Itai Lahan, Snapchat for brands, and artificially intelligent design – VB Engage

In this week’s episode, Stewart and Travis discuss the impact AI is having on the way websites are designed. AI is now building millions of creative elements for us, and we’re starting to move away from curated, static web pages.

We interview Itai Lahan of Cloudinary on the future of images and video and how technology can still offer up a few surprises in that area, especially as smartphones and mobile internet access expand across third-world countries. And in the news, we talk about the free ride brands are getting from Snapchat, and how long it might (not) last.

By listening to this episode of the VB Engage podcast, you will hear:

• Welcome to VB Engage episode 40! [00:10]
• New report by Snaplytics on Snapchat pre-IPO statistics [01:20]
• Snapchat has 161 million daily users, 25-28 minutes of app usage daily [02:10]
• Snaplytics analyzed 500 brands on Snapchat: 24,000 stories and over 270,000 snaps [02:20]
• Do they get opened? [02:55]
• Do people watch to the end of the story? [03:15]
• Brands are getting a free ride [03:50]
• Snapchat is terrible for discovery [04:25]
• We talk about Stewart’s big box for Snapchat (not a euphemism) [05:25]
• Brands are getting better at using Snapcodes and deep links [06:00]
• Stewart is 147 years old this year [06:25]
• Bryan Kramer needs to rebrand as Human to AI [07:10]
• Likelihood’s AI-design platform flexes the power of a million creations per second [07:35]
• Most ecommerce uses the “trays and pray” philosophy [07:50]
• Amplero, RankEngine, FollowAnalytics are recent AI startups that we’ve covered  [09:45]
• These tools are set up to take away the menial tasks [10:20]
• Make Marketers Great Again! [12:00]
• Influential.com is partnering with IBM Watson to augment intelligence around influencer marketing [12:50]
• Forrester surveyed marketers about artificial intelligence, and the results are surprising [13:35]
• VB Engage is offering a sweet competition in the upcoming weeks [15:15]
• Welcome Itai Lahan, CEO of Cloudinary, to VB Engage! [16:30]
• Image management is so important to optimize across mobile and desktop internet
• You need high-quality images and videos, and you need to be able to access all markets around the world [16:55]
• Images are a central piece of every website’s user experience [17:25]
• The more modern the website, the greater the focus on images [18:05]
• New thinking is required to adapt the desktop web experience to mobile [18:35]
• Average ecommerce sites have hundreds of thousands of products, with dozens of images per product [19:00]
• Adapting images to each and every device, size, and browser is a challenge [19:45]
• Consumers are never satisfied. They expect 360-degree versions of products and videos [20:35]
• Cloudinary creates one URL for the image and automatically deploys the right image according to the device, browser, and space available [21:00]
• The whole notion of adapting images for responsive design is a complex process [21:40]
• When you resize on the client side, you are downloading huge images unnecessarily [22:20]
• Google launched WebP image format and the Microsoft JPEG XR format for Edge [23:30]
• Customers get impatient when you have a longer page-loading time [24:25]
• “I WANT IT NOW!!” – Veruca Salt of Willy Wonka [24:45]
• Cloudinary is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution [25:45]
• 40 percent of companies surveyed build their own stuff in-house [26:05]
• Have your developers work on your products and let Cloudinary manage your images [29:05]
• It has plugins to WordPress, Magento, and Drupal, and you can use it as a Digital Asset Management alternative and delivered via a fast CDN [29:50]
• Cloudinary programmatically determines which media is the best wherever it’s needed [30:20]

Next week, we interview Mitchell Reichgut, CEO of Jun Group, and talk mobile advertising. Jun means “truth” in Japanese. The company claims its advertising platform is the honest, efficient way to get millions of people to engage with video and branded content across devices.

If you missed last week’s episode VB 039, Travis and Stewart interviewed Howard Love, author of The Startup J-Curve.

We discussed how startups can succeed and how the “always mobile, always connected” customer has changed the landscape forever.

As always, thanks for tuning in. We can’t rely on AI bots to review and subscribe to VB Engage — that’s something you have to do for yourself. Thanks in advance for being human.