Vipeline - give your online users a voice, with more than just text comments

Vipeline Azure technologies to deliver a native, user generated, social video experience on a brand’s site or advertisement.

 
Vipeline Co-Founders: Alex Hamilton, Chris Wall, and Dave Barker

Founded in Jersey City, New Jersey, Vipeline is a self-funded startup that turns websites and digital campaigns into a native social experience – transforming any website into a social media hub and destination. A multi-tenant platform supporting video capture that allows users to record and display video dialogue from a variety of devices, Vipeline is designed to aggregate and retain website traffic as easily and efficiently as possible by promoting and facilitating engagement with video generation and consumption says CEO and Co-founder Alex Hamilton. “We identified the need for publishers & agencies to increase engagement, drive traffic, and boost revenue with brand safe, native social video dialogues.”

“We’ve looked at trends in video engagement, consumption, and generation and found a lack of native engagement with video” adds CPO and fellow Co-founder Dave Barker, “after identifying opportunities and pain points in the industry, as it relates to increase in bounce rates or decreased time on sites, we were able to develop a native video generation and consumption tool.”

Vipeline is a service that allows users to submit videos in real-time, directly into the site, without any app barrier - increasing engagement, traffic, and revenue because the user stays on the same web presence. The user interface is a simple experience that can be deployed, quickly, to any HTML framework. "Vipeline wanted to hone in on how video makes a website more functional" says COO and fellow Co-Founder Chris Wall. By enabling video to be a key part of the website, Vipeline keeps the user engaged, lets them have something to do on the site, and creates a web community.

A Microsoft BizSpark member, Vipeline relies, in part, on their business relationships and previous professional experience. The BizSpark program has provided Vipeline with Azure as a hosting service, says Hamilton. “We were looking for a good business relationship and knew of the Azure platform. It has worked great and the BizSpark team has been even better. Every need we identified in our organization, Azure and BizSpark have hit the mark.”

Vipeline employs Azure to improve their products reliability, scalability, and regional delivery. Azure’s centralized ecosystem of robust tools has empowered the company to quickly improve their text related services, while enabling them to house their entire product under one roof. “Azure is a powerful brand. We take great comfort in the fact that Azure provides a high level of service, without the problems of working on multiple platforms” says Barker. Wall continues, “With the broad regions that Azure covers, it took a lot of the architectural nightmare of managing and integrating multiple systems and turned it into one robust, elastic, regionally scalable platform.” “It’s great to have an elastic platform that can grow,” adds Hamilton, “We have confidence that, beyond configuration, we can scale rapidly and manage our offering.”

In addition to Azure, Vipeline relies on other Microsoft technologies to enhance the quality and usability of their product. Their solution employs several Microsoft components including SQL Database, Virtual Machine, and Send Grid - as well as several Web Apps and Cloud Services. These services provide Vipeline with a “robust, secure scalable platform to build and deliver our API.” says Barker.

Although Vipeline is not heavily integrated with any open source technologies, they have capitalized on Azure’s compatibility with open source where necessary. “Our solution does not rely on many OSS packages.” says Wall, “Ultimately, the majority of our solution and implementation is custom, using Azure. Our back-end components rely on FFMPEG, which in turn relies on a few OSS libraries, while the front-end components rely on AngularJS and a handful of Github libraries. We haven’t really needed to venture into open source because Azure has provided us a one-stop shop for the entire platform, but, with the little open source that we have incorporated, everything has run so smoothly. No down time at all.”

Since their official launch in January of 2015, Vipeline has used their product and business partnerships to rapidly grow their customer base, including the additions of Xing and Focus Online – wings of the German publishing and internet giant Hubert Burda Media. Hamilton concludes, “We have no more thoughts on what platform to use, or who to align and partner with. BizSpark and Azure have been amazing - everything we could have asked for and more."

A Vipeline Overview from David Barker on Vimeo.

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Microsoft is helping these startups succeed through its BizSpark program. To join or see other startup stories, visit us at our website here. To listen to our startups, check out these podcasts on devradio here. 

About BizSpark: Microsoft BizSpark is a global program that helps startups succeed by giving free access to Microsoft Azure cloud services, software and support. BizSpark members receive up to $750 per month of free Microsoft Azure cloud services for 3 years: that’s $150 per month each for up to 5 developers. Azure works with Linux and open-source technologies such as Ruby, Python, Java and PHP. BizSpark is available to startups that are privately held, less than 5-years-old and earn less than $1M in annual revenue.