NAB show in Las Vegas

Today we announced our new product and service, the Media Gallery-on-Demand Website Creation Tool and Hosting Service at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show in Las Vegas.

WEVA members are a key target market

Don and Breene are there and will be meeting and discussing our new product with potential customers and partners. Here is the press release:

MAVRIC Media Introduces Revolutionary Media Gallery-on-Demand Technology for Managing, Storing and Publishing Content Instantly Online

100,000 media professionals attended

Media Gallery-on-Demand Website Creation Tool and Hosting Service for Creative Media Professionals to Easily Manage Rich Media Content Online

Las Vegas (NAB Show) April 20, 2009 - MAVRIC Media, a provider of web-based digital asset management tools, today introduced the Media Gallery-on-Demand, a revolutionary tool that creates a professional business website incorporating next generation video management, media production, file transport and collaboration tools.  The Media Gallery is optimized for video that is built into every hosted website, enabling creative professionals and online marketers to instantly upload, manage and showcase photos and videos in an elegant online 3D media wall enhancing their online presence in minutes.

The Media Gallery provides businesses an opportunity to quickly and easily build their own branded website and immediately upload and showcase video or any other rich media.  Full administrative functionality enables users to categorize, organize and share content.   Each category or asset can be assigned public or private viewing permissions and is completely secure.  All common video and image file formats are supported.   The website’s content can be created in minutes and easily updated using MAVRIC Media’s rich text editor with video insertion tools and very sophisticated, user-friendly video management tools.   MAVRIC Media clients get their hosted website, unlimited email accounts and 10GB of scalable storage for the low price of $59.95 month.  The automated signup process includes domain search and registration, resulting in a live website ready for customization.

“We can change a company’s online presence dramatically, quickly and easily with our hosted video application,” explains Breene Kerr, Founder and President of MAVRIC Media.  ”Most people understand that it typically takes 4-6 weeks and around $5000 to update or launch a video-enabled business website, but we can get a client’s site up in a few minutes.  Additionally, there is usually a huge on-going dependence on a web developer for site updates, but our service empowers clients to easily build and maintain a media rich website with lively, up-to-the-minute content, and they can do it all on their own for very little cost”.

The Media Gallery website can be used for small to medium sized businesses (SMB) in many different applications and even enables companies to set up their own Internet TV channels.  MAVRIC Media websites are designed for video production companies to manage project workflow and collaborate with editors, graphic artists and clients.   Wedding videographers and photographers can showcase their work to impress clients and increase business.  Corporate clients can set up marketing extra-nets organized with private and pubic media sharing categories at a fraction of the cost of traditional media asset management systems.  In fact, any creative business can use MAVRIC Media’s technology to facilitate the gathering and sharing of content while streamlining the approval and distribution of their work.

The Media Gallery-on-Demand is a versatile tool that many SMB’s will find can help them dramatically enhance their online business image while giving them complete control over website content, all for a low pay-as-you-go monthly subscription.  According to industry studies, more than 60% of companies plan to incorporate video into their online presence, and MAVRIC Media’s Media Gallery-on-Demand will play an integral role in this industry-wide migration.  E-commerce functionally is scheduled to be added in the next release of the Media Gallery (anticipated in summer 2009) which will give MAVRIC Media clients the ability to monetize their content directly from their website gallery.  An interactive website to demo the Media Gallery can be viewed at www.mavricdemo.com .

About MAVRIC Media

Based in Northern California and founded by digital media veterans, MAVRIC Media is an ASP (application service provider) offering rapidly deployable, cost effective On Demand Rich Media (ODRM) Solutions as a Service (SaaS) to deliver turnkey video-optimized, gallery-on-demand website solutions.  We leverage product development for P2P content distribution, scalable mobile distribution, Internet TV, and e-commerce tools, enabling our clients to monetize their media assets. MAVRIC Media’s products and services are designed to provide a core set of DAM (digital asset management) and content delivery solutions to a group of customers tightly focused on the bottom line.  By providing these customers with a simple, reliable and easy-to-use feature set at an attractive price point, MAVRIC Media intends to lower the  barriers of adoption to DAM solutions, large file transport and other advanced technologies for a significantly underserved market segment. For more information please visit www.mavricmedia.com

High pressure week as Mavric Media’s new software is finally getting a workout by the founders. A demo site is being developed and should be ready for general viewing sometime Tuesday, March 17th.   The site is already up and has been populated with images and videos.   The on-demand video gallery and its easy adminitration is one thing that really makes this product unique.   Digital media can literally be uploaded and on the website in a few seconds and images can be moved around at will.  Don and I demonstrated this over at VantagePoint Venture Partners on Thursday.  This level of end user administration is unprecedented in this type of hosted template based website and should be very attractive to customers.

Another compelling aspect to the website is our use is an embedded viewer from Cool Iris.  This is how we get the “video wall” look and feel for the images.   We are working very closely with them as we approach our beta release.  I was at Cool Iris today making sure we get the latest updates for this software which include enhanced player controls.    We should have this update on the demo site by early next week.

When you talk to engineers and programmers who have really taken a deep dive into media asset management, the subject of metadata is sure to come up. I often hear questions like: “How do you handle metadata?”, or “What’s your strategy for geotagged information (metadata)”, etc. In fact, the the holy grail of media asset management has to be auto creation of metadata, generally conceived of as some kind of advanced facial and object recognition. Homeland security is rumored to have something already working, probably powered by some parallel processing super-computer.

Based on what I have seen with our customer databases as well as my own, metadata often goes unentered and unused. It turns out that nobody has the time to enter the various identifiers in the appropriate fields. I have to admit to being guilty of this myself. So generally, we rely the items being placed in the correct books, pages, categories or albums. Searches can of course be based on file names or entry titles, but often the desired identifier isn’t there.

Tags are one type of metadata that does seem to get used. In our upcoming product release we are counting on this being the preferred way to add searchable information to video, photos and other media assets. One or more “tags” can simply be added upon media file upload. These tags are “un-categorized”, that is, they can be anything from a person’s name to a color, a noun like “dog”, “barn” (or more likely “red, barn”), really anything that might later make a search more productive. While tags represent a rather undisciplined approach to creating metadata, they sure beat the heck out of having nothing, particularly as a databases get larger and harder to casually scan through.

Here is what a “Video Gallery” looks like in our new hosted environment. This is our own “web 2.0″ media asset management system which is part of every customer website.  This is a fully functional digital media database which can be updated by the customer at any time.  We are looking for beta customers to begin designing their websites in around two weeks.

The Mavric team has been working out details of the new hosted websites with video galleries. First up are website templates for general business (SMB’s), video production companies and wedding videographers. Initially, the sites include 5 standard web pages and the unique video gallery which can store unlimited images, videos and other digital media.

In un-certain times, people gravitate toward the basic necessaties, and the comforts of what they know is safe

If I ask ten people about digital asset mangement, or content management, I get 6-7 different answers, and they all take a couple minutes to explain. Since we formed Mavric, I am always trying to understand the awareness of DAM (digital asset management) in the general marketplace. We have complex technology and our team is always working on a simpler way to explain what we do in the most general terms that help a typical business  experience what we all know is a very important technology to preserve, manage, share and publish a company’s priceless media assets.

We have spent over a year offering hosted media asset management tools to digital media professionals and to small to medium business. Overall, even though I have 15 years in the business I have continued to struggle with a message I could get across to general business people in 30 seconds or less. Some say it’s because I talk too much. That may be true, but additionally, I believe it is symptomatic of why our business remains in the early adoption stage.

Recently, Mavric engaged in a new product development effort that is ready for beta release. We have completely overalled our approach to creating revenue in the digital asset management marketplace. WHY? Experience has taught us that the average business, marketing communications professional, or digital media prosumer really just wants a way to easily catalog, store, use, share and possily sell their video and photos. More importantly and simply, clients tell us they just want a way to easily integrate this capability with their website and show their work, or collaborate with others on a project.

Mavric Media’s new product is easy to explain. Come here and setup a complete “video” (on demand rich media) web site in 5 minutes for $59 per month. In early surveys, our potential clients get it. They do not care that it’s a $100,000 DAM software system underneath. They care about an easy to use gallery of their videos, images, and documents.

We are ready to actively talk about this product and in a couple of weeks or less, introduce a “back to the basics” approach to the marketplace. More simply, if you want to get on with your business, Mavric Media has the fastest, simplest, most cost effective way to build a complete website. You get your own unique domain name, unlimited email, and high quality website INTEGRATED with our multi-media gallery which allows you to easily load, storage, organize, share and publish video, images, and other rich media. This gallery will offer a very unique 3D wall viewer that not only provides a WOW factor, but a very fast visual browsing experience.

For more information, send email to sales@mavricmedia.com or stay tuned in here for the latest news.

From Breene Kerr

As we hurtle towards our release date for our new website hosting service, a lot is on the line. That means we need to focus our efforts while broadening our appeal. On Friday, we decided to make a few minor tweaks to the administrative tools, allowing customers with existing web sites to keep those web site active while at the same time using our technology to add a media gallery and its enabling database. This should be attractive to people with a large investment in their existing web site and for those that simply want to take a evolutionary path to updating their online presence.

We are able to do this by allowing customers to optionally “turn off” the home page and other stand-alone website features and simply direct traffic right to the video gallery which will be registered as a .tv domain. We’ve also added a handy feature to make navigating back to the customer’s existing .com home page a simple, one click command (just click the embedded customer logo).

Don and I have a venture presentation scheduled for Friday, February 20th and will be showing the web facing interface of our new sites at that time. I will post it here first.

As we look forward to that presentation at Vantage Point Venture Partners, I am mindful of the changed business and financial environment that we are navigating. A quote from Tom Chaffee of Institutional Investment Partners (IVP) as his firm joined Benchmark Capitol in placing a $35M investment in Twitter says it all. “We are trying to find the ones like Twitter that are defying gravity,” Chaffee said. “Because the gravity is pretty heavy right now.”

It’s friday the 13th and we are reviewing our upcoming web site hosting service.  Most of the hard coding is done, including everything powering the signup and site editing processes.  The look  and feel of the website is coming next.

Mavric Media’s new web site hosting service beta release is February 20th. Launching March 1st, this service allows users to add, change or delete videos to their web site instantly.