This time of year always brings with it a heavy dose of reflection.
We set big goals for ourselves in 2021 as we continued to navigate our post-pandemic reality—one that hangs on with each new variant. As Cloudinarians, we remained mindful of the effects the pandemic continued to have on us and our customers.
While facing the pandemic-induced setbacks to its live-events business in the past two years, our customer and event innovator Bizzabo decided to reshape its offering into a digital-first Event Experience OS that fosters human connections and generates excitement. Toward that end, Bizzabo turned to Cloudinary for support of high-performance, visual events for large audiences to replace or augment live shows.
Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, virtual reality, the so-called metaverse—it can be tough to keep tabs on the development of technologies. In particular, for businesses or brands characterized by highly visual experiences—retail, entertainment, travel and hospitality, and so forth—identifying which technologies to prioritize is challenging.
In today's digital age, businesses must deliver to all viewing devices visual media that tells their brand’s story. To do so, the digital content must be in one place as the single source of truth for use by the entire organization. Additionally, syndicating an ever-growing library of media assets for all channels is a daunting challenge because of the constant need to transform assets into the correct format for delivery, in context, and at scale.
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.