I have a lot to tell you about the API for our live captioning platform, called Recapd. The Recapd API is actually two APIs – a Server API and a Client API. The Client API is what I want to tell you about today. This week we’re making a BIG update available.

We rolled out a project last week that we’ve been working on for two years – SyncWords. SyncWords automates captioning when you provide media and a transcript, and does it with great precision and style, and puts users in control.

I sat down the other day to pen a post for our blog, which has sadly suffered from neglect. I start most of this kind of writing in my email client, Thunderbird, so I went to my Drafts folder to pick up a recent piece I started about caption reformatting (now I know you’ll be checking back regularly in anticipation!). Well, as I went through a few drafts I had started, I found 16 different posts I was writing in varying states of completion. :(

Starting January 1, 2013, our partner, the National Captioning Institute (NCI), will be launching their NCI On Demand platform. The platform will bridge the gap between live captions for broadcasts and captioning for the web. Our very own Recap’d will be the cornerstone of the service, handling capture and delivery of captions up to 24×7×365, and conversion of live captions for offline use on the web and in editing workflows.

The Workshop now works beautifully with video from archived GoToMeeting webinars and meetings. All the codecs – GTM2, GTM3, and the current GTM4 are now supported. Working with video archived from GoToMeeting is just as straightforward as any other video.

This weekend, I sifted through some data to pull together a custom report and one of the details popped out at me. Our viewer IDs switched up from 6 digits to 7 digits – we crossed the million user mark!

Over the last several months, LinkedIn has gotten very good – I’d say scary good – at recommending “People You May Know”. It regularly pulls up names and faces of people whom I last spoke to 5 or 10 years ago, and even further into the past. Some pop out – it’s found an old friend or co-worker.

The scope of Frameweld’s past work with video and rich media is deep – implementations that combine countless layouts, applications that monetize content, learning handled a variety of ways, social features, certification workflows, custom reports, live events, unique workflows for specific clients, and the list goes on. Cramming everything into the Workshop was not an option. Aside from the staggering investment of time and effort it would take, the end product would be as expansive as it would be amorphous and directionless. We would likely end up with a video CMS and application framework that would be fantastic for our own use and a group of clients, but a small audience beyond that.

Work on our new online video platform, called the Workshop, started about a year and a half ago. We began with conversations and experiments on various user interface and workflow options. The origins of the Worskhop, however, stretch back many years beyond that. Here is the back story of why and how the Workshop was created.

Our splash page for SyncWords is up. If you’re wondering what SyncWords is and how to get more info – I encourage you to get to that page asap and drop your email address in the field.