Website owners and application developers know that analytics and usage monitoring tools play a major role in growing their products and making them effective, and highly tuned to their customers needs.
One of the hardest optimization goals when showing images to your website (and mobile application's) visitors, is to minimize the image file size while maintaining high enough display quality.
Smaller image file sizes directly translate to faster load times, reduced bandwidth costs and improved user browsing experience. But small file sizes directly translate to lower image quality and may harm visitor satisfaction. Maintaining just the right balance is both crucial and hard.
As tradition goes, we are happy to present Cloudinary's "10 Startup companies that manage their images in the cloud" - Part 3. (previous parts: Part 1, Part 2).
As Cloudinary continues to grow, so do the features and capabilities we offer. This allows for usage methods that are even more creative and sophisticated than before. We wanted to showcase 10 great startup companies that each in its own wonderful, unique manner, use Cloudinary to manage their images.
Online advertising is one of the most popular tools to drive traffic to your website and mobile application in a consistent and cost-effective manner. Online text ads play a very big role in this strategy.
Many modern web and mobile applications include integral social aspects as parts of their online solution.
Users can sign-in to these services and be identified by their chosen social identity. This is made quite straightforward by leveraging single sign-on services such as Facebook Connect, Twitter, Google+ and others. After signing in, activities in the service and user generated content can be accompanied with the real name of the users as well as their profile pictures.
Modern image compression techniques have had a large impact on our lifestyle. Digital cameras can save thousands of high-quality photos on a single memory card, smartphones can quickly share high resolution images on-the-fly, and websites and mobile apps can show rich media quickly. All of this just couldn,t have worked if image data was stored at its original, raw form.
Two decades ago websites had such a simple usage flow. Web servers returned complete HTML pages and each user action required that a new HTML page be reloaded from the server. Later on Ajax joined the game allowing dynamic updating of specific web page fragments via simple Javascript requests to the server. Google's wide-spread use of Ajax with Gmail was simply mind blowing at the time. Today's product requirements wouldn't settle even for that.
Do you like to show your photos exactly as they were taken or do you usually tweak them a little to get that extra punch? What about applying artistic filters before sharing them with your friends and family?
Fashion outlets have evolved dramatically in the last decade. In the past, if you wanted to be on top of the latest fashion trends, you had to subscribe to all the latest magazines and every month wait for the mailman to drop them off. If you wanted to remember a certain outfit or designer, you could either dog ear the page ('bookmark') or cut out the model or design and literally pin it to your cork board.
Web applications and web APIs are usually programmed to perform requests in a synchronous manner. A common web-based access flow will start with a requester accessing a remote service. The remote service in turn will process the request and quickly return the result.