Shoppers return time and again to Minted’s global online community of independent artists and designers because they know they can count on unique, statement-making products of the highest quality there. Concurrently, the visual imagery on Minted.com must do justice to the designs into which the creators have poured their hearts and souls. For Minted’s VP of Engineering David Lien, “Because we are a premium brand, we need to ensure that every single one of our product images matches the selected configuration exactly. For example, if you pick an 18x24 art print on blue canvas, we will show that exact combination on the hero images in the PDF.”
As website and mobile apps rely more on visual media to create engaging user experiences, delivering strong web and app performance becomes more challenging for developers. The faster your site, the more time visitors would spend on it. Conversely, the slower the site, the higher the bounce rate, and the lower Google ranks it in SEO.
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.
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.
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.
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).
AVIF is a 2019 spinoff from the AV1 video format developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOM), whose members include Amazon, Apple, ARM, Facebook, Google, Huawei, Mozilla, Microsoft, Netflix, and Intel. As an open-source and royalty-free video codec, AVIF delivers much higher compression rates than the older image codecs like JPEG and WebP, and is on par with the brand-new JPEG-XL format, which does not work on any browser yet.
User-generated content (UGC) took off with, first of all, the advent of the internet and, subsequently, social networks. Everyday consumers were given keys to the kingdom, so to speak, so that they, too, could compose and post content, simultaneously engaging with others online. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok—the networks through which we can create and publish content have grown exponentially, and brands are becoming aware of the benefits of tapping into the gold mines offered by those networks.
Since the restaurant industry hinges on human connection, the quick-service restaurants (QSRs) and fast casual eateries that came out ahead during the COVID-19 pandemic-induced lockdowns were the ones that built integrated and immersive interactions with video and other technologies for delivery in store, at the drive-through, and online. At the virtual event on Marketing Innovation hosted by Brand Innovators on September 28, Scott Schnaars, vice president of sales, Americas, at Cloudinary moderated a “fireside chat” with Casey Terrell, senior director of marketing at Focus Brands and acting CMO at Schlotzsky's, a franchise chain with over 330 locations.