Cloudinary Blog

As technologies advance apace, the volume of online videos continues to increase fast. Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, YouTube, Musical.ly are just a few platforms among many that massively share and distribute videos around the clock.

In today’s digital age, brands rely heavily on rich media to tell stories, foster engagement, and make emotional connections that drive results. Marketers use videos and images, tuned to customers’ interests, to create dynamic visual experiences. Digital campaigns about trips to Florida, for instance, have separate plot lines, depending on audiences’ passions for golf, deep sea fishing, or kid-friendly versus romantic getaways. Marketers expect to detect preferences, produce personalized experiences highlighting different desires, and turn digital prospects into vacationing customers. The ultimate success of a marketing campaign relies on the consistent delivery of these customer experiences, at scale.

Cloudinary was founded by developers and developer-centric thinking is in our DNA. Our work with developers helps them better understand all things rich-media management and delivery is crucial to us. Now, in an effort to recognize, support, and reward the innovative leaders in that technical community, we’re excited to introduce a new Media Developer Experts (MDE) program! MDEs will leverage the Cloudinary platform to foster a community of media-management professionals; receive training and certifications to become experts within their field or audience; advance the state of media management, adoption, and best practices; and make the web more accessible.

William (iChuloo) Imoh, who hails from Lagos, Nigeria, recently embarked on a U.S. speaking tour, February 20-March 12, during which he powwowed with technical and product teams and communities at such renowned enterprises as Netlify, Pluralsight, Lucidchart, Twilio, and more in Salt Lake City, Dallas, Las Vegas, and San Francisco. On March 5, he gave an enlightening talk, entitled International Developers and Development: Building for the Next Billion Users at Cloudinary in Santa Clara, California. Below is a synopsis. For details, see the related slides.

Focus on customers has always been Cloudinary’s mantra. Because we owe them our success, we are constantly reaching out to our customers, not just for feedback on our offerings, but also for their vision, wish list, and buy-in of what Cloudinary can do to meet their needs and make them succeed. About six months ago, it occurred to us that it would be beneficial if we could meet regularly with those who are behind innovation at our key customers—executives, product gurus, developers, content managers—to swap strategies, product roadmaps, best practices, and such. In particular, we’d like to solicit actionable feedback as a foundation for our plans of product enhancements.

Static sites and the JAMstack are quickly becoming a standard for developing safe and performant websites with an optimal workflow for developers. Netlify CMS (not to be confused with the company that created it, Netlify) is an open source content management solution that works especially with static site generators such as Gatsby, Hugo, etc... enabling content storage in your Git repository along with your code for easier versioning, multichannel publishing, and direct content updates in Git.

If you're the developer for an online store, a news site, a social media app, or any other website that delivers new media content on a regular basis, you are probably painfully familiar with both the challenge and importance of delivering well-cropped images.

At Feature Upvote, we specialize in enabling product managers to consolidate and prioritize customer feedback through simple online boards with a built-in voting capability. Companies across the world use our boards either publicly or privately to source ideas from their internal teams or B2B clients.

Vitaly Friedman is a die-hard devotee of beautiful content. Born in Minsk, Belarus, he studied Computer Science and Mathematics in Germany, unearthing in himself a passion for typography, writing, and design in the interim. After a six-year stint as a freelance designer and developer, he co-founded Smashing Magazine, a leading online publication on web design and development. You can follow SmashingMag on Twitter @SmashingMag.

For Stylight, a fashion and design retail search engine, uptime, performance and customer experience are key to the bottom line. With tens of thousands of new images being added to its site each week, and a very small development team, the company needed an efficient way to manage and manipulate images, so they could be viewed quickly and optimally on any device used by consumers in 16 countries. As one of the earliest users of Cloudinary, Stylight sees significant performance and financial benefits related to Cloudinary’s cutting-edge solution for image optimization and delivery on multiple content delivery networks (CDNs).