of their user base.  If successful, the trial will morph into a full set of revenue producing services available to the entire user base.   The widget to be used for this test is essentially a reproduction of  the carrier’s brand – there is nothing similar to it in our existing widget library.   That said, the code for this wireless carrier’s widget and,  more importantly, the dynamically produced images of widgets that we use in Facebook and other places are now handled through the same new code as our regular and more conventionally custom widgets.

The bulk of this change will be invisible to most of you but was a huge leap forward for us.  It improves your experience as a user by providing new out-of-the-normal widget designs and reduces the possibility for errors since we only have a single set of code to maintain.  It also opens the door to a whole slew of widget customization opportunities that we hadn’t been able to do before through a web interface. We previously were having to manually build exceptions for every insanely custom widget that we built.  That is no longer the case.

That said, our next release is very real estate focused with the added benefit of our enterprise experience in other non-real estate markets.  The real estate functionality is now a module or add-on to the core platform that can be seamlessly added or removed for specific organizations and individuals with a single configuration setting within the platform.

Real estate technology is the perfect showcase for answering the question of “what’s of value and what’s around it?”.  Even if you aren’t involved in the real estate industry, you’ll still find all sorts of new functionality related to mapping, content management, and mobile capabilities.  The next release is just around the corner…

from feedback we received, we’d done well in some image handling areas especially those that involved video previews upon upload.  As we sat down and really had some open discussion internally and with enterprise customers, we need that we needed to do better.

The first focus area was the automation around knowing exactly what type of image had been uploaded. While we likely have a state of the art implementation for automated detection on the video side, our image detection system wasn’t nearly as comprehensive or reliable.  We’ve made tangible improvements for the next release.

The second focus area was making ensuring that every image was efficiently sized and shaped for all potential uses throughout the platform and on partner sites.

Lastly, we spent a lot of time focusing on how members store, share, group, and syndicate  all of the available content within the platform but especially images.  I’ll cover the specific functionality and platform features in more detail as we get closer to release.  There are a number of surprises here that I cannot wait to share.

We’ve also done a lot of image specific work within the developer API.  Members with access to the dev API will receive a separate document detailing all of the changes just prior to the next release going live.  We done our best to incorporate as many improvements as possible into the existing API set so you *may* already be seeing benefits from the code changes for the next version.

This is just a taste, I know…but we still have two weeks or so until launch. Until then, know that we’ve heard you….

As background to better understand what we are changing, we have a small cluster of processing servers that convert videos, resize photos, and do all of tasks like create documents on the fly.  Currently, when a video is uploaded, it’s sent to the first open server. If there are no open processing servers, the requests  waits in line for an open server and then the request is processed. The first request is the first one processed.  Like most sites, we have more unregistered guests than members and more free members than paying members.  We are taking steps to make our platform “smarter” to improve our service for our members.

Processing Priority: We’ve introduced the ability for prioritizing processing requests based on membership status or affiliation based membership such as a company or organization.  During periods of high activity, paying members will be prioritized over members who in turn will have priority over unregistered guests. Note that this change will have no impact when there are plenty of open servers. It will only kick in when requests are waiting in line.  In order to ensure that even low priority requests don’t have abnormal waits, we have also added a way of gradually raising a request’s priority over time automatically.

Parallel Processing: When a member with privileges to process multiple files at once sends the files, they’ll be processed on different machines at the same time.  Of course, this will depend on the member’s processing priority and open server availability.  Our old logic reserves a single server for them and they were processed one after the other.

Members using this functionality should see marked improvements in the amount of time needed to wait on a group of large videos to be converted.

Customized Processing Options: Certain membership levels will have highly customizable processing options.  We’ll cover this in detail upon launch of the next platform version.

If video processing is a bit wonky today, it’s because we are putting these changes in place in the live environment.

These changes will result in reduced waiting and far more flexibility for our individual and corporate customers.  They’ll apply across the board to all of the different types of platform customers (real estate, mobile services, etc.)  This should lay the foundation for our continued growth in 2010 and beyond.

Exciting times…

A few months ago, we rolled out some experimental functionality to several non-real estate enterprise customers.  The response was awesome enough that we have been “heads-down” to roll out a production version of it with the changes that they came back with.  It’s a set of deep changes for us so we want to be sure that we have all of the bases covered and the functionality fully tested before rolling it out to other companies.

Note that some of the work that we are doing has occasionally impacted our live environment for reasons that we’ll discuss when we launch in December.  Though we haven’t seen any new impacts, we apologize in advance for any issues. 

The new functionality that we will be releasing aren’t small changes or simply putting a new shine on an old product…it will totally shift how you think about and deliver rich content to your customers via your web sites. See you soon….

Incidentally, Google will also index the syndicated content on your site rather than ours which is quite a different approach than most vendors.

You’ll be seeing a lot more about this theme soon.

Because we were (and still are) a bootstrapped company, our approach was fairly simple: build out a section of our platform, get paying customers, rinse, and repeat. We made the decision to focus in real estate because it was and still is a great niche to demonstrate our platform capabilities with geolocation, content management, and language support.  Let’s face it, we were video before video was cool, local before local was cool, and international before international was cool.

That said, we always knew that the platform had broad applicability outside of real estate.  We are starting to market to those non-real estate markets and beginning to find success. We’re entering into a series of technical discussion with multinational players around a number of applications for our platform.  We’ll still have a team 100% focused on the real estate specific platform features but are also now hiring for broader expertise and executing against a plan well beyond real estate.

As a result, this blog will continue to focus on the broader aspects of the platform.

When we said that we would be an enterprise solution, we meant it. If our current technical discussions go well, we anticipate seeing rollouts of non-real estate versions of our platform within the next 2-3 months.  Stay tuned – we’ll release details as we are allowed.

The Month of Code concept came about as a result of a simple question – “what features do we have just laying around that aren’t live?”  because we are bootstrapped without external investors, we’ve sometimes get sidetracked by large projects that keep the lights on.  This means that development on a certain feature begins, gets interrupted for a period of time, and then isnt a priority when we get back to feature development – the iPhone conversion feature is a great example.

So we’ve decided to do our best to see if we can empty our library of unreleased changes.  Here is our progress so far:

—————————–

1 April – significantly boosted our platform’s video conversion quality without losing the instant start and buffer free video that we are famous for

2 April -Added capability for members to associate videos by language so alternative language version appear in the player

3 April -  Integrated profile videos with certain types of content (example is from our real estate video portal)

4 April – Saturday

5 April - Sunday

6 April – released by popul;ar demand Unbranded Video for MLS and the ability to group Community/Neighborhood videos (real estate specific fixes)

7 April – added iPhone friendly video conversion for most types of video uploads

8 April – added FLV processing for videos uploaded as video podcasts

9 April- Improved the handling of related videos that are shown underneath the main video

10 April- Rewrote the interface and logic for creating custom branded embeddable video widgets far more simple

11 April – Saturday

12 April – Sunday

13 April – Added the ability to Syndicate  Documents/Youtube/Real Estate Show Content From A Folder to a tab underneath the video that is playing

14 April – Made a bunch of virtual folder upgrades and externation syndication changes for partner sites  (added a video demonstration for virtual folders)

15 April – Made updated new feature and system information available in member area

16 April – Added Geo targeted local market reports and hyperlocal blog posts available in member area

17 April – Made it possible to Syndicate Member Blog Posts To Videos/Filter Blog Posts by Tag

18 April – Saturday

19 April – Sunday

20 April – made a member’s shared video content available on the member’s public profile page (didnt quite get all of the bugs out of the functionality for video podcasting that we hoped to release today)

——————————-

I’ll keep adding to the list from time to time as we go through the month.  Taking the platform route was a choice that cost us early on but now we feel that we have “crossed the hump” and can develop new features and implement them on customer sites rapidly.  Thanks for sharing the ride with us.

1) to improve the location based video, document, and external link services that the online content management provides.

Back story: we started building the bulk of our geolocation services in 2007.  It was initially slow and clumsy and limited to just video but we knew that it would be the future path to differentiating our video services and providing a set of valuable services to our customers. We kept geolocation in the middle of our priority list as we finished the huge work items that we had.  In short, we worked on different parts of location based services at different times and added new content types for these types of services throughout 2008.

The result was a system to geolocate properties, documents, images, and members  that worked well but didnt have a lot of standardization on the back end.  With most of this phases big work items out of the way now, we spent this past week updating and standardizing how geolocation across the entire platform so that we can really focus on a new set of local video and content services for both users and application developers of web and mobile applications.

2) To tee up broader organizational focused functionality associated with corporate memberships

We believe that enterprises should be able to pass unique organizational branding and syndication to their staff, members, and partners to provide a seamless experience for their users. We’ve been selling memberships to selected real estate, web portals, and other organizations for over a year now that allow these orgs to do just that. We haven’t been offering membership levels on our website in an automated way because much of what we have been offering involved a very hands-on, boutique style of professional services approach. Now that our first phase of functionality is built out, we are specifically focusing on automated set of value-add online services that we can help organizations, portals, and associations provide to their employees, members, and internal business online. In addition to an automated method to sign up for various membership levels (including corporate), you’ll also be seeing a whole set of functionality aimed at the enterprise customer in the coming weeks.

Imagine being able to provide different types of content branding and syndication for different business units, teams, or levels within your organization. Content can be accessed, shared among the organization, and syndicated externally to others without multiple uploads, cutting and pasting of embed codes, or constantly moving content into “networks”. Content can uploaded that remains private…as in “no one can see it but you”.  Your organization doesn’t have to be limited anymore to public facing channels.

We realized that we had a number of dependencies on the back end of the platform that were fine for individual members but not as flexible for broad organizational use as we think that organizations need. Those dependencies have since been cleaned up this past week.

The result is that we are now ready to start offering a broad set of content management and branding functionality that allows a member to be part of any number of organizations. apply that organization’s branding and use any unique sharing/syndication associated with that organization when it is needed, and still retain the capability to use their individual membership to the fullest.  Multimedia and content developers will also find the new capabilities appearing in both the member set of the platform developer application programming interfaces as well as the full set.