Cloudinary Blog

Doug Sillars, a digital nomad and a freelance mobile-performance expert, answers questions about video streaming and delivery, website optimization, and more.

Doug Sillars, a freelance mobile-performance expert and developer advocate, is a Google Developer Expert and the author of O’Reilly’s High Performance Android Apps. Given his extensive travels across the globe—from the UK to Siberia—with his wife, kids, and 11-year-old dog, Max, he has been referred to as a “digital nomad.” So far in 2018, Doug has spoken at more than 75 meetups and conferences!

In May 2018, Cloudinary sponsored Capitol Music Group’s first hackathon held by its new Capitol360 Innovation Center, which aims at connecting musicians and software technologists to facilitate and stimulate the creation of music. See this interview for details. As a starter project for the hackathon, we built a sample app called Music Discovery Service.

Over the past several years, I've had a chance to participate in hackathons, as part of teams that developed a social payment app and helped users decide meals to cook. But it wasn't until last month that I got to experience a hackathon from the other side, as a judge.

It should come as no surprise that video use on the internet is exploding. You can see the dramatic growth of video on the average site in this SpeedCurve blog post.

With the growth in video comes greater bandwidth use, which is not only costly for your IT budget, but for your visitors as well. Beyond the expense, there is the user experience to consider. The heavier the page, the longer it will take to load, and the greater likelihood visitors will abandon your site. Page load speed is also an important factor in SEO ranking, so clearly video is something we need to take seriously and get right. Video is challenging, presenting terms still unfamiliar to developers - like codecs, bitrate and adaptive bitrate streaming. As a result, mistakes are being made in video implementation.

Over the life of a mobile device, the cost of a cellular data plan often exceeds that of the device itself. To optimize data usage and purge useless data on their mobile devices, users can enable Data Saver from Android 7.0 (API level 24). To do so, users toggle Data Saver in quick settings under the Notification shade or under Settings > Data usage. With Data Saver enabled, apps that aren't whitelisted cannot use cellular data in the background. They are also directed to consume less data while active.

At Cloudinary, we manage the entire pipeline of media assets for thousands of customers of varying sizes from numerous verticals. Cloudinary is an end-to-end solution for all your image and video needs, including upload, storage, administration, manipulation, optimization and dynamic delivery.

Famed American poet Henry David Thoreau once said, “This world is but a canvas to our imagination.” And, like your imagination, the transformations you can apply to images with Cloudinary are practically endless. You can even render any flat image to appear three-dimensional and framed on a canvas.

TL;DR

We live in a visual world, often while on the go, and consumers expect media-rich web content. Accordingly, the loading speed of images and videos is a big factor in user experience. To optimize customer satisfaction with your mobile content, you must focus on the quality, format, and size of your digital assets. With Cloudinary, optimization is simple, not only enhancing your mobile web and app performance, but also upping your SEO game and boosting customer experience.

Zapier is an automation tool that connects web apps, such as Gmail, Slack, MailChimp, and others, over 1,300 in total. With Zapier, you can connect multiple apps to automate tasks without coding or relying on your development team to build the integration. You can also automate data moves among your web apps, freeing you up to focus on other tasks.

Cloudinary has recently added the Cloudinary Demo - eCommerce App to the Google Play Store. The App demonstrates the best practices for optimal delivery of images on a storefront, including category pages, product pages, and a shopping cart.