Tag Archives: reviews

Is it worth it to post startup videos outside YouTube?

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I’ve been uploading my startup videos to YouTube , Vimeo, DailyMotion and Blip.tv with the help of OneLoad (the best tool I know to upload to multiple video hosting sites at the same time.) I love OneLoad as a tool and recommend it wholeheartedly to everybody that wants to upload to multiple sites: you just upload and write the description information once and you get aggregate and per channel play statistics.
But I do ask myself a question: is it worth it to publish my startup videos anywhere else than YouTube?  I don’t have a clear answer, but I hope that you can help me with your comments. 
The numbers may not be high enough to offer a definitive statistical answer (I wish I had a lot more viewers and comments!) and there’s been problems along the way that have stopped some videos from displaying in some channels. I will explain one by one. 
My video channels
As you can see in the screenshot above, Youtube is responsible for 81% of the views on all my videos, probably also because it is my platform of preference to embed the videos in my blogposts. At the beginning I had trouble uploading some videos because they were too long for YouTube, they had a 10 minute limit that was waived and now everything gets published. It is here that I see most of the views on all videos and where I can go back and check best statistics on how people found the videos (although lately they are having some issues with numbers in the video manager.) 
I also get some weird things like a copyright claim for a song that I cannot contest in a video without music.
Vimeo scores a 10%. I pay for the pro account so that I can upload via OneLoad. The views are concentrated in a few videos that I used for my blogposts because at the time they were too long for YouTube. I love their interface and that they make me pay (yes, it gives me confidence in the sustainability of their platform). The main problem I think is related to the audience of Vimeo, that is much more visualy inclined. I don’t do spectacularly good looking videos with great music: I concentrate on the words of the entrepreneurs. Some of the videos, like the coworking dance by Spandy Andy, were not accepted due to some issue with the song. 
The startup videos on DailyMotion account for a 6% of the total views. I’ve had lots of issues here because of the lenght of videos, although lately it looks like everything is going through (maybe thanks to all the original content that I’m posting under a creative commons license. I guess that the problem here is also that the audience is more French-speaking and very few of my videos are in French. Also, the videos may be too serious for them. The dancing video was rejected here too, which ends up giving an advantage to youtube with their deal with copyright owners to monetize on the adds displayed on the videos they claim have some of their content. 
And then comes the dessert of Blip.tv: no views in OneLoad (maybe they just don’t share that info) and 650 according to their own statistics (a 3%), not even a homepage that displays right, confusing interface and login… I opened it because a TV producer that did a show at my coworking space in Brussels told the me a fatal “how can you not be in Blip.tv!“, and since he was a professional… It is the one that really is not giving me any satisfaction.  I don’t even like looking at it. 
I’m also giving a try to business.me, a dedicated platform for business videos where I’m not uploading anything: I just add my YouTube videos to a directory that I hope will do a better matching between  video and audience. They are in Beta and just starting, so the results are not very good (almost inexistent), but at least they have a lot of interesting startup videos to share the space with and I hope that in the future, if their brand grows, there will be more views and exchanges. 

I understand that startup & business videos may not be as interesting as cute cats and hot women, but still I think there’s a lot of room to grow and that the content is interesting enough to reach a bigger audience. 
Back to the question: is it worth it? 
As a general question, I don’t know. On one hand I do my videos to promote tech startups and entrepreneurship, so every view counts as a success. But on the other hand having so many channels ends up meaning that I do not put enough effort
in them and that I don’t concentrate wholehartedly in one of them. My numbers are so small anyway that the percentages are not tha important, but looking at the total views, it does represent a few thousand viewers, and there are not that many as a whole (19,478)…
The uploading of videos that fail to be available in one or the other channel makes it worth it just to have a video online that you can embedd, even if it is not in your preferred channel. The disadvantage is that there are no uploaders for my smartphone, although I use it in few cases and it is a pain to write long texts in it. 
Everything is set up right now, so I will just leave it as it is and see what happens in the future. But if I was to start from zero again I would just concentrate on YouTube and work more on the community management there. 
What do you or would you do? 
UPDATE (17 April): I just noticed something in the video stats that definitely tilts the balance to yes it is worth it. This video where GA Hanin explains how he found his technical cofounder thanks to coworking in DailyMotion got over 2700 views in one day. I guess that means that it was featured because I did not do anything to promote that channel.
This has brought DailyMotion far ahead of Vimeo in views, but still far from Youtube.

I found my startup cofounder thanks to coworking par ramon-bru

Samsung 900x3a Ultraportable Review: WOW! The Looks!

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I’ve been lucky enought to put my hands on a Samsung 900x3a for a couple weeks. I fell in love with it at a Samsung event in Brussels, like the picoprojector, and had been asking for it ever since.  

WOW! The Looks

The design of the Samsung 9 series makes you scream wow. When you get it, even the box makes you say wow. It is beautiful, sleek and different, something you want to carry around because it will make others say the same and look at you in a much better way. And that is exactly what happens. Wherever I’ve pulled it out questions have arised about it and everybody wanted to hold it. That’s where the second hit comes…

Trully ultralight and ultraportable The computer is so light you are just shocked.

Just these were enough for my friend Boye to order one online right-away :)

On the bad side, it is a finger print magnet, which can easily ruin its looks (see the picture underneath, lower right corner of the computer.) And what really sucks about it is that the duraluminium body surfaces are really nice to tuch. I personally hate the touch of aluminium and the coating of the 9003xa is very agreable to touch.

Great Screen

The 900x3a comes with a matt 13.3 inch display that is as good as the computer is goodlooking. Fantastic. The only con is the fricking ugly shiny cheap plastic that surrounds it. Seriously, with a computer this well designed I don’t understand how they’ve screwed up the beauty of the screen with that ugly and scratch prone frame aroun the screen and the keyboard.

Ports

The computer comes with a surprising array of hidden ports on both sides: 2 USB ports (one 3.0 and one 2.0), a mini HDMI, a microSD card reader, and a proprietary port for the Ethernet adaptor. I don’t like carrying parts with me to make my computer work, and even less proprietary connectors, but appreciated the possibility of connecting the computer to the network with an Ethernet cable. The lack of a vga adaptor is a real bummer.  The fact of having a microSD card reader instead of a regular SD reader has started a debate in my mind I’ve not been yet able to solve. I guess that basically what they’ve thought is that the users are turning to their smartphones more and more and so their compatibility should prime over the cameras that most people have.

Battery

The main negative point for me is here: the battery can not be taken out easily. When working with a portable computer you are not always on the go, in fact most people use them as a substitute of a regular desktop, just connecting a big screen, a keyboard and a mouse. The battery is the part of the computer that degrades the fastest, with every charge cycle, and not being able to take it out while at work on my desk just screams back at me “you are killing the battery!”

Ubuntu Linux

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As soon as I got the ultraportable I put my hands into linuxifying it. My working operating system is Linux and I needed to see if there where any hardware problems. Installing Ubuntu on the Samsung 9003xa is easy as soon as you learn that you have to install on the right side port. 

Overall Ubuntu worked fine, except for a very anoying problem with the mousepad, which meant that I had to choose between being able to click & drag and to scroll. Any of these two choices is bad and reduces productivity a lot. 

The procesor was strong enought to do some basic video editing with Kdenlive, but I guess all of todays’ computers are easily capable of doing so. Overall the computer was not superfast, but quite good. I am looking for a bit more punch in my next portable computer.

Windows

Unfortunately, the Windows version provided was in Dutch (talk about a steep learning curve…) so I could not really use it much, and my Ubuntu Linux was running good enought to skip Windows :)

 

Samsung Pico Projector: a Step in the Right Direction

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via picplz.com

During the presentation of the latest Samsung products in Brussels, I fell in love with a couple geeky gadgets and the first one was the Samsung pico projector SP-H03. The fact of being able to play with a projector that fit the palm of my hand was just mesmerizing. 

Luckily, I have been able to test it. I find it to be a step in the right direction: pico projectors in our mobile phones and tablets. 

Looking at the pictures of their suggested uses I can just not imagine any sales person using it to do a presentation projected against a binder. First of all, the projection would not be much bigger than the screen of a tablet, and for that the efect would be much better with an iPad or one of Samsung’s tablets. 

Second, because it is made with led light projectors it has a great autonomy, but can not be used if there’s sun light for larger projections than a computer screen. This is a problem common to all leds that I also have in my diving lamps: they just don’t work under sunlight. The good thing is that the moment you use them at night or in a close space with artificial light (like in the picture) the projector is powerful enough to give crisp images of close to 2 meters wide. Bigger than that it looses focus, but can still be an enjoyable experience for leisure projections (in my case watching Outsorced in bed projected about 4 meters wide in the wall.) The loss of focus was annoying at first but the size of the screen made for a great watching experience.

My feeling about it is that it is a great geek toy, but not a gadget to use professionally. 

Do any of you use it for business?