Game Time

Originally published on the Clarify.io blog. View archived copy.

As one of the founders of Clarify, I am very excited to have been able to announce the completion of our Seed funding round. I am excited, energized, and little bit terrified.

The last few months have been a wild ride:

• We fundraised,
• we hired some brilliant people,
• we launched our product into private beta, then beta, then production, and
• we even printed some t-shirts.

Over 400 developers have already used our API, which — to me at least — is the most exciting thing of all. We’re clearly building things that people need, and we have a lot more coming.

Our current priority is getting out and meeting you, our potential customers. Our beta users came up with use-cases we hadn’t imagined, and I suspect there are lots more coming.  We’re already talking to developers in education, telecoms, financial services, human resources, healthcare, and media.  Everyone has media files and everyone’s trying to figure out what to do with them.

We all know the problem is getting worse.  Here’s a chart of the data humanity is creating and storing:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Most of that data is audio, video, and still images. Exciting, energizing, and terrifying to consider.

As we start getting our arms around all this data, i.e., as we start being able to use and interact with all this media, things get more and more interesting. I recently began talking about where I think we’re going at a very high level. We’re entering an era in which basic literacy is no longer necessary, an era in which machines use human language, not vice versa.  Who could have predicted this a hundred years ago?

But enough ivory tower talk. We aren’t going anywhere without a bit of elbow grease. We have to keep extracting more and more data from audio and video files, developers have to come up with interesting ways to use that data, and we have to make it easy for them to implement them.

To that end we’re doing everything we can to make our technology easy to use. We’re paying a lot of attention to our APIs, leveraging hypermedia techniques that we’re convinced are going to pay big dividends to our clients. We’re also paying a lot of attention to support tools like helper libraries, example code, and documentation. You’ll find these in our developer portal and of course on Github. We’ve already received community contributions, and we couldn’t be happier about it. We want your feedback, and we appreciate your help.

I’d love to tell you all about our roadmap — it’s really exciting — but I can’t, because it’s being refined and improved as we learn from our users. We want to make sure that the most important stuff comes out first. We listen, so don’t be shy. Tell us what you need!

Thanks to our recent funding we’re expanding our team of engineers and scientists, and we’re making plans. If you or someone you know wants to help us change the future, get in touch. But of course you don’t have to work for us to do that.

The real game changers are going to be built on top of our API. We know that, and we can’t wait to see what they are.