We are in the process of reworking the information architecture of the encoding.com client interface and would love your feedback.  What features are currently missing from the interface?  What exisrting features could be implemented better? Speak now or forever hold your encoding queue!

Brandon Goldberg joins us this week as our new Director of Marketing.  We could not be more excited about this roll becasue frankly we have not focused on marketing to date.  Over the last few years we have been more than occupied handling overwhelming inbound requests and building the world's largest encoding platform.  Now it is time to spread the word about encoding.com and vid.ly.  Brandon was born with an unquenchable thirst for generating new business revenue. As a result, the first several years of Brandon's career were spent honing his sales skill-set by hunting, closing and growing new clients for enterprise technology companies such as CDW and XO communications. After realizing that building a robust sales pipeline for himself was no longer enough, Brandon committed himself to mastering the marketing discipline of demand generation and applying those skills towards beefing up top-line revenue for companies such as Stockgroup Media Inc and Arkadin Global Conferencing. Today, Brandon focuses on driving pipeline growth for salespeople across the Encoding.com organization. When not souping-up lead generation and marketing automation engines, he enjoys film production, international travel and fine dining. Brandon has finally managed to keep his thirst at bay…for now. 

We pushed this nice little upgrade to vid.ly today, here is what was included.

Drastic speed improvements on video load time.  We had some complaints about multi second load time of vidlys and reworked the logic of the device detection to be significantly faster.  Our qualitative testing has shown some big improvements, we will share any quantitative metrics when we have them available.  Please send us your feedback on the video load times.

Automatically upgrade a free vid.ly to a paid vid.ly.  Now any free vid.ly owner can visit their vid.ly url /upgrade  (e.g vid.ly/a1b2c3/upgrade) and add billing information to convert their free vid.ly to a paid vid.ly.  This feature is useful when a user creates a vid.ly, runs into their free 50GB limit monthly bandwidth limit and wants to convert it to a paid account.  

Not bad for a Monday, now on to the rest of the week.

It took us a little bit more time than expected to get it out the door the "right" way however we are now very pleased to announce the availability of a vid.ly analytics package delivering detailed browser and mobile device statistics via the new API call GetStatistics   We built the vid.ly analytics platform on Cassandra and join a growing number of companies (e.g  Facebook, Digg) who have deployed Cassandra to manage enormous amounts of data.  The vid.ly analytics package provides a deep analysis of your mobile device audience by providing viewership data on over 6000 mobile devices and tablets.    Vid.ly analytics is available as a webservice via our API allowing you to customize this data to meet your organization's individual needs and easily integrate the realtime data into your existing systems and media workflow.  Vid.ly analytics data can be pulled for a single vid.ly url, group of urls, or account wide on any date interval. Below is the data we are returning for a mobile device as well as web view:

                <col>Vendor</col>  (Desktop or Mobile)
                <col>Model</col>  (Mobile Device Manufacturer, Apple) 
                <col>Platform</col>  (Mobile Brand, iPhone )
                <col>OS</col> (Operating System, Windows)
                <col>Browser</col> (Browser, Firefox)
                <col>Browser Ver</col> (Browse,  9.0.1)
                <col>Hits</col> (Number of video plays)

And just one more thing...we have just also released a new API call UpdateMedia  This function allows users to update the source media for a vid.ly that has already been created.  This scenario occurs when a vid.ly is published or hardcoded and the preference is to reuse the same url as opposed to creating a new one.  This function also supports our new vanity URL feature which allows customers to reserve a vanity vid.ly, for example vid.ly/obama and continue to update it with new and relevant video content.