Castfire

Many sites worry about the Digg effect — their traffic can be overwhelming. We have always built with the mindset of having all of customers getting Dugg at the same time and it has worked like a charm. Yesterday, however, we got the true Digg effect: Federated Media is running video ads through Castfire ON Digg. Instantly, our system monitors alerted all of us that the system was starting to perform slowly under the increased load. Uh oh…feels scary!

It was at that moment that I was happy I followed the lead of our friends at Dogster and had retained Laine Campbell from Palomino DB. In our hurried conference call, with everyone throwing out suggestions, she calmly identified the issue and suggested a simple, elegant solution. With her assistance, we had the fix in 30 minutes later and the all of the servers were back to no load and humming along. Laine has quickly become a part of the Castfire team and works with us not as a consultant, but a full member of the team.

If you are a startup looking at growth and scaling, I pass on the same recommendation that Dogster did: contact Laine! She is uber responsible and quite the wizard. Thanks to Dogster and Laine!

Sometimes it is shockingly evident to me that Castfire is able to move forward only because of the highly skilled members of the team. I have to publicly thank Christoph, Leo and David for each owning their part and getting this release into production. This week alone has seen 5 AM mornings — that’s finish, not start — three times!

To Christoph: yet again you amaze me, my friend. Castfire would not be here without the super human efforts you continually extend. As always, let’s keep moving on to the next release.

I will be at SXSW this year — Saturday through Tuesday. I have a couple of meetings, but also have a bunch of additional time. Leave a comment here or message me: brian@castfire.com if you want to schedule something ahead of time. SXSW has been on my list of conferences/events to attend and I am excited to be going!

I have been on the road presenting and have always love getting face to face time with media companies. It is interesting to hear their needs, see their plans, and speak about the future of their media empires! Normally, we speak of today’s environment, how we can solve problems, new opportunities, etc. However, we had an excellent exchange with one company that has me smiling and thinking.

One of the attendees of the meeting said they were looking for a partner that would continually innovate, bringing new value to their existing business. What did we see in the future? What is our dream? What a great question! As a team, we got to speak about technology innovations that we see in the coming 6-12 months. In my mind, that portion of the meeting was building a foundation for our relationship in the future: trust that Castfire will continue to innovate on their behalf. I have been thinking about that all night and day since the meeting.

What a great way to start each day: how can I innovate for our customers today? I love it.

As we head into our second birthday, we decided it was finally time to update the website and let the world know what we actually do! It had become painful to discuss our website publicly…Robert, Christoph and I really hated even mentioning it. However, we were so busy with customers and the product that it continued to slip. Now, the time is over and we are launching our new look.

We have rolled out tractor trailer worth of new features, added in enhanced audio and are finishing up the video product. From one console, you are able to manage all of your audio, enhanced audio and video! Over the coming weeks, I will be posting screen shows to demonstrate every that you are able to publish through Castfire and the ease of use. We are focused on making fairly difficult processes easy to do!