We’re in our final stages of the Collage private beta. It’s been fantastic seeing what has been created!
We’ve added a bunch of new features lately, including:
to check out collage, visit: http://www.vuvox.com/collage
We’re very excited about the advancements in ‘VUVOX: Cut-out Express‘. It’s been been fun watching some of our early beta testers create some pretty amazing things. The possibilities of dynamic frame cut-outs allow any photograph to be used to create a contextual portal to another piece of media. That could be a slideshow OR video. The juxtaposition of the media seems to be a really nice combination.
There’s really no end to what you can create with this thing. We want you to use it, share it and *dare* someone to a Cut-out dual!
Click on the ‘Menu’ button in the player to navigate to other cut-out examples.
We’ve been making advancements in our photo collage tool. Our most recent collaborations include the San Jose Mercury News Photo department, specifically the work by Richard Hernandez. We recently invited Tech Blogger & photo enthusiast, Robert Scoble to talk with us about these recent developments, and how VUVOX works with Photojournalists.
The piece created by Hernandez was an interactive photo essay on the town of Willow Glen, California. The piece took about two weeks of research to document and photograph, but only about two hours to create in the new VUVOX collage tool. Scoble interviews Richard on his Creation process.
Next, Robert Scoble interviews Dane Howard, CXO of VUVOX about tool itself and how the user experience was design for VUVOX collage.
The Collage tool is currently in private beta, if you’re interested in giving feedback or being contacted about the VUVOX beta, let us know.
A new style variation emerged the other day from our test bed of Beta Production tools. This time we’ve added it to the public beta line-up of VUVOX Studio styles that everyone can access. Embedded in this page is an example piece published with this new style. It shows off a couple things we’ve been working on.
Firstly, we’ve been working on styles composites that take on multiple media targets, each can designate their own presentation ‘engine’. Cinematic Duality allows you to set the foreground to ‘Slideshow’ and the background to ‘Vuvision’. We’ve also developed our ’sequence’ engine, which overlays images on top of eachother. An example of the sequence engine is found here. It works best when shooting burst mode on your camera.
The layout is very simple here, but the relationship of foreground/background & the letterbox showed real promise. The live tools allows you to add music and change background color. The customize palette allows you to specify which layout you want in your scene.
TIP: make sure that you play with the order of your media in your storyboard to affect the layout and flow of which images flow into the media targets
VUVOX is centered on enabling our customers to visually express in new ways. We recognize that the market is stuffed full of simple slide shows, video editors and widgets. In many cases, one dimensional presentations are more than sufficient to communicate random images that are may be centered around quick social updates. We are confident that many of these companies will do well and we wish them the best. We are on another track.
We really care about final quality and the content that is being communicated. We also believe that most people feel strongly about how their memories are preserved. However, production values (to borrow a Hollywood term) have always been the domain of lofty professionals with big budgets and time on their hands. Current desktop and online consumer companies have more or less said: “if you want high quality personal content, be prepared to spend a lot of time.” In a 24/7 world….who has time ? The result is that today’s creation solutions force you into accepting imposed limitations. In this world, tech terms like “ease of use” become an accepted tradeoff for simplistic expression. The result: EVERYTHING looks the same. Is this the future of digital media communication ? Is this all you want ?
Anyone who spends time on VUVOX, immediately realizes that we take the user’s overall site experience and targeted feature design very serious. While we don’t always get it right the first time, we know that design elegance centers on making complex tasks appear easy. The experience should deliver results that continually delight the customer. There is no reason more advanced production values can’t be within reach of every customer.
Of course, talk is cheap.
We just had a discussion about a specific feature that might be just beyond some customer’s ability to intuitively understand its function. If they have previously used any standard photo editing tools…they should instantly understand this feature…if not, they might be initially scratching their heads until they move through the process once.
The risk: It will require the customer to click a few more times and perhaps learn something new.
The reward: If we implement this feature it introduce a new browser based creation paradigm that is very exciting (we hope).
What do you think ?
- Should we put that functionality in ?
- Do we “dumb down” the product to make sure everyone can use it ?
- Do we narrow our target market to provide a feature that may cause the larger mass market problems ?
VUVOX Blog