Our Co-Founder Dean was recently featured in the polish start up magazine Mam Startup.
- What is Vidlogs?
Vidlogs is an AI-powered Meetings solution to make remote teams work productively across the globe – either Live or Asynchronously.
Vidlogs records, and summarizes meetings’ transcriptions using AI – extracting useful information that can be used to recall what was discussed without the need to write notes and exchanging lengthy emails after the meetings.
With our Asynchronous meetings feature, project managers can reduce team meetings by upto 50% by asking team members to record videos and send updates on their own time.
- How and why did you start Vidlogs? Is it related to the current situation caused by the pandemic?
We created Vidlogs because we faced these problems ourselves – we are a remote team of 7 spread across three time-zones, spending a lot of time in meetings for development, for product design, or customer support.
It’s not easy to sync up and remember what was discussed during all these meetings.This becomes a bigger problem as the team grows.
In several cases team meetings are not required at all – developers can give updates when they are done with features, that QA or PM can watch or respond to when they’ve time to catch up.
During pandemic as everyone is working from home, and is stressed about missing out on important team meetings, Vidlgs can be quite a useful tool for staying connected using always on or on-demand video meetings within the team that Vidlogs provides.
- Could you introduce yourself and your lead team? Tell me something about everyone’s previous achievements.
1. Ritam Kharbanda – Ritam is an experienced Women-in-Technology leader with 19 years of experience in building enterprise products and managing technology teams. Currently working on exciting projects on digital transformation redefining customer experience both on online and mobile banking, as a development manager she is always focused on getting the best possible product out of the door in the given budget and resource constraints.
She has great expertise in project scoping, project planning, task prioritization, technical debt management, triaging , process management, change management and more recently vendor management.
She has worked in both startups and fortune 500 companies in financial services , insurance and telecom domains. Ritam is based out of Toronto, Canada.
www.linkedin.com/in/ritam-k-45937029/
2. Dean Grover – Dean is an enterprise product and cloud solutions architect, who previously designed highly scalable telco-grade, products utilizing Cloud, AI and Big Data while leading startup and enterprise teams.
Dean is passionate about bringing ideas into products, learning and playing with new technologies and building training tech teams from bottoms up. He has 18 years experience in building tech solutions within both startups and enterprises like Cisco.
www.linkedin.com/in/deangrover/
3. Adam Dubov – Adam is an Emmy-winning digital media executive, content strategist and creative director with a record of achievement in film, television, entertainment marketing, sports, the Internet, VR and AR. An executive producer and digital storyteller with deep experience in building and operating content-driven businesses.
Experienced in digital product design, cross-platform content development and production, editorial, video and emerging media, VR and AR. Adam is based out of Berkeley, California.
www.linkedin.com/in/adamdubov/
- You made a pivot in your business ventures. What was your first idea?
We were working on Vimix.ai – an AI powered solution for extracting insights and structured information for brands, from thousands of influencer videos from YouTube and Facebook related to certain products. Up to 64% of consumers rely on YouTube reviews or how-to videos for buying or using products.
But with over 700 hours of videos being uploaded on Youtube every hour, it is very difficult for companies to understand how these videos impact their business. This product was designed to keep a pulse on social media video chatter for brands, and help with Influencer Marketing.
With Covid, there was a reduction in marketing budget while a huge need to improve communication for work from home teams. So we decided to focus on Vidlogs – incidentally using quite a lot of technology we built for Vimix.ai.
- What problems do remote working teams have when compared to a traditional office setting?
On one hand, work from home has some benefits, like saving time for commuting but with video calls being the primary mode of communication, remote teams are stressed out because of being in too many virtual calls.
Quoting a BBC article –
Being on a video call requires more focus than a face-to-face chat. Video chats mean we need to work harder to process non-verbal cues like facial expressions, the tone and pitch of the voice, and body language; paying more attention to these consumes a lot of energy.
“Our minds are together when our bodies feel we’re not. That dissonance, which causes people to have conflicting feelings, is exhausting. You cannot relax into the conversation naturally,” he says.
According to Microsoft Team, the volume for video calls increased by 5 times within just 15 days when the pandemic started. This increase in the number of meetings eventually eat into the productive time that each person has to do their work.
- Which problems does Vidlogs solve?
Vidlogs is built to save time and reduce stress of working remotely for a team – Remote teams within a company use 100s of hours of live video meetings internally or with customers. Current solutions like Zoom are great for one meeting at a time, but it’s very difficult to keep a track of what was said or discussed in so many meetings, keep notes or take action on it – across the team discussions.
- What does the virtual assistant on your platform do?
Virtual assistant feature is Beta feature that captures and acts on spoken words, and help takes actions.
Think of it like Siri who joined business calls, who can help schedule follow ups, bring documents into the meeting as required, invite other people or share calls. Not just that all these actions can be customized via APIs and developer SDKs.
- Do you have any financing from VC or business angels?
We raised a small friends and family round, and we’ll start raising funding in the next year after the product has more traction.
- Who’s your client? Are you targeting people in specific industries?
Currently, our target customers are Project teams working remotely – these could be software houses, marketing teams, designers and educators. We have signed up over 800 users so far for our early access program.
We are integrating our solution with Project management tools for integrating within their end to end workflow.
- What’s your company’s goal?
We want to make meetings smarter and help save time and stress, within teams. The current solutions
Read the original article (in Polish): https://mamstartup.pl/vidlogs-tworzy-transkrypcje-z-anglojezycznych-wideorozmow-dean-grover-vidlogs
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