Archive for the ‘Company News’ Category

Non Sequitur Fridays: Games With Friends

Friday, May 17th, 2013

This post is part of our Non Sequitur Fridays series, which will feature a different Wistia team member's take on a non-Wistia-related topic each week. It's like our "employee of the month" but less "of the month"-y. Liat Werber is a designer at Wistia.

I am a huge proponent of playing games with friends.

When it comes to socializing, there isn’t a lot of variation: crowded bars, snobby coffee shops, dank basements: from a distance, it all looks about the same. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy sitting and talking, but every so often, I like to take a more gameful approach to socializing.

Skeptics may tell you that playing a game will distract from enjoying the company of your friends. But here, I would like to argue that the perfect game requires enough mindfulness that it challenges you, but not so much that it prevents socializing mid-game.

Of course, the ideal talk-to-play ratio will depend on your mood and how social you are at base level; other things to take into account are the number of players, how competitive you’re feeling, and whether or not there will be drinking. With all that to consider, it can be difficult to decide what type of game to play, but luckily I have outlined the range of possibilities in a handy little graphic.

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Non Sequitur Fridays: Hard Drive Fever

Friday, May 10th, 2013

This post is part of our Non Sequitur Fridays series, which will feature a different Wistia team member's take on a non-Wistia-related topic each week. It's like our "employee of the month" but less "of the month"-y. Chris Lavigne is video producer at Wistia.

Hi, I'm Chris. And I have a lot of hard drives.

I have an unhealthy obsession with storing every piece of my digital life. Videos, photos, documents, downloads, funny iChat screenshots, etc. The byproduct of that obsession is this.

Yup, those are my drives. And there's Lenny for scale.

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Non Sequitur Fridays: Buying Headphones for Work

Friday, May 3rd, 2013

This post is part of our Non Sequitur Fridays series, which will feature a different Wistia team member's take on a non-Wistia-related topic each week. It's like our "employee of the month" but less "of the month"-y. Robby Grossman is an engineer at Wistia.

A couple years ago, I found myself searching for a pair of office headphones. Unable to find a local retailer with demos of the models I was interested in, I ordered a half dozen pairs, compared them, and returned all but the keeper. Here are my reviews of each model in case anybody finds themselves on a similar search and wants to expend less effort.

Grado SR-60 ($74)

The Grado SR-60s came to me highly recommended from the head-fi.org forums, but my experience with them was less than flattering. The open design leaks a lot of sound, which is particularly unfortunate in an office where there's often chatter competing for your attention. Sonically speaking, they have a very airy quality to them. It's not a big deal if you're listening to hip-hop, heavy rock or other bass-heavy material, but if you listen to lighter acoustic tunes, a lot of the detail gets washed out. To their credit, they were very comfortable; I wore them for hours and forgot they were on my head.

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Non Sequitur Friday: Growing Up a Flipping Gypsy

Friday, April 26th, 2013

This post is part of our Non Sequitur Fridays series, which will feature a different Wistia team member's take on a non-Wistia-related topic each week. It's like our "employee of the month" but less "of the month"-y. Laura Hokenson is office manager at Wistia.

So, here's the thing. Until recently, I assumed I had a rather normal upbringing. Truly American, I rode a Huffy bike, I had braces, I begrudgingly participated in what my mother termed "educational enrichment activities," I scaled closets hunting for Christmas presents. I'll concede the absence of television in my house made me a minority. And I'm sure the fact that I wore boy's elastic waist denim until I was 15 set me apart from my glittery bell-bottomed peers.

But I never paid any real mind to any stark differences between my formative years and those of others. Until I went to college. Yes, higher education is supposed to be this eye-opening, world-widening experience of meeting new people and doing new things—but I was thrown. I was shocked to meet people who had lived in the same house for the entirety of their lives, who didn’t understand the terms "easement" or "escrow," or who had never held a mallet before. And they were just as shocked by me and my stories.

Before I left for college, my mother and brother and I moved more than a dozen times. I wasn't an army brat, and we weren't (as far as I know) a part of the Witness Protection Program. It was just something we did.

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Building the Wistia Labs Framework

Wednesday, April 24th, 2013

We recently explained how we built Wistia Labs with an all-hands-on-deck hackathon called Labstock. Working on Labs this way wouldn't have been possible without a lot of background preparation beforehand.

The Old Wistia Labs

If you're an old-school Wistia follower, you might remember the original Wistia Labs, which handled things like the Social Bar.

Back then, we didn't have an organized way to add things to embed codes, so we just appended Javascript and HTML specific to the situation. It wasn't a very cross-compatible approach -- Labs worked with one type of embed code, they frequently conflicted with existing frameworks like jQuery, and we couldn’t use them in any place where Javascript wasn’t allowed.

After we built the SuperEmbed Builder, we dispensed with Labs because we were able to perfect the functionality they provided and work it directly into the product.

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