Since I’ve launched Ankoder, I started to think alot more about marketing, especially online. The biggest question is how to get more people clicking onto your site? Well, I’m going to start a little experiment by adding a play button looking icon on my gravatar and see if that makes more people clicking on my profile.
Marketing guru Seth Godin explains why it is important.
Just a quick post about our successful exhibition at Web Direction South 09. It was great to hear the responses and indication of interests from the developers that were attending. I had a good time standing for 12 hours 2 days in a row, not something familiar to a developer 😉
Thanks to Atlassian‘s active for support in the Aussie startup space, I was lucky to be able to have a booth there at an affordable price.
I also met a bunch of cool indie startup guys as well. Very useful sharing our experiences and stories.
* Agile Bench a project management tool designed to support agile software development processes
* Ankoder a video transcoding web service built on top of Amazon’s S3 and Elastic Cloud
* Doculicious, an easy way to create embeddable web forms that generate PDF documents
* Hiive Systems web-based service & client tracking tool that provides professionals with access to critical client information
* Platform 46 Social Business Integrator
* Topikality topikality learns what sort of articles you like, and emails them to you
* 88 Miles making time tracking simple and quick
I was invited by Vinko to join a Wave conversation with “all” of the, 50 (that we know of) Google Wave users located in Hong Kong. It turned out to be a massive wave with blips and stuff. Most people, including myself, probably doesn’t know how to best use it. Honestly, I find it pretty slow and not easy to use. To me, it feels like an improved version of real time forum. In fact, I think Tangler actually had a good attempt at this. If you strip away the Wave philosophies and compare the application features, there aren’t really much breakthrough.
If you are wondering, I still cannot send out invites yet. But HK Wave users are forming groups and socialising on Facebook. You may be able to find some invites there 🙂
Hong Kong Wave Users Facebook Group:
http://www.facebook.com/groups.php?ref=sb#/group.php?gid=155378497339
Google Wave Hong Kong User Group
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=154547443060
Google Wave Hong Kong User Group
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Google-Wave-Hong-Kong-User-Group/177116597052
Well I’m proud to announce that Ankoder is launched. I can finally say that it is working as I wished it had. It was 200% on Ankoder because we completed 1 yr’s work in 6 months.
Life as an entrepreneur is tough. There’s been so many difficult decision making, emotional roller coaster and long working hours. It was a journey and lesson both physically and emotionally.
Anyhow, with the help of some smart interns, we managed to pack alot of cool features into Ankoder. There’s multiple thumbnails, watermarking, segmented files for HTTP streaming, FTP/SCP by public key. Of course the most exciting part if the automatic scaling. This was a tougher problem than we originally thought. Scaling transcoding servers is not a matter of starting servers as job comes in. We needed to predict whether it is worth starting new servers, (as well as terminating running servers). First we need to estimate how long it would take to complete current running jobs. Then we estimate time required to process jobs in the queue. We have a formula for each type of video codec and therefore we can ensure a maximum queue time for any jobs we receive.
So that is what our unique technology, despite the SERAP panel thinking otherwise. Now I’m onto promotion, marketing and make deals. I hope I can find more time updating this blog when I can afford it 🙂
For those that don’t know what is Ankoder.
Ankoder is a cloud based video transcoding API enabling companies to easily integrate video functions into their existing web services. With its pay-per-use service, Ankoder keeps you up-to-date with the latest codecs and saves you from developing your own custom encoding solution. Ankoder provides all the ingredients required to get a video site up-and-running quickly, easily and successfully while ensuring that it will scale. Using Amazon’s cloud computing services, it is designed to meet high demand while minimising queue time by automatically processing videos in parallel. Ankoder enables web services providers to focus their time, resources and capital on developing their businesses, not on creating video encoding infrastructure. Visit http://www.ankoder.com
I’m back in Sydney now and will be exhibiting at Web Direction South 09. See you there.
Presentation I did to IVE computing students at TsingYi.
Rex Chung 