Monthly Archives: May 2007

Taglines and Web 2.0

Have you ever tried to come up with a good tagline for a new company? In the times of Web 2.0, taglines seem to matter a lot. They are the essence of the elevator pitch. But because they can only be a maximum of 3-4 words long, they tend to be rather meaning less and just contain content-free Web 2.0 buzzwords. In fact, this has become such a fashion that there is a Web 2.0 bullshit generator.

Up until recently, we had the tagline “Making Video Clickable” for Vquence, because we believed that our slicecasting technology helps hyperlink between videos and make video more web-like. However, this phrase is a poor representation of what Vquence does, what services we offer, and how we’re going to make life better. So, a new tagline was in order.

But what a challenge! You have no idea how difficult it is to come up with three words that capture what a company is about! Sure – I have been to management training courses and they say it is an artform to come up with a good mission statement for a company and that some companies spend tens of thousands of dollars just to get it right. But a tagline!? Well, let me tell you, a tagline is harder than a mission statement – probably because of the word count restriction.

We discussed for weeks, we even used the bullshit generator and it became rather ridiculous – in short, we did some serious brainstorming (whenever we were not coding). Finally, our newest team member came up with what we have for now accepted as our new tagline. It has all the key ingredients: it is techy, personal, raises curiosity, but is still meaningful (we hope). So, let me present our shiny new tagline: “Vquence – Slicecasting your internet”.

And if that’s totally meaningless to you, then you need to go to www.vquence.com and try out our slicecasts to make it real. Hmmm, I like it. 🙂

Xiph file extensions and MIME types

Today we nailed down a policy for Xiph on what file extensions and mime types we recommend using for Xiph technology.

Basically, we have introduced some new file extensions to allow applications to more easily identify whether they are dealing with audio (.oga) or video (.ogv) files, or some random multiplexed codecs inside Ogg (.ogx).

We recognized the fact that existing Ogg Vorbis hardware players will need to continue to work with whatever scheme we come up and therefore decided to dedicate the extension .ogg to Ogg Vorbis I files – and deprecate all other use of it. That includes the deprecation of the use of Ogg Theora and Ogg Flac with this extension. In future, Ogg Theora files should have a .ogv extension and Ogg Flac a .oga extension. (For further details, check out the wiki page.)

MIME types will be changed accordingly and the RFCs required to register them will start to be authored now.

None of this has been written in stone yet though and there is still time to change this policy if it doesn’t make sense. So if you have any strong objections, speak up now!

Vquence technology progress

I’ve been rather quiet about what we actually do at Vquence, but I have to say that the recent months of intense development are coming to fruition and we are secretly enjoying the play with the first version of our new product, while at the same time working on bugs, new features, and on a scalable setup.

For those who have read our website and recent blog entries it will be clear that we are working on video, using flash/flex for the development of a playlist player, and are developing a web application service around these playlists using Ruby on Rails. If you want to be one of the first to try it, you can join our mailing list to be invited to a closed user group trial, which we will start a few weeks from now.

For those curious to find out what we really do, we’ve created a white paper – email me and I will shoot it through.