On March 20, 2013, kPoint became a finalist in the “Best Video Tool” category of the 2013 SIIA CODIE awards. You can read more about it in the press release on our site. This blog is not about that!
The CODIE nomination is an important public milestone for kPoint. Our quest to “search” within a video began a couple of years ago. Or, maybe the seeds were sown about 30 years ago when I watched videos of professors teaching important topics, feeling helpless that I could not easily jump over topics I understood well to the ones I did not. Over the last 30 years that I have been directly involved in building and using technology, videos have improved by leaps and bounds – better quality (SD vs HD), democratization of videography (bulky gear to pocket devices including phones which anyone can carry), easy distribution (YouTube) and global reach (all you need is a computer, a phone and the Internet).
However, a few things have remained the same. Videos are still sequentially watched, one still cannot search within a video, interacting with a video is still relegated to writing comments under it, discoverability of videos is still left to manual meta-tagging and the knowledge of viewership is still limited to how many watched it and from where. kPoint’s technology mission has been to make video discoverability and viewing catch up with video creation and distribution.
With full of conviction we started talking to prospects, experts, analysts – anyone who could validate it. Very few did. There was plenty of negative feedback. We were regularly confused and filled with self-doubt but we carried on, honing our product, making slow progress towards our vision. Getting the first paying customer, who bought mainly on faith rather than merit, strengthened our resolve to make the product really work for that customer. From that point onwards, our journey was regularly punctuated by input from our customers, some being Fortune 500 companies, who provided significant input to make our product a lot cooler. Nothing works better than meaningful suggestions from customers that have immediate impact.
Much work remains to be done but this nomination gives us immense satisfaction for staying on course. We were impressed by the rigorous process followed by SIIA and are humbled by our nomination! We invite you to try us out by visiting kPoint and hope to hear from you.
