Blade Kotelly thinks that any Radio Shack salesman and Steve Jobs are telling the same exact story. Jobs is just better it at. That would be: “Here’s the problem, here’s the product, here’s the call to action,” he says.
It all plays into Kotelly’s theory that there are the same few story lines recycled throughout the world, and that some people just convey them more successfully than others.
The idea is the driving force behind his startup, 1Minute40Seconds, which is developing story templates for businesses and marketers to plug images and words into. It then pops out quick, compelling videos that it hopes will engage viewers better than existing ads or text. “If we can codify those stories in a way that allows you to tell it better, you can capture [your audience] emotionally and intellectually,” he says
Kotelly, who teaches engineering innovation and design at MIT and has previously taught design at Tufts University, said the idea for the company came to him late last year. His company formed this spring and has been developing its Web-based software technology throughout the summer, with the help of three current Tufts students and a couple of recent graduates working part-time. Kotelly has staffed the startup with a 2:1 ratio of designers to coders.
“It’s a platform that very flexibly allows you to integrate your words, your pictures, your video, your sound, in a template,” Kotelly says of his technology. “You drop it in and it assembles it for you.”
The platform also allows users to pull existing content from the Web, like YouTube videos, and uses third-party technology to translate written words to voice recordings throughout the video. That’s a field Kotelly is familiar with—he spent much of his career in design and marketing at SpeechWorks, which was eventually acquired by Burlington, MA-based speech software developer Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: [[ticker:NUAN]]) (called Scansoft at the time).
1Minute40Seconds isn’t the first startup to recognize that plenty of businesses don’t have the budget to hire professional video production teams for marketing content and the like. Cambridge, MA-based Pixability provides customers with Flip video cameras to take their own footage, and hires video editors to produce marketing videos from that content.
But Kotelly says his is the first company to center that process entirely on technology and turn out a finished product in minutes. “This is at the core of what makes this technology different—we can do it very, very, very fast,” he says.
The speed of the process extends 1Minute40Seconds’ reach to beyond
