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Well it really has been one hell of a year. 2009 had already been feted as the year that businesses started to embrace online video, as a digital means of marketing and became so as Internet users lapped up video in greater volume than ever.

The year started for vzaar with the unveiling of our new player and a pricing model built around consumption. We hold the philosophy that making our features available to all paying customers is the best way to drive adoption and also loyalty so in early January we brought to market our Search Enhancer feature, built to help publishers improve the visibility of their videos in search. February and we learn that vzaar had been approved for the eBay Selling Manager Applications program. Great news indeed - now we just needed to put in those extra hard yards!

March, and at ChannelAdvisor’s UK Catalyst event we announce the first our API partnerships as the template providers Frooition, make adding video to their templates easier than ever via vzaar. At the same event vzaar are invited to speak on Turning Buyers Into Browsers. It is clear from those attending the event that video remains an ambition for many, but realising the time and budget in a tough economical climate remains a hurdle.

April, and we continue to release new features based around the continual development of our video player. First come multi size players, swiftly followed by an MP3 version of our player which allows audio to now be streamed.

June comes and there is a new face at vzaar HQ as Balint joins the team as Search Engine Marketing Manager. His task is to help more people find vzaar online and July sees a record number of new users flocking to the site and signing up. At the same time, our ace developers Applicake are working away on vzaar 2.0 which means we are able to not only release a new version of the site, but also a host of new features including HD players, customisable players and our ever popular Brand Text

Late August, and a year in the making, eBay launch their SM App Program. vzaar are hand picked as one of the launch partners and overnight our video service is making it easier than ever for eBay sellers to add video to their listings.

September comes and we’re busy tidying up aspects of the site that will improve the overall customer experience. As well as moving to a new office, we migrate our customer support over to the impressive and versatile Tender App, we switch our content delivery network of choice to the best-in-class Edgecast and launch a series of new libraries on our Developer API. Our first major API client the car dealership GetAuto sign up and by the end of the month have already uploaded over a thousand videos. Video is fast becoming a volume game.

October and reasons to be cheerful. vzaar come third in the European Streaming Awards for Best Online Video, we pass 500 paying customers for the year and our newly launched Affiliate Program is helping more and more publishers spread the vzaar word!

As 2009 closes out, November sees guest blogger Kris Drey comment on the Small Business Edge that sees more and more businesses moving over to online video. Fallon, a UK based digital agency, are living proof of this as they bring their creative campaigns for Trebor and Cadburys to life with vzaar video and our customisable players.

Finally we roll into December and the demand for features goes on. Our new Thumbnail Picker goes down a treat with existing customers as does our new Showcase page which illustrates the amazing variety of videos are customers are uploading on a daily basis.

Quite a year and yet still the pace quickens. The online video space is often criticized for being an overly crowded one with little to differentiate services. To that point, we welcome the launch of VidCompare who aim to simplify the selection process, but maintain strongly as a company that there is ample room for a platform like vzaar that focuses on making the streaming of video as simple as possible. It needn’t be a complicated process and that will remain core to our thinking and philosophy as we step into 2010.

We look forward to seeing you there!

John Gruber, wrote an interesting piece on HTML5 Video embedding on his Daring Fireball blog yesterday title “Why the HTML5 ‘Video’ Element Is Effectively Unusable, Even in Browsers Which Support It”

The first thing I noted of interest is that even for a leading edge person like John HTML5 video is still not ready for general usage. I’ll probably do a follow up post on my thoughts on why this is not ready (multi-encoding, fallback code, etc etc)

What I want to talk about is John’s footnote on Flash Video

As for why I refuse to embed Flash, let me put it this way. I use and highly recommend ClickToFlash, which blocks all Flash content by default. Why would I publish content using a technology that I personally block by default? I truly hope to see Flash fade as the de facto standard for embedded web video, and I’m willing to put my markup where my mouth is.

I think HTML5 video is going to be good and provide some significant inroads into what we do with video on the web. However I think that John misses one key reasons as to why flash video is going to stick around for a bit …

It enables video sharing sites and video services such as ourselves to provide a single player packed with functionality. With our vzaar video player (and equally with our competitors video players, video player developers like Flowplayer and the video sharing sites) this allows us to put together a whole package of functions for example our border colours or brand text.

Additionally as a business, this allows us to restrict some of those features to paying users only. All in one simple prepacked flash file. This makes the embed code simpler (although not perfectly simple, thanks Firefox, thanks embed tag).

This is possible in HTML5, as Mark Pilgrim said in reply to my comment on reddit. However possible, and ready for prime time, ready for normal users isn’t the same thing.

Top player design in HTML5 with Javascript and styles is all possible, but mostly if you have complete control of the environment, and you run your own site. e.g. It would work for John himself and as it does for Apple (e.g.) However for many of our users this wouldn’t work. We have a broad base of users with technical skills from being able to cut and paste HTML (and for many of our eBay users not even that) to leading design agencies who value the easy of use of not having to worry about this.

When it comes to embedding video all over other sites, I still firmly believe that flash for all it’s flaws, is the the only viable way to make sure the video will work cross site, cross browser. For flash to be truly replaced by pure HTML, I believe that we not only need HTML5 to gain greater adoption, but a better way of embedding widgets (such as video players) with one block of code. I’d be very surprised if as HTML5 gains adoption, a new packaged “widget” format doesn’t develop to take on flash.

However without a viable way of embedding blocks of rich functionality on other webpages, that you know will work across all bowser types, flash is here to stay.

I recently attended Future of Web Apps 2009 an annual conference held by Carsonified in London to talk about our industry and where it’s going. I find it good to get out of the office once or twice a year and get a fresh perspective on things. I met up with fellow Web App developers and all round great guys Ben Bodien and Marc Roberts of Neutron Creations and settled in for two days of being a sponge and soaking up some knowledge,

To be honest, I found the first day a little disappointing compared to past years. The exception being Mike McDerment CEO of Freshbooks who’s talk on “Three vital marketing systems for a successful web app” I found really resonated with me. And coming from a guy who has grown a web app to a million users, and is profitable and generating good revenue, one should listen. I was fortunate enough to meet Mike on the Friday and have a chat with him, which just reinforced what a nice guy he is and why Freshbooks is such an industry leader. Mike invited me to a Freshbooks dinner, which I really should have gone to but I was just exhausted from a tough week so I sadly turned down the offer.

Friday was a bit more about real business’s and less about ‘social’ type apps. For me this is important, and reflects where the industry is going. I barely heard anything thing about advertising supported models and a lot more about freemium. Freemium is more than just a free service with some add-ons to generate revenue now, it’s more of a “great paid service” (like vzaar) with a free add on to allow users to test and play.

Two web apps that launched at FOWA and certainly interested me, were Go Test IT and Aware Monitoring. We’re already using Go Test It and hope this will take a lot of the manual strain off testing, allowing for quick deployments. I’m really keen on checking Aware Monitoring out, as soon as my beta invite comes through. I think this will be “Pingdom on Steroids” and allow for us to really monitor more deeply in our application.

Friday had a lot more laughs in it with a great talk by Dave McClure called “Start Up Metrics for Pirates” which you can see here. Aside from some retinue burning colours it was inspirational and important for anyone trying to run a real business. It wasn’t dissimilar to Gary Vaynerchuk’s closing talk “Be passionate, work your arse off, care, or go home” talk.

My take home from all of this, is that the web isn’t much different from any business. Find a problem you have, solve it better than anyone else, and work you socks off. It doesn’t guarantee success (nothing does), but not doing it certainly guarantees failure.

A short video introduction to the development process of our video application for eBay’s SM App storefront. Any developers that would like to learn more please do feel free to drop us a line

Each website may be different, but shoppers share some common traits when making a decision to part with their cash - principally that they’re impatient and sceptical. Managementtoday.com invited vzaar to provide some tips to their readers on boosting your online business and here is what we had to say.

1. Think about your search engine marketing
There are four sources of traffic to your website. Some users come to you direct - by typing the website address into their browsers. Some come via referrals - partners who give them your website details. Otherwise you’re relying on search, either free or paid. Free (or organic) search is traffic generated by users finding your business in search engine results pages; this is based on relevance and driven by search words. Google won’t tell you exactly how they determine the results of this page, but they have published a useful handbook that covers the basics to search engine optimization. It’s important to get this right.

Paid search is traffic generated from paid ads shown by Google on its results pages. These are driven by keywords you select and pay for on a ‘cost-per-click’ basis. Gone are the days of untargeted advertising. There is simply no need to do the equivalent of door-to-door sales, when thanks to search engine marketing, you can put your product right in front of those searching for it online. We’ve blogged about ‘Perfecting the art of Google Adwords’ before, but the key to developing a strong paid search marketing programme is to have the confidence to put aside a sensible budget and then spend some time analysing your performance.

In the long run you should work out what price you are prepared to pay for a transaction. Start with a small budget at first, and use the data this generates to fine-tune your ad words campaign. Once you are satisfied with your campaigns, then you can start to increase your daily budget to generate more leads.

2. Understand your traffic
If you’re spending a considerable amount of money on driving customers to your website, you need to know who is visiting, where they’re coming from and how they interact with your site. Google Analytics gives you a comprehensive insight into user pathways and the decisions they make on your site. From the myriad of data it offers, you can make decisions based on hard data. Understand what search terms people use to arrive at your site, work out which pages incur the most drop-outs, see from which countries and at what times people visit your site - and then plan around that.

3. Make the shopping experience as simple as possible
Once a shopper has arrived at your website, it’s important to keep them engaged. The shopper’s experience needs to be easy and pleasant. IKEA do a great job of this in their brick and mortar stores; invariably you end up buying much more than you intended to. The tip here is to make the flow easy and make your products or services easily discoverable. Products should be easy to find. Checkout should be easy to find. Contact info should be easy to find. Remember: shoppers have little patience, so if they can’t find what they are looking for, they’ll go elsewhere.

4. Use video
Thanks to the ubiquity of broadband, everyone can view video online. This presents a great opportunity for merchants to use this medium to showcase their business. Buyers are sceptical and need to feel confident in their purchase. Having a video of your product or service builds confidence. It can also reduce the rate of product returns and decrease the amount of product enquiries. You can click here for some tips on adding video to your website.

5. Use Video to boost your search ranking
Google has now expanded its search results to include media. It calls this blended search, and having a video means that if the page shows up in a search results page, the video thumbnail will also be listed. This helps your page stand out from the rest. Be sure to submit your video site map to Google and other search engines that support blended search.

6. Make the pricing obvious
Pricing must be kept simple, clear, concise and discoverable. Sounds obvious, but this is a common flaw in many sites. Imagine you are in an antique shop and you like the look of an item - so naturally you look to see the price. It’s not there, and the shopkeeper is busy with another customer, so eventually you get fed up and leave the store. The same principle applies online. Customers have little patience. Many purchases are impulsive so be sure your price is easy to find and make sure it’s easy to pay.

7. Make check-out fast - and shipping free
Forrester Research claims that most sales are abandoned in the shopping cart stage. So don’t include any unnecessary fluff during check-out. Try and keep it to three steps once an item has been selected. Include PayPal as well as credit card options; many shoppers have PayPal accounts already, and if they do, check-out will be quicker. Finally, offer FREE shipping. Build it into the cost if needs be. The perception of free shipping is compelling and has proven to be a strong conversion tactic.

8. Have great customer support
This is an easy way to build your reputation. It will drive traffic more than conversions, but since traffic is the funnel to conversions, it indirectly drives the latter too. Shoppers are easy to impress, because they expect most customer service to be poor. Be responsive, helpful and honest, and they will become your biggest fans - even talking you up to their friends.

9. Blog
Previously blogging may have been seen as blatant self-promotion. But these days a company blog can be an effective marketing tool, sitting alongside more traditional avenues. Engage with current or potential customers by sharing insights into you and your business. Be open and share the good times, as well as the lessons you’ve learnt. Customers enjoy seeing the people behind the business, so don’t be afraid to present yourself and your team. Putting a face to a name can break down some of the psychological barriers that lead to customers thinking of enterprises as ‘faceless’ and ‘unapproachable’. If you do blog, do it regularly and ensure that it is well linked to from the major pages of your site. Finally, submitting your blog pages to StumbleUpon is a great (and free) way to increase visitor numbers.

10. Get on Twitter
Who isn’t on Twitter, it seems? Although 10% of users are seen to be active on the service, it’s how you use it from a business perspective that is the key (Click here to read MT Expert’s Ten Top Tips). Twitter allows you to interact with current customers in real time, and distribute soundbites about your industry. Best of all, you can join in conversations directly with those that are asking questions or making statements about your product or service.

Hi all,

I’m the latest addition to the vzaar crew and it’s an honour to be here. I’ll be focusing on vzaar’s search engine marketing efforts, so expect my posts to be themed around that topic.

When I started a week ago, one of the priorities were to create a reporting template that would allow us to oversee all aspects of our Adwords and other activities. Hence I started to put together a sophisticated reporting tool in Excel. Charts naturally accompany such spreadsheets as they help you to visualize data.

I used to use a special kind of chart quite a lot at previous jobs, the one that displays two, different kinds of data, like impressions (a simple number value) and click-through-rates (a percentage value). In Office 2003 and prior versions, it’s quite easy to produce something like that, all you need to do is to choose the right kind of chart and there you go.

For some reason, they eliminated this option from Office 2007, but there’s a workaround to create similar charts.

(1) Firstly, you need to create a regular chart. The data source should include both columns of data

To eBay has long been a verb. I’ll eBay that later tonight I’ll tell my wife when we are uncluttering the house. The company, to all intents, own the online auctioning moniker and they sweep up quite nicely in most categories from automotive to collectables to antiques and more recently residential property. That’s not to say that dominate in all ecommerce verticals as there is one that is bubbling away quite nicely that I have been using for a year or so now.

Parkatmyhouse.com is the eBay of parking spaces if you get my drift. The site allows users to effectively market their car parking space, garage, forecourt to a market of would be buyers/drivers.

Imagine you are going to see Andy Murray at Wimbledon this summer. The weather is set fair and the strawberries are looking good but you want to drive to SW19. On street parking is a no no and the various car parks in the area will be doing a mean trade at very high prices. So instead you visit Parkatmyhouse to see that there are currently 147 spaces currently available for rent, ranging from daily rates (usually between £5 and £10) to weekly and monthly rates for the longer term visitor or commuter. In theory, if you get in early enough its possible to bag yourself a secure, off street space for your car and enjoy the tennis without worrying about traffic wardens, parking meters or timing restrictions.

Hello again all you vzaar readers, it’s Sami the spring intern at vzaar. I posted an article on the blog last month, talking about how vzaar had started to develop Adwords and SEO Marketing campaigns. This week I’m looking forward to share some more insight with you by suggesting a few useful tips for those of you who are interested in developing an Adwords strategy for advertising your business online.

Be Specific, Stay Focused
First of all I must say it is important for you to be relevant in your marketing strategy ensuring you focus on exactly the product or service you are selling. Providing mixed Google adverts by amalgamating your offers and messages or being too general will ultimately cost you as you’ll generate a lot of clicks from a wide audience. Know your buying audience and pitch to them as if you would face to face. That’s why it may be preferable to stay focused on your niche and the people you usually target. Google mainly rewards relevancy - keep this in mind!

Know Your Keywords
Try to use specific and targeted keywords specific to your business: this is the key to relevancy. Remain as precise as possible in the words you think your customers will use and explore all the combination’s you can think of. Of course some keywords will be more useful than others but you never know when which one will be used and meanwhile keeping some on standby won’t cost you much. Try to think like a buyer. What would they search for. You really have to enter into people’s internet searching habits to guess which keywords and which ads are more likely to getting click-throughs.

Remember you can also choose which negative keywords you don’t want your adverts to be associated with. This helps you avoid a lot of impressions on irrelevant search terms that could easily be eating up your budget.

You may have seen this site recently on how to use twitter for marketing and PR.

At vzaar we have been finding Twitter rather useful for marketing and some minor PR. Jamie (‘business guy’ on the blog), takes a bit of time each day to respond to people looking for video solutions and communicate with them. Sometimes this is one way, but it can also become the opening to a conversation which is the best way to find new users. Conversation, not broadcasting.

I’ve also noticed a lot more people following our @vzaar twitter feed in the sales space (i.e. online selling of something). What I find interesting is the average follower count of these people is normally in the 1K-10K range.

I find this curious. On my personal feed I tend to block most (not all) followers like this. I don’t want someone following me to boost my follow count, or because they expect me to follow them back. I want people following me who either actually know me, or want to follow me because they find me interesting. I would say I have probably an 80% hit rate of genuine followers out of my 250ish followers. On our work account I would say this hit rate is probably more like 20% out of the 200ish followers we have there.

But then in fairness, we follow 206 people, and we don’t read the stream of people we follow. We read the search stream and we follow our own personal streams, but we don’t follow the stream of who we follow, as we’re all just too busy, so we’re equally as bad.

I would love to reduce our work twitter stream to people we actually follow and read, but we all follow them on our personal accounts anyway. I think Twitter is splitting into two groups. Those who use them for personal conversations, and those who use them for work and/or to amass followers.

I think there is much more value in real links than the empty links you get when it’s a game and the winner is how many followers you get.

The coffee shop and restaurant above our office, just started a twitter feed. @thepantrylondon only has 14 followers. But all of those followers are valuable as they are all people who live or work nearby. I would rather have 14 valued followers than 10000 empty ones.

They don’t have to be the most followed coffee shop in the world. What they need is people who might by coffee from them, to have an interaction with them when they are not in the shop.

That’s how you use Twitter for PR and marketing.

Hi all you vzaar readers, I’m Sami, the spring intern at vzaar. I come from France, where I’m studying Business & Management, and look forward to graduating in the field of marketing in 2010. My interest in sales, communication and new technologies made me choose coming to vzaar in order to experience a new form of online advertising; namely Search Engine Marketing (or Google Adwords if we are being more honest!).

When I first arrived at vzaar, I had very little knowledge of Adwords and I was wondering how I was going to be able to attract to the site new customers with no adverts on the radio, billboards or other forms of conventional media used for advertising. As I started to get familiar with the concept of bidding on keywords, writing new ads and managing a budget I quickly came to realize the amazing opportunity that Google offers businesses who want to compete at a global level.

Whilst Google Search appears to be simple and intuitive to use, Adwords seems a bit complicated when you first dip into it. It took me a fair share of time reading books, watching tutorials, attending webinars and some expert best practice sharing from the good guys at Swoopo, before I really get started but today I can say that I don’t regret it all and neither would you if you do ever decide to work with Adwords.

Last year we needed some extra development, and started looking for resources. We had no intention of looking outside the UK, although an outsourcer in China had contacted us so we thought we would follow up with them, and see if it was a possibility.

The Chinese outsourcer was very quick to get back to us. We set them some development tasks to do and sent it off.

We then posted a few job postings for developers on some of the jobs boards. Gumtree because it was cheap, and a few of the free rails boards.

And boy did the onset of emails begin. About 50 mails from individuals, outsources (USA, China and India mainly) and recruiters. I quickly developed a filter system of Yes/No/Maybe and started cutting down the mails. It soon started taking over my life.

Fortunately a small company based out in Cracow (or is that Kraków) with a affection for muffin logos dropped us a mail. We sent off the same home work task and got on with filtering the emails.

Applicake completed the homework within a day or two, and impressed our in house developer. A few skype chats and a phone call later we took them on as our development team.

2 Weeks later the Chinese outsourcer replied to us.

Our in house developer decided to move onto some work of a different technical nature leaving Applicake as our primary development team, and if I said we were happy with their work, I’d be lying.

We’re ecstatic with their work.

Last month vzaar appeared as part of a panel at the ChannelAdvisor Catalyst event for eBay and online merchants and retailers. We were invited to be part of a larger discussion on the theme of Turning Browsers Into Buyers. A great theme given that the room was largely full of vendors looking to optimise their sales and marketing tactics in what is a ever increasingly busy and competitive space.

Joining me on the panel, which was chaired by Michael Jones of ChannelAdvisor, were

• Andrew Main of Frooition
• Michelle Hocking of Webloyalty
• David Monterroso of RichFX

The video runs some 50 minutes but as a group we cover a number of themes including new technologies and services that can help increase your conversion rates, thoughts on what turns buyers when purchasing online as well as time for a question and answer session from the audience.