In November 2021, Cloudinary teamed up with Dolby.io to participate in their Build the World With Dolby.io Hackathon aimed at sparking spectacular and innovative hybrid audio- and video-conference experiences. Invited were developers and creators from around the world to compete for a prize pool valued at over $25,000. Not only did the hackathon grant those professionals the opportunity to supercharge their projects' media assets with Cloudinary’s unique features, but it also enabled them to join a series of talks given by Cloudinary's resident media experts: Tessa Mero, Becky Peltz, Paige Drake, and Scott Wachtmann.

“Holistic accessibility … provide[s] people with disabilities the best chance to achieve equality.” — Sheri Byrne-Haber
As digital technology advances, video is gaining popularity across industries, replete with entertaining, engaging, and coherent content. All too often, however, not everyone can access it for various reasons.

Now that telecommuting for work will likely continue to be the norm, people are communicating more and more by audio and video. In fact, many professional creators are now running projects from their home setup.

We recently released our 2021 State of Visual Media report, which offers a view into how visual media content is produced, managed, viewed, and consumed. For this third annual report, we analyzed a massive amount of visual-related data, looking at billions of image and video assets across 670 enterprise customers and 10 vertical industries, to reveal key trends in visual engagement, particularly those accelerated by the pandemic. We also take a look at what’s needed to raise the bar on these visual-first experiences as we continue on in a world in which fast, flawless visual content will remain critically important to the user experience.

A brick-and-mortar store’s ability to connect with shoppers is a main draw of shopping in person. On the other hand, e-commerce requires an understanding that online shopping differs from physical retailing, calling for proactive steps that mimic in-person experience as much as possible through sight and sound. Since the in-store experience extends beyond merchandise to ambiance, decor, and lighting, let alone the presence of sales associates, it makes sense that retailers are leveraging imagery, video, and other graphical elements to make shopping online similar to buying in store.

Like people, companies are creatures of habit that tend to continue doing things the way they’ve always been done, especially if the processes seem to be working just fine. Consequently, businesses are at times unaware that more effective and efficient ways exist.

Media management is at the heart of what WordPress does, and with Cloudinary’s WordPress Plugin, we’re all set to alleviate numerous pain points for WordPress users by adapting the plugin’s features developed by Cloudinary, and adapted by XWP, on its platform into a working WordPress plugin.

In technology, partnerships are frequently the key to success. Recognizing and leveraging each other’s strengths can lift up all parties involved—and even the industry as a whole. XWP’s collaboration with Cloudinary, the two companies’ complementary strengths, and the benefits accorded the CMS industry by the technology we built together are a shining example of effective partnerships. Most important, we share a common goal of forging a user-oriented and performant web at enterprise scale.

Early this year, we at Cloudinary decided to go all in and build something bigger and better than what we’d built before. The team kept its word: Cloudinary’s WordPress Plugin Version 3.0—called WP Plugin V3 in the rest of this post—is here and it’s awesome!

Nowadays, no way can we build modern apps for the web without considering visuals, which are one of the most efficient ways of communicating online. However, improvements in image quality over the years have exacted a price in larger files, slowing down page loads, especially in low-bandwidth regions or on mobile devices. To resolve that conundrum, turn to Cloudinary, a platform that offers the infrastructure for managing images in web apps. Additionally, Cloudinary’s reliable APIs serve visuals through multiple, fast content delivery networks (CDNs).