Q. Where can these applications run?
A. Any web page, Facebook, and they can be served as ads by ad servers (e.g. DoubleClick.)
Q. Where are they hosted?
A. A single application consists of:--
*Media media (videos, images.) These can be served from anywhere, including from within YouTube. Amazon serves video for our deployments.
*Applications. The applications can be served from anywhere (your servers, our servers, 3rd party servers.)
*Certain syncronization processes (e.g. for a video to receive a phonecall) require our servers for connectivity.
Q. What kind of tracking/logging is available?
You can track as many events/thresholds as you care to. There is a DoubleClick tag built-in to our script language but we can quickly adapt that tag to other ad servers. You can also make real-time http tracking/logging calls to your or our servers.
Q. How many videos make an interactive video?
A. More than 10 and less than 100. There is an art rather than a science to making an interactive experience. Production is a different process that for regular "linear" video.
Q. How long does it take to make an interactive video?
These are the steps:--
*Ideation and scripting
*Prep and shooting
*Post-production and coding
These phases can be as short as a day each (see the Cambio demo) and mainly depend upon client/agency timeframes and timeliness.
Q. Why do you refer to your speech rec ability as "voice buttons."
A. We use Flash to stream off a voice snippet then process for recognition and send the result back. This makes scaling easy and cost incredibly low. We can also do conventional speech rec which uses voice servers which makes scaling harder and costs much higher.
Technical Stuff
The applications listed on this site are Flash-based applications that call and execute scripts written in an XML-formatted scripting language (see www.interactivexml.com for details.) The Flash (.swf) file is built for Flash 10 players and is roughly 70 KB. We have a 25 KB polite-load version for ad servers that starts upon user click. The Flash unit, XML and media can be served by any web host. The applications pull media as and when they need it.
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Applications can be embedded in web pages, Facebook (and shared in Facebook) or served as ads by ad servers (e.g. DoubleClick.)
XML is text-based and can be read by any browser, but developers can obfuscate their XML so that it is no longer readable by simply encoding it here. We have also built "push" technology so SWF's can receive emails, texts, IMs, QR codes (or any other real-world event) in real time and respond to them. So for example, a video-based application can ask the user to type their email address on screen, then send them a confirmation email. When the user replies to this email, the app can interpret the response and act accordingly within the video, in real time.
We run several processes on the back-end--
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These allow external "events" to be directed to user browsers in real time and process voice input through the browser and route results back to user browsers in real time.
