Market7

Pixel Corps/DV_Garage Senior Production Manager gives us his pro opinion on Market7 thus far.

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1) That’s Shannon whom you can see peppered throughout this blog & elsewhere on the Market7 Web site site as a director of creative development with darker hair, which I’ve been assured will become the case again before long.

2) That’s the video.Market7 application working in Internet Explorer! Our pilot projects have so far just been sanctioned in Firefox, but recent development work has us operational in IE and in Safari, which will be pushed out to the world when we go commercial very, extremely soon (we’re starting to count in terms of days until launch).

If you pay attention to technology industry news, perhaps even if you don’t, you’ve most certainly noticed Google’s launch this week of its Chrome browser. Major themes include providing a more efficient, stable and secure platform for accessing application functionality via Internet. These are themes Market7 endorses too as a provider of Web-based applications.

Less covered, but even more squarely within our domain, was Google’s simultaneous announcement of a video sharing application within the enterprise. Video, enterprise — that’s our market! This is cool, as for one thing our year old company frequently receives questions about the magnitude of potential  success in our newly emerging space. We believe that the timing to focus on enterprise video is ripe because of a confluence of trends such as more accessible production resources, faster bandwidth, and rising user familiarity with accessing video in multiple modes on multiple devices. So there’s another conviction we share with Google which finds its enterprise video opportunity sufficiently large to unveil in sync with its much-hyped browser launch.

The actual application Google is launching resembles an internally accessed version of YouTube. Videos can be uploaded for certain recipients or for all enterprise members, and those videos can receive comments, tags and ratings. This promises to enhance organizational effectiveness through broader, more intelligent access to the distinctively engaging, illuminating and persuasive medium of video. And Market7 elevates those organizations’ abilities to efficiently and effectively get video produced that can be circulated internally through environments like the one Google is launching, or circulated more broadly through other mechanisms.

Market7 welcomes Google’s public entry to the enterprise video  space and we are excited by the synergies of our activities and opportunities to collaborate.

Another Vertical! I am getting sucked more deeply into these conventions than the Olympics ever had me, as attested by my twitter stream. There is some really good (& some not-so-good) speaking going on, and some compelling prospects still coming up. Along with sports, and, um adult entertainment, oh and also religion and education — anyhow, politics has long been one of the fields leading in realization of video technological innovations, a notable example being the rise to prominence of Pseudo.com through its 360-degree live coverage of the 2000 RNC.

As an increasingly obsessive start-up guy, any non-Market7 thought that rises in my head immediately beckons its company-relevant peers, so as I start pondering this election season I quickly segue to considering what usage our offering may find in political activities. So we’re talking to people in this field. And the reception’s good. Political video production tends to be tightly time-constrained, logistically complex, multi-handed, and subjective in nature which raises the priority for clear, organized and consensual collaboration — areas in which video.Market7 excels. Stay tuned.

Seth, in between meetings,
at Il Fornaio Palo Alto
writing this blog post

We have two panel proposals up for South by Southwest (SxSW) interactive content festival for next year. If you love us, you will click one of the two panel links below and vote for our panel! (Yes, you have to create an account, but it is SOOOO worth it to support our fabulous team).

In the development of our software, we have collected a ton of best practices for video producers and their clients. It seems fitting to try and leverage some of that in the form of an informative and fun panel.

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/1766 - Video Content Producer - Get Paid!

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/1768 - OMG: How Much Will That Video Cost?

Recently, our company experienced terrible customer service from another Software as a Service (SaaS) company.

Instead, it is meant to highlight some of the key areas where SaaS is potentially weakest and where we (in accordance with our fine customers’ request) we hope to excel here at Market7.

• After signing contract, customer cannot easily alter agreement after four months of low-usage
• No online account management capabilities, must call customer support and wait for the assigned Account Representative to call us back
• Despite leaving a better phone number for the Account Rep, Rep continues to call the phone number listed on the account, resulting in extended game of phone tag
• Refusal to reassign account despite 4 weeks of Account Rep phone tag
• Finally! Rep contact. Then 27 days go by with Rep failing to deliver promised new contract terms
• After angry customer call and quick Rep follow up, Another four days pass, Rep still fails to deliver on promises
• Through the entire process, customer is being charged for services they are not using

What can we at Market7 learn from this debacle? First, that customers feel vulnerable when dealing with SaaS. They are relying on someone “out there” to take care of them. They are at the mercy of outages, down-times, upgrades that result in bugs and loss of data. Because of this, it is especially important that they feel comfortable with the customer support system.

The irony is that the service is very, very good. If not for this customer service experience, I would recommend them to anyone wanting to have an online meeting in real-time. It is a shame that so much time was put into a great software experience only to lose customers because of their customer support.

Why is this different than traditional software? The vulnerability factor cannot be overlooked. SaaS companies must go OUT-OF-THEIR-WAY to take care of a simple request (like changing a service plan). Customers who get the impression they are just a number will conclude that their valuable information is at risk. “Wow, if they won’t even take the time to adjust my subscription, what will happen when I have a real problem like data loss on their servers”.

For Market7 video projects on a specific and limited time scale, producers and clients all fear that at the worst possible time (IE, 24 hours before the video is set to air) Market7 might not be there for them. As a result, it is crucial that we do three things for each and every customer:

1. Make it easy for them to contact help
2. Accept responsibility and encourage open communication
3. Keep them constantly updated about progress and follow through the conclusion

A big “yay” from me on Market7 having a product manager. And he’s a good one! And he’s less-than-horrible at Wii golf. Nicholas has spent the last five years preserving security on the Internet in these wild lands we’ve heard about south of San Francisco. Now he returns to SF to enhance organizational management of video. Welcome back to civilization Nicholas.

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Market7 is getting very close to selling our stuff. This may seem odd as our Web site is still light on details of exactly what we provide. There are reasons for that, and we’ll try to get a couple of things done and then start disclosing more publicly soon. If you’re interested to learn more in the mean time, please contact us!

Anyhow, the topic of this post, related to our starting sales soon, is to provide some flavor of what we’re encountering in the rising load of meetings with prospective customers we’re having.

We can convey that video.market7.com is generally an online solution for enhancing video production efforts, with benefits that include making them more efficient and improving the quality of end results. One of the premises of our company is that every professional organization, be it a corporation, government office, religious institution, and so on, and so forth — they all need to concern themselves with video production these days, just like every organization had to get serious about its Web presence during the mid-1990s. We find ourselves calling on a large variety of kinds of organizations, and in so doing are increaingly noting that several vertical industries that we address are each distinctive and substantial markets.

One fun recent meeting we had was with the video production crew of one of the Bay Area’s professional sports teams. They have to produce hundreds of videos a year for a variety of purposes including what’s shown during stoppage of action during live games and public service announcements featuring the team’s athletes for various good causes. We learned that the more than 100 major league sports teams and more than 100 division 1 universities, as well as hundreds each of less prominent professional sports teams and smaller colleges, generally share related needs, such as more effective means to coordinate many simultaneous projects and to identify opportunities for re-purposing footage.

Another notable recent encounter, slightly less fun than meeting with a sports team, was with a litigator friend of ours. He told of the requirements of media production for evidence in the midst of law suits. These projects can come up on a few hours’ notice for usage the very next day, so the onus is on intensive interaction for rapid turnaround. And for better or worse, there are certainly more litigators out there for us to address than there are professional and college sports teams combined.

Not dull to begin with, building a start-up gets increasingly exciting as customer engagement intensifies. With our rising sense of the distinctive needs and substantial opportunities we can address across the many verticals Market7 can serve, we’re now accelerating on our unmitigated thrill-ride.

What is a longshot? No, not my favorite pony bet. It’s a camera framing description. Here I break down all the different types of shots and what they look like and when you would want to use them. I have also provided a cheat sheet so you can impress all of your friends at your upcoming video production parties.

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Torrential thanks onto colleagues (& our families & friends), contractors, participants in more than 30 pilot projects, investors, service providers to us (favorites of which are at Pivotal Labs), our vendors, advisors, collaborators on various initiatives.