Let’s make this pig prettier, together
Verified eyewitness media, either video or photo, is a mainstay of modern news reporting. Eyewitness media is not the future of journalism, it is the now. Think about the current conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, the protests in Ferguson, or the attacks in Paris.
Every person with a smartphone is a potential news gatherer, and Verifeye Media is positioning itself to represent them all; a truly global news agency, verifying and curating the most important stories in the world.
This week, after almost a year of beta testing in a controlled group, we are delighted to have released our Verifeye Media Pro Camera iOS app in the App Store.
The Verifeye Media Pro Camera app is a professional-standard video and still camera, enabling users to shoot, send, and sell eyewitness videos and photos from breaking news events worldwide — and allowing media outlets to trust and licence the content from the Verifeye Media newswire.
Our camera app harnesses the power and value of metadata to expedite verification in real time. By gathering time, date, geo-location, altitude, and compass bearing, Verifeye Media is able to offer news desks not only video footage or photographs, but a degree of contextualization, including visualization on maps, which no other news agency can.
The general consensus in startups is that you mustn’t launch too early, as you risk your offering being unable to deliver its main promise, but you also mustn’t launch too late, as you may be overtaken by someone else, and lose that all important “first mover” advantage. This is wonderful advice, in theory, but in practice it’s very hard to quantify the exact point at which to actually launch.
More helpfully, a VC once told me that when you launch it’s ok if your product is ugly as a pig, as long as it’s getting prettier every day. Since we announced Verifeye Media to the world back in June 2015, we’ve been testing, tweaking, and iterating like crazy. At times it has looked like Frankenstein’s laboratory around here. As we’ve brought more contributors and more clients have onboard, we‘ve spent a lot of time talking to them, and looking at how they use what we’ve built, and we’ve adjusted both technology and process to make our startup faster, smarter, better.
Our camera app is the gateway to the Verifeye Media news agency, and more specifically, it is how contributors can shoot and send videos and photos to our newswire. Our newswire remains in beta, as we continue to improve and adjust, but now our camera app moves out of beta. The camera isn’t finished, and I’m not sure it ever will be, but right now we are thrilled to offer it to the whole world, and look forward to seeing how it is used, and learning from all of you how it can be improved. Let’s make this pig prettier, together.
