Viewzi.

we’re launched.

go there.

Viewzi is set to launch our Public Beta starting Monday. This week’s been full of last minute cleanup, bug fixes, and features squeezed in at the last minute. But we’re nearing the finish line and at 7:00PM Monday night, we launch. What this means is anyone will be able to search using Viewzi without having (or creating) an account. We call that “taking the wall down.”

Mind you, we’ll still be in “beta”. We’ve still got lots to do, bugs to squash, features to complete and roll out, etc. Lots of stuff to make Viewzi an even better, more fun way to search.

It’s been quite a ride at this point, and I only expect it to speed up. As a team, we’re really starting to get our legs under us and start hitting on all cylinders. And the feedback we’ve been receiving is quite flattering; very positive and constructive. We didn’t expect as many people to “get it” as apparently have over the past 5 or 6 weeks, and it’s really great to hear. We’re very excited about where the product is headed, and anxious to show the world what we’ve been working so hard on.

Well, 71 hours to go (really less, more about that later). Back to work.

Viewzi. Changing the way you look at Search.

Well, Viewzi made the news tonight… the 10:00 CBS local evening news to be exact. My part even made the cut. It was about 45 seconds on the 7:30 sister-station news (channel 21), and then a full 2 minutes (with two “coming up” teasers!) on the 10:00 on the Dallas CBS affiliate, channel 11. It repeated at 12:30. Very cool.

And we got hammered.

Within 15 minutes of the story on the 10:00, we had received several hundred new user accounts, and the queue manager for the screen capture subsystem was smoking. Almost literally. It never crashed, but it bogged down quite a bit and is still working out from under the deluge.

I’m in the middle of rewriting the queue manager (the part of the code that delegates screen capture tasks to the many servers we have capturing website images), but I haven’t finished it yet and rolled it into production. So, we’re still running on the old code, which is having a hard time keeping up. I think the architectural changes I’ve made to the system will allow it to scale much more gracefully, but right now it’s kinda falling on it’s face.

The rest of the system has held up beautifully, though. For a little while there we were executing almost 35,000 SQL queries a minute, and the database server hardly broke a sweat. The rest of the architecture is sound. But screen capturing is a nasty business. Once we roll out the new code, we should be able to literally have hundreds of screen capture servers running to keep up with the load.

The feedback has been very good, overwhelmingly positive, and we’re still seeing new users sign up at a faster clip than we have since we went on the air about 5 weeks ago. It’s pretty exciting, and crazy at the same time. I just hope I have a little more time to work the kinks out before we hit the national news.

If you’re curious about what I’ve been up to for about the past 6 months, today is the day. We’ve just come out from flying under the radar, and my company, Viewzi, has launched our private beta!

What is Viewzi? We’re building the next generation of visual search. It’s hard to explain in text, so go take a look at our site and see:
http://www.viewzi.com
There’s even a little movie to explain the whole thing.

What’s a private beta? Well, we’re not quite ready to accept the deluge of traffic from the world just yet; we’re still building great functionality and ironing out all the kinks. But we wanted to get a bunch of people trying out the system, so we’ve created an invite program. If you’d like to try out Viewzi for yourself, click on the “Try Viewzi” ticket on the main site, and enter the referral code “steve” (no quotes). The system will send you an email confirmation and then let you into the system so you can try out Viewzi for yourself.

I’d really like to know what you think, so post feedback (either from within the site itself or here).

I just realized I didn’t wrap up my day 2 at NAB. Only being at NAB 2 days this year made it a really quick trip. I didn’t even venture out onto the strip, and missed seeing things like the fountains at the Bellagio, especially with my new camera. Oh well, fodder for next year.

The main hilight of day 2 was the 8k Ultra High-Def demo from NHK. Absolutely stunning. Presented on a 400-inch screen, it was completely amazing — as if they opened up a window and we were peering out on the beach of some ocean, following a hang glider over the cliff. It was so clear it was almost unnerving. They had footage of the Pro Bowl in Hawaii and you could read the shirt of a player on the other end of the field, or see logos on tee-shirts of fans in the stands. One scene was a field of sunflowers, and you could see the pollen grains on the leaves of the plants. In addition to the visuals, the demo included 22.2 surround sound, which was crystal clear and enveloping. Most amazing.

I made a mad dash around the rest of the show floor for the rest of the day (sat in on a couple of demos at Adobe, but other than that, just walked around). The show seemed a little lighter this time, but that may have been my haste to see it all.

Flew back early Wednesday morning and was right back into the swing of work… too much going on!

Well, day one is done and I’m beat. I spent most of my time in Apple’s booth checking out all the new goodness that is Final Cut Studio 2, but managed to see a little bit more in the south hall, including a new camera from Sony and various other booths.

Being an Apple guy and an Apple integrator, I’m most interested in what Cupertino has been up to. Here’s what it boils down to:

• Final Cut Pro 6. They’ve expanded and refined the capabilities of RT Extreme to more gracefully deal with multiple formats in the same timeline. They’ve made the UI a little more friendly by asking you if you want to set up a new sequence’s settings based on the first clip you drag in. They’ve made roundtripping to the other apps a little smoother, including templating of motion projects. They’ve increased the usage of FXPlug filters, including some technology from Shake for motion tracking and shake removal. And they’ve added the new Apple ProRes 4:2:2 codec for extremely efficient HD resolution with 4:2:2 colorspace in SD filesizes.
• Motion 3. This is perhaps the strongest upgrade in the lot. Motion is now fully 3-D in it’s capabilities, from cameras to lighting to particle systems to text effects to behaviors. They’ve added an extremely cool new feature to the HUD to control the positioning and movement of objects in 3-D space without the normal complexities of dealing with many objects in the scene. They’ve added significant new filters with FX Plug technology, including some inheritance from Shake. Very cool indeed.
• Soundtrack Pro 2. Surround sound. Advanced take management and audio restoration tools. Multipoint spotting display. Podcasting. All around, a significant upgrade to an already powerful tool.
• Compressor 3. This appears to be almost a from-the-ground-up rewrite of compressor as we’ve known it. New workflow to include migration of transcoded assets to remote servers, dozens of new presets, the ability to overlay animated watermarks and timecode burn-ins at transcode, and more efficient use of multi-core Macs, this is a strong contender.
• Color. Here’s something groundshaking. Apple bought Final Touch last year, and now we see that repackaged with enhancements into Color. While it is a first-class color timing package (not just a set of filters), the amazing thing is what was once a $5,000+ package is now “in the box.”
• The Rest. DVD Studio Pro remains unchanged at version 4. Live Type 2 and Cinema Tools are unchanged as well. But in the box with all of these other tools at a price point of $1,299 new and $499 upgrade… simply astounding.

I look forward to getting my hands on these tools when they finally ship in May. Go check out all the demos at Apple.

I’m curious about the DVDSP non-upgrade, tho. Methinks this has to do with hardware arrangements more than anything. There’s got to be a reason they’ve been shipping the Mac Pro towers with two optical bays… I think Apple hasn’t finalized negotiations with Blu-Ray and HD-DVD burner providers, and is holding the next version of DVDSP until those arrangements are made. Surely that won’t slip until next NAB.

The other huge introduction, as if the above isn’t enough, is Final Cut Server. FCS is a repackaging of Proximity’s ArtBox media asset server product, which Apple purchased back in December 2006. Used in conjunction with Xsan systems, it looks to be a very powerful way to aggregate and catalog media in a production environment. And the price point again is hard to beat: $999 for 10 concurrent users, and $1,999 for unlimited users. This will be very useful for some of my clients.

Since I’ve only a day more on the floor, I’m going to hit it commando-style tomorrow and try to see as much as I can. I need to ask some more questions at Apple’s booth, since that most directly relates to things that make money for me, but I want to see what else is out there as well. Let’s hope the old feet hold up.

I’m here in Vegas, checked in and on-line. Got some work to do before going to bed… early morning and lots of floor to walk tomorrow.

Things have been really hoppin’. Too much to allow blogging time.

Cynthia and I took a short trip to Vegas, stayed at the Luxor, saw Blue Man Group, had a blast, but had to come back.

Work is busy. So much so, that I haven’t even had the time to put together a decent website for the new business. Got to get that done. Several projects (happily paying ones) have been keeping my attention.

And yet, the world marches on. Plenty of dumb things happening in the political landscape: Fahrenheit 911 is getting plenty of press, but people seem to be wising up to all the fallacies and deceits of this mockumentary. John Kerry picks a “safe” VP running mate that won’t help him at all. A story leaks today that Homeland Security is investigating the possibility of postponing the election in the event of a terrorist act; something that won’t happen (the postponing, that is). It would be just about the stupidest thing ever to do, giving in to the terrorist threat. Ah, to have more time to comment.

Apple previews Tiger, steps all over a successful developer, introduces marvelous new displays (including a 30″ monster), and sells the 100 millionth song on the iTMS. If they’d only hurry up and release Motion…

O, and it’s hot. But that’s not news, that’s normal for Texas in July.

I had a very strange meeting this afternoon. Perhaps I’ll tell you about it sometime, but not right now. I did, however, pick up a copy of Return of the King tonight on the way home. Sweetness.

And yes, I know it’s been a while since I posted. I’m out of town, although that’s no particular excuse. I’m trying to catch up now. See, I updated the books on the right side…

I’m in San Antonio, recording voiceover and video for a training series we’re doing for the US Courts. Long hours in the sound booth, woo.

There’s a lot going on, both at work and at home. And in the world. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to comment on some of it soon.