TwinTechs

Today, according to BusinessWire Twin Technologies’ partner and customer ZapMyTV has signed an agreement with Paramount Digital Entertainment to license content for live streaming broadcast across the Internet.  Under the agreement, viewers will have on demand access to Paramount’s vast library of movies and content.  Zap subscribers only have to access one web site to watch live television, view movies on-demand, search the internet, email, chat, video conference, and blogging. 

Viewers expect more control over their content and flexibility in where it’s consumed and how they share and discuss it.  To offer licensed, live cable TV to any streaming device, combined with social networking, interactive video, text and audio chat together in one place, Zap enlisted Twin Technologies to help create a multi-functional digital platform from the ground up using tools like Adobe Flash, Flex and ColdFusion.  This is the first web-based platform to offer live, fully licensed television over the Internet with picture-in-picture, recording capabilities and the ability to watch what you want, when you want it, wherever you are.

Before ZapMyTV, most TV content available on demand was pre-recorded and encoded into a format for viewing on a computer or mobile device. The few streams that are live are owned and managed by broadcast organizations, so users have to visit mul­tiple web sites for their favorite content.  Moreover, current platforms did not offer options for chatting or social networking with people watching different channels, and many required custom software that was limited by operating systems and browser.

ZapMyTV is currently in an early beta test period. Consumers may sign up for the beta at www.zapmytv.com. The site is currently streaming live cable channels, and at the time of its official public launch plans to have 50-100 channels in addition to Paramount’s theatrical motion picture content.

Zap is lining up additional content providers and studios, so viewers have lots of content to choose from.  This announcement is the first of several key strategic alliances with entertainment companies that ZapMyTV will announce in the near future.

“Twin’s combined expertise in digital media and product manage­ment and development allowed us to get our product up and run­ning quickly,” says Steven Turner CEO of ZapMyTV.

We were pleased to see that Unlocking Android, for which Robi Sen and Jesse Dailey contributed to, just got slashdotted.

We recently had an internal project that required us to extract meta-data from video files.  We needed information such as the number of streams, length of the video, format, creator, encoding, and anything else we could gather.  This information was then stored in a database for the easy extraction and categorization of a large set of videos.

Twin has also recently started an internal streaming media framework using tools like Red5, Xuggler, and ffmpeg.  Using the expertise we gained with Xuggler, I decided to quickly write our own meta-data extractor. Later I decided on an even simpler solution.

The first method was to write our own meta-data extractor using Xuggler.  In order to use Xuggler, download and install it from http://www.xuggle.com/xuggler/downloads/.  In Linux, you will also need to add the XUGGLE_HOME/lib directory to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable so the native libraries are picked up by Java (Xuggler uses JNI to call its own C++ wrappers around ffmpeg).  The Windows installer does this automatically for you.

After Xuggler is installed, I cracked open the demos it had and modified one.  The code is very simple and required few changes.  The Java code is downloadable below.  Just make sure the xuggle-xuggler.jar (included in the XUGGLER_HOME/share/java/lib folder) is in your classpath before compiling and running it, and pass in a movie file as a command line parameter.  For example:

java com.twintechs.video.demo.GetMediaMetaData /path/to/your/video.mpg.

The output will be something along the lines of:
Opening video file: /home/dave/workspace/twin/MetaData/video/test.mpe
null (probesize):     32000
set mux rate (muxrate):     0
set packet size (packetsize):     0
null (fflags):     0x00000000
set the track number (track):     0
set the year (year):     0
how many microseconds are analyzed to estimate duration (analyzeduration):     3000000
decryption key (cryptokey):     §C,
max memory used for timestamp index (per stream) (indexmem):     1048576
max memory used for buffering real-time frames (rtbufsize):     3041280
print specific debug info (fdebug):     0x00000000
file "/home/dave/workspace/twin/MetaData/video/test.mpe": 2 streams; duration (ms): 53700; start time (ms): 149; file size (bytes): 11323804; bit rate: 1686972;
stream 0: type: CODEC_TYPE_VIDEO; codec: CODEC_ID_MPEG1VIDEO; duration: 4833000; start time: 13490; language: unknown; timebase: 1/90000; coder tb: 1/30; width: 432; height: 320; format: YUV420P; frame-rate: 30.00;
stream 1: type: CODEC_TYPE_AUDIO; codec: CODEC_ID_MP2; duration: 4810187; start time: 13490; language: unknown; timebase: 1/90000; coder tb: 1/90000; sample rate: 44100; channels: 2; format: FMT_S16

And a lot of other stuff.

The output is hard to make sense of, however, since it’s essentially in its rawest format.  Instead of painstakingly mapping each raw field to human-readable English, (for the record: not a good use of a consultant’s time!) I searched a little online for a pre-existing solution.  Not surprisingly, there were many.  The best one, which is also an open source project on SourceForge, was MediaInfo.

So, the second method of extracting data from source videos, which is a little easier but more limited because the program’s sole purpose is for info on media (e.g. you couldn’t play a video sample if you wanted), is to download and install MediaInfo.  The website is at http://mediainfo.sourceforge.net/en.  Download and install this on your platform, and then using either the GUI or the CLI (command line interface), you can see the available information of essentially any video.  For example, using the CLI, you can then type something like:

MediaInfo –Full “/path/to/your/video.mpg”

This will give a lot of information, most of which is human-readable. Then this information can be extracted using any of a number of methods, like Python or Perl text parsing, etc., and fed into a database for categorization.  And there you have it; two easy ways to extract every bit of information from a video file and categorize it for further use!

Here is a example file getmediametadata.java.

Death of a Recruiter

As a growing small business we are fortunate to be one of the few companies looking to hire talented people in the current market. Twin Technologies is a firm made up of some of the brightest software minds in the industry and we need to continue to fine the best of the best to keep up with client demand for our offerings. 

Having already exhausted most of our personal networks in building out the current team we thought it was time to bite the bullet and bring in a professional recruiter.  After interviewing three prominent East coast technology-recruiting firms I was disgusted at the proposed terms of engagement for their services.  All three recruiters proposed a fee of 15-20% of the first year salary for each resource they source, payable up front!  Which means if I use a recruiters resource on a $120,000 hire I owe the recruiter $24,000 before my new employee works their first hour for the company. 

But sir, we have a very large Rolodex…

Using a recruiter may have been a worthwhile solution - and perhaps the only solution - to finding talent in the days of the Rolodex.  Remember those?  Contacts would hand out business cards but those same cards did not have holes that were needed to insert them into the Rolodex so you had to poke custom holes in the business card before sticking it into the Rolodex.  Of course the custom hole job was never good enough so the business cards always got stuck when flipping on the Rolodex and when trying to fix the jam the plastic rings would fly open and dump all the business cards to the floor… I digress…

Thank god for Al Gore who invented the Worldwide Web.  With the internet as a new vehicle for communication, the world was flattened and there are now numerous avenues to find talent – no matter how rare – and connect with them directly.

This my friends is exactly the direction we have taken in connecting with and engaging with our most recent 5 hires in the last two months.  We found a Director and three Sr. Consultants via simple LinkedIn searches.  And we found a Top Secret Security cleared Consultant for Uncle Sam work via a Twitter post.  The Tweet for the Top Secret resource found its way to someone abroad in Europe who knew referred us to a friend that just happened to be local to and perfectly skilled for the project.

The lesson here is Al Gore flattened the world; and it didn’t happen due to a glacier expansion – ZING!  No longer do we need to pay for a middle man to sync us with talent.  Does anyone actually use a travel agent any more with Expedia and the like available?  Put down your hand mom & dad… anyone else?  No.  It’s the same concept and why in the near future recruiters will follow travel agents and classifieds editors.

In the software industry – and this should really be the case within all vertical markets wherever open-minded people are looking to advance - any enterprising technologist worth their weight will have their profile prominently displayed within every major social media vehical: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. 

Sir, your time is valuable.  Let us help you get back to doing what you do best, and let us worry about resourcing…

It’s a great sales close but not applicable here.  The argument of a recruiter removing the burden searching and vetting freeing me up for other areas of my business.  Why this value add against opportunity cost does not work for me is due to our firm being driven by high-skilled architects, designers and developers.  Everyone that is cleared to carry the Twin Technologies brand has been vetted by two existing members of our team in the practice that the potential resource would be bringing to the team.  We have a best-of-breed reputation within the industry and any new hire must be able to meet that expectation, hence, the toughest critic in vetting will always be our own team. 

I imagine that almost every other small business or line-of-business within mid and large companies has the same hiring philosophy.  Since we are going to do the vetting anyway, there is little to no value in paying 20% of a persons salary for another organization to pre-vet which would always be substandard to our internal vetting practice.

We are five for five in freeware searches finding highly-skilled new team members who we have hired. We saved over $100,000 in recruiter fees by finding those five resources ourselves.  The level of effort was a 15 minute search on LinkedIn or a 30 second Tweet for each search.

There is one remaining bastion of value for recruiters.  When a company needs to quickly find a massive head-count, a recruiter is probably the best solution.  The key words in this scenario are ‘quickly’ and ‘massive’.  If speed in finding the resources in not a component then there is significant value to be found by first hiring a recruiter as an employee who then keeps the search internal.  ‘Massive’ is a variable unique to each company.  Searching for fewer than 10% of an employee base should be a manageable challenge to keep in house with the freeware meathod.

In conclusion, if you are a line-of-business staffing less than 10% of your division, and especially if you are a small to mid sized business; say goodbye to recruiter fees and embrace the staffing power of a flat web-based world.  

David Ladd, SVP Bottom Line

Recently manning sent out a report from Java One which said:

“Unlocking Android showed up in the top 10 [of books sold at Java One Bookstore]–a good sign for Google’s entry into the mobile app space. And it’s no surprise that a couple of iPhone books, including iPhone in Action, also made the list. With JavaFX and Microsoft  Silverlight also making a run at mobile development, along with new developments in location based services, mobile aps are clearly here to stay.”

Amazon.com is also showing a positive acceptance of Unlocking Android by the user community.  If you have read the book please let us know what you think and to let you, the readers know, we are keeping the code up to date with 1.5 specific code changes.

Not only is Twin Techs’ own Dave Feltenberger a recent MBA grad and Sr. Technology Consultant, he also happens to be an accomplished Photog who has a show around “Urban Decay” showing at the Glenview Mansion Art Gallery in July.  Congrats Dave on the 25 pieces you have on display at the show!

For anyone able, there is a show opening reception on July 5th.  Dave’s work can be seen here.

Show opening reception: July 5th, 2009 from 1:30 - 3:30 PM
Gallery Hours (other than the reception):
Mon., Wed., Fri., 9 a.m to 4:30 p.m.; Tues., Thurs., 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.

GLENVIEW MANSION ART GALLERY
Glenview Mansion at Rockville Civic Center Park
603 Edmonston Drive Rockville, Maryland 20851 

360|Flex Indy featured Twin Technologies’ own CEO Ben Elmore on “Do You Speak Flex?” If you’ve been hesitant to use Flex because you think developers are hard to find or that it’s only appropriate for large scale projects, you might be pleasantly surprised.  It’s easier than you think.

Once you understand the terminology and can qualify the steps of your project, on-boarding the right developers doesn’t have to be difficult.  Ben discussed simple strategies to identify, qualify and hire Flex developers to build the solutions you need.

Attendees learned how to assess their own software needs from a business development perspective.  Who do you need on your team?  What levels of experience make for a good team?  What skills should each member have to complement the others?  How are we going to gel quickly and get the project completed?  Even a small team of cohesive developers can be top notch technologists turning out sophisticated, engaging Flex-based RIA applications.

Principal, Experience Design Will Evans spoke on Emergent Social Search Experience during a panel discussion at the Enterprise Search Summit in NYC on May 12

The social web is all the rage, but does “social” work for the enterprise? Like water cooler wisdom, social search can help surface information workers might not know exists. Search inside and outside the enterprise is becoming social. Will discussed the evolution of social search, how crowd wisdom is evolving search interfaces, and what the enterprise can learn from these developments.

Will’s expertise helps Twin Technologies clients learn strategies, explore solutions, and build the skill sets you need to make your content not only searchable but findable and actionable. Enterprise search is not just about locating masses of information, it is about enabling employees to more effectively perform their jobs.

You can catch up with Will at the Enterprise Search Summit West in San Jose this November.

Senior Vice President and Managing Partner Robi Sen launched his blog series, Building Higher Performance RIAs for Smart Phones today on InsideRIA. The series will address the challenges of optimizing software for mobile platforms.

Today’s smart phones are not only used for making calls, taking pictures, and listening to music; now people are using their phones to do business, build presentations, make quick edits to important files, and even surf the web.

Yet contrary to what the commercials would have you believe, few smart phones provide a web experience equivalent even to a netbook. In large part this is because web application developers rarely consider the memory and CPU constraints of smart phones. At the same time, an increasing number of people are using their smart phones as a secondary or even primary method for accessing the web (http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2009/03/02/iphone-mobile-browser-share-67/). This becomes problematic because most websites are slow to download, hard to navigate for mobile users, and, most importantly, often take a long time to render, which is driving more and more mobile users away from the interactivity and power that Rich Internet Applications promise to deliver. The answer to this dilemma is that developers need to create RIAs, generally using AJAX, that are specifically designed and optimized for mobile phone users. In this series of blog posts, we are going to look at how to make applications that are not only rich and powerful, but respond quickly and offer users the experience they have come to expect from the web.

Leveraging its digital media and RIA expertise, Twin Technologies is creating web applications for the mobile platform.  These are optimized for use on mobile devices and offer the  functionality of desktop software and the agility of RIAs so users can access the material they need whenever they need it.

I have always been a Star Wars guy.  I’m the type who could give you 5 generations of the Skywalker family tree.  But I’ve never been a Star Trek guy.  Sure I watched some of Deep Space 9 on WGN in my younger days when the Cubs were rained out but I always had a difficult time getting past the stuck-in-the-70’s lifesaver colored bridge shirts.

While the early plot was a little to diamond in the rough just needs polishing predictable; I cannot remember a better close the deal line to get the diamond (Kirk) out of the ground and polished up than Capt. Pike to a drunk Kirk, “Your father was captain for 12 minutes and saved 800 lives.  I dare you to do better.”