The uTIPu Blog

We have known it all along and many users agree - TipCam is the best and easiest-to-use screencast recorder.  Now PC Magazine also agreed with us.  It has just named TipCam as one of “The Best Free Software of 2009”.  Many of our users are so satisfied with it, they want to use it in their business for commercial use.  We have made separate arrangements with some users for commercial use.  But to satisfy the huge demand, we will soon release a professional version of TipCam that can be used commercially.

Thank you all for your support!

John

I am excited to announce that the release candidate (RC1) of our next version (v2.1) of TipCam is available for download at http://www.utipu.com/app/download. This new version addresses many of the requirements that we have received from our users:

1. Now you can record a screencast video for as long as you want and as your hard drive can hold – the 20-minute limit has been removed. Please note that your upload to our web site is still limited to 100MB per video.

2. You can record even if your Windows user account does not have administrator privilege. This makes it possible to use TipCam in organizations where average users do not have administrator privilege.

3. Now you can double click on any FLV file on a local drive of your computer to play it in TipCam.

4. It enables you to trim off a portion of the recording from the beginning or at the end of your recording so your screencast can always start and end exactly the way you want.

5. If you need to change your recording settings frequently from one recording to the next, our new wizard recording mode can prompt you with session specific settings every time you start recording.

6. You can now configure your TipCam so that it always puts the recorder in pause when starting recording. This will allow you to get everything ready (including zoom and panning) before the recording is activated.

Do not take my words for it. Give it a try and please let us know what you think. We will keep improving our service based upon your input.

John

We are proud to announce that we will release a new version of our web site tomorrow (Tuesday). Thanks to the many suggestions and requirements that we have received from our users, we have incorporated many exciting new features into this release.

In our previous release, we made it possible to create a public community under a company’s brand. That enables a company to create a video community to engage its customers and employees in a constructive conversation about its products and services. (See the video community that Citrix created using our service, http://citrix.utipu.com.)  These communities also provide companies a business-grade foundation for embedding screen video content into their blogs, portals and any other web-based applications such as a knowledge-base.

Our new release will include two important features:

1. Create Your Own Community. If you want to create a community around a special interest like SecondLife, Microsoft Office, Google Lively, or Sudoku, you can get started in less than 1 minute at www.utipu.com all on your own. Add some interesting content and recruit some members, and you could soon become one of the most influential people on the web.
2. Private Communities. The content of a private community can be accessed only by its community members. Companies can create private communities under their brands enabling employees to securely share proprietary knowledge and ideas as videos within a company, division or department. If you want branding, just choose the option for requesting a branded site when you create your private community.

When we make the upgrade Tuesday, the service may be interrupted for a few minutes. You will also be prompted to upgrade your TipCam so that you can upload videos directly to all these new communities you will join. Your existing account will allow access to all of the communities that you would be enrolled in.  Thank you for your cooperation.

Please leave a comment here or contact customerservice@utipu.com if you have any questions.

John

Boca Raton, Fla. 8/19/2008 uTIPu Inc., the provider of a knowledge networking platform, powers the new Citrix Systems VideoTips community site (http://citrix.utipu.com) to enable its customers, employees and partners to create and share video help tips about Citrix products.

uTIPu Community is a Web 2.0 service that enables any organization to rapidly create a branded community website for communicating help tips about its applications, services and processes in video. Using uTIPu’s one-click TipCam™ screen recorder, anybody can record and publish help tips easily. With broad grassroots participation, the website quickly grows into a content-rich, searchable, and user-rated video library about an organization’s products and services.

Citrix has had its online community forums for quite some time. But for many help tips, words and still-screenshots are still limiting.  A video showing all steps of a help tip including mouse clicks and voice narration is worth more than a thousand words. “We find that screencasts are very effective in communicating application and configuration tips,” said Chris Fleck, vice president of Solutions Development at Citrix. “The challenge that we have had is to make such video creation and sharing easy enough for everyone in the Citrix Community to participate. The uTIPu solution provides a great enhancement to our new community site (community.citrix.com).”

“I am very impressed by the Citrix vision of engaging its customers and employees in an active, constructive conversation about its products and services using Web 2.0 technologies,” said John Yin, chief executive officer of uTIPu. “In order to include both non-technical and technical people in the same conversation, the communication needs to be visual and free of technical jargons. uTIPu makes ‘See What I’m Saying’ possible between these two groups of people.”

uTIPu Community is now available to any organization that wants its users to share knowledge about its products, services and processes.

About uTIPu
uTIPu provides a knowledge networking platform that makes knowledge sharing simple.  It enables businesses and professionals to capture knowledge by recording computer activities as videos and to build online communities for sharing them. This makes it easy for customers of uTIPu to provide user-friendly help and technical support, strengthen customer relationships, and promote best practices. For more information, please visit www.utipu.com.

Media Contact:

Chad Roll

chad@utipu.com

561.262.3474

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uTIPu and TipCam are trademarks of uTIPu Inc. Citrix® is a trademark of Citrix Systems, Inc. and/or one or more of its subsidiaries, and may be registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Knowledge Sharing Among Employees and Customers Has Never Been Easier

Boca Raton, FL, July 22, 2008 – uTIPu Inc. an emerging leader in the Knowledge Networking space, is pleased to announce the availability of the uTIPu Knowledge Networking Platform. This innovative Web 2.0 platform enables businesses and professionals to capture knowledge and experience by recording computer activities as videos (“TipClips”) and to share them on public and private online communities that can be rapidly configured by uTIPu or on popular social networks such as Facebook.

These TipClips can be created with uTIPu’s free, easy to use screen recording software, TipCam.  With one mouse click, the user begins recording everything that is happening on the user’s computer screen combined with voice narration.  With another click, the TipClip is uploaded to a community website to be shared with whomever the user desires.  TipClips can be viewed from any browser without any additional software.  As a result, the tedious process for documenting knowledge is eliminated.  Since a TipClip captures all the mouse clicks along with narration and annotation, the video is easy to understand.  A TipClip is worth more than a thousand words.

uTIPu also offers both public and private, Branded Community websites to host libraries of TipClips and to facilitate sharing.  Sponsors of these communities can moderate and categorize the content, manage community membership, and monitor the knowledge flow.  Users can easily search, view, rate and comment on TipClips, in addition to managing TipClips that they have contributed.   uTIPu’s platform, therefore, provides incentives and mechanisms for liberating knowledge from the minds of the few and placing it in the minds of the many.

“uTIPu’s service addresses several challenges that businesses face today,” said Chris Fleck, vice president of Solutions Development at Citrix Systems. “It can be a very effective tool for educating and engaging customers externally as well as increasing productivity internally.”

“We have been very pleased with the responses that we received on our knowledge networking platform,” said John Yin, chief executive officer of uTIPu, Inc.  “We are excited about the impact that video-based knowledge sharing will have on corporate social networking.”

Pricing for the service is based on your configuration needs and ongoing usage volume.  Please contact Chad Roll as shown below for more information.

Start knowledge networking today @ http://www.utipu.com/app/download.

About uTIPu, Inc.

uTIPu provides a knowledge networking platform that makes knowledge sharing simple.  uTIPu enables businesses and professionals to capture knowledge by recording computer activities as videos and to share them on online public and private communities.  This makes it easy for customers of uTIPu to provide user-friendly help and technical support, strengthen customer relationships, and promote best practices.  For more information, please visit http://www.utipu.com.

Contact:
Chad Roll
561.262.3474
chad@utipu.com

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uTIPu, TipClip and TipCam are trademarks of uTIPu Inc.  All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Due to an outage at our storage service provider Amazon S3, users of our website may experience problems in viewing tips.  We are very sorry about any inconvenience that this may cause.  If we have any update, we will post it here.

– Update:  as of 7:41 pm ET, Amazon S3 service has been restored and our service is available now.  We are again sorry for the service outage and thank you for your patience.  Here is the status log of Amazon S3 and other Amazon web services:  http://status.aws.amazon.com/.

We have talked to many company owners, executives, managers and employees about sharing knowledge.  While they all agree sharing knowledge is critically important to their companies, most of them are frustrated by the dismal progress in getting their employees to share such information.  Among all the reasons that we heard from them about why people do not share knowledge, the top ten are listed below.  I would like to know what you think.  Please mark the top three reasons that you think why people do not share knowledge and feel free to tell us any other reasons by leaving us a reply below.  Once you enter your vote by clicking on the Vote button, you will be able to see the overall voting results.

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Thank you very much for your time and feedback!

John

This is my first entry as VP of Sales and Business Development at uTIPu. My name is Chad Roll and I am a veteran of the high tech world having been around since the early 1980’s. My experience is mostly in launching emerging technologies and I am very excited about the Knowledge Networking Platform that uTIPu has to offer.

I am confident the technology we have at uTIPu, will change the way companies, customers and partners share knowledge in the future.

My first few weeks at uTIPu have been memorable; I was able to attend the Microsoft Tech Ed Conference in Orlando, FL. The partner expo area was filled with first class exhibitors and very well attended by the conference participants. My raffle ticket was only 5 numbers away from winning the Ducati Motorcycle in AvePoint’s booth, probably a good thing because my wife probably wouldn’t have let me keep it anyway.

The mood of all the exhibitors I was in contact with was upbeat and hopeful the activity in the booths would lead to meaningful opportunities. A good percentage of the vendors were talking and thinking about how to better communicate with their customers and a majority of the attendees were talking about how to better train their user community.

One of the biggest challenges facing today’s busy IT professional is where to find valuable information in a timely manner. Getting to the answers you need, when you need them can make or break a project and having timely and accurate information available to corporate end users is vital for internal IT Support folks.

It is this area of need that the uTIPu Knowledge Networking Platform can provide tremendous value to both companies needing to support their customers and partners and the Corporate IT support folks needing to support their user community.

I made many great contacts at the show and I look forward to working with all of you to help you meet your customer satisfaction goals. I welcome any feedback or comments about how your company plans to provide your customers and partners with the knowledge they need to successfully utilize your products and services.

Best Regards,

Chad

We are pleased to announce the availability of TipCam version 2.0. This version includes new and exciting features that make screencasting available for even wider audience. With this release our team strived to incorporate the feedback we received from the community and to secure our lead as the easiest-to-use screencast service for everyone.

The significant new features include:

• Multi-language support – Option to switch the user interface to your native language. Swedish language is now available. Additional languages are supported by dropping in standard XLIF formatted language files into TipCam installation directory. Please join us to support international community and contribute language files back to uTIPu. Instructions of how to add additional language files available in the readme.txt file packaged in the tipcam download.

• Option to save captured videos in AVI file format – Alternative video capture format allows for easy video editing using free tools, (Windows Movie Maker, VirtualDub, etc)
• Addition of 800×600 and 480×360 resolution and zoom options – Smaller video size work better for sharing on youtube.com and embedding into BLOG’s, and WIKI’s. Larger video size is available for those that require extra level of details and intend to share videos on the fast networks.

• Support for uploading videos to a specific community space – Claim your own space and create a community around your company, product or an interest group. uTIPu is now supporting creation of branded communities. Please visit our first partner site at Citrix VideoTips powered by uTIPu and inquire about setting up your own.
• Option to broadcast TipCam captured video to YouTube.com - Share your screencast with the largest video community on the Web.

• Optional countdown before recording starts - give yourself a moment to prepare.
• Option to cancel file upload - If you start uploading a video by mistake, you can now cancel the uploading without having to wait for it to complete.
• Automatic tipcam issue reporting - One click is all it takes to report potential TipCam issues to uTIPu when there is a problem.
• Optional “Help us to improve TipCam feature” - Anonymous usage statistics collection helping us to know what features you use the most.

Have an idea of how to make TipCam even better? Please comment on this post.

- Oleg.

uTIPu is about enabling people to help one another by sharing knowledge and ideas. We have taken another step toward our goal this week by releasing Branded Public Community. Branded Public Community is a service that allows any organization to rapidly create a meeting place for its customers and employees to share screencast videos about its products, services and processes. Citrix, a global leader in application delivery infrastructure, has deployed its Video AppTips site (http://citrix.utipu.com) using our Branded Public Community service.

With Branded Public Community, customers and employees of any company can record, share and communicate help tips with one another easily and effectively, under the company’s brand. This allows them to engage in an active, constructive conversation about the company’s products and services. This will have a profound impact on the way customer support is provided.

If you are interested in setting up your own branded community site, please contact us at http://www.utipu.com/app/business.

John