#videorecon

Earlier this year, IBM nominated candidates to be named IBM Champions for Cloud. The IBM Champion program recognizes innovative thought leaders in the technical community. We are excited to announce that we have not one but THREE Cloud Champions at BlueChasm!

Definition of an IBM Champion: 

“An IBM Champion is an IT professional, business leader, developer, or educator who influences and mentors others to help them make best use of IBM software, solutions, and services. These individuals evangelize IBM solutions, share their knowledge and help grow the community of professionals who are focused on IBM Cloud. IBM Champions spend a considerable amount of their own time, energy and resources on community efforts—organizing and leading user group events, answering questions in forums, contributing wiki articles and applications, publishing podcasts, sharing instructional videos, and more!"

Meet our IBM Champions: 

Andy Lin: Co-Founder 

Andy Lin is the Co-Founder of BlueChasm where he is responsible for helping to drive strategy and execution for key initiatives company-wide.  One of Andy’s focus areas has been leading BlueChasm’s capabilities in supporting digital IT strategies, which include helping clients build tech stacks not only for business-critical core applications, but also for cloud-native, hybrid platforms that revolve around open source, cloud, analytics, mobile, cognitive/AI, and IoT.  Andy is an IBM Champion for Cloud and Power Systems, and an IBM Redbooks published author. 

Ryan Van Alstine: CTO and Co-Founder 

Ryan VanAlstine serves as CTO and Lead Developer for BlueChasm. Ryan is charged with product and technical direction and leads the team of developers in building platforms and prototypes, mostly on the IBM Cloud and Bluemix stacks. Ryan was a Co-Founder of BlueChasm in late 2014 with Andy and is an IBM Champion for Cloud. He is also an active community member and advocate for Server-side Swift, much of it after serving as an iOS consultant and working with both large companies and startups, prior to founding BlueChasm. 

Robert Rios: Software Developer 

Robert Rios serves as a software developer for BlueChasm. Robert grew up coding, having written his first script in middle school, which was designed to automate tasks on a Windows computer. At BlueChasm, Robert has been the inspiration for many of our platforms and prototypes, including creating the first version of VideoRecon. Robert also open sourced the community’s first npm package for IBM Cloud Object Storage (then Cleversafe) and has been active in writing about how to code efficiently on IBM Bluemix, IBM Cloud Object Storage, and on the IBM stack. Robert is an IBM Champion for Cloud and has led sessions at Watson Developer Conference, World of Watson, and InterConnect. 

By Ann Marie Woodburn

Last week, IBM announced a new cloud service that will analyze videos. The tool will utilize the IBM Watson platform to analyze the video for keywords, concepts, images, tone, and emotional context. We are looking forward to the release of this new service at the end of the year as it complements our VideoRecon platform. IBM’s entrance in the market validates what we have believed for the past year and what our users have been testing for the past 6 months. Now that the ecosystem is starting to grow, we have extended our platform to focus on solving specific enterprise use cases.

VideoRecon is a platform that uses deep learning to “watch” and “listen” to videos. It returns “auto-tags” based on objects, audio, and descriptions it identifies in the video content. These tags make the video file easier to search, filter, and analyze. Currently, businesses manually tag each video by hand which can lead to human error, bias, and higher headcount depending on the quantity of videos and timeline for which the data is needed.

VideoRecon uses several of Watson’s APIs such as speech to text, tone analyzer, personality insights, natural language understanding, and visual recognition, IBM Cloud Object Storage plus our own unique services.

In the announcement, it discusses the impact this will have on media and entertainment companies to manage their content libraries. Not only in media and entertainment is this valuable but in education to analyze classroom videos, marketing or support videos posted online for clients, and even internal videos used for training or communications. The value of VideoRecon and IBM’s video service is that it enables users to more accurately tag videos, search and filter with ease, and view analytics more quickly.

Stay tuned as we roll out our new VideoRecon services and integrate with IBM’s video service in the next couple of months. If you would like to learn more about VideoRecon please reach out to us or sign up for beta access to our VideoRecon API or VideoRecon upload portal. If you would like to work with our platform in another way, please let us know!