BlipSnips Blog

“Now we’re cookin’ with gas!” That was an expression my dad used to use when all the pieces would fall into place and the momentum felt unstoppable. It was usually during a hotly contested game of Stratego, but I digress. I feel that now with BlipSnips. So many things are coming to a head right now, it’s a moment where I can honestly say: This is fun! Somehow the long hours, the stress and risk fade away because the right things are coming together. We’re cookin’ with gas.

On Derek – Where to begin? Derek and I knew each other at Lijit, a company making social search technology. It was complex stuff we were doing but Derek’s calm demeanor and completely thorough if not sometimes orthogonal approach to problems made me confident as the head of product. He and I are data nerds, me having spent more than a decade in data architecture and he sculpting data into actionable and meaningful gold for the businesses he worked for, especially at Lijit. I’d always said internally to myself: “If I build something someday, I love to build it with that guy so I can sleep well at night.” John and I are honored to have Derek on the team as our CTO. Read all about it here.

On 100,000 downloads – It’s an amazing milestone and we’re proud to see it tick off for our BlipSnips for Facebook product (v1.0). The most amazing part is to watch the data…how and when people are using the application, how often users are uploading videos, user interactions with the app on Facebook, etc. When you start to reach scale, the patterns are so cool to witness….and so invaluable to learn from for future releases. Which brings me to….

On version 2.0 – The team is working so hard on v2.0. Middle of the night check-ins by the engineers with code comments ensuring I see all the details are implemented for our users. It is a NEW ANIMAL! With no embellishment, I’ve never used a mobile video product like what we’ve made…and that’s what we shot for. Elegance and simplicity to shoot, tag your individual friends on Twitter and Facebook and share it all seamlessly as publically or as privately as you desire. Most of all provide a beautiful and engaging viewing experience, something we call The Theater, and make it available everywhere BlipSnips can be viewed…on the phone, on your desktop and within Facebook. In the coming week or so as we prepare for launch, you’ll see more about v2.0 and all what we have prepared for you and the mobile social video market. Get ready. We’re cookin’ with gas now!

Over the afternoon and evening of Cinco de Mayo, BlipSnips’s CU Brand Ambassador, Cameron Weiss, took BlipSnips on the road and attended a block party or two near the University of Colorado, Boulder campus. Cameron brought with him a custom designed BlipSnips Beer Pong table designed by local artist Stefan Bast (www.stefanbast.com). Check out the interesting post-party interviews with some BlipSnipping college students:

My absolute favorite line of the interviews:

Cameron: What would you use BlipSnips for?

Students: Life.

Have a great weekend everybody. And BlipSnip life!

Moments Matter. 9/11 and Me.

It must have been a ‘Sliding Door‘ moment for us, but were it not for a scheduling conflict, my colleague Jeff Jonas and I would have been in meetings in the World Trade Center towers the morning of 9/11. Two weeks or so prior to that fateful day, we learned that the individuals we wanted to brief had a conflict, so, since our plane tickets had already been purchased, we scheduled another meeting uptown. We were briefing a Big 8 accounting firm on the use of software our company had developed to identify insider threats within organizations. (Ironically, the same technology would later be successfully used in counterterrorism missions.) A woman knocked on the conference room door and said, “I’m sorry, but I thought you should know that CNN is reporting that a small aircraft has collided with one of the Twin Towers.” While alarming, most agreed that it was likely a terrible accident. Our briefing continued.

Moments later, the same woman appeared again. “CNN is now reporting that it wasn’t a small plane but a commercial jet!” While everyone was deeply disturbed by the news, no one had yet offered the view that the plane crash was possibly the work of terrorism. As the meeting continued again, one of the individuals, turned white and gasped, “Oh my god, I just remembered my daughter had a meeting down there today!” He got up, phone in hand, and ran out of the room. Discussion ensued whether we should reschedule the briefing when the same woman appeared a third time, clearly in a state of shock. “CNN says a second plane has crashed into the Pentagon! I think we’re under attack!” The meeting was over. People gathered their things and we shook hands quickly, agreed to resume at some later date, and began to walk to the elevator. As we walked down the corridors, people were huddled in groups around those who had TVs, watching the news live. I still remember the looks on their faces. Disbelief. Shock. Fear. Could there be additional attacks still to come?

As Jeff and I entered the elevator, a woman was crying. I asked her what was wrong. She said her roommate’s boyfriend was a firefighter that had been dispatched to the first tower, now fully engulfed in flames. The rest was unspoken. When we exited the building, I saw something that I hope I never see again. Imagine everyone in mid-town Manhattan out of their offices, on the street, and looking towards Wall Street. Through the street’s view corridor, all we could see was a jet black plume of smoke. It looked like pure evil. People who appeared not to know each other were consoling those who were crying. People were screaming. People were frantically trying to call loved ones on their cell phones. And all were saying, what is happening to us? For those of us on the street that day, that became the moment we will never forget. Moments matter.

Tears come to my eyes as I write this, still, 10 years later.

No still camera could have captured what I saw and heard, because our reactions were constantly evolving, as we took in more information and interacted with those around us. I wish we had smart phones back then, and that I had captured the street scene. I wish I could show that video to my daughter and grandchildren some day. As I would have narrated the scenes of raw humanity unfolding around me, she would have heard her Dad, perhaps for the first time, scared, his voice almost in tears. But it would have been important for her to hear and see that, to bear witness to these incredibly powerful moments — this one happened to be a street in Manhattan – where all reached out to people as if they were family, simply because they were Americans.

As I write this, we have learned Osama Bin Laden is dead. I hope his death provides some measure of closure for the families of those who lost loved ones that day, for those who had moments like the one I just described, and for our country.

And thus was pithily stated two of the three MUST HAVE elements in any successful social app.

All apps bow before the gods of Narcissism, Voyeurism and Relevant Social Credit.  Think about it. What’s the most successful social app on the planet? Facebook. What does it do really well? Well, it allows me to broadcast stuff about me (“Narcissism”), see stuff about you (Voyeurism”) and bask in Likes, tags and comments from my friends and colleagues concerning my captivating photos, videos and shared content (“Relevant Social Credit”). If you need more proof of this theorem, consider Twitter. I get to post tweets about me (“Narcissism”), see tweets you’ve posted about you (“Voyeurism”) and revel in the social credit I’ve received from my Tweets, as calculated by the gain in my Twitter followers or re-tweets of my content (“Relevant Social Credit”).

It is no wonder then that photo tagging on Facebook is nothing more than socially-engineered crack: immediately and forever more addicting.  When you receive an SMS notification on your smart phone that someone has tagged you in a photo on Facebook, can you really resist not clicking on it? When someone comments on your tagged photo, can you resist not reading it? And if several people comment or Like your photo, can you resist not ultimately commenting yourself? Congrats, you’re human.

We, the Keebler Elves for video, are busily crafting BlipSnips 2.0 that, in our humble elfin estimation, will do for video what we all love to do with photos: That is, convert the Medium (video) into the Message: create conversations around the people IN those videos. (Apologies to McLuhan). No longer will video be lifeless, passive and one-dimensional – the poor, ugly step child to Photos. Instead, video will rapidly overtake photo as the predominant sharing experience because it has an unparalleled ability to connect with you and me emotionally. Bandwidth, storage costs and clunky UIs, the last thin ropes holding Gulliver down, have snapped.

Let me share just two videos that should amply demonstrate the point that video is becoming the predominant medium for emotional connection online.

The Giggling Child. Watch this video and tell me, honestly, that even if you were Annie Lebowitz, is there any one still image you could take that could capture this child’s laugh? Would you want to look at the photo again and again, as you do with this video? Could it make you break out in uncontrolled smiles and laughter? I thought not.

Ueli Speed Soloing the Eiger. How can you capture with photos the knot in the pit of your stomach when you watch him miss ice axe placements or slip on footholds? Or run, not walk, across the summit’s knife edge? Or feel just slightly nauseous when the camera pulls back revealing the awesome abyss he into which he just may plunge?

BlipSnips is actualizing the base human desire to be social within moments in video. We’re all past looking at video; we want the video to be the centerpiece of a social experience between people. We want to be part of a conversation that video animates. Come join us.

Friends Don’t Let Friends Shoot in Portrait Mode – A BlipSnips P.S.A.
While a picture may be worth a thousand words and a video may be a worth a million gazillion, when you record video in portrait mode, you’re doing yourself and whoever views the video a disservice. So, the BlipSnips team thought we should put together a Public Service Announcement to help us all help ourselves from being forced to view … “SKINNY VIDEO!”

First, what is Portrait and what is Landscape? On the iPhone and other mobile devices, Portrait and Landscape refer to the general conventions relating to the orientation of the phone in your hand. They are best understood by looking at it like this:

When shooting video, cameras like the iPhone are just BEGGING you to hold in Landscape position. Why? With their High Definition (HD) recording capabilities, these latest generation phones are primed to have their videos displayed in 16:9 widescreen format. In other words, ‘landscape’ format.

So what’s all the fuss? The finished product your viewers get to see! That’s what! When video is shot in portrait style, it looks and feels right on the handset. The video fills up the whole screen and looks HD just like you see above in Portrait mode. However, don’t be fooled. This is what you and your friends are seeing after you upload your image:

Yup, cue in the sad trombones. My dog Cerna is so disappointed by this image of him, look, he won’t even chew on his bone! Look at all that black space on the sides and how stretched the video looks from top to bottom. It’s not the way video was supposed to be enjoyed. Although we’ve gotten used to taking pictures like this, the way that video moves across the dimensions of the screen again begs to be shot in landscape mode.

We hope this PSA was helpful and will stop the spread of SKINNY VIDEO. Orient that handset landscape-style and channel your inner Francis Ford Coppola to shoot epic wide-screen movies right from the palm of your hand. Like this one….

Or, this genius work of lip-synching seen in all its landscape-shot glory.

Today, my friends, we have launched “blipsnip.it”. The first phase in our release train of our brand-spankin’ new mobile platform.

The site we’ve launched today will allow you to sign up for early notification of our v2.0 product. We want you to be the first kid on the block to have the herringbone-plaid goodness in the palm of your hands when we launch in a few weeks’ time.

In a prior post, I alluded to the some of the key attributes we’re gunning for in our upcoming ‘v.2’ release, all driven from the copious feedback we received from users of our ‘v1.0’ BlipSnips for Facebook app. One obvious change you should notice is the URL: blipsnip (dot) it. BlipSnip it! It has been super cool to see across the twittersphere the number of instances of folks using BlipSnips as a verb when talking about a video: “Just blipsnip it and send me the URL.” It’s influenced us enough to wrap that phase up directly into our product strategy, thus the new URL and domain. The new mobile platform will be based upon this URL structure (and a shortened version) moving forward.

From a more macro perspective, the v2 app will be a radically more progressive experience than what we started in v1.0, offering more flexibility in virtually every way through an entirely new and elegant UX. I will be dropping posts in the coming weeks leading to launch about what to expect, but we’re pumped and know you will be too. Mobile video should be more than shooting—>sharing—>viewing like we see with all these carbon-copy apps these days. Video is an AMAZING form of communication and making it impulsive to use and have it more feature-rich to more easily converse with this powerful media type is what you’ll find with v2.

Finally, even if you are a current user, please sign up for early notifications and help us by sharing the new blipsnip.it site. We’ve provided the tools upon entering your email  to ‘Like’ on Facebook or Tweet out to the ‘webs. Click on the image below to go to blipsnip.it and sign up!

Get ready to BlipSnip it!

On Milestones and Keepin’ On…
Remember that old saying and the iconic image that went along with it: “Keep on truckin’?” Yeah, that one. It’s been a defining mantra for Bliss and me as we continue to push…and push….and push. Yesterday we had one of those moments where we were able to literally push the chairs back from our desks and say…’wow’! That was due to the fact we’d amassed over 20,000 users of our BlipSnips for Facebook iPhone App. 20K!  Since we launched this product only in late January, that’s a significant milestone for us, and one we’re proud of.

On Sketchpads…
After we’d launched BlipSnips on iPhone (‘v1.0’) the feedback came in straight away. You ‘got’ what we were up to — the ability to shoot personal video and start marking it up; captioning in your own words each moment; and, tagging your Facebook friends as they appeared within those moments. But while you said, “Yes, we want the video analog to Facebook’s photo tagging,” you also said, “Give us more!” Armed with my ever present sketchpad and mechanical pencil, my sketches began to assimilate the features that users were instinctively discovering they needed by using the app.

After much scribbling, erasing, line drawing and discussion, a new platform was born. Something we have been calling: ‘BlipSnips 2.0’. All new mobile. All new web. All new features. All new fun with video. In the coming weeks, we’ll be rolling this out to you and the other 20K users who downloaded the original version. And more really means more:

More mobile to mobile interaction between BlipSnippers….

More social network support to tag ‘who’ appears within moments of your video…

More discovery on ‘where’ these videos occurred around the globe…

More user-to-user commenting at moments to help describe ‘what’ is going on in the video…

More ease of viewing with progressive HTML5-based technologies…

More elegance and simplicity in a completely overhauled user experience…

More association with our now rapidly growing user colloquialism: Just BlipSnip it…

We cannot wait to get this into your hands. We’ll be announcing early adopter sign ups shortly and would LOVE your participation.

On Plaid…. Plaid?

And yes, there will be lots of plaid. Just like your dad used to wear….or, maybe in a Freudian way, like my sketch book

Spring is fast approaching and weddings will be popping up like flowers and fresh grass all around us. Every year, people get more and more innovative with their wedding planning, from deluxe destinations to ridiculously expensive (albeit delicious) catering spreads. At the end of the day, you want your wedding to be the single most memorable occasion in your life and the lives of your family and friends. And to that end, everyone in the wedding planning business is working their hardest to suggest innovative ways to make your wedding a day to remember.

For the bride and groom, the wedding day is a blur. After many months of planning and preparation, when it comes down to is this: they simply hope their friends are having a blast. As the couple get escorted around to meet and greet ancient relatives whom they haven’t seen in 10 years and dad’s annoying business partner, the bride and groom are hoping their friends are raging up a storm and frolicking the way they wish they could. And you know there will be tales to tell of that night.

To ensure there are those awesome random memories captured at weddings, the ‘tradition’ over the last decade was for the bride and groom to drop disposable cameras on the table. When developed (when was the last time you had film developed?), they end up being 99% garbage and impossible to really glean much from. Mostly thumbs and parts of peoples’ heads.

So we say…

Isn’t it time to join the mobile video revolution? Instead of using a disposable camera, ask folks in advance to ensure they bring their mobile phones to the party (just keep ‘em on ‘silent mode during the vows!) and instruct them to download fun-to-use products like BlipSnips for Facebook. Modern weddings are like the living-breathing version of your Facebook account with all the important ‘connected’ friends there celebrating with you. Have your guests shoot video, tag your friends and upload to their favorite social networks to remember that day and re-live the moments in all the sound, motion and color as it happened.

Now, look ahead, twelve months later to your one year anniversary, and you’ll be able to open up Facebook, check out your videos, see where all of your friends were tagged in the wedding videos and re-live the actual wedding, not just camera shots of it. If you’re going to spend a ton of money (or even if you don’t spend much at all!) on your wedding to make it memorable, use video to preserve those memories in their richest possible form.

The Knot

http://wedding.theknot.com/wedding-planning/wedding-photography-videography/articles/video-photo-booth-guest-book-idea.aspx

Project Wedding
http://www.projectwedding.com/blog/2011/03/23/thrilled-about-the-video-guest-book/

The scene…

You’re out for a fun night with your wife and friends at a karaoke bar. Your wife gets up to sing. This will be good, you think. So, instinctively, you reach in your pocket for your phone to capture what unfolds. The lights behind her are perfect. You pause. "Do I shoot a video or do I shoot a still?" Indecisive for a moment, you go for it: toggle to video. You start to record. Wait for it….wait for it…there! You’ve got it! The moment. Right as she TOTALLY MISSES the high note in "I will always love you". And boy does she bomb it Whitney Houston style. And THAT moment, that bomb, made with so much flourish, is EXACTLY why you love her. And it’s why you want to share it with your friends on Facebook for one HUGE laugh ‘cause they love her too and she deserves a good ribbing.

Photos are great, but…

But a photo wouldn’t have captured that karaoke moment. You see, there are times when you must hear and experience the wider sensory context of the ‘moment’ to capture its essence. Video, not photos, supply that. Not just one static moment, but each flowing moment, funnier, sadder, more dramatic or more poignant than the next, as they unfold. The sights, the sounds, the friends you were with and the place you were at when it all went down.

BlipSnips doesn’t capture images; it captures experiences…

We’ve distilled all of that mantra into our BlipSnips for Facebook application suite and are radically improving upon the concept and feature set in our upcoming ‘version 2.0′ launch. We can see with each user and the content they are generating that people are inherently social and they’re becoming even more so with video.  The social experience = mobile and we’re making it dead easy for all their personal moments to be captured and shared. In the coming weeks, we’ll be inviting you to have a look at our next generation platform for mobile. We’re tremendously excited about it and think you will be to. So start shooting more video! We’ll help you capture and share those experiences.