We are excited to announce a major feature launch tonight - if you check out our home page you will now see an option to synchronize your video with slides.  This feature has been in private beta since we initially launched, and we are now happy to open it up to the world.

You can import your videos from YouTube, Google Video or Blip.tv as before, and now you can either upload your slides (in pdf format) or import your slides from SlideShare.

Once you’ve uploaded your slides, you can set each one to appear at a certain point in your video.  Once you have ’synchronized’ your slides, you’ll end up with something like this:

DHH at Startup School

As you can see we combine the best of YouTube and SlideShare to create a new way of experiencing presentations online.  We’re looking forward to people using this for talks, conferences, classes, training and more.  As always, we love hearing your feedback so let us know what you think!

Firstly, I want to apologize to everyone watching the Startup School videos today who experienced ‘dropouts’ - where the video file would stop playing before reaching the end.  It turns out startup school was really popular, and our server ran into a few scaling issues serving all those videos

We’re working on a solution right now, but in the mean time if you refresh the page and then seek to the section you were up to, you will be able to continue watching.

And thanks again for all the feedback - good and bad.  We read everything and are striving to make Omnisio better each day.

Well it’s been a little over a week now since we launched.  I thought I’d take a break from the craziness to write about what’s been going on.

Press

We had some great press coverage which has driven a lot of traffic to our site, including:

Plus dozens of other smaller blogs

New Features

After launching we very quickly realized that a lot of our international users were complaining about lack of unicode support in the comments - so we added it the next day.  A few days later we added the ability to search for videos from within our authoring tool (to save people the trouble of flipping between youtube and Omnisio browser windows when building a compilation).

In the next day or so we will roll out some better embedding controls, and a variety of other enhancements in response to user feedback.  We read everything you guys send us, so please keep the feedback coming in.  We want to make Omnisio the best it can be!

Interesting Statistics

The most commented video is  Ten best Ballmer-goes-nuts videos with 387 comments.  This makes watching the video a very interesting experience.  Don’t forget you can turn off comments with the button in the top-right, in case you want to be able to see the actual video

The longest compilation is Rebol Programming Tutorials by Nick Antonaccio, which features a staggering 72 clips for a total time of 8 hours and 57 minutes!  In second place is Julius Sumner Miller with 58 clips totalling 7 hours and 4 minutes, and in third place The BBS Documentary at 4 hours and 55 minutes.

Over 2,500 video compilations have been created so far.

What next?

We are hard at work on our next set of features.  Some of the things in the works are specialized Facebook and MySpace applications to make it easy for you to share and discuss video clips with your friends, and a public release of our slide synchronization tools.

As I said, keep the feedback coming in!  We read everything and use this to prioritize the features and enhancements that we are working on.

After several months of coding, 1028 SVN commits, and a couple of changes of direction based on early user feedback, we are excited to announce the launch of our first set of features!

Some of the things you can do on Omnisio today:

• Extract your favorite clips from videos hosted on Youtube and other video sites, and share these with your friends
• Create compilations of clips from multiple videos and embed these compilations in your blog or profile page
• Add in-video comments - make videos more fun to watch with your friends

We have a couple more exciting features on the verge of being deployed:

• Synchronize powerpoint slides with videos
• Tag people and interesting highlights in videos (to help people quickly navigate to the best parts)

What’s next? Fundamentally we have an architecture for quickly building rich applications based on video. We believe that online video is still very early in terms of innovation. What you see today on the web is largely replicating the experience of TV, just like the early days of TV replicated the experience of radio. It takes time for innovators to explore the capabilities of a new medium and create something truly unique. We believe this is about to happen with online video, and in fact we are going to help make it happen!

We have a lot of ideas about how to make online video better, but we are most excited about hearing from you. Please don’t hesitate to click on the feedback link in the top-right corner of our site. We’d love to hear what you think, good and bad, and hope that we can help make your online video experience dramatically better.

We spent the last few months developing some cool technology for sharing educational materials online (see my post below for some examples).  Our beta testers loved it, and this got us thinking… Why are we constraining ourselves to educational materials?

While we love learning new things, there’s a whole world of video out there on the internet that could benefit from our technology.  This is exciting to us because it opens up a whole new market, and will allow many more people to experience our online media platform.

So stay tuned… we’ll be launching in the next few weeks and we think you’ll love what we have to offer.  Sign up on our homepage and you’ll be the first to know (we’ll even let you into the site before we launch to get your feedback!)

We haven’t posted here for a while - not because there’s nothing going on but quite the opposite! We’ve had our heads down coding some great new features, and have been meeting with lawyers and investors as we progress towards a public launch around March next year.

Although our platform will ultimately be designed for ‘everyday experts’ who want to publish tutorials online, we are currently working closely with selected organizers of conferences and events who want to make their content available. We are still in private beta are being very selective about who we work with (we want to make sure we adequately test all parts of our system), but I’d like to showcase a few of the groups currently using our platform:

The MIT/Stanford Venture Lab is using our embedded platform to publish high quality events on their web site.	The Stanford Law and Technology Association has used our embedded platform to publish this great talk from Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia.
Advance held a great event recently on Venture Capital Trends, and again used the Omnisio embedded platform to publish it on their site.	The Community Next Platform conference held in October is hosted in its entirety here.

I think you’ll agree that all have provided great educational content, and we are very excited to be making progress towards our goal of making it as easy and enjoyable as possible to learn things online.

Keep in mind that we are still in private beta, so you may find that some features are missing and that things are changing rapidly. We love hearing feedback, so let us know what you think (good or bad)! And if you’re interested in putting your conference/event content online please drop us an email. Over the next few weeks we’ll be looking to accept a few more users into our private beta.

We recently partnered with our good friends at Community Next to capture the action of their recent Platforms conference. Aside from being a great beta test of our upcoming platform, it was a great opportunity to learn the secrets behind Facebook application success.

The developers of the amazing applications listed below each talked about how they built, scaled and monetized their applications. Check them out to learn the secrets, and you’ll also get a sneak preview of our upcoming platform.

Please drop us an email to let us know what you like, or dont like, or just say hi!

	Top Friends (slide.com owned)	Keith Rabois
	Zombies (Vampires/Werewolves)	Blake Commagere
	Where I’ve been	Craig Ulliott
	Quizzes	Joe Winterhalter and Eric Diep
	(fluff)Friends	Mike Sego
	Grow-A-Gift (Case Study)	Keith Schact, Mark Achler and Ben Pollack
	Grow-A-Gift (Building a business)	Keith Schact
	Free Gifts	Zach Allia
	SocialMoth	Paul McKellar
	Honesty Box	Dan Peguine
	Food Fight	David Gentzel
	Visual Bookshelf	Edward Frederick
	Mardi Gras (Oktoberfest / Luau)
	Hot potato (Firecracker)
	Who am I?	Alex Backer

Welcome. We (Julian, Simon and myself) decided to start this blog to give you some insight into what we are doing here at Omnisio. While we can’t say too much yet, we are very excited to be working on some cool technologies that will transform the way people share knowledge and learn online.

Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be providing limited private beta access to some of our early features, so keep your eye on this blog or sign up to be notified.

In the mean time I want to set the stage with some thoughts on the ‘big picture’ of learning.

The amount of new knowledge being created by humanity is increasing at an exponential rate. Researchers at UC Berkeley estimate the amount of new information created each year is increasing by 30% a year, and that 5 exabytes of new information was created in 2002.

Consequently the number of new ‘concepts’ we need to learn and understand as humans living in society is growing at a similar exponential rate. If we hope to be able to advance the state of the art in any given field, we need to understand what has already been discovered which means over time we will have to learn and understand more and more concepts. In 300 BC great thinkers like Aristotle had basically a ‘green field’ opportunity to think about the nature of the world. Today, thousands of papers are published in academic journals each year - the scientists and engineers of today need to understand a great deal more ‘prior art’ before they can make meaningful contributions.

The upshot is that we appear to be heading towards a future where there are too many concepts for one person to learn in a lifetime. Does this mean that people will be forced to specialize? This would be sub-optimal since a great deal innovation occurs by ‘cross pollination’ of ideas from one field of study to another. One example is the field of nanobiotechnology - created by cross-pollination of ideas from the fields of nanotechnology and biotechnology, and growing at a faster rate than either of these two specializations.

Our position at Omnisio is that this problem will instead be solved with technology.

Time and time again, across all industries, technolgy has allowed us to ‘jump to a new curve’ whenever we find the current curve to be providing decreasing marginal improvements. In the same way, technology will enable a shift in the way we learn. Imagine a future where an intelligent agent, backed by a database of all human knowledge, is able to provide on-demand knowledge to a student, customized to his or her current level of knowledge, preferred learning style, and desired learning goals.

This future may not be as far away as we think, and Ominsio hopes to play a part in helping us get there.