Mobile Edition
Print
Get the Mag
Weekly Updates[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
WHAT DO you get when a research scientist with a love for jazz and an inventor with a love for art and computer music decide to collaborate? An idea that makes perfect sense--computer applications that make video, photo, and music splicing and editing simple by automating the process.
That is the idea that spawned muvee Technologies. Founder and chief executive Terence Swee is muvee's deal-seeking ambassador, spending most of his time travelling to various cities in pursuit of new business.
The avid jazz pianist is based in the United States and hangs around jazz clubs whenever he can on his travels, often waylaying the resident keyboardist to jam with the band. According to Lo Sheng, muvee's vice president engineering, Terence's insatiable curiosity as a youth led him to pursue a degree in electrical engineering so he could find out how things work.
Later Terence joined Kent Ridge Digital Labs where he combined his music knowledge and signal processing background to develop algorithms to aesthetically fuse voice and music using spectral manipulation techniques.
Pete Kellock is muvee's co-founder and strategist. A keen inventor, he has created new tools for interactive music production, desktop sound effects, automatic video editing, and other aspects of digital media.
A trained classical musician, Pete plays the French horn. He studied physics and became deeply involved with computers, designing digital hardware, and writing software for financial services to Arabic wordprocessing, and music, and later for video.
Pete has eschewed a daily role in the firm after leading it for more than five years. Currently, he sees himself as the "chief visionary officer" looking at developments that will bring the firm farther forward.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Founded in 2001, muvee Technologies is a privately held company headquartered in Singapore with a subsidiary, muvee Technologies, Inc in New York. The company's flagship application, muvee autoProducer, is designed to let most novice users easily and automatically transform dull videos and pictures into professional-looking multimedia productions.
The software automates many aspects of the video editing process based on computer analysis of video and music. The company's patented technology incorporates many of the rules of professional production to dramatically simplify the process of creating a compelling video. It lets users to make better productions more easily and in a fraction of the time than they could make themselves using traditional editing software.
The firm's roots lie in the Kent Ridge Research Labs which originated from the Institute of Systems Science, the applied research centre in the National University of Singapore. The core technology that the company is founded on is automatic video. Users simply select their video clips and photos, add in their favourite music, and pick a production style. In minutes, muvee autoProducer intelligently selects key scenes from the video footage, and cuts these highlights to the chosen music with effects and transitions synchronised to the beat.
Success Factors
Lo Sheng says that the reason that muvee took off was two-fold. Firstly, the finished product is comparable to the polished look and feel of professionally edited video. It is also an excellent way for the average person to compile all the rich pictures and video that they have accumulated on their digital devices.
He says: "This technology lets the user produce video clips that have great editing for both content and sound but without the need for knowing much about the technical aspects of picture, video, or song editing, and sequencing."
While this technology was original, not many people realise that the company is a Singapore firm. When it started out, the timing couldn't have been worse as it came to being during the tail end of the dot com crash in 2000. Not surprisingly, gaining investment funding proved difficult as many investors shied away from Internet-related businesses.
The company began with the backing of some investors with a few million dollars. The company broke even on its third year but is cautious about 2009 as most of its current customers are based in the United States and it expects some effects of the global meltdown to affect its bottom-line.
Over the last nine years, the core muvee technology has expanded from a desktop application to become available as applications on Nokia, Samsung and LG phones as well as the Nikon S-series cameras.
"Our products continue to evolve. Anyone purchasing a Hewlett-Packard laptop or desktop will find the muvee application embedded as one of the bundled software. The software has also spawned a Web-based version that is being tested at the moment," says Lo Sheng.
The major obstacle with a Web-based version was the need for higher bandwidth connections. But as the infrastructure of many countries is being improved, more consumers have the choice of using the Web-based application thanks to greater broadband speeds and connections.
Lo Sheng says the reason that muvee gained ground so fast was because the co-founders of the company are computer scientists with great interest in music. Thus, the company is the result of the unusual combination of two research scientists whose left brains and right brains were able to collaborate and come up with a technology that addressed both areas of their interests.
"It's a mix of the hard science with the art. This continues today as most of the staff embody two separate skills sets. We have hardcore computer science people alongside photographers and editors who have a healthy interest in each other's specific fields," explains Lo Sheng.
In the bigger context, he sees the technology as a useful tool for the lifestyle that people lead today. He hopes to transform the way people relive their memories: "Most people have several digital gadgets that capture pictures or video. We don't realise it but today we take more digital pictures and video than when cameras were film-based. This is simply due to the enormous file storage capacity of memory cards."
But after taking so many shots at that family function or at that scenic vacation, how many people print the pictures? Besides putting some up on social networking sites like Facebook, most would try to do a slide show on their computers but audience interest wanes after the first 30 pictures.
"Our technology lets consumers put the pictures into a seamless video clip that would be automatically synchronised to the tempo of the accompanying track. It's easy for the novice and it gives great results," says Lo Sheng.
He has no illusions as to the marketability of the firm's ideas: "Frankly, I believe we are ahead of the curve so we are well placed for success. There are several factors converging that would make the company even more successful. Firstly, the proliferation of digital devices and the incorporation of digital image and video recording in mobile communications devices means that there will be a greater need for such a technology or solution."
"Then there are the existing connections that we have forged with our technology users like HP and Nokia that put us in the right position to exploit this opportunity. These should aid us in making our endeavours a resounding success," adds Lo Sheng.
He counts among the firm's success factors, its unique pool of talent. More than 50 research and development staff are based in the Singapore office. The sales and marketing teams are based in the United States, Japan, and South Korea. It is difficult to get staff with a passion for both the science and the arts. Lo Sheng acknowledges that the people with the right mix of skills are not based in one country or region. Besides Singaporeans, the staff at muvee come from China, India, Europe, and Canada.
Besides being smart and motivated, the employees have to be very good at coding. Muvee uses a lot of C and C++ in their coding and many universities including those in Singapore have done away with these two languages in the computer degree programmes. There are also staff who need to be extremely competent at Web programming, video production, art, editing, music, and more.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Ideas Flow Upwards
One edge that Lo Sheng thinks the firm has is the company culture that encourages staff to expand their skill sets and to be motivated to learn more skills. Ideas are expected to bubble up from the bottom rather than to be filtered down from the top. It is simple to find staff who can spot errors but more difficult to get those who can propose solutions.
Employees are encouraged to take the initiative and propose changes or chart new proposals. They are as a matter of course delegated the authority and responsibility to act. If something is going wrong, the company expects staff to not only notice but also propose solutions and to take ownership of problems that arise in the course of work.
From day one, the company knew their market was beyond Singapore's shores, so in a way it was born global. Visitors to their office usually assume that the firm is not Singaporean due to the make up of its staff. But beyond that, the culture of creativity, responsibility, and trust that permeates it makes it seem like a miniature Yahoo! or Google. Staff retention figures are also better than the industry norm and most of the staff have a strong sense of purpose and belonging.
Lo Sheng is not too concerned that many Singaporeans may not be aware of muvee as he feels that this only means that there are greater opportunities for his firm to capture bigger market share.
"I'm not lulled into believing that the company has arrived because none of the staff live a luxury lifestyle nor have they been able to move into good class bungalows. It just shows that there is much work still to be done and that there will be more stages in the development of the firm in the future.
FEED