Continuations

This past Saturday was Video Hackday in New York City. It had been organized by the team at Ziggeo with the help from many others, including a great roster of sponsors. I enjoyed participating and wrote a little hack that you can see here. Even though I am pretty rusty as a developer, I managed to write something that let’s anyone ask a written question (which then lives at its own URL – all handled via Firebase) and others can answer by recording a video response (recording and playback from...

Earlier this year I had a blog post about how writing software applications in-house is making a comeback. I was reminded of this when I attended the HackNY hackathon at NYU over the weekend. I was there to help Susan with representing Ziggeo, her startup, which provides an API for video recording and playback. The number of APIs and open source projects out there that do amazing things is simply staggering. Watching some other NY based startups present their APIs and feeling the excitement a...

It’s not too late to find a summer internship! In fact, my wife Susan and her co-founder Oliver over at Ziggeo are looking for marketing and sales interns for the summer. So if you know of any students who are looking, please send them their way. Thanks!

For many years we used to have Au Pairs to help with our children. The screening process to find a new Au Pair was quite cumbersome and mostly paper based. It was difficult to go through many possible candidates and try to form an opinion on them. That all changed when the agency we were using asked Au Pairs to start recording short videos of themselves. Now we were able to skip many profiles after just a short look at the video and focus on the ones we could imagine living with us for a year...

Susan and Oliver’s startup Ziggeo is now out of beta. Today they launched three simple pricing plans which include a free tier. To let everyone try out Ziggeo, I have set up a “screening room” where you can ask me a question or suggest a blog post for Continuations.

Video is everywhere these days and for good reason. Even a short video clip contains a lot more information than a still image. But playing back videos in a way that works across browsers and devices has been tricky. Just using the HTML5 video tag means you have no control over the controls on the video and event handling is a complete cross-browser mess. Both jwplayer and video.js don’t behave like standard HTML elements and are therefore hard to use in modern responsive layouts. If you have...

If a picture is a thousand words, then a video is a thousand pictures. Our brains seem built for extracting a huge amount of information from the shortest clips (and even animated gifs). Prior to smartphones capturing video was sort of a pain but now there is a Cambrian explosion of new recordings. This leads us to expect video in more and more places, whether that’s Instagram or a news article. This change in expectation over time will affect all sorts of online services, whether that’s recr...

API pricing requires striking a tricky balance between the needs of developers and the cost/profitability of the provider. I am on the boards of several companies that provide APIs as their primary business model, including Twilio, Dwolla and Sift Science and have been in long discussions about the relative merits of pure usage-based pay versus some type of bundle pricing (sometimes also referred to as t-shirt pricing). This morning Ziggeo which provides video recording, storage and playback ...