New developments

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Ulrich Fischer

We are working on major updates on the back-end application (the Memoways software) and on the front-end side (the visualization of Memoways content on websites).

The Memoways software is now getting automatic updates:

The next important features that will come this month are:

separation between Workspace view (the “objective” metadata and asset handling) and the Project view (the “subjective” metadata and affiliation of the assets into specific projects).
search & filtering

Once those two major updates are implemented, the Memoways software will permit a more efficient and precise work.

The plug-in for WordPress is about to be released:

The core functionnality is already implemented (see http://walking-the-edit.net/en/movies/brussels/) but through this plug-in the use will be greatly improved.

Venture Night at Lift

Posted on February 8, 2013 by Ulrich Fischer

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to present Memoways in the Venture Night pitching session at Lift. I had the chance to be coached by very good people (from Accenture & Netinfluence) and, above all, to be helped with magnificent drawings by Anna Cavelleri, who joined our team two weeks ago. We will upload the presentation soon, here on the blog and on the website.

Those few weeks working on a new way of communicating our project where intense and opened doors to a new horizon for our communication: it is not (only) about technology, but about what to do with it, and why you are doing it…

Here is the whole video of this evening; Memoways appears at minute 22 and at 1 hour and 7 minutes. Enjoy !

Thanks to Lift, to the coaches and to Anna Cavalleri !

And here is the reportage on the venture night preparation with the coaches and the venture night – from Nouvo:

First screenshots

Posted on December 2, 2012 by Ulrich Fischer

The Memoways application (more about this app here) is still in very early development stage, but already “working” with real world projects, like the adaptations we did this fall in Brussels, Basel and Montreal.

Here are some first screenshots of the main editing interface:

The interface should be quite obvious: you have a liste of assets (the non edited footage), you select an asset on the left side, and you can then “index” (tag) the asset with geolocalisation, give an suggestive name (subject) and affiliate the asset to usages and thematics. Those lists, as seen with those two examples, can be managed and edited by the administrator.

Once the indexing work is completed (geolocalisation, name, usages and thematics) the basics are done and it is possible to export a “package” of content to build a specific version of the WE app for iPhone. This package consists of the audio part of the original assets, together with the metadata that are used by the editing engine in the mobile application.

Two more screens to show a little more: the login screen and the upload window.

More will follow soon !

Great news

Posted on November 13, 2012 by Ulrich Fischer

After a financial support from the OFC / BAK (Swiss Federal cultural funding) this summer, helping us to build up the Memoways application, we just received another Swiss Federal support, from the CTI. To both institutions, a warm "thank you" for the financial help and confidence in our project. Both institutions are giving an important amount of money (for their corresponding financial capacities), so their support becomes even stronger and more important for us.

What is great with those two founding, is that it shows that our project is "compatible" with two, ordinarily separate visions: the cultural politics and the industrial logic. In order to build up a toolset that is generic and open to use outside of a given artistic / esthetic background, we need an open-minded support that is not only focused either on the technical / economic side or only on the artistic / cultural aspects.

A few words about this project, called "MoveYourStory : Automatic and Interactive Mobile Story Creation", done in close partnership with ISS / University of Geneva.

The MYS project will improve the Memoways toolset by taking into account the behaviour and the current interests of the user. This information will be obtained by analysing the data produced by the different sensors of a smartphone.

Summer news

Posted on June 21, 2012 by Ulrich Fischer

What happened since our last post ?
We where very busy with following things:

- we did some tests with other DAM solutions (like Kaltura, Brightcove and others), but none of the existing solutions provides the flexibility we need for our project. So we went back to a "homemade" DAM;
– after testing the possibilities of editing the assets with a webapp, we decided to change strategy by programming a native Mac OSX software. More information about this will follow;
– the main actual issue is the financial side: it is very difficult to raise money for this kind of project, especially at this stage. We did several funding requests (lots of work), that are still pending – we hope that good news will come soon…
– the other issue was to find a brilliant programmer for building up our client software – and we found ! Since almost two months now he is working on this Mac OSX software, and we plan to release a beta version at the end of this summer

A post in the Walking the edit blog gives some complementary news.

Memoways new roadmap

Posted on October 29, 2011 by Ulrich Fischer

As explained more in detail on this blog, we decided to change the strategy of our development.

We are currently redesigning our Memoways application with consideration of two new aspects:
– we will build up our DAM on an existing one (like Kaltura or Brightcove, we have to test and to choose in the next days) – we will be much faster and moreover we will rely on an established and solidly evolving product;
– our web app will be much more versatile and powerful than we decided on the begining: next to the classical DAM and indexation possibilities, it will be possible to adjust the settings of the web services, the editing engines, to personalise your use scenarios – in short, there will be one centralized place to adjust everything from the content (the assets) to the form (the way your files will be present through web services).

The Memoways website will be updated to reflect the new developments, so stay tuned !

Demo for the webapp is online

Posted on August 18, 2011 by Ulrich Fischer

We are still working on the webapp – it's an alpha version so things will change a lot over the next weeks !

You can test it out at following address:

http://apps-dev.memoways.com/client/

user: demo@demo.com

pass: demo

Once you are logged in, you go to the Groups menu and select the "demo" group – a list of documents will show up. You can then play with the documents by just double clicking on a document: it will open in a new window where you can change the settings.

What is still missing are the following important functionalities:
– link with the map: we are still implementing the map and adding the geolocalisation feature
– updated indexing window (re-arranging the tabs and better navigation)
– more columns in the list view
– search & filtering capability
– document metadata retrieval
– upload / importation of documents (with creation of presets to automatize the creation of metadata)

More information and a user guide will follow.