The day was started by one of the veterans in Swedish business, Jan Carlzon, who talked about his experiences about advertising. You can catch some reflections from Jan about his performance on stage here.

The Lemonwhale Cloud Video Platform enables VK.se to focus on editorial actions rather than technological ones, which are taking care of by Lemonwhale. Our extensive Cloud Video API has been used to develop the HTML5 based Play TV portal. Automatic flow of video content from Scanpix and seamless integration of Ad Server engine Videoplaza are some key elements in the Web TV implementation.

Video on Demand with full HTML5 support and Liveacasts for a global audience has been secured by the usage of Lemonwhale Cloud Video platform. We are looking forward to support the national team entering the Olympic games this summer i London. You will also be able to follow the players closer than ever before by the usage of videoblogs from individual players.

There are several noticeable things with the acqusition:

• Just before the acquisition Instagram actually closed a $50M investment round, those investors instantly doubled their money
• The instagram user base on iOS alone is 27 million and when they launched their Android app it received 1million downloads in the first 24 hours
• This indicates that Facebook could potentially become a common exit option if you manage to build something that scales fast enough

The next step after image sharing is naturally video sharing. We have long believed that video sharing from the Smartphone will be a key feature and have therefore devloped the Mobile Send application to capture and upload videos from your Smartphone with direct publishing to your blog etc.

Lexicon and Lemonwhale see a great potential in this Business School concept delivering customized video content to companies workforces. This concept has really started to get market footprint where we are preparing for delivery to more than 50 new customers during 2012.

Many individual companies do A/B testing specific types of videos on their own home pages, but these numbers are not usually disclosed, and we have yet to see industry-wide studies looking at the effects of these specific videos. However, the effectiveness of product videos in the ecommerce and retail space is well-documented, and the same factors that help these videos sell products seem to apply to promoting websites and apps as well. That is typically our experience of the companies that keep track and disclosed the data to us, videos usually improved conversion rates by 15%-75%.

Why Video?

Help your fans evangelize your product. Video is an extra standalone tool that can be easily shared on Facebook or Twitter. Our favorite example of this is Visual.ly – Visual.ly had over 80,000 signups from a video on its LaunchRock page… months before the company actually went live.

Tips on making videos:

If you are going to make a video, here a few basic rules to keep in mind:

1. Don’t make a “viral” video. While there are extremely successful and truly viral videos out there people don’t usually realize the time, effort, and experience required to create something people actually want to share. And even if they do, virality itself is unpredictable. Most companies would be better off leveraging the existing organic traffic on their site and focus on turning those users into customers, rather than spending resources they may not have trying to designing to get a mass audience to post their videos on their Facebook page. This doesn’t mean the video needs to be a PowerPoint pitch deck, or that it can’t be engaging, but that the top priority should be to explain how a product fits into a user’s life, and not shareability.

2. Don’t just make a product walkthrough. Product walkthroughs have their place, but they are only effective after the user understands what the product is about in the first place. Don’t just do a product demo, starting at the login screen, and walking through all the features. Answer the question, “How does this product fit into my life?”, or “Why should I use this?”, before answering “How does this work?”. You want to pique the user’s interest with the video, then let them figure how the product works on their own, by signing up and using it. Having said that…

3. Prioritize your message and keep it short. It is tempting to want to present every use case, every benefit, to as many different audiences as possible, as you might in a pitch deck. However, the sweet spot for these videos tend to be around 45-90 seconds. Shorter than 45 seconds feels sales-y and incomplete, and viewers don’t hang around videos that are longer than 90 seconds, so putting too much in there hurts you. That means that you should pick just a few messages to put in the video Are you targeting your dream user, or are you catering to early adopters (i.e.: “Normals” vs “TechCrunch Readers”)? Are you trying to differentiate yourselves from an established competitor? Are you solving a problem that hasn’t been tackled, or is it a new solution to an old problem? Is there information that all users must know about your product ahead of time to use it effectively? These are the types of questions that help determine what goes into a final video. Focus on the three most important things, and then let them move on from the video to your product.

4. Include a call to action at the end. Videos perform better if the user knows what to do after the video is done. And if you tell a user to download a product, make sure there is a prominent “Download” button next to the video at all times. (See: Flipboard).

5. Prominently feature the video. The video does little good if it is hidden behind a lot of links. Put it on your home page, and place a large “play” button on a still of the video for maximum effectiveness. (See: Nextdoor).

6. Quality matters. While you may now be tempted to grab your camcorder and record a video of your product, the production quality does matter. A concise script, good design, clear visuals, and good quality audio all make a difference in whether users watch the video, and how they react to it and to your product. This is especially true if your product has privacy implications, or is business to business – an amateurish production may give the impression that the company is not reputable and is run from a college dorm room.

Our developers at Lemonwhale have been power users of other websites APIs for a long time and in that process we have understood what works and what does not. One of the things that we just hate is when the API dictates us to use a certain language or format. This was one of the first things we solve in our API by allowing developers to decide between XML, JSON and JSONP when exchanging information with our API.

One of the best proof points for our API is that we regularly use it for customer projects ourselves. Thus we notice what is missing or difficult. One of the latest features that we added was support for playlists so that besides the category lists available already you can also work with playlists in the API. If you have questions, comments or suggestions, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Lemonwhale’s Cloud Video portfolio fits perfect into DPS’s offering in the digital market place. First case out will be Nordic E-Commerce Summit May 9-10th where Video on Demand, Livecasts and Videoblog will be used both for internal and external use.

Lemonwhale is taking major steps into the India market and has just in 2 months executed 50 customer meetings, secured two trials and managed to secure one sale channel partner. Moreover, we have 3 parallell ongoing discussions on Livecasts. India is a very demanding market where physical distance, multi language and deep technical knowhow is combined in a complex way. Key is to find good sales people with personal contacts within the industry. Let’s come back to what happens in India, we can’t wait to see what our skilled India department will achieve;-)