Lost & Found – The key to unlocking the potential of video

By Sumner Murphy, founder of Mobento.com

In the last seven years the amount of online video has exploded. YouTube estimates that every minute, 72 hours of video are uploaded to the site.

But only now are there tools to find relevant information becoming available. The effects of these tools on human lives are many, but one thing is for certain: video finally has what is needed to make Internet based learning easy to use.

The Internet has exerted a particularly strong influence on the education industry. Study material can now be delivered via the Internet, many universities offer online study resources to their students and more importantly many of the world’s leading educational institutions provide their courses to the public over the Internet, by way of recorded lectures and classes.

This shift has raised a number of issues that have to be solved before online education can become a viable alternative to traditional schooling. Many sharp minds have and are contributing to solving these issues. In recent years online education has matured with the introduction of user-friendly learning systems.

However one of the key problems lies in online video libraries. The problem is threefold:

Storage: Video materials require an abundance of storage ,which must be reliable.

Management: Online video libraries are exhausting to manage.

Access: There has not yet been an easy way to search for video content and organize it with structure.

In fact, until now there has only been one way to search video. It’s a time-consuming linear process: start at the beginning and watch until the end.To make video search useful for education purposes, the search engine must have the capacity to search through not only the meta-data (title, description, speaker etc.), but more importantly, the words that are spoken in a video.

Many students opt to look for information in written material, as it is substantially faster to pinpoint key information, as opposed to watching a recorded video lecture in order to find an important five-minute segment.

This is whereMobento comes in. Mobento dedicates itself to solving this issue,making educational video more accessible to all.

Having experienced this shortcoming first hand, and with feedback collected from a group of key people in the education industry around the world,Mobento is developing solutions to address the problems with online video libraries.

Storage: Mobento provides scalable storage that is secure and reliable, so educational institutions no longer need to invest in hardware and support staff.

Management: Mobento has created a system that makes it easy to manage video content, allowing content creators to focus on quality instead of monotonous day-to-day management tasks.

Access: Mobentoprovides a video search solution that finds words spoken in a video and enables users to watch only the relevant points. By creating a fluid and self-explanatory user interface Mobento has ensured that even first-time users find it easy to use.

Additionally, this technology can be integrated into many existing software solutions currently used by educational institutions, and can even be customized to meet their specific requirements.

Although Mobento is targeting education, it is not limited to schools and universities. Mobento believes that education continues throughout human life. It is the growing popularity of websites providing educational material from all areas of science, life and business that proves people are always looking to deepen their understanding of the world that surrounds them.

Mobento has made it its mission to make it easy for people to find and consume information currently locked away in huge video libraries. The tools and solutions Mobento has developed have the potential to change the way people access knowledge.