Q3 2008
Green Cathedral launches FamilyCam, a new online video service for family video collections
Q2 2008
Cambridge IPTV delivers unique academic video search projects to Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Q3 2007
Green Cathedral Sells GCDM Limited To Golley Slater Group
Q1 2007
Cambridge IPTV Launches DNA Interactive Channel Pilot
Green Cathedral launches FamilyCam, a new online video service for family video collections
September 2008
Green Cathedral has unveiled FamilyCam, the latest spin-off from its R&D labs. FamilyCam (www.familycam.com) is a new online video service whose mission is to make it as easy as possible for its members to enjoy and to organise their full-length home movies and share them securely with trusted friends and family members located anywhere in the world.
FamilyCam gives its users instant broadband access to their entire home movies collections, enabling them to organise it all and to know that it's all stored safely and securely ready to browse, watch and share at exceptional quality whenever they want.
With FamilyCam, users can store very large quantities of full length home camcorder movies and legacy cine films. Part of the model is to provide a professional media digitisation service to help users import their existing family movie collections from tape, cine and DVD media formats.
FamilyCam also provides its own free movie maker and uploading software to enable all its users to upload videos in almost any digital format to their FamilyCam collections, including movies shot on mobile phones and pocket digital cameras. Many people who buy hard-drive camcorders or who capture video on other digital devices have difficulty dealing with the cascade of video clips they create on such cameras. The FamilyCam upload software solves this problem because it lets people stitch together multiple video files to create perfect movies and then upload them.
FamilyCam has been in stealth development within Green Cathedral since 2006 and draws together all the expertise gained and innovations made since the company's decision in 2005 to shift its focus towards online video technologies.
One of the pivotal innovations incorporated into FamilyCam is a suite of scene tagging tools to enable users to write short descriptive tags about different scenes in their movies. Users and their invited guests can then run searches for scenes they've tagged so they can jump to those scenes instantly and enjoy them. The Familycam scene tagging and search technology was developed and patented by Green Cathedral's video search spin-off, Doovle Limited.
Another innovation unique to FamilyCam is its emphasis on giving all its users their own personal Internet home video channel. The Familycam website at www.familycam.com is where users sign up and manage their accounts and movies, but to watch the movies themselves, users open up their own personal video channel which is designed to display perfectly on PCs, Macs and HDTV screens. The FamilyCam video channel technology was developed by Green Cathedral's Internet TV channel spin-off, Cambridge IPTV Limited.
Dr Michael Woodley, FamilyCam technical founder and CEO commented: "The days are gone when the excitement of watching cine reels with a projector in the living room was sufficient reward to justify the effort. Today, people shoot family video so easily that the comparative effort of later finding the right scene on the right tape or disc and watching it seems to be too much. Everyone in the family can shoot it but the magic of presenting it has somehow been lost.
"With FamilyCam, we can change that and we want to rekindle the excitement of the magic lantern show in the living room. Having a FamilyCam channel is meant to be a life-long project and one that members will pass on to their heirs, so that eventually generations are spanned.
"When several members of a family each have their own FamilyCam channel, this opens a new dimension of multiple home video collections all linked together in a family tree. One generation starts the process and subsequent generations inherit and add to what was started. YouTube is where you put funny clips of your skateboarding cat. FamilyCam is a place where you can build an accessible archive of your precious and private family memories."
The FamilyCam service has been undergoing private trials with 50 families whose enthusiasm and feedback has helped refine the product to make it even more compelling and simple to use. Now, FamilyCam is open to the public and any UK resident can sign up free of charge and start using the service. Not surprisingly, the company has produced a set of online videos to introduce the service to new users and to help all users get to grips with some of the more advanced features such as guest sharing, scene tagging and video scene browsing.
All users are given one hour of high-quality video storage for free and can then upgrade to a range of subscription packages giving from 10 to 100 hours. All video streaming for users and their invited guests is free and guests can login from anywhere in the world.
Business Focus
Green Cathedral's plan for FamilyCam Limited is to grow its online subscription business and its offline media conversion business independently in the UK to begin with, followed by launches in other countries. The company is already in discussions with camcorder manufacturers and major retailers with a view to providing FamilyCam accounts with new camcorder purchases, especially hard-drive and solid-state drive cameras which record straight to digital formats.
Technology Focus
FamilyCam uses the latest Adobe Flash H264 video streaming standards and claims to have one of the finest Flash video players in the world, providing an amazing and identical experience on Windows PCs and Apple Macs. Dr Woodley commented: "We spent a long time trying other video standards such as Quicktime, FLV and Windows Media. But Quicktime has no full-screen streaming capability, FLV streams well but is difficult to work with and WMV is a closed and inferior format that just doesn't stream on Macs, even using the rather buggy Microsoft Silverlight plugins. When Adobe announced H264/MP4 support for its Flash media streaming server, we found our answer."
About FamilyCam Limited
FamilyCam began life in 2006 as a project within Green Cathedral. FamilyCam Limited was incorporated in 2007 with a founding team including Chairman, Mark Bernstein (ex Geocities, Gameplay and AOL) and Operations Director, Giles Hutchison (ex Reciva).
For more on FamilyCam, see www.familycam.com.
For more on Doovle, see www.doovle.com.
Cambridge IPTV delivers unique academic video search projects to Howard Hughes Medical Institute
May 2008
Green Cathedral, the Cambridge technology incubator, and its subsidiary Cambridge IPTV have produced two unique and fully searchable Internet video web sites for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and Cold Spring Harbor Labs in the US.
The first project, DNA Interactive, is dedicated to the moment on February 28, 1953, when Jim Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double-helical structure of DNA and to the scientists who breathed life into that structure. Over 60 leading scientists, including 11 Nobel Laureates, were interviewed for their viewpoints on how we came to understand the language of DNA, how we bend it to our own service, and what it can tell us about who we are.
The DNA Interactive project enables students and academics to search and to watch on their computers over 150 hours of detailed interviews with world-renowned DNA scientists including Jim Watson, Linus Pauling, Sydney Brenner, Mario Capechi, Tom Cech, Fred Sanger and Craig Venter.
The DNAi video archive site has been produced in the form of an Internet TV channel using the unique Cambridge IPTV channel creation platform. It also uses GC's patented Doovle video soundtrack search technology which makes it possible for users to search for words and phrases that occur in any of the video interviews and to watch matched scenes immediately.
Dr Michael Woodley, Green Cathedral CEO commented: "It is a fantastic privilege to have been invited to deliver this project and to work with an organisation with the reputation and reach of HHMI. Having cut my own scientific teeth as a researcher at the Chemistry labs at Cambridge University, and having gone on to build Green Cathedral in Cambridge rather than London, it's been a great pleasure to work on a project devoted to DNA whose structure discovery has been so central to the standing of Cambridge as a global centre of science and technology."
To access DNAi, see www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/videosearch.html
The DNAi project was delivered along with another Internet video site devoted to the annual Holliday Lectures at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The HHMI Holiday Lectures span subjects including genetics, evolution, genomics, RNA, stem cells, and cancer.
Previously distributed on DVD to students at HHMI and other US universities, the new Holiday Lectures video archive is now available to search and to watch at high quality over the Internet from any country. And, of course, the entire collection of five lecture series is fully searchable, thanks to Green Cathedral's Doovle video search technology, enabling students to jump straight to the parts of the lectures they want to watch.
Technology Focus The video archive sites built for HHMI by Green Cathedral and its subsidiaries use the latest Quicktime H264 video standards and a relatively high video streaming bitrate of 512kbps with a widescreen Quicktime player. Dr Woodley explained: "Working with Windfall, we chose H264 Quicktime streaming because of the quality and because it is such a natural export from professional video editing systems. And it works so well with our Doovle video search because you can invoke Quicktime streams at precise start times."
About DNA Interactive DNA Interactive was commissioned and produced by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories to commemorate the 50 years of the discovery of the strcture of DNA. Filming and Video production was by Windfall Films and Windfall Digital. Molecular Animations were produced by Drew Berry at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research. Internet TV Production was by Cambridge IPTV with video search technology by Doovle.
To access DNAi & the HHMI Holiday Lectures, go to www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/videosearch.html For more on Doovle, see www.doovle.com
Green Cathedral Sells GCDM Limited To Golley Slater Group
July 2007
Green Cathedral has sold its main operating subsidiary, GCDM Limited, to Golley Slater Group in a 100% cash deal that was completed on July 19th 2007. The deal represents a major change of direction for the founders of Green Cathedral, Dr Michael Woodley and Paul Putwain.
GCDM stands for "Green Cathedral Digital Marketing" but the business will now trade as Golley Slater Digital.
The entire management and staff of GCDM (47 people) have now joined Golley Slater. Those based in the Cambridge office will remain at that location and those based in the London office will join Golley Slater's London team.
Dr Woodley and Mr Putwain have left the board of GCDM but they remain as controlling shareholders and directors of Green Cathedral and plan to pursue new technology incubation and investment opportunities alongside their Chairman, Mark Bernstein. These include two 2006 spin-outs, Cambridge IPTV Limited, an Internet TV channel developer, and Doovle Limited a supplier of patented video soundtrack search technology known as Doovle®.
GCDM Limited was established by Green Cathedral in 2001 as a pure digital marketing agency and grew rapidly to become a well respected UK online marketing and search engine marketing supplier. In 2005 GCDM was merged with Green Cathedral Interactive Limited, the original web solutions business upon which Green Cathedral itself was founded. The combined full-service agency enjoyed strong revenue growth under its MD, Paul O'Donoghue, and FD, David Manston, reaching £6m in 2006 and forecasting £7.5m for 2007. The agency is ranked 14th in the top 100 UK digital agencies list published by New Media Age and has always stood out as one of the largest independent digital agencies in Britain and certainly the largest digital agency in Cambridge with clients including Open University, CenterParcs, PCWorld, TrafficMaster and Business Link.
Dr Woodley, Chief Executive of Green Cathedral comments, "Having watched our digital marketing business grow from strength to strength, we are delighted to see the company under the new ownership of a group with the reputation and the reach of Golly Slater. We wish them every success in the future."
"This deal represents a turning point for the business we started in 1996 with a £30,000 bank loan. Having devoted most of our endeavours over the last 10 or 11 years to designing and building complex web sites and to providing online marketing and search engine marketing solutions to very prestigious clients, we now plan to devote the next 10 years to developing our Internet TV and video search businesses. We think it's all now going to be about moving pictures."
GCDM's managing director, Paul O'Donoghue, who will head up the newly expanded company, Golley Slater Digital, comments, "There has been considerable interest from many companies in acquiring us but we were impressed by Golley Slater's culture, ethos, passion for Digital and vision for future integrated marketing services".
CEO of Golley Slater, Chris Lovell, commented "Our own digital business has been growing rapidly. However this acquisition provides Golley Slater with a step change in its ability to service the increasing demands from our clients for digital expertise. The digital arena touches all parts of our business, and in Green Cathedral we have acquired a management team and digital practitioners who understand how digital interfaces into other marketing disciplines adding further strength to our integrated offering."
Cambridge IPTV Launches DNA Interactive Channel Pilot
February 2007
DNA Interactive (DNAi) is an educational DVD produced by Windfall Digital and funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).
It is dedicated to the moment on February 28, 1953, when Jim Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double-helical structure of DNA – and to the scientists who breathed life into that structure. Over 60 leading scientists, including 11 Nobel Laureates, were interviewed for their viewpoints on how we came to understand the language of DNA, how we bend it to our own service, and what it can tell us about who we are.
Together with Windfall Digital, Cambridge IPTV has produced an Internet TV version of the BAFTA award-winning DVD that can be viewed on any Mac or PC equipped with a broadband connection.
Using the unique Cambridge IPTV video delivery and channel creation platform, as well as integrating GC's patented Doovle® video soundtrack search technology, the DNAi pilot enables students to watch on their computers all of the themed programmes, animations or interviews from the original DNAi DVD and to search for words and phrases that occur in any of the videos and to watch matched clips immediatley.
The DNA Interactive IPTV pilot site can be Watched Here.