Easily capture, curate and manage videos with Ziggeo
Ziggeo claims to power the leading asynchronous video recorder/video player that accesses any webcam recorder and mobile camera. It’s video APIs (javascript camera API) and video capture SDK for iphone/android lets you can easily capture, curate and manage videos.
Kevin William David interviewed Susan Danziger, CEO at Ziggeo to know more.
Hey Susan, So tell us about what you are working on?
Sure, we’re working on the future of video — one that makes video distributed, flexible, and customizable. Imagine the digital universe being made up mostly of video — not just limited to a few major sites. That’s what our focus is. We’ve already built award-winning video APIs and mobile SDKs to record, transcode, and play videos from anywhere. And that’s just the start.
Tell me more about the problem you are trying to solve?
We built the technology to solve our own problem. Our original idea was to launch a recruitment platform with a focus on capturing candidate videos. With no solid video recording/playback API in the market, we had to dedicate months of engineering resources to develop our own solution. We realized then that the bigger opportunity was in video technology. So we launched our first video API, closed down the recruiting part, and have been working on improving video technology ever since.
Interesting!
What’s unique about what you are building & why do you think companies should use Ziggeo?
We developed the first responsive video player and video recorder as an API, launched SDKs for iOS and Android, and developed our own token-based security system to ensure videos are viewed only by those with permission. We’ve also developed rich social-sharing features (e.g. video integration with Facebook) and recently launched a dedicated EU service separate from our U.S./worldwide service.
Can you tell us a bit about the different customer segments using Ziggeo?
Given our own background, recruitment platforms were our first customers. But now we have customers that use Ziggeo for video messages, video reviews, video comments, video profiles and video updates. It’s being used for market research (capturing customer videos); education/training (recording videos for feedback); verification (e.g. for test-taking); dating (exchanging video messages); and even digital greeting cards (think: “Happy Mothers Day, Mom!” on video). Every day brings new use cases.
Interesting use cases!
Could you share an unique use case and some surprising data around it?
Sure. The crowdfunding platform, Crowdrise, used Ziggeo to enable video updates. They studied the impact of video updates and found those videos actually tripled their campaign revenue. Here’s a snapshot of a chart from a case study we did on Crowdrise that shows the impact of video updates.
You can find a copy of the study here. (https://ziggeo.com/casestudies)
Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?
We organized Video Hack Day (we recently held Video Hack Day 3) which brought brand awareness to the engineering community. We also automated as many business processes as possible with internal tools.
What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?
We needed a way to enable permissions on a case by case basis so videos could be viewed only by those who have permission to view them. We solved this by developing our own unique token-based system that enables fine-grained permissions.
Another challenge was finding a framework flexible enough to build all the customizable features we wanted to implement. Since one didn’t exist, we led the development of the open-source framework, BetaJS.
What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added? Are there any that have been particularly impactful for you?
We’ve integrated with a number of services including Heroku, Dropbox, AWS S3 and Youtube.
AWS has been really impactful as it’s allowed our clients to choose to host / backup videos themselves within their own deployment environment.
Before we wrap up, what are the top products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?
AWS for hosting; BetaJS as a framework that our JavaScript SDK is built on top of; Slack for team communication; Github for hosting our public repositories; and Pingdom for our uptime status page.
