muveeMix

Entry Date: December 27th, 2006

Service disruptions on Wed, 27th December 2006

Due to earthquakes off Taiwan this Wednesday, our service is facing severe delays in video creation. Communication between the website (hosted in the USA) and our video creation service (hosted in Singapore) is starting to become more stable, but it will probably take one more day to fully recover.

In the meantime we’ll do our best to process the queued videos as soon as possible.

Update: 3rd of January 2007

Happy new year!! Our service has been restored to its full capacity. The quake affected three major Asian networks, which resulted in extremely high volumes of traffic on the still functional lines. After 48 hours we were still experiencing network problems, but those quickly subsided to tolerable levels.

In cases like this it’s easy to forget who the true victims of this incident are. It goes without saying that we feel for all the earthquake victims and may they and their families quickly recover and share the happiness of the new year.

Entry Date: December 19th, 2006

What’s cooking?

It’s been a while since our last update. We’re aiming to have one more refresh before Christmas to fix some of the reported issues and other glitches.

But we’re not stopping there. So what’s in store for next year? Some features we’re currently exploring are:

• Upload to YouTube support - I’m currently working with the development team from YouTube and we’re making good progress; we expect to have this feature in by Q1 2007
• Better quality videos - all this time we’re making you wait for your video, and the result aren’t always that impressive. Instead of trying to eliminate the waiting time, why not produce videos that are more stunning?
• Faster download times - we’re working together with our CDN provider to distribute your videos across the globe for faster access by your friends or families overseas.

The above are just technical features and improvements; on top of this we’re also improving the user interface to make online video creation a breeze!

Until the next wassup!

Entry Date: December 7th, 2006

Mix Master Tip: Want cooler muvees? Put that VIDEO in it!

We had some folks telling us how much they enjoyed muveeMix as a tool for creating photo slideshows. Thanks guys! And if you think our photo slideshows are cool, there’s more you could do to make it cooler - add videos. Yep! That’s it…

muveeMix works its magic best when short video clips are blended with an array of pictures so that the entire production is cut to the pace of music – just like how the transitions seem to come in at the right time and place in a music video.

[video clip(s) lasting 1 to 3 minutes each + 10 pictures at least + music lasting at least 1.5 minutes] should do the basic trick but do put in as much media as you can and reach that 100MB limit.

Besides, motion pictures always seem to be able to charge up that adrenalin or induce that nostalgia ache in us more readily than just static pictures. Well, that’s how we see it. Whatcha think?

So now you know how easy it is, remember to capture that few minutes of cake smashing action at the next birthday party or the dancing busker while touring the streets. And don’t worry about editing it. We’ll be with you on this. Just add it into your muveeMix concoction and enjoy that moment of marvel - true blue effortless cool.

Entry Date: December 3rd, 2006

Hotmail thinks muveeMix emails are junk

As you may know, our service requires registration via an activation system. We send out an email upon registration to make sure the specified email address is (still) in use. After clicking the activation link within the email, the user is activated and no further action is required.

Recently, we’ve noticed that many activation e-mails were never opened, primarily by Hotmail users. To find out why this happens, I used my own Hotmail account to register at muveeMix. At that point I noticed that the activation email went straight to the Junk folder instead of the regular mail box. Since then, I’ve been into discussions with Microsoft Email Delivery Support to find out what’s wrong with our emails.

So far we’ve increased the reputability of our mail server by adding SPF and DomainKeys, which works for both Gmail and Yahoo! (Gmail actually supports both of these frameworks), but so far we haven’t been successful to pass through Microsoft’s SmartScreen™ process. One interesting response I’ve gotten was “Your email looks like spam, but we can’t tell you why as this would render our scanner useless”; good point

In any case, this case is under further investigation and I hope to update you soon on any signs of success.

Update: 04-Dec-2006

Hotmail came back to us saying that our domain has been added to their SenderID program; after two working days the changes should be propagated through their network. In hopeful joy we wait

Update: 07-Dec-2006

Our prayers have been answered! All those sleepless nights have come to an end! Our emails are now accepted on Hotmail accounts as being reputable. Their explanation:

“The deliverability issues on your IP address were based on negative filter verdicts and/or other IP reputation problems”

This is a good lesson to learn for all who are setting up a dedicated host on a recycled IP address