Recherche avancée

Sur d’autres sites (7187)

• My journey to Coviu

  27 octobre 2015, par silvia

  My new startup just released our MVP – this is the story of what got me here.

  I love creating new applications that let people do their work better or in a manner that wasn’t possible before.

  My first such passion was as a student intern when I built a system for a building and loan association’s monthly customer magazine. The group I worked with was managing their advertiser contacts through a set of paper cards and I wrote a dBase based system (yes, that long ago) that would manage their customer relationships. They loved it – until it got replaced by an SAP system that cost 100 times what I cost them, had really poor UX, and only gave them half the functionality. It was a corporate system with ongoing support, which made all the difference to them.

  The story repeated itself with a CRM for my Uncle’s construction company, and with a resume and quotation management system for Accenture right after Uni, both of which I left behind when I decided to go into research.

  Even as a PhD student, I never lost sight of challenges that people were facing and wanted to develop technology to overcome problems. The aim of my PhD thesis was to prepare for the oncoming onslaught of audio and video on the Internet (yes, this was 1994 !) by developing algorithms to automatically extract and locate information in such files, which would enable users to structure, index and search such content.

  Many of the use cases that we explored are now part of products or continue to be challenges : finding music that matches your preferences, identifying music or video pieces e.g. to count ads on the radio or to mark copyright infringement, or the automated creation of video summaries such as trailers.

  

  This continued when I joined the CSIRO in Australia – I was working on segmenting speech into words or talk spurts since that would simplify captioning & subtitling, and on MPEG-7 which was a (slightly over-engineered) standard to structure metadata about audio and video.

  In 2001 I had the idea of replicating the Web for videos : i.e. creating hyperlinked and searchable video-only experiences. We called it “Annodex” for annotated and indexed video and it needed full-screen hyperlinked video in browsers – man were we ahead of our time ! It was my first step into standards, got several IETF RFCs to my name, and started my involvement with open codecs through Xiph.

  Around the time that YouTube was founded in 2006, I founded Vquence – originally a video search company for the Web, but pivoted to a video metadata mining company. Vquence still exists and continues to sell its data to channel partners, but it lacks the user impact that has always driven my work.

  As the video element started being developed for HTML5, I had to get involved. I contributed many use cases to the W3C, became a co-editor of the HTML5 spec and focused on video captioning with WebVTT while contracting to Mozilla and later to Google. We made huge progress and today the technology exists to publish video on the Web with captions, making the Web more inclusive for everybody. I contributed code to YouTube and Google Chrome, but was keen to make a bigger impact again.

  The opportunity came when a couple of former CSIRO colleagues who now worked for NICTA approached me to get me interested in addressing new use cases for video conferencing in the context of WebRTC. We worked on a kiosk-style solution to service delivery for large service organisations, particularly targeting government. The emerging WebRTC standard posed many technical challenges that we addressed by building rtc.io , by contributing to the standards, and registering bugs on the browsers.

  Fast-forward through the development of a few further custom solutions for customers in health and education and we are starting to see patterns of need emerge. The core learning that we’ve come away with is that to get things done, you have to go beyond “talking heads” in a video call. It’s not just about seeing the other person, but much more about having a shared view of the things that need to be worked on and a shared way of interacting with them. Also, we learnt that the things that are being worked on are quite varied and may include multiple input cameras, digital documents, Web pages, applications, device data, controls, forms.

  So we set out to build a solution that would enable productive remote collaboration to take place. It would need to provide an excellent user experience, it would need to be simple to work with, provide for the standard use cases out of the box, yet be architected to be extensible for specialised data sharing needs that we knew some of our customers had. It would need to be usable directly on Coviu.com, but also able to integrate with specialised applications that some of our customers were already using, such as the applications that they spend most of their time in (CRMs, practice management systems, learning management systems, team chat systems). It would need to require our customers to sign up, yet their clients to join a call without sign-up.

  Collaboration is a big problem. People are continuing to get more comfortable with technology and are less and less inclined to travel distances just to get a service done. In a country as large as Australia, where 12% of the population lives in rural and remote areas, people may not even be able to travel distances, particularly to receive or provide recurring or specialised services, or to achieve work/life balance. To make the world a global village, we need to be able to work together better remotely.

  The need for collaboration is being recognised by specialised Web applications already, such as the LiveShare feature of Invision for Designers, Codassium for pair programming, or the recently announced Dropbox Paper. Few go all the way to video – WebRTC is still regarded as a complicated feature to support.

  

  With Coviu, we’d like to offer a collaboration feature to every Web app. We now have a Web app that provides a modern and beautifully designed collaboration interface. To enable other Web apps to integrate it, we are now developing an API. Integration may entail customisation of the data sharing part of Coviu – something Coviu has been designed for. How to replicate the data and keep it consistent when people collaborate remotely – that is where Coviu makes a difference.

  We have started our journey and have just launched free signup to the Coviu base product, which allows individuals to own their own “room” (i.e. a fixed URL) in which to collaborate with others. A huge shout out goes to everyone in the Coviu team – a pretty amazing group of people – who have turned the app from an idea to reality. You are all awesome !

  With Coviu you can share and annotate :

  • images (show your mum photos of your last holidays, or get feedback on an architecture diagram from a customer),
  • pdf files (give a presentation remotely, or walk a customer through a contract),
  • whiteboards (brainstorm with a colleague), and
  • share an application window (watch a YouTube video together, or work through your task list with your colleagues).

  All of these are regarded as “shared documents” in Coviu and thus have zooming and annotations features and are listed in a document tray for ease of navigation.

  This is just the beginning of how we want to make working together online more productive. Give it a go and let us know what you think.

  http://coviu.com/

  The post My journey to Coviu first appeared on ginger’s thoughts.

• My journey to Coviu

  27 octobre 2015, par silvia

  My new startup just released our MVP – this is the story of what got me here.

  I love creating new applications that let people do their work better or in a manner that wasn’t possible before.

  My first such passion was as a student intern when I built a system for a building and loan association’s monthly customer magazine. The group I worked with was managing their advertiser contacts through a set of paper cards and I wrote a dBase based system (yes, that long ago) that would manage their customer relationships. They loved it – until it got replaced by an SAP system that cost 100 times what I cost them, had really poor UX, and only gave them half the functionality. It was a corporate system with ongoing support, which made all the difference to them.

  The story repeated itself with a CRM for my Uncle’s construction company, and with a resume and quotation management system for Accenture right after Uni, both of which I left behind when I decided to go into research.

  Even as a PhD student, I never lost sight of challenges that people were facing and wanted to develop technology to overcome problems. The aim of my PhD thesis was to prepare for the oncoming onslaught of audio and video on the Internet (yes, this was 1994 !) by developing algorithms to automatically extract and locate information in such files, which would enable users to structure, index and search such content.

  Many of the use cases that we explored are now part of products or continue to be challenges : finding music that matches your preferences, identifying music or video pieces e.g. to count ads on the radio or to mark copyright infringement, or the automated creation of video summaries such as trailers.

  

  This continued when I joined the CSIRO in Australia – I was working on segmenting speech into words or talk spurts since that would simplify captioning & subtitling, and on MPEG-7 which was a (slightly over-engineered) standard to structure metadata about audio and video.

  In 2001 I had the idea of replicating the Web for videos : i.e. creating hyperlinked and searchable video-only experiences. We called it “Annodex” for annotated and indexed video and it needed full-screen hyperlinked video in browsers – man were we ahead of our time ! It was my first step into standards, got several IETF RFCs to my name, and started my involvement with open codecs through Xiph.

  Around the time that YouTube was founded in 2006, I founded Vquence – originally a video search company for the Web, but pivoted to a video metadata mining company. Vquence still exists and continues to sell its data to channel partners, but it lacks the user impact that has always driven my work.

  As the video element started being developed for HTML5, I had to get involved. I contributed many use cases to the W3C, became a co-editor of the HTML5 spec and focused on video captioning with WebVTT while contracting to Mozilla and later to Google. We made huge progress and today the technology exists to publish video on the Web with captions, making the Web more inclusive for everybody. I contributed code to YouTube and Google Chrome, but was keen to make a bigger impact again.

  The opportunity came when a couple of former CSIRO colleagues who now worked for NICTA approached me to get me interested in addressing new use cases for video conferencing in the context of WebRTC. We worked on a kiosk-style solution to service delivery for large service organisations, particularly targeting government. The emerging WebRTC standard posed many technical challenges that we addressed by building rtc.io , by contributing to the standards, and registering bugs on the browsers.

  Fast-forward through the development of a few further custom solutions for customers in health and education and we are starting to see patterns of need emerge. The core learning that we’ve come away with is that to get things done, you have to go beyond “talking heads” in a video call. It’s not just about seeing the other person, but much more about having a shared view of the things that need to be worked on and a shared way of interacting with them. Also, we learnt that the things that are being worked on are quite varied and may include multiple input cameras, digital documents, Web pages, applications, device data, controls, forms.

  So we set out to build a solution that would enable productive remote collaboration to take place. It would need to provide an excellent user experience, it would need to be simple to work with, provide for the standard use cases out of the box, yet be architected to be extensible for specialised data sharing needs that we knew some of our customers had. It would need to be usable directly on Coviu.com, but also able to integrate with specialised applications that some of our customers were already using, such as the applications that they spend most of their time in (CRMs, practice management systems, learning management systems, team chat systems). It would need to require our customers to sign up, yet their clients to join a call without sign-up.

  Collaboration is a big problem. People are continuing to get more comfortable with technology and are less and less inclined to travel distances just to get a service done. In a country as large as Australia, where 12% of the population lives in rural and remote areas, people may not even be able to travel distances, particularly to receive or provide recurring or specialised services, or to achieve work/life balance. To make the world a global village, we need to be able to work together better remotely.

  The need for collaboration is being recognised by specialised Web applications already, such as the LiveShare feature of Invision for Designers, Codassium for pair programming, or the recently announced Dropbox Paper. Few go all the way to video – WebRTC is still regarded as a complicated feature to support.

  

  With Coviu, we’d like to offer a collaboration feature to every Web app. We now have a Web app that provides a modern and beautifully designed collaboration interface. To enable other Web apps to integrate it, we are now developing an API. Integration may entail customisation of the data sharing part of Coviu – something Coviu has been designed for. How to replicate the data and keep it consistent when people collaborate remotely – that is where Coviu makes a difference.

  We have started our journey and have just launched free signup to the Coviu base product, which allows individuals to own their own “room” (i.e. a fixed URL) in which to collaborate with others. A huge shout out goes to everyone in the Coviu team – a pretty amazing group of people – who have turned the app from an idea to reality. You are all awesome !

  With Coviu you can share and annotate :

  • images (show your mum photos of your last holidays, or get feedback on an architecture diagram from a customer),
  • pdf files (give a presentation remotely, or walk a customer through a contract),
  • whiteboards (brainstorm with a colleague), and
  • share an application window (watch a YouTube video together, or work through your task list with your colleagues).

  All of these are regarded as “shared documents” in Coviu and thus have zooming and annotations features and are listed in a document tray for ease of navigation.

  This is just the beginning of how we want to make working together online more productive. Give it a go and let us know what you think.

  http://coviu.com/

• Ode to the Gravis Ultrasound

  1er août 2011, par Multimedia Mike — General

  WARNING : This post is a bunch of nostalgia. Feel free to follow along if you recall the DOS days of the early-mid 1990s.

  I finally let go of my Gravis Ultrasound MAX sound card a little while ago. It felt like the end of an era for me, even though I had scarcely used the card in recent memory.

  
  
  

  The Beginning
  What is the Gravis Ultrasound ? Only the finest PC sound card from the classic DOS days. Back in the day (very early 1990s), most consumer PC sound cards were Yamaha OPL FM synthesizers paired with a basic digital to analog converter (DAC). Gravis, a company known for game controllers, dared to break with the dominant paradigm of Sound Blaster clones and create a sound card that had 32 digital channels.
  
  I heard about the GUS sometime in 1992 through one of the dominant online services at the time, Prodigy. Through the message boards, I learned of a promotion with Electronic Arts in which customers could pre-order a GUS at a certain discount along with 2 EA games from a selected catalog (with progressive discounts when ordering more games from the list). I know I got the DOS version of PowerMonger ; I think the other was Night Shift, though that doesn’t seem to be an EA title.

  Anyway, 1992 saw many maddening delays of the GUS hardware. Finally, reports of GUS shipments began to trickle into the Prodigy message forums. Then one day in November, 1992, mine arrived. Into the 286 machine it went and a valiant attempt at software installation was made. A friend and I fought with the software late into the evening, trying to make this thing work reasonably. I remember grabbing a pair of old headphones sitting near the computer that were used for an ancient (even for the time) portable radio. That was the only means of sound reproduction we had available at that moment. And it still sounded incredible.

  After graduating to progressively superior headphones, I would later return to that original pair only to feel my ears were being physically assaulted. Strange, they sounded fine that first night I was trying to make the GUS work. I guess this was my first understanding that the degree to which one is a snobby audiophile is all a matter of hard-earned experience.

  Technology
  The GUS was powered by something called a GF1 which was supposed to use a technology called wavetable synthesis. In the early days, I thought (and I wasn’t alone in this) that this meant that the GF1 chip had a bunch of digitized instrument samples stored in the ASIC. That wasn’t it.

  However, it did feature 32 digital channels at a time when most PC audio cards had 2 (plus that Yamaha FM synthesizer). There was some hemming and hawing about how the original GUS couldn’t drive all 32 channels at a full 44.1 kHz ("CD quality") playback rate. It’s true— if 14 channels were enabled, all could be played at 44.1 kHz. Enabling more channels started progressive degradation and with all 32 channels, each was only playing at around 19 kHz. Still, from my emerging game programmer perspective, that allowed for 8-channel tracker music and 6 channels of sound effects, all at the vaunted CD level of quality.

  Games and Compatibility
  The primary reason to have a discrete sound card was for entertainment applications — ahem, games. GUS support was pretty sketchy out of the gate (ostensibly a major reason for the card’s delay). While many sound cards offered Sound Blaster emulation by basically having the same hardware as Sound Blaster cards, the GUS took a software route towards emulating the SB. To do this required a program called the Sound Blaster Operating System, or SBOS.

  Oh, how awesome it was to hear the program exclaim "SBOS installed !" And how harshly it grated on your nerves after the 200th time hearing it due to so many reboots and fiddling with options to make your games work. Also, I’ve always wondered if there’s something special about sampling an ’s’ sound — does it strain the sampling frequency range ? Perhaps the phrase was sampled at too low a bitrate because the ’s’ sounds didn’t come through very clearly, which is something you notice after hundreds of iterations when there are 3 ’s’ sounds in the phrase.

  Fortunately, SBOS became less relevant with the advent of Mega-Em, a separate emulator which intercepted calls to Roland MIDI systems and routed them to the very capable GUS. Roland-supporting games sounded beautiful.

  Eventually, more and more DOS games were released with native Gravis support, sometimes with the help of The Miles Sound System (from our friends at Rad Game Tools — you know, the people behind Smacker and Bink). The library changelog is quite the trip down PC memory lane.

  An important area where the GUS shined brightly was that of demos and music trackers. The emerging PC demo scene embraced the powerful GUS (aided, no doubt, by Gravis’ sponsorship of the community) and the coolest computer art and music of the time natively supported the card.

  Programming
  At this point in my life, I was a budding programmer in high school and was fairly intent on programming video games. So far, I had figured out how to make a few blips using a borrowed Sound Blaster card. I went to great lengths to learn how to program the Gravis Ultrasound.

  Oh you kids today, with your easy access to information at the tips of your fingers thanks to Google and the broader internet. I had to track down whatever information I could find through a combination of Prodigy message boards and local dialup BBSes and FidoNet message bases. Gravis was initially tight-lipped about programming information for its powerful card, as was de rigueur of hardware companies (something that largely persists to this day). But Gravis eventually saw an opportunity to one-up encumbent Creative Labs and released a full SDK for the Ultrasound. I wanted the SDK badly.

  So it was early-mid 1993. Gravis released an SDK. I heard that it was available on their support BBS. Their BBS with a long distance phone number. If memory serves, the SDK was only in the neighborhood of 1.5 Mbytes. That takes a long time to transfer via a 2400 baud modem at a time when long distance phone charges were still a thing and not insubstantial.

  Luckily, they also put the SDK on something called an ’FTP site’. Fortunately, about this time, I had the opportunity to get some internet access via the local university.

  Indeed, my entire motivation for initially wanting to get on the internet was to obtain special programming information. Is that nerdy enough for you ?

  I see that the GUS SDK is still available via the Gravis FTP site. The file GUSDK222.ZIP is dated 1998 and is less than a megabyte.

  Next Generation : CD Support
  So I had my original GUS by the end of 1992. That was just the first iteration of the Gravis Ultrasound. The next generation was the GUS MAX. When I was ready to get into the CD-ROM era, this was what I wanted in my computer. This is because the GUS MAX had CD-ROM support. This is odd to think about now when all optical drives have SATA interfaces and (P)ATA interfaces before that— what did CD-ROM compatibility mean back then ? I wasn’t quite sure. But in early 1995, I headed over to Computer City (R.I.P.) and bought a new GUS MAX and Sony double-speed CD-ROM drive to install in the family’s PC.

  
  
  

  About the "CD-ROM compatibility" : It seems that there were numerous competing interfaces in the early days of CD-ROM technology. The GUS MAX simply integrated 3 different CD-ROM controllers onto the audio card. This was superfluous to me since the Sony drive came with an appropriate controller card anyway, though I didn’t figure out that the extra controller card was unnecessary until after I installed it. No matter ; computers of the day were rife with expansion ports.

  
  
  The 3 different CD-ROM controllers on the GUS MAX
  

  Explaining The Difference
  It was difficult to explain the difference in quality to those who didn’t really care. Sometime during 1995, I picked up a quasi-promotional CD-ROM called "The Gravis Ultrasound Experience" from Babbage’s computer store (remember when that was a thing ?). As most PC software had been distributed on floppy discs up until this point, this CD-ROM was an embarrassment of riches. Tons of game demos, scene demos, tracker music, and all the latest GUS drivers and support software.

  Further, the CD-ROM had a number of red book CD audio tracks that illustrated the difference between Sound Blaster cards and the GUS. I remember loaning this to a tech-savvy coworker who disbelieved how awesome the GUS was. The coworker took it home, listened to it, and wholly agreed that the GUS audio sounded better than the SB audio in the comparison — and was thoroughly confused because she was hearing this audio emanating from her Sound Blaster. It was the difference between real-time and pre-rendered audio, I suppose, but I failed to convey that message. I imagine the same issue comes up even today regarding real-time video rendering vs., e.g., a pre-rendered HD cinematic posted on YouTube.

  Regrettably, I can’t find that CD-ROM anymore which leads me to believe that the coworker never gave it back. Too bad, because it was quite the treasure trove.

  Aftermath
  According to folklore I’ve heard, Gravis couldn’t keep up as the world changed to Windows and failed to deliver decent drivers. Indeed, I remember trying to keep my GUS in service under Windows 95 well into 1998 but eventually relented and installed some kind of more appropriate sound card that was better supported under Windows.

  Of course, audio output capability has been standard issue for any PC for at least 10 years and many people aren’t even aware that discrete sound cards still exist. Real-time audio rendering has become less essential as full musical tracks can be composed and compressed into PCM format and delivered with the near limitless space afforded by optical storage.

  A few years ago, it was easy to pick up old GUS cards on eBay for cheap. As of this writing, there are only a few and they’re pricy (but perhaps not selling). Maybe I was just viewing during the trough of no value a few years ago.

  Nowadays, of course, anyone interested in studying the old GUS or getting a nostalgia fix need only boot up the always-excellent DOSBox emulator which provides remarkable GUS emulation support.