Ozbon Clients
Visual Media FX Ltd (VMFX)
Start-Up
The initial brief with Visual Media was short and pithy. "Build us a social network" At the time, social-networking was very much the new kid on the block in a world where Facebook didn't really exist and MySpace was only being used by kids. Visual Media's main product was Jahshaka, an open-source video editing package, aimed at bringing new users into digital content creation (DCC) using Jahshaka and then as the product was developed, to bring the user's skill-levels along at the same time. The social networking site was to be used by those same users, enabling them to create film and video projects online, and form communities around those projects - for example, having the script written by someone in Australia, the main filming done in the UK, the effects added by someone from the USA while the sound-effects were created by someone in Germany. The site would bring these elements together, let people work on projects, blog about them, send messages, add new media to their libraries, and also have basic project management tasks run online.
In three months, we produced an initial proof-of-concept site for Visual Media and their venture-capital funders, and secured extended funding to bring the site live. Version One of the completed site went live in July 2006, with plans to develop further functionality for a release of Version Two in January 2007 along with a rewrite of certain sections of the codebase.
For Version One, the site had full functionality of the following sections:
- Blogging
- Comments
- Media Library
- File Upload/Download
- Groups
- Projects
- User registration/editing/management
- Site administration
- Comment and media moderation
The site was initially well-received by the users of Jahshaka, and work continued on Version Two. In September 2006, Ozbon's contract with Visual Media came to a close, and was not renewed. We left Visual Media with a well-trained team of developers working on Version Two.
Unfortunately, in the end the venture-capital companies stopped funding the company, and Visual Media closed in 2008. The code we created continues to live on in other sites, but the Jahshaka social network has closed along with Visual Media.
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