• SundaySky automates the multimedia e-commerce experience

    Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

    Biggs is the East Cost Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... → Learn More

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    When I was in Israel two weeks ago I sat down with the guys at SundaySky. I need you to bear with me here because the service doesn’t sound cool outright but once you realize the power for commerce sites it becomes amazing.

    Here’s how it works: e-commerce sites have lots of products. Take cameras, for example. You have a few set attributes – zoom, megapixels, etc. – and the rest of the incidental information could fit in a paragraph. So SundaySky creates a video using a product image and audio from a pre-recorded pool of preset phrases (“This W camera has X and Y built-in and includes a Zx zoom lens”, where all the variables are pre-recorded as well). The rest of the info appears as text in the video. That way you could talk fairly convincingly about an Olympus camera with a set of data from a pre-recorded pool and then add the small stuff as a visual. In this way you can make video out of every single item in your store.

    The service is obviously limited to the amount of information you create. The quality here is a bit bad because it’s a blown up FLV, as well.

    This can work with almost any site including a banking and apparel. The prospect for e-commerce is interesting because it offers a nice way to describe gadgets in plain English quickly and easily – presumably on multiple platforms – without a lot of hard reading.

    This is obviously not for everyone and, in its current form, is fairly limiting. One image, some voiceover, and a couple of slides is not a detailed, hands-on look at a device, but with a little work you could feasibly incorporate that into the service. However, it does automate the tedious process of adding multimedia to staid product pages.

    There is a set contract price for e-commerce providers and the service includes creative services and video generation tools. They were funded to the tune of $8 million in January by Carmel Ventures and Globespan Capital.

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