Yesterday, we were lucky enough to have a Spanish language website give a nice writeup (as far as I could tell!) of Episend. Soon after, I noticed that a bunch of new signups were coming from Italy, so again, a search was in order to try and find the source. Turns out that this website had just posted a writeup. Back to Google Translate, and it seemed to do another serviceable job:

EpiSend, create and send multimedia messages to our friends

Online communication is slowly supplanting the telephone, and soon we also bench to replace verbal between people located a few meters away. In short, the screen of our computer is becoming a window screaming all that we want to communicate, to feel could be thousands of people.

Through our network we can send voice, images, videos and many other types of files. But today, I want to present something that will allow you to create beautiful multimedia messages that contain any file type. I am not referring to the usual email carrying such files in the annexes. Thank you EpiSend easily create beautiful multimedia messages and send them in any way you know, you can also share on facebook or any other social networks, thanks to a link that will be released to rescue us from our creation.

Yesterday, Episend appeared on Time.com’s techie website, Techland. You can see the article here. There was also a nice writeup at about the same time on KillerStartups.com. As a result of one or both of these articles, signups started flowing in (and haven’t stopped since), which is terrific.

I noticed that many of these signups were from international locations, so I searched to see if I could see what the source of these signups was. Sure enough, I came across this blog post, written in Spanish. Obviously, I wanted to know what it said, and having only taken high school French, I was unable to figure it out. So I headed over to Google Translate and gave it a go. Here’s what it came up with:

Episend, an attractive way to send and receive interactive messages

So far, we know different options for sending messages to other users via the Internet, but what is proposed Episend is something unusual, by calling in some way. And is that Episend allow us a different way to create interactive multimedia messages so we can share more as we please.

Simply enter our account with Google, Yahoo, Facebook or OpenID account to create our own in Episend. The first thing you do is upload files to our library of multimedia elements such as videos, photos etc., Taking into account that being free ourselves, we only have 50 MB of space for our library.

This library will serve us to create our messages, consisting of one or variaspáginas, we can modify to our liking, both in size and depth, opacity, etc. and that it can drag some of these elements in our library, placing it wherever we want.

Once created our message, we will save it and send it in different ways thanks to the URL you have the message, allowing us to wherever we want and share it on Facebook, Twitter, emails or any other means in our power as well as other users of Episend if we want.

How fun! I am very impressed that the translation engine was able to get it into a form I could understand, even if some of the sentences were kind of funny and awkward. If anyone speaks Spanish, feel free to let me know how good of a job Google Translate did.

While writing some code to communicate with the Google Servers (more on that next week), I came across a very cool page on their site which lists every service you have signed up for with Google and all of the data they have in each service. If I’m not explaining it that well, go and see for yourself and you’ll see what I mean. It’s easy.

1. Go to your Google Accounts homepage (this link will open in a new browser window so you can follow along).
2. Right there under Personal Settings is a link called “View data stored with this account”. Click it.
3. You’ll likely be asked for your Google password again.
4. You’ll see a list of all Google services you have ever signed up for. I personally have 24, which is astonishing, and it includes several I don’t even remember signing up for (but I’m sure I did).
5. From this screen, you can edit your settings and see your data for each application.

The  Finalist notifications were mercifully sent out the next day so there wasn’t too much time to wait. When the email came in with the subject “MITX Technology Award Finalist Information”, I almost dropped out of my chair. I had done it. I was going to the Awards Ceremony and Episend, Inc. was listed on the Finalists page right there in the Rich Media category along with some very successful companies.

At that point, I was more than satisfied, although I remember having some anxiety dreams, during one of which I went to the awards and barely anyone showed up and by the time they announced Episend everyone had left. But that was hardly the case.

My wife and I went and after the networking social hour, we found seats in the “Open” seating section at the back of the ball room where the event was held. They started announcing category winners, interspersed with several “Best-of” awards and the Lifetime Achievement Award to Bill Bulkeley, whom I had the pleasure of speaking with after the ceremony. The Rich Media category came, and I was happy for the GoTuit people, who won the category I was in.

After all of the category and Best-of winners were revealed, it was time for the PwC Promise Awards, given “to start-up companies whose emerging technology solutions show promise to make a significant business impact.” Before the event, I figured that if I had a chance to win anything, this would be it. The Price Waterhouse representative was on the stage to present the awards, and he began by saying “this year, we’re giving three Promise awards, one to Analytics and Business Intelligence, one to Mobile Infrastructure, and one to Rich Media.” At that point, my heart started jumping because I knew I had a good shot, being by far the smallest of the Rich Media finalists.

I heard “and the Rich Media Promise Award Winner is an application that lets users create and send messages with videos, images, large files”, I knew it was me, and I immediately started thinking about giving an acceptance speech to 450 professionals in a huge room. I made my way up to the stage and went to the podium. Fortunately, you could not see the people in the room, which made it easier. I think my brief speech reflected how truly happy and honored I was to get such an award, and I felt great. After I spoke, they had a Q & A with the three Promise Award winners and we made our way out to get our pictures taken.

I was still in such a daze that I only half-heard Jeremy Allaire’s speech for winning the Innovation Hall of Fame Award. One thing he said that did resonate, however, was something to the effect of “you can have the best team, the best idea, and all the funding you need, but in the end it really comes down to executing.”

The ceremony ended soon after. My wife and I got to meet several really nice people after the lights came back on, and I was congratulated countless times, which was great.

I need to thank MITX and the judges for being open minded enough to recognize Episend based on the merits of the application rather than on the size of the company. It sure says a lot about the organization.

When my friend Jenn sent me the entry form for the MITX Awards several months ago, I figured it couldn’t hurt to enter. I had launched Episend just days before, so fortunately I had the video demos and other information they required for their application. I spent a few hours getting the answers ready and submitted my entry right at the deadline. Then I went back to work. A week or so passed and I received an email that my entry had made it through the “pre-judging” round. Very cool. After another week or so, the deadline came for them to let me know if I passed the next round of judging. The day went by and I didn’t hear anything. Oh well. I tried. Then at 6pm an email came through indicating that they needed another day to figure things out, so I wasn’t out of it yet.

The next day, I got an email that I was moving on to the in-person judging in Cambridge. I guess I was the equivalent of a semi-finalist. This judging would take place only a few days later, so there was not a lot of time to get nervous. From what they emailed for preparation, you get 15 minutes to show the judges what you’ve done and go through a PowerPoint if you want. I went to the judging and waited for my turn to be called. There were a bunch of us in a reception area of the Microsoft Research New England building squinting to see if we could read each other’s “Hello my name is” stickers.

I had downloaded a stopwatch application to my Droid that I would have running on the table next to me so I would know when the 15 minutes were up. When I got into the room, the first thing that struck me was how many judges there were. There had to be 10 or 12, although I can’t be sure. There was a long conference table that they were all seated around. They had obviously been there a while as the table had the moved-in look of piles of papers, paper notebooks, empty drink bottles, and laptops in front of most judges. I looked at them and they looked at me, so I just started talking.

I started my stopwatch app and tried to recite some of the elevator pitch I had tried to memorize so I wouldn’t start stuttering from nerves. The demo itself went fine – it was more interactive than I had anticipated, but this worked out well. Instead of going through the app for 5 or 10 minutes and then having a Q & A session, it turned out that I would show them one feature, and then there would be questions that would lead me to show another feature, and so on. I remember looking down at the stopwatch and saw it was on 7 minutes, so there was still plenty of time. After what seemed like just a minute later, the MITX representative in the room stated “time’s up!” It went by so fast!

I wrapped up quickly, thanked everyone for their time, and left having no idea what they thought. Worst case, I thought as I drove home, was that I got valuable experience demoing Episend for the first time and got to think about some of the questions the judges asked. My wife reminded me when I got home that just being there was a compliment even if I got no further.

At the MITX Awards Ceremony on June 2, Joyce McMahon of McMahon Communications let me know about a print article in Mass High Tech that mentioned Episend, and I am glad she did. I found the online link to the article, in which they had their own panel give their opinion on some of the MITX Award Finalists. They chose Episend in the Rich Media category, and the expert giving her opinion was Dayna Grayson of North Bridge Venture Partners.

She described Episend as “Rich media embedded in e-mail” and classified Episend as a “Longshot”, with the explanation:

They will need to prove that they can attract the consumer segment. They describe the prosumer/freelance market as a target but this problem has been solved with other tools for that market.

I am grateful to get her feedback. What it told me is that the message on the website is not relaying what I want it to. Episend isn’t an email plugin and it’s providing something unique to the market, but regardless, it must have come across differently in the website messaging, so that’s what matters. I can now go and figure out what gave her these impressions and work from there to improve. There aren’t always opportunities to get valuable feedback from experts, so when it comes along, it’s important to utilize it.

It’s a very exciting day to be an Episender. A feature-laden release of Episend is now live. Let’s go over some of the new things you’ll find.

When Episend was first launched back in February, it was as an Adobe AIR application, which is kind of like Flash for the desktop. This initial version of Episend required the user to download the Adobe AIR runtime if they didn’t have it already and download Episend itself to run within the Adobe AIR framework. What we found is that people were signing up for Episend accounts, but understandably seemed reluctant to download anything to their computer.

The solution to this was to rework Episend so it would work within any computer’s browser with no downloads required. This has been accomplished. It took a lot of rewriting of certain parts of the application, so while the hood was open and many of the parts were on the floor, it was a good time to add features.

Most of these will get its own blog post.

• Automatic video optimization. Upload your video in pretty much any format, bitrate, or size. Episend will automatically optimize it to be playable within the application while preserving the original so it can be downloaded by your recipients if desired.
• Page Background Images. Episend messages used to be limited to just a solid background color. Now, there are nearly 600 professionally designed background wallpapers and frames available to every Episend user for use in their messages. There are backgrounds available for any need — business, holiday, party, artistic, etc. And this is not just some cheesy clip-art. You really need to see these images.
• Easier Message Element Manipulation. You used to have to right click things to get to menus that would let you do things like remove message elements from messages, change the order of images in image stacks, etc. Now there are very intuitive options that appear based on what type of element is selected. No more right clicking.
• Easier Message Sending. Click the URL of any message in your message library and its URL is automatically copied to your clipboard for pasting elsewhere. It’s literally one-click.

There are other improvements throughout Episend to improve usability and reliability. As always, let me know what you think.

If you don’t have an Episend account already, click here to create one. It only takes a couple of seconds and you’ll be logged right into Episend so you can start using it.

The main goal of Episend has always been to make it as easy as possible for users to use. Part of this means making the upload process as simple and seamless as possible, especially when it comes to videos.

Videos come in all types of formats and sizes. Most cameras, webcams, and camcorders output their video in different ways, and most of the time it’s in sizes way too big and bandwidth intensive to stream across the internet. It’s very difficult, unless you’re a professional, to figure out which format is necessary for a video to be in so that it will play online.

Most online video services take care of this for you, where you just upload your video in nearly any format and it is automatically converted to be able to play online. Episend does the same thing, but also keeps the original video file intact and “downloadable”, in case your intention is not just to have people view your videos, but download them for editing or other purposes as well.

Episend allows the upload of video in 18 different formats, which covers the lion’s share of what’s out there. Once a video is uploaded, Episend determines if the video needs to be optimized for online playback — again, this process does not affect the original file. If a video needs to be optimized, this process usually only takes from 30 seconds to just a few minutes, depending on how many videos are waiting to be converted and the size of the original video.

While a video is being optimized, Episend overlays a message like the below on the “snapshot” of the video:

You can still place the video on your messages, and when it’s converted, the message will be removed and the video will be playable.

There’s really no need for users to worry about what formats videos should be in so that they’ll play in Episend.  You should be able to just take a video right off your computer, upload it, and have it work. This is exactly what Episend allows you to do.

We are proud to announce that Episend was named as one of six finalists in the Rich Media category of the 2010 MITX Technology Aawards! We were thrilled to have the opportunity to present our idea to some of the greatest minds in the MITX network, but to be selected as a finalist, well… we’re still kind of speechless about the whole thing.

We want to wish the best of luck to all of the rest of the Rich Media finalists, too. There’s some fantastic software out there, and we’re humbled even to be mentioned in the same conversation as companies like Brightcove, Gotuit, myBrainshark, RAMP (formerly EveryZing) and Wistia.

A million thank yous to the staff at MITX who were extremely helpful throughout the award submission process. We’re grateful for the opportunity, and we look forward to attending the awards dinner on June 2nd. If you’d like to join us, you can buy tickets on the MITX Awards site. We’ll see you there!