The clock is ticking fast the world of digital is transforming at the glimpse of an eye!
The biggest trend in digital right now is video…Online video advertising to grow to nearly $10 billion this year:
Digital video advertising will drive nearly $10 billion in ad spend this year. This is a remarkable 28% increase over 2015, making video digital’s fastest-growing ad format. It remains the gold standard for many brand advertisers that have relied on television for years. As audiences and devices digitize, The demand for video on all screens is quickly multiplying
Today’s digital publisher can turn a single video into a scalable marketing asset that serves across TV and various owned and unowned digital channels.”
Sources:
mixpo report “The State of Digital Advertising for publishers”
2016 IAB Video Ad spend study
Video, Advertising and Social Media the Magical Trio for Online Business!
With all recent reports highlighting the ongoing growth of Digital Video and the increasing share of Ad spending and as we see this year the integration between social networks, video and advertising is very clear.
All social networks are extremely focused on two aspects advertising (simply this is where the money is) including Facebook ads, Instagram ads, twitter ads, etc and the second aspect is video with the big fight between them as well (Youtube vs Facebook videos, etc)
so we decided to dedicate our upcoming meetup to deeply dive in this area, also focusing on the local market in Egypt and trying to analyze the ads spending and user behavior over social media and watching videos online, especially what was booming in Ramadan this year!
This meetup in 6th in a row of our “Online Content Creators meetup series” that we have started earlier in 2015 focusing on online content especially video.
Join #OCCEgypt meetup on August 1st at the greek campus, register your seat here
Ramadan is a great opportunity to attract more customers because of the huge increase in social media usage we consistently see during Ramadan specially Twitter!
One of the hottest topics discussed on Social Media each Ramadan is TV commercials, TV series, TV shows and good initiatives
We had a set of interesting activities to monitor Social Media Behavior and discussions during the month of Ramadan as follows:
1. As Telecom is Egypt’s #1 influencer industry online and offline so we worked on monitoring the advertisements of the 3 Big Telecom companies “Vodafone, Etisalat and Orange” to see who won Ramadan 2016 Media Race over social media?
2.We worked on collecting the top trending hashtags to monitor what people are discussing on social media during the first 15 days of Ramadan
And one of the very interesting points highlighted during the #IOTTT Chat that “this year some of the Media entities are switching to their own Online video platforms which is a great step for working towards understanding the consumer behavior online and sustaining their revenue”
اعتقد هذه الحركة كانت ضرورية منذ فترة زمنية طويلة نظرا لتراكم المحتوى على #يوتيوب كان لا بد من ذلك #IOTTT@InsideOut_Today
In order to optimise social media best practices for brand engagement during Ramadan, make your content shareable, engageable, unique and always work on your offline and online marketing strategy according to the customer needs and always consider that the strategy needs to be adapted to the audience’s changed beahvior during Ramadan
Media Entities, Broadcasters and news publishers in Egypt Must Join the race and understand the big shift in consuming news, news video formats are going through a significant transformation.
Media Publishers Worldwide have gained audience and advertising revenue through creating a range of video output for their own websites and for distribution through social media. “Going Beyond Youtube with Online Video Platforms”
Elevating Digitization in Egypt For Media and News Publishers:
Everyone wants to go digital. The first step is truly understanding what that means
It’s very important to understand that it’s a must to go beyond social Media with Online Marketing
Always the first thing that comes to mind with online marketing is social media. Yes, social media is a great way of marketing, but it’s definitely not the only tactic you should be implementing in your digital strategy
Another essential element of elevating digitization in Egypt for the Media and News Sector is to use an effective Online Video Platforms that measures, tracks, and demonstrates conclusively the significant impact of every L.E. that is invested in it
And As we can see that Egypt Media Industry is catching up with the digital race that’s why we decided to put lots of efforts on educating the community about the importance of digitization through a series of meetups that we have started last year by gathering all online content creators in Egypt in one place
Here is a glimpse of our last OCCEgypt meetup ” The Digital Media Industry in Egypt the Challenges and opportunities” :
It was a great event with lots of interesting discussions and useful insights and gladly we had a very special guest “Valentina Primo” a freelance journalist & a travel blogger with lots of international experience in digital media
Our last meetup had extremely useful discussions and debates about online video & digital media scene in Egypt So in this meetup we tried to better focus on the current situation of the digital media industry in Egypt, from the view point of broadcasters, newspapers, advertisers, professionals, freelancers, etc to draw an exact picture what are the opportunities, and also challenges that face Egypt to be an online content creation hub in the Arab region
To expand the reach of your online marketing efforts. … Understand each platform to Know how to promote your content and on which social networks
High quality content is the key differentiation on Social Media
Going beyond just posting over social media, to the level of correctly understanding content creation & distribution tactics
It’s a multiscreen world the mobile is dominating
Having the video on your own site allows you to boost brand engagement to encourage customers to stay longer on your site
With your own online video platform, you can create personalized, interactive video with clickable calls to action.
Valentina Primo shared her expertise with the attendees and highlighted the following points:
Each company has to have each own storyteller who masters the art of storytelling
Human stories matter more now…make the customers the hero of your story
Consumers are looking for inspiration or information, discovering new things, or making decisions so it’s very important to Optimize online content for social media and search engines
Visuals…Visuals..Visuals is the key
Fady and Valentina Concluded the Challenges that are facing the Digital Media Industry in Egypt in three main points:
The limited Perception about online
The Misuse of Technology
The Lack of proper knowledge & training of Social Media
It was a very successful event #OCCEgypt and we have collected a beautiful set of pictures from the event
Stay Tuned with our monthly #OCCEgypt meetup there’s always something new about technology to present to our community! Join our meetup community today
Our use case in MICO is focused on news and media organisations willing to offer more context and better navigation to users who visit their news outlets. A well-known (in the media industry at least) report from Cisco that came out this last February predicts that nearly three-fourths (75 percent) of the world’s mobile data traffic will be attributed to videoby 2020.
The latest video content meetup – organized in Cairo this March with the Helixware’s team at Injaz. (Images courtesy of Insideout Today)
While working with our fellow bloggers and editorial teams we’ve been studying how these news organizations, particularly those with text at their core, can be helped in crafting their stories with high-quality videos.
More over, the question we want to answer is: can videos become a pathway to deeper engagement?
With the help of MICO’s media extractors we can add semantic annotations to videos on demand . These annotations are in the form of media fragments that can be used as input for both the embeddable video player of HelixWare and the video thumbnails created by HelixWare WordPress plugin. Media fragments, in our showcase, are generated from the face detection extractor and are both temporal (there is a face at this time in the video) and spatial (the face within these frames is located at xywh).
The new HelixWare video player that we’re developing as part of our effort in MICO aims at creating an immersive experience for the end-users. The validation of both video player and video thumbnail will be done using A/B testing against a set of metrics our publishers are focused on: time per session, numbers of videos played per session, number of shares of the videos over social media (content virality).
Now let’s review the design assumptions we’ve worked on so far to reimagine the video player and in the next post we will present the first results.
1. Use faces to connect with users
Thumbnails, when done right, are generally key to ensuring a high level of engagement on web pages. This seems to be particularly true when thumbnails feature human faces that are considered “powerful channels of non-verbal communication” in social networks. With MICO we can now offer to the editor a better tool to engage audiences by integrating a new set of UI elements that use human faces in the video thumbnail. The study documenting this point is “Faces Engage Us: Photos with Faces Attract More Likes and Comments on Instagram” and has been authored by S Bakhshi, D. A. Shamma, E. Gilber in 2014.
2. Increase the saturation by 20%-30% to boost engagement
Another interesting finding backing up our work is that filtered photos are 21% more likely to be viewed and 45% more likely to be commented on by consumers of photographs. Specifically, filters that increase warmth, exposure and contrast boost engagement the most.
3. Repeat text elements
As seen in most of the custom thumbnail tutorials for YouTube available on-line adding some elements of the title or the entire title using a bold font over a clear background can make the video more compelling and accordingly to some, significantly increase the click-through-rate. One of the goals of the demo will be to provide a simple and appealing UI where text and image cooperate to offer a more engaging user experience removing any external informations that could distract the viewer.
4. Always keep the editor in full control
We firmly believe machines will help journalists and bloggers focus on what matters most – writing stories that people want to read. This means that whatever workflow we plan to implement there shall always be a human (the editor himself) behind the scene validating the content produced by technologies such as MICO.
This is particularly true when dealing with sensitive materials such as human faces depicted in videos. There might be obvious privacy concerns for which an editor might choose to use a landscape rather than a face for his video thumbnail and we shall make sure this option always remains available.
We will continue documenting this work in the next blog post and as usual we look forward to hearing your thoughts and ideas – please email us anytime.
Broadcasters, cable television networks and Traditional Media need nowadays to survive the emergence of online streaming should switch to Online Video Platforms as viewers are spending more time watching digital video than ever before as per all latest studies and statistics
And here in the below infographic we have collected some important data that should be considered due to the big shift in consumer behavior:
So What’s Important:
Content delivery networks will carry over half of Internet traffic by 2019. Globally, Sixty-two percent of all Internet traffic will cross content delivery networks by 2019 globally, up from 39 percent in 2014.
So It is important for the online video industry to convert non–users of online video platforms into users
How to Build a more Valuable and Sustainable Business?
Well there are several popular business models for online video where content owners and video producers can make business out of their investments in video productions. For sure this opens the everlasting debate where to upload my videos, shall I upload them to social networks like YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion or shall I invest in online video platforms, like HelixWare or others.
And the ideal answer would be YouTube and other social networks are ideal if you are using video as a marketing vehicle, which is now crucial and huge. Video marketing is essential these days as we consume more and more video content. Making business out of video over social networks is basically advertising based, so you should take this into consideration.
While on the other side if you decide to invest in your own OVP (Online Video Platform) you can control over your video assets, advertising and also who can access the content and how, in other words you can back full control over your content, and that Is why you need to invest. Fair enough?
But how can we do business here, over my own OVP? Well the models can be, but not limited to, one (or more) of the following:
The most popular is called SVOD, which stands for Subscription Video On Demand, where basically users pay a monthly fee to access premium video content. International players here include platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc and on the regional level the popular platforms are Shahid.net, OSN Play and Telly. This can be any type of video, from movies, series, drama, how-to videos and event cooking! We have to admit that we loved working on a project for the cooking academy of SiChef in Italy.
Another interesting model is live events especially for sports. Our showcase here is SportTimeTV for example. Moreover, imagine watching live your favorite football match but as soon as you moved away from the TV, your team scored their goal! If you are watching that online, interesting features like time-shifting makes watching live matches a real joy, where you can seek back to watch the goal and then switch back to live streaming! Here the business model can be either advertising or subscription based.
Going digital is not only about watching your favorite videos, its about a whole digitally immersive experience. Another interesting model is the Second Screen apps, where you download an app that gives you the ability to interact, in real-time, with your favorite TV or Radio show. Interesting example here can be a radio station that everyday plays top tracks based on user votes, we developed a cool HTML5 App for 5FM in South Africa for their daily program Beats By Demand, where users can vote for their favorite tracks in real-time and also share these votes over social media as well to boost the buzz around it.
News & media industry in the Middle East needs to evolve as there’s no Mass production specially in Egypt!
The media industry in Egypt is undergoing a heavy, quick and sometimes hectic transformations, especially moving online now. Several reasons are behind this due to cultural, political & economic factors and also due to a new young enthusiastic generation that consume news and content mostly online, especially on social media and from their smart phones!
This meetup is fourth in a row, where we dig deeper in the importance of online content, especially video. This time we are very focused on the media industry in Egypt as we see huge potential if online video is better utilized through dedicated streaming platforms, and content distribution best practices.
This meetup comes aligned in a series of meetups previously held by Insideout Today, to bring together all the community of online content creators in Egypt, especially video and this time more focusing on the Media industry in Egypt
Lots of interesting sessions took place during the event:
1. Welcome speech by our CEO Fady Ramzy who gave to the attendees a quick introduction about Online content creators meetup series and how InsideOut Today is striving to drive real change in the Online Video Business for Media Industry in Egypt , and he shed the light on the online media scene in the Middle East and how are new opportunities, especially for Video, are now more than ever before!
Fady went through the internet penetration in the Middle East for the year 2016 and the consumer’s behavior online stats and figures.
Fady also explained Streaming platforms & how to configure the platform according to business model
And lastly he gave the attendees a brief introduction about Shoof Cairo “it’ s a city story telling application” crafted by InsideOut Today…. it will be our biggest gift to the community as Shoof Cairo definitely will change the way users watch real time videos” currently it’s still in closed Beta version for testing
and finally Fady showcased HelixWare successful customer projects demonstrating how Streaming platforms is a turn key solution for content providers.
2. Interesting panel discussion took place and during the panel online video for the media industry situation in Egypt was discussed by successful TV anchor and Head of Mass Communication at Misr International University as follows:
a. Head of Mass communication department at Misr International University Dr. Amany Bassiouny talked about the science and management of the ecosystem provided to the MIU students and she stressed that the media industry in Egypt needs to provide a wider range of news such as news documentary” and how important is that for Egypt Cultural and historical heritage
b. The Energetic and Successful TV Anchor Dina AbdelKarim – TV Anchor in Al Kahera wa Nas TV channel she talked about the Digital news Online distribution “the Smart Distribution” and the obstacles Media Industry is facing
c. And Proudly Baher Esmat – ICANN Vice president was attending the meetup and as usual he gave great insights about the Online Video Production for Media industry in Egypt and he highlighted that there’s no mass production in Egypt
Fady Asked the attendees Why broadcasters now prefer prefer to go online through streaming platforms while they are FTA??
Everybody agreed on the same points that people prefers “online streaming” because of all the interactivity features that are not available on tradition TV like live interactive streaming, time shifting, Video archiving, Catchup TV & of course TV Ads are boring and non-interactive ”
The Main points highlighted during the event was:
User Generated Content trend will be dominating news industry in the very near future
We have to work on switching from being content consumers to be content producers ” content is the heart of effective web presence”
Media & news industry in the Middle East needs to develop further towards online presence, as there’s no Mass production specially in Egypt recently
Traditional media has no option but to switch to online video platforms to sustain the money.
The meetup was also an excellent opportunity to network in a professional environment and interact with others who share the passion for great Video content creation, brainstorm and attendees to have their questions answered by the panelists and the event organizers.
It was a very successful event and we received lots of great feedback about the meetup on the hashtag #OCCEgypt and we have collected a beautiful set of pictures from the event
Stay Tuned with our monthly #OCCEgypt meetup there’s always something new about technology to present to our community! Join our meetup community today
Online Video Content Creators are the new superstars of the online business!
Online video is now a crucial ingredient of any business, this is a FACT not a forecast anymore. Last year also social networks have heavily adopted video technologies and the online video tech industry has witness many mega acquisitions
InsideOut Today is focusing on the entire funnel of Online Content Creation especially video content & video platforms, we are working hard to bring together all the community of online content creators in Egypt in one place aiming to raise awareness, share knowledge and network with like-minded pears about different topics related to online business. First meetup was last week focusing on the importance of Online Video content in Egypt, presenting the latest technologies in online video world and finally discussing the different opportunities for this business in Egypt
Our First Meetup this year “Why Video is Crucial for your business in 2016?”
The meetup took place on February 18th in partnership with Injaz Egypt providing us the meetup space at their office at one of the best Nile view spot in Cairo!
The event was attended by almost 50 persons who are interested in online content from influential bloggers, graphic designers, photographers, online Journalists, videographers, community managers, social media specialists and entrepreneurs.
Event Highlights:
Welcome speech by our CEO Fady Ramzy who talked about the art & science of Visual storytelling and the latest technology for Online video platforms focusing on how social networks like Facebook & Youtube are fighting for your own video today! Here is a glimpse of fady’s presentation
Fady highlighted during the event 3 main points:
The state of online video in 2015 and how it indicates the situation for online video business in 2016
How Online video is driving the future of Digital Marketing and It’s impact on immediate SEO Results
Fady stated that traditional media has no option but to switch to online video platforms to sustain its revenues.
And lastly he presented HelixWare online video platform our latest product to support streaming media business inviting the attendees to Try HelixWare for free to listen to their comments and feedback
Interesting panel discussion took place and during the panel online content creation situation in Egypt was discussed by successful entrepreneurs and online content creators as follows:
The Digital Media Geek Tarek Nasr Managing Director of the Planet talking about the business of Online video creation in Egypt and the top social media platforms used in Egypt to watch videos and he talked briefly about the successful story of enterplanet360 Online web series giving quick advices to startups about how to grow their business through digital media
The Energetic Ranya Shalaby Business development Manager of Injaz Egypt talking about the new generation of Egyptian entrepreneurs and content startups she saw and how Injaz Egypt is supporting them
Reham Salem a very dynamic Egyptian TV presenter showcased the best practices for Media entities using Online video in Egypt such as Almasry Alyoum multimedia experience
The meetup was also an excellent opportunity to network in a professional environment and interact with others who share the passion for great content creation, brainstorm and attendees to have their questions answered by the panelists and the event organizers.
It was a very successful event and we received lots of great feedback about the meetup on the hashtag #OCCEgypt and we have collected a beautiful set of pictures from the event.
Stay Tuned with our monthly #OCCEgypt meetup there’s always something new about technology to present to our community! Join our meetup community today
We love the Web. We’ve been using the Internet in various forms since the 90’s. We believe that the increasing amount of information should be structured beforehand by the same individuals that create the content.
With this idea in mind and willing to empower journalists and bloggers we’ve created WordLift: a semantic editor for WordPress.
With the latest release (version 3.4) we are introducing a Dashboard to provide a quick overview of the website’s Knowledge Graph.
What the heck is a Knowledge Graph?
Knowledge Graphs are all around us. Internet giants like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and Amazon they are all running their own Knowledge Graphs and willingly or not we are all contributing to them.
Knowledge Graphs are networks of all kind of things which are relevant to a specific knowledge domain or within an organization. They contains abstract concepts and relations as well as instances of all sort of ‘things’ including persons, companies, documents and datasets.
Knowledge Graphs are intelligent data models made of descriptive metadata that can be used to categorise contents.
Why should You bring all your content and data in a Knowledge Graph?
The answer is simple. You want to be relevant for your audience. A Knowledge Graph allows machines (including voice-enabled assistants, smartphone apps and search crawlers) to make complex queries over the entirety of your content. Let’s break this down into benefits:
Facilitate smarter and more relevant search results and recommendations
Support intelligent personal assistant like Apple Siri and Google Now understand natural language requests by providing the needed vocabulary to identify content
Get richer insights on how content is performing and is being received by the audience. Someone calls it Semantic Analytics (more on this topic soon)
Sell advertising more wisely by providing in-depth context to advertising networks
Create new services that drive reader engagement
Share (or sell) metadata to the rest of the World
So what makes WordLift special
WordLift allows anyone to build his/her own Knowledge Graph. The plugin adds a layer of structured metadata to the content you write on WordPress. Every article is classified with named entities and these classifications are used to provide relevant recommendations that boost the articles of your site with widgets like the navigator and the faceted search. There is more.
The deep vocabulary can be used to understand natural language requests like – “Who is the founder of company [X]?”. Let’s dig deeper. Here is an example that uses a generalist question answering tool called Platypus.
Playtypus leverages on the Wikidata Knowledge Graph. Now if I would ask “Who is the founder of Insideout10?” Wikidata, would probably politely answer “I’m sorry but I don’t have this information“.
Now, the interesting part is that, for this specific question, this same blog holds the correct answer.
As named entities are described along with their properties I can consult the metadata about Insideout10and eventually have applications like Platypus run a SPARQL query on my graph.
The site owner does. Every website has its own graph published on data.wordlift.it (or any custom domain name you might like) and the creator of the website holds all licensing rights of his/her data. In the next upcoming release a dedicated rights statement will be added to all graphs published with WordLift (here you’ll find the details of this issue).
So how big is this graph?
If we combine all existing beta testers we reach a total of 37.714 triples (this being the unit of measurement of information stored in a Knowledge Graph). Here is a chart representing this data.
While this is a very tiny fraction of the World’s knowledge (Wikidata holds 975.989.631 of triples – here is a simple query to check this information on their systems) it is relevant for the readers’ of this blog and contributes to the veracity of big data (“Is this data accurate?”).
The blog post summaries the work done in the context of the EU project FP7-MICO in the area of digital journalism.
This last December we attended in Cairo one of the most exciting events in the Middle East and North Africa region on Entrepreneurship and Hi-Tech startups: RiseUp Summit 2015. We engaged with the overwhelming crowd of startuppers and geeks on our HelixWare booth and in a separated Meetup organised at the Greek Campus.
We had the opportunity, during these two hectic days, to share the research work done in MICO for extending the publishing workflows of independent news organizations with cross-media analysis, natural language processing and linked data querying tools.
Riseup summit is Egypt’s largest entrepreneurship summit to be held for the 3rd year This year RiseUp15 took place on the 12th & 13th of December 2015 and it’s slogan was the summit’s slogan is “The world is coming to Cairo”it was a great success and it took place this year on at the heart of Cairo “American University Greek Campus, Les Freres Bab El Louk School and Falaki Building located in Tahrir Square” combining business owners and young ideas in one place, to provide opportunities for startups and linking entrepreneurs with investors.
How RiseUp is Flourishing the Middle East startups
#RiseUp15 – The facts and figures
Event highlights:
Speakers from Google, Facebook, Uber, Microsoft, Aramex, Techcrunch and many more discussed Egypt and the MENA region’s ecosystem and the prospect of investments in startups.
Startups showcased their projects, aiming to catch the attention of investors and professionals to attain the funding needed to bring their ideas to life. They had the opportunity to network, discuss and listen to Keynote speakers sharing their success stories also participants had the opportunity to join professional workshops.
How Startups Drive Local Economy Growth:
Startups are refuelling hundreds of cities worldwide
Small business owners are locals. They live locally, shop locally, and use local resources. They employ local manpower, local freelancers…they come up with more revolutionary technology and innovative ideas
When these startups grew, they will directly impact growth of their cities
Small businesses plays a very important role to develop and boost Local economy in the future
How InsideOut Today was of assistance for RiseUp15
Live Streaming the event to the world:
InsideOut Today proudly provided for the 3rd consecutive year the live streaming service for the RiseUp Summit broadcasting the event to the world over the internet to multiple devices, using our video streaming platform, the HelixWare.
This year was more challenging to us as the event grew bigger with many tracks and many interesting sessions, workshops, keynote speeches and fireside chats to be live streamed! Thanks to the Riseup team who assisted us in spotting the most important spots to stream. As usual, we have provided one live-streaming portable station that included the capturing devices, encoders, professional services and finally the HelixWare streaming servers over the cloud.
Social Media Monitoring:
We are also glad that we supported RiseUp team in understanding the traction happening about the event over social media. We provided a full detailed report about the Online Social interaction across multiple networks, before during and after the event. the report included the total number of mentions, location of users and source of traffic, the top influencers, top contributors and top mentioned users, languages used and top hashtags associated with RiseUp15
Personal Branding Workshop:
InsideOut Today CEO Fady Ramzy conducted a very interesting workshop about Personal Branding and it was the most booming workshop in Riseup15 which was overbooked with double the number of attendees in other workshops during the two days.The room was packed with very energetic youth eager to learn about Personal Branding.Following the workshop Fady had Side Chats with some of the workshop attendees for sharing Knowledge, opinions and experience and it was a really interesting discussions! Here is the Simple steps how to build your personal brand online
Also Gladly this year we had our own booth at #RiseUp15 to showcase our very own product HelixWare Online Video Platform which was a great opportunity to introduce HelixWare to the Mena Region
The Interaction on the hashtag #riseup15 generated a great engagement as people were posting pictures and feedback during and after the event and we collected some of the best advices by those who made it big here and also we collected some lovely pictures from #riseup15 on our flicker account
Was such a great journey to be operating Social and covering the event; we enjoy being part of the community and supporting entrepreneurship in all fields. Looking forward for RiseUp16
