2009 was a challenging year for many of us.  For Gregg and me, and the entire Encoding.com team, it was a time to hunker down and focus our very limited resources on trying to build a disruptive world-class service.  As with any startup, sacrifices were made to keep the dream alive — time with family, financial, sleep…

But a friend and mentor once said to me, “Just keep swimming.”  No, I’m not referring to Dory in Finding Nemo.  We did keep swimming, and our persistence along with your patience, feedback and support has paid off.

It is with great pleasure to announce that we closed a $1.25M Series A financing on December 31st.  We feel very fortunate to have put together such a great group of investors who believe in our vision and our ability to execute.   The round was led by Metamorphic Ventures, a fantastic and extremely supportive firm from NYC run by guys who have built their own successful companies.   Other notable investors include Pat Condon, co-founder of Rackspace; Dave Morgan, CEO of Simulmedia and founder of TACODA and Real Media; Zelkova Ventures from NYC; and Allen Morgan, venture partner at Mayfield.

We will use these funds to continue improving our platform, and to generate awareness that our solution exists.  And yes, we will celebrate with morning bagels for all employees… for one week.

The Encoding.com team thanks you for your continued support.

We’re excited to announce that we are now live on the Rackspace Cloud. Please watch this wildly entertaining 3-minute video describing the benefits to you for our integration with Rackspace. Being the only video encoding SaaS provider integrated with both EC2 and Cloud Servers, we can ensure that we’re minimizing the distance between your source video and our cloud-based platform. Ideally, you’ll store your videos in the cloud and now you have two great choices with Rackspace and Amazon.

For detailed technical information on our Rackspace Cloud implementation, please click here: Rackspace Info

Encoding.com was recently featured on Mashable’s “Spark of Genius” series. Check out the story here: http://bit.ly/6OKzLo . Can’t say we mind reading, “That’s why Encoding.com is so brilliant.” Yes, that’s slightly overstating our value proposition. But, we do appreciate the coverage and starting the year off with a bang.

Happy New Year. Wishing you a fantastic “twenty ten”.

Christmas has come early for Encoding.com customers. Today, we are proud to announce a great set of enhancements to our platform.

1. Prepay Plans
Do you have a defined encoding project? Would you prefer to buy a set amount of encoding bandwidth? Now, you can take advantage of our Prepay Plans available to new and existing customers.  With 4 new Prepay Plans to choose from, we now offer a wide range of packages that offer ultimate flexibility to match your encoding projects.  The new Prepay Plans come with an optional auto-recharge feature that will refill your account when you dip below the 1GB threshhold — so you never run out of encoding bandwidth in the middle of a project.

2. Rackspace Cloud Integration

The only thing better than one cloud… is two! We’re very pleased to kick off an important partnership and great technical integration with our friends at the Rackspace Cloud.  With integrations into the two leading cloud computing providers, you can take advantage of a video encoding service with virtually infinite capacity to scale along with added intelligence to route your encoding job to the processing datacenter closest to your source media’s location. If your media is stored on Amazon’s S3, we will process your jobs on Amazon’s EC2 compute platform. If your media is stored anywhere else, we process your job on our preferred compute platform — the powerful Rackspace Cloud Servers system

3. Basic Plan now includes 5GB (up from 1GB)
Maybe it’s the Holiday spirit… We’ve decided to give a present to all existing and future Basic Plan customers. The Plan now includes 5GBs of encoding bandwidth increased from 1GB. Happy Encoding!

4. Other Stocking Stuffers

The Encoding.com WordPress Plugin allows you to quickly and easily upload video from your computer and insert into your self hosted WordPress blog posts by using the encoding.com platform for automatic transcoding. The plugin is easy to use and comes with a simple encoding setting page and includes a free Flash player from JW Player.  Visit the Encoding.com WordPress Plugin site for more details and to download the plugin.

One of our favorite things about building Encoding.com is the very candid feedback we receive from you, the users of the platform. While we have spent most of our time developing new features and improving performance, we heard from many of you over the past 6 months your dissatisfaction with the Client Interface. That said, we are proud to announce the launch of a major release to our web-based Client Interface.  What was once our Achilles heel we now believe is one of our most impressive features! Of course, you’ll be the judge of that.

No more Media List! The Media List section of the Client Interface previously enabled you to manage individual encoding jobs: add/delete, edit, process and restart.  The UI was slow with a large volume of jobs in the queue, and there was overlap with the Encoding Queue.  It seemed logical to combine the media management functions of the Media List into the Encodign Queue. Now you can edit, delete, process and restart jobs directly from the Encoding Queue. In addition, we have created a special section called “Add Media” which is dedicated to adding individual tasks via a browser from your hard drive, FTP/SFTP. HTTP, or S3 locations.  We have also added live job status updates to the Encoding Queue so you can see the progress of any job in your queue without reloading the page.

Key system metrics added to the Statistics section!
By popular demand, we have  added a few key system metrics to the statistics section, Encoding Success Rate, Average Queue Time, Average Processing time, and Average Connection Speed from your source destination to server to our cloud data processing centers.

Major Speed and Stability Improvements We re-architected the interface from the ground up to improve load times up to 150% faster and more efficiently for a larger set of popular web browsers.

Watch Folder Redesign Finally, we made some minor improvements to the Setup Interface for Watch Folders and the management of large numbers of Watch Folders.

Please don’t be shy and let us know what you think. It’s ok, we can take it. Praise is welcome as well — the positive reinforcement seems to work for our 6-year old kids. :)

Thanks,
- Gregg and Jeff

Hey Everyone,

Wow. Thank you very much for helping choose us as a finalist for a second category in the Streaming Media Readers’ Choice Awards: Best Transcoding SaaS.

Winners will be announced at a gala reception at the Streaming Media West show on November 19th in San Jose, CA. Your continued support is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
- Gregg and Jeff

Hey Everyone,

Hot off the press…Encoding.com was selected as a finalists for the Best Online Video Technology Startup for 2009 for the Streaming Media Readers Choice Awards.  Winners will be announced at a gala reception at the Streaming Media West on November 19th in San Jose, CA.  A special thank you to everyone who took the time to vote for us!

Thanks you.
- Gregg and Jeff

We are so excited to announce the launch of our new Adobe Air application called Encoding.com Desktop. Imagine the power of cloud-based encoding with the convenience of desktop uploading and management… now you don’t have to. Just drag and drop your media files into the app window, choose your encoding output, and click upload. It’s that simple. And, you can keep working (or playing) at your Mac or PC while all the heavy crunching is done in our cloud platform. Want the encoded videos delivered to your FTP, S3 or CloudFiles location? No problem.

Watch out Squeeze and Episode, we’re about to steal your market share. (OK, not very humble but we are excited.)

For those of you who will continue to utilize our API or Watch Folders as your integration method, you can utilize Encoding.com Desktop to manage your queue in real-time.

As with anything we launch, we’d love to hear from you. Please let us know what you think and how we can improve Encoding.com Desktop going forward.

Check it out… it’s really slick. www.encoding.com/desktop