“With Wispeo, it’s no more compression. You don’t have to worry that the video of your kids first steps that you send to grandma is going to be compressed and she can’t tell who the kid is. It’s full-resolution — literally the identical version that is captured on the phone will be available to whoever the recipient is.”
It’s time to talk about the transfer of media files. Specifically, how painful it is to transfer files from your cell phone to another cell phone in a timely manner, all while maintaining the sacred integrity of your initial file. You know exactly what I’m talking about — you take a 4 minute video at a concert, feel the overwhelming need to share it with your closest friends and family, but the process of sending the video takes too much time and comes out on the other end looking like a pixelated 1980’s music video, the kind where all genders blur together. Now, I’m not opposed to blurred gender lines, but I am opposed to slow, low-quality media transfers. Thankfully, so is Wispeo.
“There’s not really a good, low-friction way to move media in its original format, we’re talking full-resolution,” Wispeo founder Grant Calder told Beehive Startups in a recent interview. “We’re basically leveraging 30 years worth of technology expertise, putting it into a startup, and making it happen.”
Spun out of their parent company Mainstream Data (that’s where the 30 years worth of tech expertise comes from), Wispeo has been forged over the last nine months in an attempt to calm the rocky sea of media transfers. Users can download the app, select any and all media they want to transfer (up to 3 GB and 50 files), then enter the email addresses of people they want partaking. The files are then uploaded to the cloud where they can be previewed and downloaded in their original, high-resolution format. Wispeo also features a number of transcoding options, where users can upload images/videos in various file formats or different resolutions if needs be.
“The big differentiator is, if you were to use the maiden mobile version to send a video to someone, it’s always compressed,” Calder said. “With Wispeo, it’s no more compression. You don’t have to worry that the video of your kids first steps that you send to grandma is going to be compressed and she can’t tell who the kid is. It’s full-resolution — literally the identical version that is captured on the phone will be available to whoever the recipient is.”
Wispeo launched this week on both the Apple and Google stores, a positive step for anyone who values a good, hearty, full-resolution file transfer. And as anyone involved with the early-stage startup world can tell you, a released product means the fun (and also tons of work) is just beginning.
“We’re getting to the point where we’re going to start thinking strategically about bringing on additional capital, product development, and customer acquisition,” Calder said. “There’s no one that is focused on the problem of getting high-quality video from your phone to someone else, while maintaining the original quality.”
We live in an age where anything technologically-oriented should be fast, painless, and super-high quality. I want televisions that let me watch football and actually see the muscle fibers that aren’t working on Peyton Manning’s throwing arm. I want computers that let me access anything on the internet (and I mean ANYTHING) in a fraction of a second. And I want an app that allows me to transfer media files in a precise, timely manner.
“People who take video or capture content on their phone, it tends to just sit on the phone until it fills up, then they plug it into a computer and stuff it on the hard drive or Dropbox and never see it again,” Calder said. “Now, you can sit there and take video and pictures and immediately send them to whoever wants to have it. It makes it stupid-easy to get media from your phone to whoever needs it.”
To learn more about Wispeo, contact Calder at gcalder@wispeo.com or Jason Stebbing (Head of Product & Marketing) at jstebbing@wispeo.com.
Published 9/24/2015
