JibeCast was born of frustration after Mark Ford, the company's president, found few commercial solutions to the challenge of securely distributing training videos to new sales representatives of Qwasi, his previous startup.
"I found myself challenged to not sit on training calls every single day to regurgitate the same information over and over again," Ford says. "I found myself sitting on webinars doing a lot of internal activity versus helping my sales team close big deals. I started to think about how we might be able to leverage online video to basically put myself into a cloning machine so that I could distribute that training message consistently and effectively."
The result is
JibeCast, a cloud-based service that allows clients to secure their video content, distribute it easily and track immediately who accesses it. Formed in Dayton last year, the company has distributed the product privately and plans a beta launch in the next few weeks.
"Video presents a unique challenge in that most companies infrastructures aren't well equipped to manage online video," Ford says. "The media streaming and encoding aspects of handling video are totally different than putting up a pdf on your website. And then properly formatting it and being able to secure it online is a challenge for most organizations.
JibeCast is targeting small to midsize businesses that either have a sales focus or heavy training component.
"We also have a focus on healthcare market, where they are constantly being mandated to comply to new government standards and they have to continually audit their employees and teams on process and procedure. So anywhere where there are process and procedure requirements for tracking and auditing are also a sweet spots," Ford says.
Ford lives outside of Philadelphia, but -- with the help of the
Dayton Development Coalition and $300,000 in
Ohio Third Frontier funds -- established the company in Dayton.
"Dayton provides access to affordable talent," Ford explains. We looked at Ohio, Cincinnati, Dayton, as a great hotbed for technology, and we said there's just a tremendous talent pool here and it comes at a significantly reduced cost."
Source: Mark Ford, JibeCast
Writer: Gene Monteith