A month or so ago Andrew Angus of our customer Switch Marketing pointed out that often his firm starts multiple simultaneous projects with a single set of clients. The way our software was working, the participating clients would have to accept individual invitations to each project. He pointed out that this can be a nuisance to his clients, and that sometimes people don’t at first go through accepting each invitation resulting in their not gaining access to every project. So, his recommendation was to change our software such that when two people have been in a project together before, when one of them invites the other to a new project, the addition should be automatic with no need to accept an invitation. We agreed, and built it, and are grateful to Andrew.
Automatic addition of prior team-mates to project means no invitation acceptances which is of course mostly a benefit for video.Market7 users, but Michael Haley of our customer Bars + Tone pointed out to us that after we made that change this also can mean no notification of some new team members’ arrival in projects’ activity feeds. He finds it useful to know when first log-ins happen, which makes sense to us too. So, using our agile development practices, we wrote a story in Pivotal Tracker that when an experienced video.Market7 user first into a project a new project of theirs, that occurance should go to the project’s activity feed.
Next week all of our customers will benefit from both Andew’s and Michael’s good ideas after we release new code that includes the latest customer-driven development ideas which our engineers just completed programming.
We have always used GetSatisfaction as a lifeline for our customers in need of support, and a channel for exchanges about ideas and questions. We use customer recommendations to decide what features and improvements to focus on. The large majority of what we’ve built directly responds to requests users share with us, and already our service integrates dozens of features initiated and enhanced through the feedback provided by GetSatisfaction in particular.
To make that easier, we have embeded the GetSatisfaction tab into our site. Better yet, we now share a single sign-on so customers who want to leave feedback don’t have to log on to their service separately or even have a GetSatisfaction account. You can now do everything right within the security of your Market7 project.
So try it out and let us know what you think (both good and bad) it’s the way we will get better.
T is for “turkey”, “Thanksgiving” and, and to some, a special kind of “person”. The case for hiring & working with “T-shaped” people is one I’ve encountered a lot lately. I think it’s a good description of the sort of person with whom I most value working and engaging. If you want to know what it means, and why I think it’s so great, including for our customers, watch the video that follows this paragraph. You can even play a little game: see if you catch my mistake, revealed below the video. Also stay tuned for Shannon’s cameo at the end. In spirit of holiday, I’m thankful for him always being on-the-spot with video equipment for recording my takes. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
As integration among our modules rises, I don’t anticipate too many users will “write a script about the task” as I mistakenly said on-camera. I meant more that benefits accrue when our software can allow contextual assignment of a task-about-a-script from within that script’s page instead of having to navigate away from it to a Tasks module page.
Above is the question I’ve heard the most times during the past few days in particular. But if I real-time search my memory for the most frequently fielded query during a longer period of the past several weeks, I think it’s from other people who are trying to make various other business endeavors succeed, and they’ve been asking, with hope, something like whether I “feel things picking up in the market?”
Many of those who’ve asked about experiences in the economy have indicated that they themselves are rebounding and looking forward to more developments. Market7 is doing fine, adding impressive new customers at a good pace and steadily building revenues. But nothing’s been too steep, and the growth has felt more organic than environmental.
But maybe my perception’s changed to greater economic robustness during the past few days at the Streaming Media West event in San Jose.
I started to work on what’s now Market7 during 2006, so this year’s is my fourth consecutive Streaming Media West in this capacity. I believe that the number of exhibitors has more than doubled during that span. And this year a new development was having to navigate around people having conversations in the aisles. Not even exhibiting, and there more for partnering with vendors than for selling to prospects, Market7 scored two new customers.
So my answers to question are: the show was a good one for me; and I think I am now starting to feel things pick up in the market.
While initially building video.Market7 we presumed that a typical production would involve sharing of a few cuts of footage towards the final product plus occasional collection of some integrated assets like graphics that appear within video. So we built our Files module to be a single, simple repository for everything assembled within a project, thinking that just sorting the list according to certain criteria would be sufficient to organize and find. In fact our customers are using projects in our service to collect much more content including storyboard elements, headshots of actors & scouting shots of locations, b-roll & other footage to be integrated into production, and various planning & organizational documents. Several have asked for better capabilities to work with larger amounts of documents and media typically assembled in a project so we are in the midst of enhancing our files capabilities, the latest aspect of which is folder-based organization:
Another point that’s come up more than once from our users is that awaiting review, feedback and approval about content is a frequent source of anxiety. So we’ve included viewing of video, files and published scripts as activity feed generating items, whether or not the viewer makes comments. And instead of having to constantly log into a project to check its activity feed, we now allow users to subscribe to projects’ feeds by email, including control over which modules they want to follow and how frequently emails should go out:
There are a couple other new features in this release, also responsive to customer requests. Uploading content now includes availability of an “alternative uploader”, based on HTML instead of Flash, that may prove more robust for large files (like 1-2 GB). We are working towards bringing such robustness to our Flash uploader too but there are a few current challenges for that in industry practice, acknowledged and under consideration by the relevant technical community. Also, video.Makret7 project-owners now have the ability to edit other team members’ comments in our Annotative Player which could be used to clean up clutter of comments after decisions have been made or to resynchronize comments if a file’s been replaced with a newer version that has timeline alterations.
We appreciate Peter Wylie’s insightful questions about how it is to put a new start-up company through its paces in the current, challenging economic environment. Check out those questiona and our responses here (meaning, click logo below to link to the interview):
I am amazed by how fast things are happening for Market7. My prior company makes routers for cable and telecom operators which required years of engineering and qualification and mind-numbing progression through various other obstacles encountered before we had our customers using our work. This go-round, it seems our time is now.
Two video.market7.com modules are pretty much ready to be used. One focuses on preparation of materials for a video shoot, including some of the scripting concepts Shannon’s included in blogposts. The other relates to the review of footage and management of the editorial / post-production processes. It’s the source of the screen shot on our home page. We are ready for professional producers to try these modules in cooperation with actual clients to execute real-world projects.
We’re fortunate in the influence we’ve received getting where we are. This now extends through direct interaction with our own users. Will you have a project over the next couple of months which could use a better approach to working together on writing a script and planning how to shoot it? or to reaching consensus on what’s the best footage and how it should transform to final deliverable? Do you promise to talk to us about your experience during and afterwards? Please let us know – you can reach us via the contact info on the right of this page (scroll down a little), or indicate your interest in the comments & questions part at the bottom of our feedback form. We look forward to it.
