Top 5 Places for Entrepreneurial Insights

Submitted by Sam on Tue, 01/26/2010 - 11:43

Sam BlackmanRecently, I was interviewed by the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network (OEN) for a member spotlight and it got me thinking about how important shared resources are to new ventures. Elemental’s co-founders and I know firsthand how challenging it is to turn an idea for a business into a legitimate company -- not to mention delivering on the commitment of a high ROI for our stakeholders.

Luckily, Portland has some great resources for new firms. Along with the OEN, the Software Association of Oregon has networking events and valuable services for member companies. Then there are other local startups that have built impressive businesses, including Jive Software, Tripwire, and Kryptiq. Many of the executives at these success stories are active in the community and always willing to share their stories and experiences with new companies. 

In the hopes that Elemental has something to contribute to the dialog, I thought it would be worthwhile to jot down the places I've gone for advice, wisdom, and inspiration. Perhaps these resources will be useful for others. 

Blogs 

  • Redfin’s corporate blog gives an interesting perspective inside the life of a thriving real estate startup. Glenn Kelman, the firm's CEO, has a heck of a lot of fascinating insights on what it takes to build a disruptive company.
  • Brightcove alumni Adam Berrey shares his experiences as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence in his new blog, "Startup Blender"; this is a great place for advice that cuts to the chase. 

Web Sites

  • Startupjournal.com is a comprehensive guide with information on topics such as financing and PR tools from the experts at The Wall Street Journal.

Connections

  • Some of the best advice I receive is from peers, colleagues and mentors. Going to events has proven a critical way for me to get connected in the business community. In our neck of the woods, the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network (and it's sister funding organization, the Oregon Angel Fund) has a diverse membership base and organizes numerous events that help foster these relationships. 

Involvement

  • There are lots of cool ways to be part of your local startup community, whether virtual or local. Portland Incubator Experiment (a.k.a. PIE) is an interesting new project that’s the brainchild of techies and creatives (including Sillicon Florist and Weiden + Kennedy) striving to advance startup innovation and promote community. There's also NedSpace, which continues to expand at a rapid clip, and the Portland State Business Accelerator.
School of Hard Knocks
  • I've got an honorary degree from this fine institution. One of the beautiful aspects of starting a company is that you get knocked down a lot. The successful startups are the ones comprised of founders who keep getting back up.

So those are mine. What are your favorite places for information and insights? Please leave a comment, I’d love to hear thoughts from others.

And by all means, if you find our blog to be a useful resource, subscribe to our feed or receive posts by email. You can sign up at the top left side of this page.

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New Year's Resolution: Output Video for Clients Faster

Submitted by Julie on Tue, 01/12/2010 - 13:47

It's that time of year when we dust off our pile of good intentions and decide how this year will be radically different and dramatically more productive! Well, according to one video editor in Virginia, those don't have to be hyperbolic statements if you follow five easy steps to boost your system. With some essential upgrades to your hardware (and software), you can actually see some of the drama everyone is talking about with Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects, such as video encoding that takes two hours instead of ten and ensures you can actually meet the rush deadline that just came up.

Won Novalis' article, "Essential Ugrades to Boost Your System," for the After Effects user site ae.tutsplus.com presents an incredibly useful upgrade guide to start the year off right. Won breaks it down into five steps complete with supporting graphics and videos, including:

   1. Get a Bigger Desk (Memory)

   2. Get Lighting That's Easy on the Eyes (Monitor)

   3. Hire a Video Specialist With Her Own Office (Video Card)

Aetutsplus article

   4. Get More Storage Space (Hard drives)

   5. Get a Presentation Room to Review Your Work (I/O Card)

 

In step three, Won highlights Quadro FX graphics cards from NVIDIA and their diverse uses from high resolution effects to accelerated playback of Flash and H.264 video. We were excited to hear his description of the added benefits of NVIDIA's Quadro FX cards carrying Elemental Accelerator, which Won said, "boasts the ability to utilize the Quadro to dramatically boost your After Effects or Premiere Pro render times." Read the whole article to learn more.

Won told us more about his personal experience using Elemental Accelerator during his daily work as a post-production editor at Adandon Films. Straight from the author's keyboard:

"I don't like slow renders and I don't like spending money on hardware that never gets fully utilized, yet when it comes to production, it is unfortunate that our video cards often sit untapped of their true potential by a majority of the software we use daily.  It is a major deficiency.  In the short time I've gotten to use Elemental Accelerator I've been extremely impressed with what the software can do to leverage the Nvidia Quadro Card and Adobe's CS4 Production Suite along with it, especially if you are trying to get every last ounce of performance out of your workstation. It is great to see software that takes great strides to remedy the deficiency by leveraging your video card and increasing the value of your hardware investment. I look forward to seeing a lot more from Elemental Technologies and a lot less render time."

If you have yet to try Elemental Accelerator with After Effects as Won suggests, check out our application note and start cranking out content!

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Elemental Continues Growth by Adding Sales Rock Star

Submitted by Julie on Wed, 01/06/2010 - 10:48

Dan MarshallToday, we're excited to announce a recent addition to our executive team: sales and software veteran Daniel Marshall. As our new VP of Sales, Dan will spearhead development of a global sales team and worldwide sales strategy to drive adoption of Elemental’s enterprise-class video encoding products. After 25 years in the trenches of the enterprise storage, media and broadcast industries, Dan has had an influence on every part of the sales cycle. Learn more about his past successes in the news release. Dan has built a legion of relationships in the video industry in boardrooms, trade show floors and cocktail lounges around the world. Oh, the stories he could tell...

When he's not racking up frequent flyer miles like George Clooney in Up in the Air, Dan calls San Jose home (where he also houses his collection of rare comic books and vintage guitars). An accomplished guitarist, over the past 30 years Dan has played everything from folk to heavy metal in music venues around the Bay Area and with such legendary bands as Silk and Steel and Yellow Hurl.

With so much going on in San Jose, what drew Dan to Portland-based Elemental? "I was instantly attracted to key qualities ever-present at Elemental: the company is quite progressive, scary intelligent and most of all, high-energy. Elemental has the same core ingredients as any successful Silicon Valley start-up – great people and great technology," Dan said. We're glad to hear it and to have Dan on board to hit the ground running in 2010.

Be sure to follow us @elementaltech to keep up with Dan and Elemental.

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Smarter Server: Moving from Man-hours to Computer-minutes

Submitted by Julie on Tue, 01/05/2010 - 18:08

 

Smarter Server

 

What will it take to create a video processing system that maximizes content output and minimizes management input?

Producing a "smarter server" will take a lot of time and effort, but the seeds of innovation are clearly in the market today. While an industry roadmap is not yet established, Elemental CEO Sam Blackman weighs in on the development potential for a smarter server. Here's an excerpt from the Streaming Media article:

"High-level approaches have already been implemented to improve the media processing workflow. Platform players have long been devoting resources to improve this pipeline. Complete solutions like these often focus on the overall high-level management layer, but this isn’t necessarily the best way to solve the problem for the rest of us. Other approaches for keeping up with the rising demands for online content have created a niche of prohibitively expensive systems that are only applicable to a small group of very large media properties.

A better overall solution is to make the individual components of the system smarter, not just develop a more intelligent overall architecture. In turn, these individual components will be useful to a wider range of content creators, providing them with necessary workflow improvements.

Elements of smarter servers are already appearing, including features like load balancing and grid encoding. But we still aren’t using these encode systems to their full potential. Instead, we remain focused on tailoring system design to match human workflows; the resulting solutions are dependent on manual intervention at far too many stages. Fundamentally, next-generation systems should focus on reducing human touch and increasing system autonomy."

Read the whole piece, "Industry Perspectives: Building a Smarter Server" at StreamingMedia.com.

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