Posts tagged video messaging

by Dave McLaughlin, CEO & Co-Founder at Vsnap

A few months ago we told you that we would be turning on a set of premium features. We’re now just about ready to make that shift. In fact it will happen on July 10^th.

Why are we introducing Vsnap Premium?

Because businesses using Vsnap have asked us for capabilities that our free product didn’t have. And because we need to ensure that we’re strong as a company, so that we can continue to invest in and improve our product for you and the other businesses that want to use our platform to make their customers feel appreciated.

What features are being introduced?

Organization Accounts

This may be the most important feature. Up until now, all Vsnap accounts have been silos. That means that you could have a hundred people in your company on Vsnap, but each of you is an independent account. Vsnap Premium introduces organization accounts, allowing you to have shared data, shared billing, and administrative privileges and oversight.

Activity Reports

Premium accounts will have an easy data dashboard, which is something that managers and executives told us they needed. We’re giving you a balcony view on your team’s Vsnap activity and success rates. You’ll also be able to drill down to see a snapshot of each individual team member’s usage, and to manage the status of any video message that one of your team member’s records. This is about giving you the right understanding to support your team as they adopt this new, high-impact behavior of vsnapping customers. 

Customizable Branding

Premium accounts will have three tools to customize the way that your vsnaps are presented to the people you want to reach. Let’s take these in order of the recipient experience:

“Send As” Customization

Premium accounts will have access to a new, enterprise-ready way to configure the “From” address on email notifications you or your team members send. This means that the person you’re reaching will get an email notification from your company email. E.g., username@companyxyz.com. The email notifications for free account holders will come from share@vsnap.com.

Note: We’ve offered an SMTP version of this feature previously, and we extended it to free accounts on a trial basis. But we’re disabling that because we don’t feel it’s strong enough in terms of security.

Email Body Customization

Premium accounts will be able to create a standard email notification format for all of their account members. You can put your logo into the email notification and choose how you want the text to read. This is a first step toward making the email notification something you feel very confident about. In other words, we expect to add additional degrees of customization for email notifications going forward, so we welcome your feedback on how you want that to work!

Logos

As of July 10th, Premium account holders will be able to display a logo on their vsnaps and in their email notifications. This feature will no longer be available for Free account holders.

12-Month Hosting

As of July 10th, we will begin hosting vsnaps for 12 months from the date of creation. This hosting period will go into effect for both free and Premium account holders. (We had thought we needed to limit free account holders’ hosting to 90 days, but we figured out how to keep your vsnaps free for a full year, whether you’re a Premium subscriber or not.)

What will Premium Accounts cost? 

In the first phase there will be two tiers of Premium accounts: 

SOLO BUSINESS 

This gives you all of the benefits listed above, except for the Organization Accounts. This is an account for a freelancer or a consultant who’s working alone and needs some business features but doesn’t need the shared data etc. The cost here is $3/month for unlimited usage (based on annual subscription). 

BUSINESS PLUS

This account is designed for groups of three or more users, and it provides all of the benefits listed above. The cost here is $15/user/month (based on annual subscription) for unlimited usage. 

Any special deals for early adopters?  

Absolutely! From now through the end of July, groups of three or more users can get a Business Plus annual subscription that breaks down to $10/user/month. Furthermore, any additional account members you add during the year will come on at that same special rate. 

I’m not planning to upgrade. What will change for me?

Well you can still record and share as many vsnaps as you like, and you can still turn to us for great support if you have a question or hit a snag in using the product. As of July 10th, you won’t be able to have your logo on the player anymore. And if you’re one of the folks that enabled our SMTP feature, that will also be disabled. Finally, as with our Premium accounts, your vsnaps will now be hosted for 12 months. That means they can be viewed for a full year. 

One more thing – you’ll also see a download button on the view page for vsnaps you create.

If you have any other questions about premium or setting up an account, you can send me an email or comment below. 

By Dave McLaughlin, CEO & Co-Founder at Vsnap

Here at Vsnap, we have an amazing new partner – and we’re very excited about it! We’ve reached an agreement with Dr. Johnny Walker (www.healthfounders.com), a Dublin-based interventional radiologist and healthcare entrepreneur, whereby Dr. Walker will use a version of Vsnap’s code base to launch a new, independent company to pursue cutting-edge uses of video messaging in engaging and empowering patients. 

The new company, called HealthSnap, will be headquartered in Ireland. 

Here’s what Dr. Walker has to say about this:

“Vsnap has made video messaging simple, accessible and measurable. Now HealthSnap will customize a version of this powerful tool to help healthcare providers bring more human warmth and empathy into their patient interactions as a complement to the face-to-face consultation. This is important because we all know that better engagement drives better care and better, safer outcomes.”

Dr. Ronan Kavanagh, a prominent Irish rheumatologist and leading voice on the intersection of medicine and social media, affirmed Dr. Walker’s perspective. “I’m very excited about what HealthSnap will be doing,” Dr. Kavanagh said. “This kind of tool gives us the ability to humanise our interactions with patients, and that matters greatly to engagement levels and outcomes.”

For Dr. Walker, this will not be the first time he has broken new ground in patient care. In 1995, Dr. Walker launched a fully digital, personalized, mobile ultrasound scan service to small aboriginal communities in Western Australia literally out of the back of a truck. That effort grew into the highly disruptive and successful international teleradiology enterprise Global Diagnostics Ltd (www.globaldiagnostics.co.uk), a company that Dr. Walker exited last year. What does the HealthSnap agreement mean for Vsnap and the people using our application?

First, it won’t affect businesspeople using Vsnap at all. HealthSnap will be a separate company with a separate product, separate development team, etc. The Vsnap product will continue to have a laser focus on meeting the needs and requirements of folks in Sales, Support, Account Management and Employee Engagement.

Second, since this partnership represents a new royalty-based revenue stream for Vsnap, it means we’re going to have more resources to invest in our product. We are committed to making Vsnap an essential resource for customer-centric companies in today’s multi-media, multi-device business environment.

Third, HealthSnap’s investment represents an important validation. It’s an example of the fact that, as the number of personal video screens skyrockets worldwide, more industries are exploring new ways to use video to solve persistent problems well beyond the Marketing department. 

We are thrilled to have found such a passionate, mission-driven partner in Dr. Walker, and we look forward to working with him and his team as they move forward. For more information, you can reach out to myself, Dr. Walker or Jim Joyce, Vsnap’s Dublin-based Co-Founder and CEO of Point of Care, a clinical healthcare company.  

Dr. Walker: @jwglobal7 or johnny@healthfounders.com

Dave McLaughlin: @davemacboston or dave@vsnap.com

Jim Joyce: @jimbojoyce or jim@pointofcare.ie

Note: for press and bloggers working on deadlines in European time zones, Dr. Walker and Jim Joyce are both based in Dublin. For American journalists working on deadline, Dave McLaughlin is based in Boston.

by Dave McLaughlin, CEO & Co-Founder at Vsnap

The Biomnis Healthcare Innovation Awards, held every year in Dublin, Ireland, recognize and celebrate initiatives that find a fresh way to attack persistent problems across several categories. This year, a small Irish company called Point of Care, was recognized with an award in the Patient Support category for its use of Vsnap to more effectively engage and help their patients.

Full disclosure: Point of Care CEO was my partner in founding Vsnap, and he is a shareholder in our company. 

In the pilot program that the award celebrated, Point of Care nurses vsnapped patients either before or after clinical visits. The team wanted to create personal connections with patients, with the goals of encouraging patient questions and diminishing the anxiety that many people feel when it’s time for a vaccination or other medical procedure. 

Basically, Point of Care believes that improving engagement will improve patient compliance and patient outcomes. And Vsnap is a way for them to improve engagement. 

I want to congratulate the Point of Care team for thinking outside the box in terms of how they help their customers – people like you and I who are receiving important medical attention. 

Their initiative is ongoing, so the company was not able to share final data with me. But we see more and more companies in a range of industries adopting this common sense belief – that sending simple, warm, one-to-one video messages makes your customer feel valued, and that how your customer feels has a direct bearing on what that customer does. 

Across industries, we consistently see three benefits: people you vsnap take action more than folks you engage via email; they tell their friends more; and they stay loyal longer.

We are excited about the possible applications for using Vsnap or other feeling-focused video tools to engage patients in ways that are warmer and more human. At this point, our technology is not actually HIPAA compliant, but we’ll have more news on this coming soon.

By Dave McLaughlin, Co-Founder & CEO of Vsnap

This morning we released v 1.4.0, which introduces the ability to bring individual Vsnap user accounts into a common corporate or organizational account. Up until now, each individual Vsnap account has been its own silo. 

Today’s release represents a key step toward providing shared billing and premium features, such as greater customization of branding and richer reporting on user activity and recipient behavior. Thanks to all of you who helped us understand your companies’ needs here!

How This Works

In the near future this will be self-serve, but for now companies that want the benefits of an organization account can just email Trish Fontanilla or me. You let us know who on your team you want to serve as the Admin Member, and we’ll give that person the ability to invite individual user accounts into your team’s Organization.

Once you do this, your Admin Member will notice the following specific features:

Organization Data Dashboard

The Admin Member now sees a simple snapshot of aggregate Vsnap activity from all members of the organization. This includes total vsnaps recorded, view rate, type of share, and an overview of recipient feeling indicators (Helpful, Thoughtful, Amazing).

Administrative Oversight

The designated Admin Member now has access to all vsnaps created by individual Organization members and has the power to delete vsnaps from any member. This provides an important safeguard for the Organization. 

Organization Ownership

If you are an individual Vsnapper and you accept an invitation to have your account become part of an Organization, then the vsnaps you create from this point forward will belong to the Organization. This means that individual members cannot delete any vsnaps they record once they become part of an Organization.

A few more things worth noting…

This Will Become a Paid Feature

The ability to link accounts in an Organization is intended to be a paid feature. We are absolutely going to continue to offer a killer free account, but it will be for individuals and not for organizations. Having said that, we’re happy to let you use it for free for the next month or so while we complete some other important premium features for businesses.  

Discount Pricing this Month

If you’d like to take advantage of special pre-launch pricing, let me know  or sign up for our premium mailing list to be updated. This month we’re offering 40% off pricing on annual subscriptions for early Organization subscribers. This will give the upcoming premium features to all members of your Organization, and it will allow us to “turn on” new features for your whole team as soon as those features become available. 

Mobile vsnaps

Although these Organization features are currently visible only in Vsnap’s web interface, they do affect vsnaps created on the mobile apps. For example, a vsnap created on the mobile app of an Organization Member now can be deleted by the Admin Member and not by the individual who created it. 

Nothing Changes for Non-Organization Accounts

If you have a free individual Vsnap account and don’t create or become part of an Organization, then nothing will change for you. You will still have free use of business features for the time-being, like the logo feature and the SMTP feature. And you’ll still own your own vsnaps.

Video Improvements

Actually there is one change that affects everybody – we improved how we handle the video file to ensure that your vsnaps play perfectly behind enterprise firewalls. This is good news for anyone using our application inside a large corporation, or to engage clients at large corporations. We’re now seeing a perfect performance on playing vsnaps in those environments.

That’s it for now. There will be much more in the coming weeks for the companies that are using Vsnap to make customers feel appreciated. Stay tuned!