Back in 2002, right after the dotcom crash of 2001, muvee - recognised globally as as the pioneer and leader in automatic video editing - was born.
What muvee does is turn the special moments in your casual home videos and photos into emotionally engaging videos that are called "muvees".
It does this by analyzing your video clips for the presence of human faces, removing the shaky and jerky video shots in favour of good steady tight shots. It then allows users to choose any music track and it will automatically cut the video to the beat of the music, observing the little nuances of its "emotional index" through analyzing the music file. From one click of an editing "Style", users can remake their home movies into anything from a 1920's Charlie Chaplin silent movie style, to a hip trip-out Eurofilm club music video.
The founders of muvee are a bunch of musician-geeks who met at Kent Ridge Digital Labs, where they were dabbling in video and music analysis using computers.
Dr Pete Kellock has his own commercial punk rock album and a PhD in electronic music and Terence Swee is an avid jazz pianist with a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering. Together with colleagues from KRDL, we raised investment and spun off muvee Technologies with eight people in 2002.
Raising VC funding right after the dotcom crash of 2001 was challenging to say the least. While we were still filing the patents (muvee has six families of patents) and building the first version of the software, we decided to divide and conquer.
Pete pitched to well over 80 VCs from Silicon Valley to Shenton Way and Terence flew to far reaches of the world in search of customers. That strategy worked out: before we had actually released our first product, we had already licensed our automatic editing engine to a Canadian company in Toronto.
Shortly after that, we began to to sell the software on the shelves of major retailers in Spain, Italy, UK, France and Germany ? totally bypassing Sim Lim Square along the way.
In the meantime Pete got two term sheets from VCs in Singapore and Europe and closed the first round of financing in August of 2002.
Starting a business right after the dotcom crash taught muvee to be lean from day one and not indulge in hyperbole; to always look where no one else was looking.
Right when dotcoms were putting out fancy websites to get eyeballs, muvee put out a plain website to do one thing and one thing only: to sell software.
No fancy (and expensive) ad-agency produced websites for us. In fact Terence picked up PHP coding over a weekend and built the very first muvee public website along with simple graphics. Looking back, that was almost laughable, seeing how far www.muvee.com has come today, however that focus is still evident in the site today. We also took a strategic decision to go global and go digital.
muvee targets the major consumer markets of the world who buy and download software with a credit card. This model has many advantages, but was really chosen out of necessity.
muvee only raised a very modest amount of capital to start up. Nothing like the amounts that were being thrown around just a year earlier. With modest cash-in-bank when we started, and being based so far away from the major consumer economies of the world (US, Japan, Europe) muvee cannot possibly be making boxes of software, shipping them halfway around the world, or managing inventories in outsourced production centres.
muvee therefore outsourced every single portion of work that was not core to their expertise, which included using a third party credit card processing partner who handled the downloads and credit card payments.
Most local businesses would have frowned upon letting someone else operate the "cash register", but getting a credit card merchant account in multiple currencies and in 60 over countries was not something we felt was the best use of their time (let alone dealing with fraud management and shopping cart development). This enabled us to immediately start making revenue instead of taking six months to build a payment system.
muvee also avoided selling in Singapore or the region for a simple reason: the market is way too small and piracy is rife in some parts. If we sold in Singapore first, being successful would have meant selling 50 CD-ROMs a week at Sim Lim Square. That wouldn't even pay for the high-end PCs in the office! With software, you have no choice but to go global.
This strategy worked very well in our favour when SARS hit the region in 2003. muvee's business was not at all affected by the Singapore SARS downturn because only 1 per cent of our revenue comes from Singapore.
By 2003-04, we were selling to over 138 countries, and had HP, Sony and Medion as customers who bundle the software globally in 15 languages, shipping well over 30 million copies a year.
We also became cash-flow positive that year.
The only effects of SARS were operational: Once, I (Terence) was not allowed to visit Sony Headquarters in Tokyo (which I visit regularly) as Sony had a company wide ban on visitors from SARS affected nations. My counterpart was very understanding and arranged to meet me at the Shinagawa train station near their offices.
Of course, many of muvee's local vendors were affected, from the guy who prints our name cards, to the air con maintenance guy. So to help them, muvee made sure to pay vendors immediately, instead of waiting out the credit period to help them alleviate their cash flow problems. We also kept up the 13th month bonus that year, when many companies were cutting back.
Internally, muvee bought a bunch of laptops and had them preloaded with the C++ Development environments in case any of the 15 software developers they had at that time were quarantined and had to work from home.
Anyone who wasn't feeling well was encouraged to stay at home, without needing to produce an MC. This practice is still current today at muvee, we're also known for treating our staff very well, although we also demand a lot of them and we only hire the very best.
If muvee were to have focussed on this region, we may not have survived SARS. Instead, muvee was able to hire some very good people and expanded the team in 2003.
A year after SARS, we launched the world's first mobile phone that's capable of editing video on the fly with Nokia. muvee became profitable in 2004, and attracted a second round of funding at the end of that year.
The current downturn has definitely affected muvee; online revenues have stagnated, shipment volumes from our large distribution partners like HP, Nikon, Olympus, Nokia and LG are also expected to reduce as the world's consumers reduce spending.
However, muvee has built up cash reserves from previous profitable years, an impressive portfolio of award winning products and strong OEM relationships and distribution partners.
muvee is approaching this crisis in a very level headed manner: we recognize that costs are the only thing we can control, however it does not make sense to cut back on basic staff welfare items like the free espresso, food in the pantry, social activities or health insurance. These cost very little money in the larger scheme of things, but yet boost morale and keeps staff happy, and loyal.
We're also not curtailing business travel and conferences, as we know that for a global high tech business, travel is a basic necessity and staff training and keeping up to date with the market is key.
Besides, Terence, who is now the CEO only travels in economy class on budget airlines, stays in modest hotels and rents compact cars. muvee's team are also very supportive and have been on a relentless drive to help the company save money, from volunteering to share rooms when travelling to offering to go on reduced work days.
From the first signs of the downturn, muvee quickly consolidated their teams and moved everyone down to one level instead of the two levels of 11,000 sq feet that they had previously occupied. This actually made them more productive as everyone and all the meeting rooms were on one floor.
However, they had to give up some frills like the 30 seat cinema cum training room and their very own "beach"; a sand pit with sand castle making implements. However, the diner and afternoon nap room were preserved.
We also instituted compulsory clearing of annual leave over the Christmas to New Year period. muvee is also being more focused, hence reducing the need to hire more engineers to build yet more variants and reducing the time to market of existing products and refreshes.
We're also focusing on selling more of what we have already built, through new markets and new channels, taking advantage of social media platforms to reach more users.
Today, muvee's PC products are bundled on over 50 million PCs, cameras and phones each year. They are embedded on over 90 per cent of all phones by LG in Korea, and in many blockbuster global models like the Viewty, Prada2, Renoir, Cooky. They are also in over 18 models of Nokia phones and in Nikon S-Series digital cameras. The online editing cloud service runs the video editing service for Yahoo! Taiwan and Korea's Cyworld, which has over 22 million online subscribers.
We are hunkering down during this downturn, consolidating products, platforms and business models to get ready for the next upturn, when we will continue to help consumers around the world celebrate the magical moments in their lives.
