by ladybro on 9/11/18, 1:05 PM with 51 comments
by ladybro on 9/11/18, 1:37 PM
I spent last year building a social video annotation app called Aech that never really caught on, but captured interest from a couple people that wanted the core annotation technology for business.
Mindstamp is the result of those conversations and six months of development work. It lets you enrich your videos with interactive notes (text, audio, video), questions, and personalization in just a few seconds before sharing them with your customers, clients, or teams.
Video is growing rapidly but is still largely a one-way, static asset. Mindstamp aims to change that by providing an interaction level on top for both creator and viewer to exchange ideas and gather feedback. We're just getting started but think there's a lot of room to innovate here.
Built 100% by me with Rails, VueJS, Vuetify, and Heroku ️
I'd love to hear your constructive feedback (please be nice, first real product shipped) and am happy to answer any questions you might have. And yes, I'm going to make a better demo video - it's just a placeholder for now.
Thanks for reading!
by realty_geek on 9/14/18, 8:15 AM
by realsneil on 9/14/18, 9:06 AM
One thing I felt was a little jarring while working through the stamps in the demo video was the audio completely cutting out when a question is posed. Perhaps having some 'standby' music would help in that way, or even just fading the audio in and out when the pause happens.
Spotify do this on play / pause.
Great stuff, and good luck with the project!
by jesperht on 9/14/18, 10:11 AM
Small nitpick: IDK if intentional, but it seems that you're not quite sanitizing input. I Added an annotation with <script>console.log("Hello")</script> and it printed to the console as I viewed the video.
by bryanrasmussen on 9/14/18, 9:46 AM
The context I am thinking of specifically is guided help systems in which you want a response from a customer before showing some more video or maybe even switching to another video.
If you think you would be willing to add that kind of functionality in to your product I can tell them when I pass it on to them and set you up to talk.
by exodust on 9/14/18, 12:23 PM
The pricing is over the top for what is just timestamps + (any interaction you can think of) on a video. And it's a subscription model, which is an extremely optimistic pricing model.
While I believe there is untapped potential for clever video time-stamping (I've worked a bit on this stuff myself), most of the time viewers don't want their video interrupted. Nor do video producers want their videos interrupted due to the fact timing, editing and pace is usually important to a video presentation.
Asking "what is your name" or inviting other input at key points could be very useful, but not when it depends on being a member of something called mindstamp. That's more than friction, that's a brick wall.
Tutorial videos, or complex "paths" for say an interactive story involving choice, could be a use case, but we're now starting to get excited about the scraps on offer after most people have said no thanks. In saying that, there could be plenty of money in the scraps if it's a niche, specific application. Such as tutorial videos, e-learning, evaluative videos, induction day training, and so on. But again... the subscription model... ouch.
by swaggyBoatswain on 9/14/18, 2:33 PM
I personally find very little value in this type of video application for collaboration. A good video presenter should know exactly what questions an audience has, before the questions asked. When you have a webinar or video, inside of tools like skype, that's what those chat tools are for. It allows for asynchronous communication on a predictable level, unobscured and easy for anyone to grasp immediately. Twitch / youtube-live are also options too.
If you want to make something I would really want -> build a app that allows you to take timestamps on youtube videos similar to udemy, but unobtrusive. Youtube has a predictable time duration on each video and time stamps, so this should be possible via a userscript and or chrome extension, with data input going to another server / called from the extension. You can opt to do localstorage but longterm that data should be stored elsewhere.
by davidpelayo on 9/14/18, 12:40 PM
by getaclue on 9/14/18, 4:33 PM
by soared on 9/14/18, 4:25 PM
by laex on 9/14/18, 7:45 AM
by AnnoyingSwede on 9/14/18, 8:48 AM
by miket on 9/14/18, 3:10 PM
by ddtaylor on 9/14/18, 8:14 AM
by burnt1ce on 9/14/18, 2:03 PM