Knowledge Networking Resonates at TechEd

June 17th, 2008

This is my first entry as VP of Sales and Business Development at uTIPu. My name is Chad Roll and I am a veteran of the high tech world having been around since the early 1980’s. My experience is mostly in launching emerging technologies and I am very excited about the Knowledge Networking Platform that uTIPu has to offer.

I am confident the technology we have at uTIPu, will change the way companies, customers and partners share knowledge in the future.

My first few weeks at uTIPu have been memorable; I was able to attend the Microsoft Tech Ed Conference in Orlando, FL. The partner expo area was filled with first class exhibitors and very well attended by the conference participants. My raffle ticket was only 5 numbers away from winning the Ducati Motorcycle in AvePoint’s booth, probably a good thing because my wife probably wouldn’t have let me keep it anyway.

The mood of all the exhibitors I was in contact with was upbeat and hopeful the activity in the booths would lead to meaningful opportunities. A good percentage of the vendors were talking and thinking about how to better communicate with their customers and a majority of the attendees were talking about how to better train their user community.

One of the biggest challenges facing today’s busy IT professional is where to find valuable information in a timely manner. Getting to the answers you need, when you need them can make or break a project and having timely and accurate information available to corporate end users is vital for internal IT Support folks.

It is this area of need that the uTIPu Knowledge Networking Platform can provide tremendous value to both companies needing to support their customers and partners and the Corporate IT support folks needing to support their user community.

I made many great contacts at the show and I look forward to working with all of you to help you meet your customer satisfaction goals. I welcome any feedback or comments about how your company plans to provide your customers and partners with the knowledge they need to successfully utilize your products and services.

Best Regards,

Chad

TipCam v2.0 Released

June 3rd, 2008

We are pleased to announce the availability of TipCam version 2.0. This version includes new and exciting features that make screencasting available for even wider audience. With this release our team strived to incorporate the feedback we received from the community and to secure our lead as the easiest-to-use screencast service for everyone.

The significant new features include:

  • Multi-language support – Option to switch the user interface to your native language. Swedish language is now available. Additional languages are supported by dropping in standard XLIF formatted language files into TipCam installation directory. Please join us to support international community and contribute language files back to uTIPu. Instructions of how to add additional language files available in the readme.txt file packaged in the tipcam download.

  • Option to save captured videos in AVI file format – Alternative video capture format allows for easy video editing using free tools, (Windows Movie Maker, VirtualDub, etc)
  • Addition of 800×600 and 480×360 resolution and zoom options – Smaller video size work better for sharing on youtube.com and embedding into BLOG’s, and WIKI’s. Larger video size is available for those that require extra level of details and intend to share videos on the fast networks.

  • Support for uploading videos to a specific community space – Claim your own space and create a community around your company, product or an interest group. uTIPu is now supporting creation of branded communities. Please visit our first partner site at Citrix VideoTips powered by uTIPu and inquire about setting up your own.
  • Option to broadcast TipCam captured video to YouTube.com - Share your screencast with the largest video community on the Web.

  • Optional countdown before recording starts - give yourself a moment to prepare.
  • Option to cancel file upload - If you start uploading a video by mistake, you can now cancel the uploading without having to wait for it to complete.
  • Automatic tipcam issue reporting - One click is all it takes to report potential TipCam issues to uTIPu when there is a problem.
  • Optional “Help us to improve TipCam feature” - Anonymous usage statistics collection helping us to know what features you use the most.

Have an idea of how to make TipCam even better? Please comment on this post.

- Oleg.

uTIPu Communities

May 29th, 2008

uTIPu is about enabling people to help one another by sharing knowledge and ideas. We have taken another step toward our goal this week by releasing Branded Public Community. Branded Public Community is a service that allows any organization to rapidly create a meeting place for its customers and employees to share screencast videos about its products, services and processes. Citrix, a global leader in application delivery infrastructure, has deployed its Video AppTips site (http://citrix.utipu.com) using our Branded Public Community service.

With Branded Public Community, customers and employees of any company can record, share and communicate help tips with one another easily and effectively, under the company’s brand. This allows them to engage in an active, constructive conversation about the company’s products and services. This will have a profound impact on the way customer support is provided.

If you are interested in setting up your own branded community site, please contact us at http://www.utipu.com/app/business.

John

Recent video playing issue with IE7

April 25th, 2008

In the past few days, we have seen problems with using Internet Explorer (IE) 7 to view tips on our web site.  If one switches quickly from one tip to another without letting the previous tip be downloaded completely, the video player may get stuck in showing downloading status (in the rotating meter).  Sometime, the web page does not show thumbnails correctly.  To see what the error looks like, click http://www.utipu.com/app/invited/id/46657683a909455686467c438676a01f.

We traced it down to a hot-fix from Microsoft (KB947864) released on April 9.  It seems that this hot-fix has caused similar problems at other video web sites too.  We have reported this to Microsoft and will keep you posted once it is resolved.

Meanwhile, you can avoid this problem by letting the current tip be downloaded completely (indicated by the light gray status bar in the player control) before switching to another tip.  You do not have to wait for the entire tip to be played, only downloaded.  This should prevent the problem from occurring.  But if the problem does occur, you can close IE and restart it.  Everything should work after restarting IE.

While this issue is not caused by our software, we are sorry if this has had a negative impact on your experience at utipu.com.  Thank you for visiting our site.

- John

 

TipCam v1.5 Released

February 28th, 2008

We are pleased to announce that TipCam v1.5 is available for immediate download. This version includes many new features and improvements, and is another milestone on our journey to become the easiest-to-use screencasting service.

The exciting new TipCam features include:

  • New intuitive user interface - Greatly improved visual feedback and single-click access to features that previously required multiple clicks or menu actions.

  • Mini-bar - A miniature action bar shown during recording to keep controls at your fingertips..

  • Voice-over – Have you ever recorded the perfect video, but botched the audio narration? voice-over let’s you redo just the audio. You can record a new narration or background music. Use pause the video feature during voice-over to add a long narration on a single video frame. It’s great for narrating a fast-paced video, like the recording of a video game.

  • Record video longer than 5 minutes – You said 5 minutes was too short, and we listened. Now you can record videos up to 20 minutes!
  • Public Computer Mode – In this mode, TipCam will not keep your account information when you sign-in to uTIPu from TipCam. Now you can safely install TipCam on a publicly accessible computer.

If you did not find the feature you are looking for, please add the comment on this post.

-Oleg.

Service downtime

February 15th, 2008

From  7:25 EST to 10:20AM our storage service provider (Amazon) experienced massive service outage.

Hundreds of businesses were affected by this failure. Our Application servers were operational. What you had likely noticed is thumbnail images and videos were not displayed. Those files are served from that our storage provider calls “Scalable and Reliable data store with 99.99% availability”. Like you, we are all disappointed by what happened.

-Oleg

Scheduled TipCam Update

January 24th, 2008

Hello.
Today we are going to release a required update for our TipCam application. The old version will expire after February 1st. Our first few beta releases have a rolling timeout limit after which the release will expire. This will help us better address user questions and support requests.  Once we exit our beta, the timeout limit will be removed and you will not be bothered by such required updates.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

Service launch feedback

January 16th, 2008

In just a few days since the beta launch we have received many great reviews of our service. I would like to share with you some of the quotes:

“Now in reality this is helpful to a certain extent to just about any computer user that has friends in the real or virtual world, but I honestly see this tool as being most useful for the plethora of startups that may want an easy option for creating a video demo to play on their site.”
- Mashable.com

“This does have a very real world application. Just think how many times you’ve been recreated by the old P and M to help with computer problems. Recording everything could save you a trip and your parents will be able to view the clip over and over again.”
- KillerStartuUps.com

“Overall, it’s a very cool service and works beautifully! It makes recording your screen very easy and super easy to share it online. … Definitely give it a shot if you want to share something on your screen that requires a series of steps. Enjoy!”
- Online-Tech-Tips.com

The feedback shows that our first step toward creating the easiest-to-use know-how capturing and idea sharing service was well received.  We realize what we have done is just the start of a long journey.  But with your help, we will get there.   

Our team is working on a new user interface that will make accessing all of the existing and upcoming TipCam features just one click away.  I will post a short preview soon.

 - Oleg

Introducing uTIPu

January 8th, 2008

Hi, this is John,

After 9 months of stealth development, we would like to introduce you to uTIPu, which is making our service available for public beta.  We are striving to become the easiest-to-use know-how capturing and idea sharing social network service.  Our product and service enable people to easily record their activities on PCs as videos and share them as help tips with one another (hence the name u-TIP-u).  While screen recording is not a new concept, until now, it has been too complicated for most users.  As a result, not many people even know about this function.  We intend to bring it to the masses by making it very easy to record and even easier to share.  Because we focus on ease of use, we intentionally did not give our screen recorder, TipCam, all the bells and whistles that have made screen recording a sophisticated, professional undertaking.  We want every user to be able to record ad-hoc and then share it immediately and conveniently.  

The benefit of our service in sharing computer “how-to’s” is self-evident.   Not as self-evident, albeit equally or more powerful, it opens up a whole new dimension to communicating what one sees on a computer screen.   Our service makes “see what I’m saying” actually possible and effortless.  During our private beta, some people used it as a cross-over between email and WebEx.  They simply recorded their voice comments about whatever they saw on the screen and sent them to others as a feature-rich email.  This was why we integrated our TipCam directly with Outlook so that one can record, upload and email in a single step.   

We thank you for stopping by at our site and for trying our service.  Please write us what you think about our service and how you want us to improve.  We have a team of enthusiastic, talented developers who are eager to turn your every requirement into reality.