Announcing VeeZ 1.7!

For those that don’t know, VeeZ is a video messaging app that enables uninterrupted video capture and sharing. In these blog posts, I plan to share our thinking as we evolve the service. The topics will vary between behavioral models, technology we selected & why, as well as marketing approaches. Feedback is appreciated!

I wrote a post on why we created VeeZ: here.

From the research we’ve done on human communication, we found that the most common form is dyadic — meaning one on one conversation. Think about this the next time you’re in a restaurant, take a look around and you find that most tables consist of two people. Of course there are larger groups but a simple count will reveal that dyadic interaction is the most frequent. (Disclosure: we are no experts in sociology; we are students)

I’ve been a follower of Sam Lessin’s thoughts at The Information and he presented this chart on the article “Selfies, Emoji and the Economics of Communication.”

The basic idea from the article is the human face is the most powerful communications ‘technology’ known. The human face has over 40 muscles that work together to create thousands of expressions. These expressions are often missed in text based, language communication. We believe that in the future, technology will enable the old ways in which we communicate: face to face, in-person as illustrated in the chart above.

So keeping this in mind, we built VeeZ to cater to this type of communication. Taking this thought further, communication and identity are intricately linked. When we communicate, not only are we sharing the “content” we are also doing it in a way that makes us unique, i.e. we use gestures, make faces, use our hands and so on. Identity is so important that we dedicated product resources to it, first releasing animated emoticons within videos.

Enhancing self expression, which more accurately is creative expression allows for more fun ways to communicate and this is an early path we are on.

The animated emoticons look like this:

The animated emoticons were custom built in-house. However, there is also an ability to search from thousands of gifs via the Giphy service. The search feature looks like this:

All of these updates are available in 1.7. We hope you like these features and stay tuned for more to come!