Werd I/O

I don't think it's saying too much to talk about how we're building latakoo into a cloud media database. Customers from all over the world - a large number of which are television journalists - are using us to send footage, archive it in a searchable way, and synchronize it with their own enterprise infrastructure. Broadcasting and Cable recently discussed one of the things we're doing with NBC News, which leverages our API to distribute archive footage to paying clients. But every day, we're adding more hooks and functionality to allow people to build sophisticated media workflows with latakoo as the back-end.

Here's one example of how it works.

A journalist out in the field shoots some footage, and pulls it straight off the camera into the latakoo desktop app. (For example, we'll take footage from a Panasonic P2 card.) They choose one or more destinations, and hit "start". The app then intelligently compresses the footage, taking note of metadata like timecode, and stitches segmented video files into a single long piece of footage if the user wants it to. It's then rapidly sent over a standard Internet connection (some folks use 4G cards, others go to Starbucks or use sat phones) to our servers. There's an iOS app too, of course, and Android is on the cards. We're also releasing new versions of the desktop app later in the summer, which includes much faster uploads for high-bandwidth environments.

Once the media hits our servers, it might be transcoded into a format of the recipient's choice, and sent to their infrastructure. That's important, because media operations don't want to have to worry about format incompatibilities: they just need to receive the footage quickly, in a predictable, fast way. There's full individual and role-based permissions, so only the people of the recipient's choice can see it on latakoo.com, and of course they have full control over their infrastructure.

They can embed the video on the web, of course, but they can also add extras like automatic transcriptions, or push to a custom-branded video portal. They can also use our API to search, retrieve and manipulate their content (which is designed to make integration simple, unlike the SOAP-based messes a lot of professional media platforms are saddled with).

Internally, our platform has the ability to hook any custom metadata at all off the footage, and we're in the process of releasing that to our customers too. There are also tags, notes, comments, and everything you'd expect from a social platform for business.

We're a very small team, but I'm proud of everything we've put together. We punch above our weight, consistently, and although enterprise software might not be as sexy as the next Snapchat or Instagram, we get to be the delivery backbone for some very high-quality news operations around the US. They depend on us, and we're proud to serve them.

#latakoo #video #delivery

Here are some of my high-level life goals. Some are pretty universal and bland; others are specifically mine:

• Have a positive, progressive impact on the world
• Live comfortably
• Work on projects I'm proud of in collaboration with great people, which allow me to fulfil the previous two goals
• Be able to choose my location, and have the freedom to discover new ones
• (Eventually) have a family, give them the attention they deserve, and ensure that my children, too, understand that they're citizens of the whole world instead of one specific place

That last bullet might read as being a little odd, but it's borne from necessity. I was born in the Netherlands, grew up in England (with gaps in Austria and North Carolina), went to university in Scotland, and now live in California. Part of my family can be traced back to the Mayflower; other parts come from Switzerland, Ukraine and Indonesia. My ancestors and contemporaries have fled pogroms, helped reform religions, lived through internment camps, built up lives over and over again. My relatives are scattered across nations and continents. In order to be connected with my wider family, I have to travel. I'd hope that my children would be connected with their wider family too!

This is both the blessing and the curse of the third-culture kid: I'm not tethered to any real sense of patriotism for any particular place (and don't feel much empathy for the sense of patriotism that others hold). Family is my nationality, and I feel relatively free to try new places. But because that extended family is scattered, I need to have a certain budget - one that is obviously multiplied with a family of my own. And I need to have freedom to travel.

I'm lucky to work in software, and I'm lucky to have been born where and when I was; all of these things are feasibly within reach for me. Nonetheless, it's a life outside the box: the world is still set up for people who live in more or less one place for their whole adult lives. My challenge, then, is to engineer the life I want to lead. (Of course, this is probably a good exercise for anyone.)

As time goes on, I think more and more people will be like me, with scattered families and backgrounds, who want to live in a way that's tailored for them, rather than dictated by tradition or a cookie-cutter mold. One possible future of work isn't with vast corporations, as it largely still is today, but with individuals loosely joining around projects. Just as Just In Time automation allows for working inventory to be minimized and components to be sourced as they are needed, Just In Time employment allows workers will specialized skills to join projects on demand.

That doesn't quite cover the whole story, though: domain knowledge is important, and consistency across a project over time is valuable. My value to latakoo isn't just my knowledge of web development and technology strategy; it's also my knowledge of latakoo itself. At it's simplest, I understand why past decisions were made, and can make better future decisions with this knowledge in mind. Not only that, but "Just In Time" employment leans heavily in the direction of the employer; employment benefit, not to mention a steady income, remain a very important consideration for the vast majority of people. Nobody wants to be without health insurance, for example (in the countries where that's necessary). Or mortgage payments / rent money.

So employment isn't going away, even for folks like me - but I work from an office that I pay for myself, in a city by myself. So there's nothing stopping me from working from the Bahamas for a week, or from London, or Singapore. Well, okay, there's the money, but the effect on the company is exactly the same. I'm still in the chat channel, still on Google Hangout, still answering calls and emails, and still pushing work. Other organizations work in similar ways: Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, prides itself on this.

This is possible because of the Internet, and it opens up some other new possibilities for employment and living: a world where your choice of city and country don't affect your employment potential, and where salaries are untethered from geography. In the future, as more and more projects become geographically decentralized, it's easy to imagine a software engineer's salary normalizing across borders. It's also easy to imagine choosing a place to live like you'd choose a car: efficiency, the experience, cost effectiveness, your values. It's also easy to imagine citizenship becoming more fluid, at least for skilled knowledge workers.

I'm looking forward to a time when people aren't locked into geography, and I'm doing my best to start avoiding that lock-in now.

#thirdculture #lifeengineering #geography #latakoo

We got a mention in Broadcasting & Cable magazine!

You've got to be a subscriber to read it, so here's a pertinent excerpt:

One notable example of those efforts can be found at NBC News, which in 2011 became the first U.S. broadcaster to set up an online site that allowed clients to buy and download archive material, Fon-Sing says. “It is part of an underlying goal of opening up the archives so our clients have easier access,” she says.

To further improve those systems, NBC News is currently working with video company Latakoo to develop a new content delivery system. On a network level, tech teams are also using a new media asset management system that will improve the capacity and flexibility of the archive system.

You can check out the whole article here.

#latakoo #nbcnews #nbc