Mediafly

Product Update 2013 Q1

Jason Shah — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 20:31:13 +0000

Welcome to the Mediafly Product Update for Q1 2013. In this post, we will cover new features to the entire Mediafly Platform made available over the first quarter of 2013. If you are an existing customer and have any questions, or want to learn more about how Mediafly’s Solutions can help your business, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Interactive User Interfaces

Jane, ACME’s VP of Marketing, likes the stock ACME Anvil user interface. Likes, not loves. She wants something unique and custom to ACME’s new branding and approach.

She wants a user interface that has a left column and lays out the next level like a contact sheet, to match the specific vision she has in mind.

Using Mediafly’s new Interactives feature, she can work with her ACME design team to make this vision come to life, in a matter of weeks and for no additional fees. Or, she can engage Mediafly to help her build a compelling Interactive UI to frame her content in a different light, quickly and easily.

Before

After

This change is just the tip of the iceberg. With Interactives, we can construct interactive, two-way user interfaces that tie to CMS and financial systems, build dashboards, and so much more.

Mediafly Interactives are available for all of our customers on iPad and iPhone. Support for Android, Windows 8, and web are coming soon.

PDF Page Selector

Joe, a Sales Rep for ACME Anvil was given access to a huge PowerPoint deck through his company’s Mediafly SalesKit app. He opens it up and wants to jump around within it.

With Mediafly SalesKit on iOS, he taps on the new “Page Selector” icon at the bottom left:

This brings up the the Page Selector interface.

He drags the screen down to find the page he’s looking for, then taps again to bring that page up.

Android and Windows 8 enhanced security

Tim, ACME’s Director of IT, has been witnessing an explosion of Android and Windows 8 phones and tablets using the Mediafly ACME Anvil app. However, he has always been concerned about the security of these platforms: security was never a strong suit of Android, and Windows 8 is very new.

However, Mediafly has him covered. The same content security and encryption technology that found its way into the iPad/iPhone apps has now made its way into the Android and Windows 8 apps. Tim can rest knowing that content that reaches the Android and Windows 8 ACME apps:

Ensure all content is encrypted in transit and at rest
Have exchanged encryption keys securely
Support ACME’s enterprise-wide content policies (conditional access, revocation, phone-home, and more)
Can help them plug any holes in the data flow through forensic watermarking

Enhanced security for Android and Windows 8 is available for all SalesKit and ProReview enterprise customers that use these platforms.

Airship improvements

Maria, ACME’s Marketing Manager, manages the content available to reps through Mediafly Airship, Mediafly’s content management system. She uses Airship once every few weeks to update content in bulk. Over the course of Q1, she noticed a number of improvements:

Maria’s view of Airship is now branded to her company in a beautiful way.

Airship became significantly faster for her. Some pages that may have taken approximately 10 seconds for her to load in the past now load in under 1 second.
Maria now gets an immediate understanding of who can access what.

User Registration System

Jane, ACME’s VP of Marketing, is putting together an event at the annual Anvils Galore Convention. She is working with Mediafly to produce an app for that convention, and wants users to have the ability to sign up for access to the app. She uses Mediafly’s new Registration System to set up a registration site for her event.

SAML 2.0

Tim, ACME’s Director of IT, sees the Mediafly ACME Anvil app as a huge benefit to sales and marketing, but doesn’t want reps to have to maintain yet another username/password with an external vendor. ACME had recently adopted SAML 2.0, an authentication and authorization specification, to allow vendors to connect to ACME employees but retain central control over rights.

Fortunately, Mediafly just completed its connector for SAML this past quarter into its iPad and iPhone apps, and it is available at no additional charge. Support for Android, Windows 8, and web are coming soon.

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Mediafly’s CTO and CFO share their expertise with the community

Stefanie Kljucaric — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 16:16:33 +0000

Mediafly’s own Jason Shah and John Evarts are busy sharing their expertise with the world this week.

Jason Shah, Mediafly’s CTO, joined a panel of experts Monday at this year’s NAB Show. The panel’s focus was addressing the remaining pitfalls that cause producers and distributors to resist moving to the cloud. The cloud sometimes makes content creators and distributors feel uneasy, especially with regard to security and reliability. Jason’s expertise in handling sensitive media successfully on the cloud for three of the four major broadcast networks made him a perfect addition to the panel. (Read the full press release here)

Later this week John Evarts, Mediafly’s CFO & COO, will be giving the keynote address at The Aberdeen Supply Chain Management Summit. The summit has emerged as the leading forum where over 200 top supply chain executives convene to explore topics related to the theme of Supply Chain Innovation – Engine for Growth. John will use his expertise in strategic, financial and operational leadership to address financing options, e-invoicing and how leading companies are using factoring and dynamic discounting to deliver higher effective discount rates. (Read full press release here)

We thank Jason and John for sharing their knowledge gained at Mediafly with the rest of the community.

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Study: Tablets Becoming Favored Device for Writing Email

Keith Waxelman — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 20:15:29 +0000

eMarketer recently highlighted an interesting behavioral trend among tablet users. Based upon a study of 4,400 iPad users in the US, conducted by Perion, tablets have now evolved into a favorite device not only for reading, but also for writing emails.

Tablets have long been touted as great ways to consume content, while many have dismissed their use for either personal or business email. However, from the Perion study,

“The most preferred device for reading emails is the Tablet (55%) followed by the PC/Mac (32%) and Mobile Phone (10%)”
“The most preferred device for writing emails is the Tablet (48%) followed by the PC/Mac (41%) and Mobile Phone (9%)”
Giving further detail, of those using tablets for email, “38 percent used the iPad for both personal and work emails, debunking the idea that the iPad was a purely leisure product.”

With users in the field embracing tablets for both presentation and email purposes, many may choose to leave their laptops behind. At Mediafly, we have witnessed this trend in many organizations, as enterprise mobility continues to expand its presence and users become comfortable navigating their tablets. Companies that initially adopted tablets strictly for executives and sales enablement have expanded usage to operations, engineering, partners, and beyond.

Mediafly’s clients rave about our enterprise content mobility solutions like SalesKit and their ease of use on tablets in the field. Let us know if you’re curious to learn more.

Click here for the eMarketer article: For Email, Users Reach for the iPad

Click here for the original study by Perion: Majority of iPad Owners Say It Is Their Preferred Device for Reading and Writing Email

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Mediafly in SAP earnings call

cconant — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 04:12:28 +0000

Mediafly was mentioned by our friends at SAP in the earnings call this week.

At 45:53 Mediafly is discussed, in particular how Mediafly has leveraged Ariba’s Dynamic Discounting to access capital from our customers quicker allowing us to invest quicker in new features

The Mediafly logo is also highlighted at 41:00 and 43:53

Use the link below and drag the slider to 45:53 to hear the mention of Mediafly.

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iBooks for the Enterprise

Jason Shah — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 15:00:08 +0000

iBooks are a wonderful addition to the iPad. Available since 2010, they provide a rich, immersive experience for readers. The experience is so good that some companies create iBooks for their sales teams, to be used for sales presentations, training materials, corporate communication, marketing, or other reasons.

However, there are many challenges with using iBooks in an enterprise environment:

Once downloaded, the iBook is entirely out of control of the enterprise.
Ensuring users update their iBooks is hard, as it requires them to click on links.
iBooks can be huge files, particularly if they embed video and other content.
Changing a small part of an iBook requires republishing the entire iBook.
Reporting for iBooks does not exist.

Addressing challenges like these, Mediafly created Interactives, a class of technology that enables enterprise organizations to publish immersive packages of content through the Mediafly SalesKit platform. With Interactives, companies can create the immersive experience they expect with iBooks while gaining the benefits of control, reporting, and updates that were lost with iBooks. Mediafly partnered with a Fortune 500 global foods company to launch their first Interactive, a direct conversion of an immersive sales-focused iBook, for over 10,000 sales reps.

To learn more, read about iBooks for the Enterprise. If you are an organization looking to tame iBooks in your organization, please don’t hesitate to contact us today.

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Mediafly’s Predictions for 2013

Keith Waxelman — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 22:50:35 +0000

At Mediafly, we have a unique perspective on media consumption. Between our private- and public-facing clients, we have seen a variety of mixed media consumption patterns through the years. Now that enterprise mobility has reached a feverish pace, we’ve helped clients with BYOD, CYOD / corporate-purchased smart devices, combinations therein, and teams who have fully embraced tablets for sales enablement purposes. Within many companies, tablets have truly accelerated the pace and perceived need for enterprise mobility to be implemented ASAP. As we mentioned last year, our past private trend predictions were fairly accurate. For 2012, we went on a limb and made some of our predictions public.

Let’s see how we did for 2012 and then delve into what we see for 2013.

Mediafly’s 2012 Predictions & Results:

1.) iPad will continue to dominate as an enterprise sales tool, but Android tablets will finally start making inroads. Nearly every tablet-adoption-in-the-enterprise story today centers around the iPad. Our own data justifies that; while enterprise talk about wanting to be able to support Android, up through 2011 this hasn’t yet become a priority. We believe that in 2012 this will start to change, as Android’s latest Ice Cream Sandwich operating system and beyond close the ‘sexiness’ gap between Android and iOS.

Yea or Nay? Yea: In our experiences, iPad does continue to dominate the enterprise tablet scene. Nay: We have not seen Android make significant inroads yet, although Windows 8 could have something to say about enterprise penetration. However, that’s something for 2013 predictions…

2.) Sales and executives will continue to be the first recipients of tablet devices. No surprises here. Mobile staff that interact with customers and decision makers have been, and will continue to be, the first to receive these devices within every organization.

Yea or Nay? Yea: from the enterprises purchasing tablets, the sales and executive teams continue to be the first in line. As enterprise mobility spreads throughout the workforce, such as to field support teams, creative teams, and beyond, this trend will likely dissipate.

2a.) These recipients will continue to carry around their laptops until they get a more robust feature set from their tablets. While tablets today are fantastic for email, media consumption and gaming, their web browsers are mediocre and their enterprise app support is in its infancy. As enterprise software and service makers continue to evolve their products for tablets, the PC will become less necessary. But outside of a few key markets and their leading vendors (CRM: Salesforce, Presentation creation: Keynote, Business Media Presentation: Mediafly), we will not see the true migration in 2012.

Yea or Nay? Mixed. We have seen salespeople completely stop carrying their laptops and briefcases once they have Mediafly’s SalesKit sales enablement solution. At the same time, many people still carry laptops, as they prefer to create files via traditional computers.

3.) IT departments increasingly turn to vendor-supported solutions for enterprise apps. For IT staff that typically work on backend systems, building an iPhone app is shiny and new. However, for IT managers with mandates of migrating to vendor-supported solutions, building an iPhone app in-house goes against the mandate and can be very costly. We expect to see internal IT groups increasingly migrate to vendor-supported app solutions for critical business functions over the course of 2012.

Yea or Nay? Yea: IT staff and even sales and marketing teams have turned to outside solutions, whether cloud-based SaaS platforms like Mediafly, or otherwise. The quality and reliability of enterprise software solutions continues to improve and evolve, making a decision to go with a vendor-supported app solution relatively painless. This allows internal IT staff to focus on core competencies and differentiation where it matters.

4.) IT departments continue to migrate to cloud-based solutions, as costs continue to drop, functionality continues to grow, and service providers continue to mature. Cloud computing functionality and reliability are still raw, but improving steadily. 2011 saw some severe outages from nearly every major cloud vendor, against which each of these vendors have honed their architecture to improve. At the same time, each month reveals new features to make migrating to the cloud a little easier. As these outages are mitigated, and as the functionality improves, traditional IT departments will continue the steady migration of data and processing to the cloud.

Yea or Nay? Yea: As mentioned above, functionality and options continue to increase in enterprise software. The redundancy and scalability of cloud-based solutions, not to mention the affordable nature, really have put them in the forefront of enterprise upgrades. Vendors are learning from the outages of the past and maximizing uptime. As an example of decreasing costs, Amazon just reduced pricing, e.g. dropping S3 pricing by 24-27% for all regions.

5.) Live streaming to mobile and TV devices will become more reliable, as Android and BlackBerry finally adopt HTTP Live Streaming (HLS). Displaying live streaming video to iOS, Roku, and Flash work like a charm. Live streaming to Android is clunky and awkward. We believe that Google will finally fix its broken implementation of HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) in Ice Cream Sandwich or its successor, and finally enable the hundreds of millions of Android devices to seamlessly play live streaming video.

Yea or Nay? Nay. Google only fixed HTTP Live Streaming in Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. At the time of this writing, Android 4.0+ devices account for only 34.2% of the Android ecosystem.

To make matters worse, Adobe took what was a fledgling Live streaming environment on Android (using Flash Player) and drove a knife through it by deciding to stop support Adobe Flash Player on Android.

6.) While HTML5 will make further inroads in the web and on TV devices, native apps will continue to dominate on mobile (iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7). Lots of talk has been made around HTML5 and how it will revolutionize cross-device development. Unfortunately, we are many years away from HTML5 apps providing as seamless a user experience as a native application. User interaction is less responsive, cross-device UI is inconsistent, support for advanced UI and CSS features is mixed, and other issues exist. While progress will be made towards HTML5 surpassing native as the platform of choice, 2012 will not be the year of the tipping point.

Yea or Nay? Yea. Native apps continue to dominate consumer, enterprise and media attention. Furthermore, the pace of innovation for pure browser-based HTML5 apps is severely limited by cross-browser issues and OS limitations. Consumer-focused apps that have unified user interface requirements continue to move away from HTML5.

Now, on to 2013 and a new year of predictions:

1) iPad continues to dominate the enterprise. The Apple iPad, even though some initially dismissed it as a consumer toy, has become the de facto standard at the present time for corporate deployments. We see this in sales reports as well as our own enterprise engagements. We believe the iPad will continue this dominance through 2013

2) Windows 8 will eclipse Android in the enterprise. The Windows 8 tablets have been widely anticipated. While the initial launch didn’t break records, there are many enterprises have held out tablet adoption pending a legitimate Windows entry into the tablet space. As mentioned above, Android has not made significant enterprise inroads at the present, and we don’t see it competing well for the non-Apple crowd vs. the enterprise favorite, Microsoft.

3) As we predicted last year, salespeople and executives will continue to be the first to receive corporate tablets. However, sales enablement and executive review will no longer be enough and tablets will migrate to more departments throughout the enterprise. Field service professionals, creative teams, engineers, and more will embrace tablets in daily workflow and increase the enterprise penetration of tablets.

4) In a significant usage shift, file creation on tablets will become more widespread in 2013. Since they were brought out, tablets have been used primarily as a consumption device- for viewing or experiencing content – versus one used for the creation of enterprise files and documents. However, with native Microsoft Office applications for Windows 8 tablets and rumored iOS and Android versions nearing the release, the world’s most-used office suite will soon be available for corporate productivity. In addition, more tablet productivity applications are embracing document creation and modification capabilities, including devices like the Samsung Galaxy Note series, making tablets closer substitutes for PCs.

5) For new enterprise equipment, sales of tablets will significantly outpace the sales of laptops in 2013. With the increase in functionality outlined above and the availability of decent accessory keyboards (for a more traditional experience), tablets are a more powerful option than ever. In fact, they have now become a viable option for corporate users instead of, not just in addition to, laptops.

6) While hybrid HTML5-native apps lose traction for consumer apps (e.g. Facebook), they continue to gain for enterprise apps. We firmly believe that hybrid HTML5-native apps will be the platform of choice in the future. The cost of creating beautiful, responsive user interfaces is dramatically less expensive and more maintainable than building pure iOS and Android native apps. Others agree. The only real question is “when”, not “if”. It may not be 2013, but 2014 is feeling pretty good.

The Mediafly team wishes you all the best of success in 2013!

Thanks to our clients and partners for your continued support in the market.

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Product Update (Q4 2012)

Jason Shah — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 15:00:15 +0000

Welcome to the Mediafly Product Update for Q4 2012. In this post, we will highlight new features made available over the fourth quarter of 2012. If you are an existing customer and have any questions, or want to learn more about how Mediafly’s Solutions can help your business, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Collections

Joe the Sales Rep has an important meeting with his customer, Globex, today. He plans to present three presentations from three different parts of his hierarchy. However, he knows that this customer likes to throw curveballs, so he wants to have another four documents, price lists, and videos ready for reference.

To do this, Joe creates a collection called “For Globex”.

He adds the various presentations, documents, videos etc. into the collection.

In his meeting, he pulls up the “For Globex” collection. He seamlessly navigates between the items in the collection.

When he’s done, he sends an email “leave-behind” with all of the documents he presented today.

Collections is an extremely powerful feature. One of our client contacts relayed to us a quote from a field sales rep: “Collections have saved an hour of work every week for me, as I prepare dry runs for customer meetings for the coming week.”

Interactives

Jane, ACME’s VP of Marketing, wants to help sales reps tell a better story to illustrate the success of commercials and other TV spots. Based on feedback from Sales, PowerPoint decks are too linear. Customers jump around, and Jane wants to be able to enable her reps to follow along seamlessly in the story. Working with Mediafly, she designs an Interactive™, a new storytelling format that lets her paint her story onto the iPad canvas with off-the-shelf tools.

Surface, Windows RT, and Windows 8 Pro

Jim, ACME’s CIO, is exploring tablets to roll out to ACME’s sales force. iPad is a favorite, but Jim wants to standardize on Microsoft, as that matches the laptop environment in the company. He contacts Mediafly about the possibility of rolling out Surface tablets with the ACME app installed. Good news! Mediafly has been working on a beta of Windows 8/Windows RT apps, specifically for Surface. This helps ensure that, if Jim adopts tablets running Windows 8 in the near term, he will still be able to provide a fantastic selling environment for his team.

Airship User and Group Management

If you haven’t heard, Mediafly Airship is Mediafly’s powerful new web-based Content Management System.

Rebecca, ACME’s VP of Sales, is ready to bring in her sales team into the ACME app. But she wants to ensure that only certain people can see certain folders. Airship’s new user and group management features offer just that.

She logs in and sees “User Management” and “Group Management” across the top.

Within Group Management, she creates a couple of groups that represent territories…

… and creates accounts for her sales reps and adds them to the groups.

She then moves over to Media Management and makes specific folders visible to specific members of her team.

Rebecca’s team now has access to the right media through their ACME app.

We are excited about what these new features mean for Mediafly and for our customers. We plan to continue the rapid pace of innovation into 2013. Stay tuned for more, and Happy New Year!

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Mediafly’s Take on the 2012 Mary Meeker Internet Trends report

Keith Waxelman — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 18:36:56 +0000

Always interesting, Mary Meeker’s Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Internet Trends Report is here for 2012. Through 88 pages, these are some of the items that we found interesting, as they relate to Mediafly’s world of enterprise mobility.

1) There is a movement toward purchasing services vs. owning assets

People are moving away from the traditional “asset-heavy” way of living and towards services that enable sharing or outsourcing for efficiency
Examples of the trend: Spotify, Netflix, and Zipcar are some service-based replacements for traditional asset purchases, while services like TaskRabbit allow outsourcing to gain time and enable focus on core tasks.

This trend is similar to the what we have seen in enterprise software. The traditional model of purchasing software discs with perpetual usage rights has migrated to yearly licensing agreements. Taking another step, cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) models, such as Mediafly offers, enable continuous software updates and improvements with minimal effort.

Mediafly’s SaaS platform empowers companies to outsource enterprise mobility management and allows IT resources to focus on core business efforts, rather than chasing devices.

2) Smartphone OS Adoption. Over the 1st 16 quarters, Android phones were adopted at a rate 6x that of iPhones.

3) Tablet Form Factor Rapidly Embraced. Fewer than three years ago, 2% of US adults owned a tablet or eReader. That figure has now exploded to 29%. With the consumerization of IT in the enterprise, as individuals purchase, companies have tended to follow.

4) Computing forever changed? This trend has big implications for all companies, whether small or a Fortune 500 global leader. Enterprise mobility is here to stay, enabling business efficiencies and boosting revenues through sales enablement efforts. The overwhelming popularity of SalesKit and ProReview speak to this.

Examining current market velocity by the number of computer operating systems shipped in 2012: iOS + Android = 45% share vs. Windows 35%. The PC is no longer king.

Impressively, the global smartphone + tablet installed base should actually exceed the PC installed base in Q2 2013!

Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends report is filled with fantastic information, and we recommend that you review the entire deck from this link.

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Mobile Device Sales to Be “Incredible” 57% of IT Spending Growth in 2013!

Keith Waxelman — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 00:00:54 +0000

Matt Hamblen of Computerworld penned a nice summary of an IDC study demonstrating the tremendous velocity of enterprise mobility and the importance of content mobility today:

“More than half of next year’s expected 5.7% increase in global IT spending will be driven by sales of smartphones, tablets and e-readers, IDC said in a forecast published Friday.

IDC projects that mobile device sales will make up “an incredible” 57% of overall IT spending growth expected in 2013.

Without the mobile spending, the IT business would grow by 2.9%, about the rate of GDP growth worldwide, IDC noted.

Mobile devices were also the biggest segment of IT spending growth in 2012, IDC said.”

For the full article, please visit this link: https://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9234190/Mobile_devices_will_drive_IT_spending_in_2013_IDC_says

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Mediafly Thought Leadership: SAP SME Power of Small Influencer Roundtable

Stefanie Kljucaric — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 17:23:23 +0000

Mediafly is excited to announce that our COO/CFO John Evarts was chosen to speak at a special event today. SAP is holding its first-ever Power of Small Influencer Roundtable in New York City. In this special event featuring SAP Co-CEO Bill McDermott, experts from across the private, public and non-governmental sectors will examine ways to eliminate barriers facing small businesses as they seek access to capital, talent and technology. Panelists will include:

Jorge Silva-Puras, Regional Administrator, US Small Business Administration
Kathryn Wylde, President and CEO, Partnership for New York City
Linda Rottenberg, Founder & CEO, Endeavor
John Evarts, COO and CFO, Mediafly
Sunil Hirani, CEO, trueEX

The Roundtable is part of a broader “SAP SME Summit” day of events, which will showcase what small businesses can do to grow and scale. Moderated panel discussions and Q&A sessions will focus on how SMEs can use mobility, analytics and cloud technologies to drive innovation and business growth.

For additional information, please visit http://www.news-sap.com/sap-sme-summit-2012/

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