Just before 2010 became 2011, we launched Shootitlive for iPhone, resigned Aftonbladet, signed Expressen and had a successful launch in Finland with Iltalehti and Ilta-Sanomat as new customers.
In this very late chronicle I’ll try to summarize a very eventful year that ended on top.
January
During the first days of January, we moved our servers taro, capa and admin from Glesys, Zetup and ipeer to the Amazon EC2 cloud. We have been using Amazon S3 to store all our data and Amazon Cloud Front for distribution (CDN) for a long time. The move went very smooth and without any downtime. At the same time we changed the host address from *. livebloggen.se to *. shootitlive.com.
Right before Christmas in the final days of 2009 we resigned Aftonbladet for another year and at the end of January we signed Sundsvalls Tidning, Gefle Dagblad and Arbetarbladet.
In connection with the reporting from the Haiti disaster, Aftonbladet used Shootitlive to live publish a photo feed and several other newspapers embedded a twitter widget displaying tweets with hashtags #haiti on their front pages. This was the start of something we had campaigned for during a long time – for newspaper to include live twitter feeds in their live reporting coverage. And that was the reason we launched twitter support in the Shootitlive player a year earlier.
At the end of January IDG Proffsfoto published the article “Låt läsarna vara med via Shootitlive”
February
Both the Olympics and the Eurovision Song Contest began in mid-February. Aftonbladet live published photos from all major Olympic events. And from Eurovision Song contest they live published from the rehersal the day before, from the main day and then from the after party. And they did this every week for the complete 6-week duration of the Eurovision.
In February, we signed the Serbian leading sports site Sportska Centrala.
March
Aftonbladet continued live publishing from the Olympics and the Eurovision song contest and the photographer Andreas Bardell took ‘gold in the live publishing“. Andreas became the first in the world again to publish photos from multiple winning races. Andreas was first in the world to publish photos from Usain Bolt’s 200m records the year before when the winning photo was published on aftonbladet 45 seconds after Usain had won the race.
Shootitlive sponsored the Picture of the year award in Örebro. Nerikes Allehanda live published photos and the Shootitlive player, showing tweets in real time, was embedded on a number of sites such as DN.se
In connection with the Eurovision Song Contest final Aftonbladet launched it’s SuperLive as a new way to follow the event live. SuperLive consist of web-tv, twitter feeds, live chats and live photos and videos in the Shootitlive player.
The magazine Kamera & Bild wrote about Shootitlive and Aftonbladet’s SuperLive here and MKSE wrote about it here
April
We’re releasing support for video. Video files that are sent to Shootitlive directly from a camera at the event, via FTP, or uploaded via our website immediately gets encoded and published in the Shootitlive player. We recommend short, unedited clips that get mixed with photos. The feedback is very positive and Danish Ekstra Bladet started to live publish videos right away.
We went to Norway to meet with VG, Dagbladet and Scanpix. We also met up with Eirik H. Urke for coffee that we previously had come in touch with via twitter and who later on become the Shootitlive Country Manager Norway.
We sign with Denmark’s leading newspaper Politiken and with Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter.
May
We’re launching support for Videoplaza Monetizer so our customers can make money from their live coverage. Ekstra Bladet is again the fastest to start displaying advertisements in the Shootitlive player but DN is not far behind.
While we’re in Copenhagen to meet with Politiken and Ekstra Bladet which we resign for another year, we get contacted by both VG and Dagbladet who want to sign up to become customers. The calls came completely independent of each other and with 30 minutes apart. It was an awesome afternoon, which was celebrated with a beer at Ströget before we flew home.
We went to London to meet with Canon Europe’s marketing director, to discuss the expansion of our Nordic cooperation to the rest of Europe.
The Norwegians are quick to get started with Shootitlive.Dagbladet live published photos from demonstrations in Athens and VG used four live photo and video feeds from the Eurovison song contest.
June
Early June is all about planning and preparation for the royal wedding. While Shootitlive is used daily by both Aftonbladet and Ekstra Bladet who live publishes from almost all World Cup matches in South Africa.
Our cooperation with the photo agency Scanpix got started with the royal wedding where they sold live photo feeds to newspapers all around Europe.
Marcus Jerräng from IDG’s Computer Sweden wrote an article about us “The Royal Wedding a boost for Swedish IT Company“. The article is very good and resulted in a lot of attention.
Over 25 sites used Shootitlive on their front pages during the royal wedding and we pushed out over 60 000 gigabytes of data which was a big time record for us.
Aftonbladet also showed ads in the Shootitlive player (Videoplaza Served) for the first time during the royal wedding, which was immensely appreciated by the advertisers.
July
July started with us moving out from our office. We had been renting our office location from a PR agency’s premises on Kungsgatan for a long time. But now they started to bring in more tenants and it was getting crowded. We moved to an office on Döbelnsgatan while we simultaneously begin the hunt for our own office.
I went on holiday with my wife and friends to Greece and Eivind spent his vacation on the west coast.
August
We start to develop our HTML5 player, continue looking for a new office and had meetings with a lot of potential partners. We had follow-up meeting with Scanpix on our collaboration on the royal wedding which resulted in a signed agreement for further cooperations.
Eirik H. Urke, who we met in Norway in April, came and visited us in Stockholm. Eirik is as dedicated as we are when it comes to live reporting and we revealed the news that Eirik was the new Shootitlive Country Manager in Norway
Martin Agfors from the IDG magazine Proffs Foto interviewed us, which resulted in this article.
September
We went to Norway and met VG and Scanpix.
Shootitlive live publishes the world’s best aurora photos. Together with the Abisko Tourist Office, Canon and Shootitlive, visitors to the Aurora sky station website can see photos that are updated around the clock.
We met with potential investors and business angels while we started to look for devs to hire and held a bunch of interviews.
Our customers have not yet got started with video on the scale we had hoped for. The reason is that the videos produced by the cameras are huge (in megabytes) making them impossible to send using 3G.
Therefore we begin to sketch out a Shootitlive iPhone app just to be able to shoot video with good quality and being able to live to publish them quickly and easily.
It’s time for the Swedish elections on September 19th. Aftonbladet, Svenska Dagbladet, Dagens Nyheter, NA and VLT live published photos using Shootitlive and Scanpix provided a live photofeed to a bunch of newspapers.
October
Yay! We are moving into the brand new Shootitlive HQ at Atlas (St. Eriksplan)
Having beta tested our HTML5 players with Aftonbladet, we launched it for all customers as a fallback, i.e. when visitors does not have flash installed or using iPhone/iPad the HTML5 player is displayed. Henrik Norrman who studies computer science begins his eight-week internship with us, where he immediately starts to further develop our system for statistics and logging.
On October 13th we went to Finland to meet with the two biggest tabloids Ilta-Sanomat and Iltalehti. They were not using live coverage at the time, but was very interested in to start doing that as they glanced at the Swedish, Norwegian and Danish newspapers. They both wanted to test Shootitlive, which they did in the following week without any hassle as they already were used to send photos over 3G.
November
We are beta testing our first beta version of Shootitlive for iPhone with a customer. We are in the Philippines with PokerStars who are using Shootitlive to live publish photos and video clips from the poker tournament APPT: Cebu.
At the end of the month we went to London to meet with The Sun. They are very interested to test live publishing and we shall jointly select a few specific events that they will use Shootitlive from.
Earlier I mentioned back in may when we were in Copenhagen and was told that both the Norwegian VG and Dagbladet wanted to become customers. The same crazy thing happened while we were in London. Within 30 minutes both Finnish newspapers Ilta-Sanomat and Iltalehti contacted us to become customers. We celebrated with pints and fish ‘n chips on Oxford street before we went back to Stockholm.
December
We went to Berlin to meet with Germany’s largest tabloid Bildt and then with the newspaper Die Welt. They will test Shootitlive for a few selected events and hopefully thereafter become customers.
We continued our conversations with investors and came to an agreement just before Christmas. They started their DD-process (due diligence = where they check all our references) and we will hopefully be able to reveal all details in January.
I had a total of eight meetings with Aftonbladet before we came to an agreement just two days before Christmas Eve. Aftonbladet is our oldest customer and have live published photos and video with Shootitlive since 2008 and now they will use Shootitlive another year. And one day before New Years Eve we finally came to an agreement with Expressen to start using Shootitlive.
It has been a extremely fun and eventful year. But we are confident that 2011 will be even better. We hope to reveal new investors at the beginning of the year and then start recruiting for the conquest of Europe!
/ Martin
