MyBlender – Delivering Mobile Brand Engagement

Consumer brand marketers need a way to have a meaningful relationship with their audience on a mobile device. With ad blockers and fraudulinks adding to the misery of mobile marketers, a new way must be found to engage the mobile audience and provide the tools for brand advocates to become content marketers.

The meteoric rise of Instagram was largely due to the simplicity of adding creative filters to photos stored on a mobile device combined with the ease of sharing. Creating engaging, professional-looking videos is an order of magnitude more complicated. This is the task that the team at MyBlender set out to do.

After a comprehensive search for a talented technical team, MyBlender engaged HyperSense Software with a clear but highly complex task: design and develop an application that can produce professional-looking videos in seconds on both iOS and Android mobile platforms.

The resulting MyBlender is a mobile brand engagement app that produces amazing looking 6 and 15 second Blends in under 6 seconds! Blends are based on creative themes and the underlying publishing platform allows MyBlender and their OEM brand customers to update the themes easily and without updating the application.

Creative Blends can include professional videography techniques such as: animated backgrounds, foreground graphics, real-time filters, animated text, Pan & Zoom transformations, music, sound FX and a comprehensive library of transitions. Behind all this visual magic is the Blend Engine – OpenGL optimized libraries that translate the Theme information at run time.

To maintain a consumer’s interest speed of processing was essential in the design. The initial request was for the processing ratio to be at 1:1 i.e. A six second Blend was to processed in six seconds. This specification was subsequently halved i.e. a 15 second Blend must be rendered on a basic iPhone 5 in under seven seconds. After an extensive period of research and optimizations MyBlender now boasts the fastest video processing engine on the market, exporting professional-looking videos (Adobe Premiere level) in half of the time needed to play them – and everything happens on the mobile device.

One advantage of the design approach taken by HyperSense Software is that MyBlender is able to continuously innovate in creative Themes. The application can adapt quickly to creative trends thanks to the Blend Engine’s core processing flexibility—the development team can add new filters and creative treatments in just a few hours.

The MyBlender application is just the delivery vehicle of the underlying publishing platform called ThemeMaker. This web-based creative tool and end-to-end content and user management system allows non-technical graphic artists to create stunning-looking Themes in a few hours without any coding knowledge. Typically custom programmed creative treatments take months to program. More importantly, Themes can be published to MyBlender installed on devices without updating the application in the app store. This allows for the timely publication of specific event-based and seasonal themes.

The ThemeMaker tool defines the overall creative look for any content combination and manages the creative assets such as graphics, video backgrounds, music and sound effects associated with the Theme and delivers them over-the-air to the mobile application via a proprietary compression algorithm that limits the size of the Theme assets. Themes include a Theme icon and three interstitial screens. These can be branded for a sponsor and link to commerce opportunities such as ticket sales, music in the iTunes or Play store or other mobile web pages integrated seamlessly into the MyBlender application.

MyBlender has been OEM’d to AERNow, a San Francisco-based live event streaming entertainment producer and will change the way fans at live sporting or music events interact with the event and their social network. To deliver the application as a technology plug-in to AERNow’s own native application a framework was developed and optimized for the integration. This allows for a customized skinning of the MyBlender application so that its overall operation is seamless with the OEMs own application.

The MyBlender team is now raising early stage capital and is in dialog with leading brand marketers to integrate the MyBlender application into their own mobile applications.