With the Internet evolving and growing every day, entrepreneurs are being forced to adjust their businesses to fit the ever-changing requirements of today’s technology. But one company – DigitalFX (OTCBB: DFXN) –isn’t just ready to meet the challenges of the Web 2.0 community, it’s helping to bring it about.
“Web 2.0” is a popular phrase used to describe the next stage of the Internet’s evolution – the point where the Internet becomes less a scattered collection of Web sites and more a conglomeration of related user-managed pages. The phrase was originally coined by Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media, an American media company dedicated to publishing books and Web sites and producing computer technology conferences.
Many people see the proliferation of user-manageable Web sites like YouTube, MySpace and FaceBook, along with downloadable Internet communication accessories like BitTorrent, and the various forms of instant messaging software, as the first stage in bringing Web 2.0 about. Their popularity, ease of use, and speed of communication make them the natural precursors to the Web 2.0 revolution.
But there’s still one problem: all these sites are unconnected, and no one site offers all the services of the others.
Craig Ellins, CEO and president of DigitalFX International Inc., said the company’s innovative flagship communications site, HelloWorld, will change all that.
“HelloWorld’s slogan is ‘making digital life simple,’” Ellins said in a recent interview with MN1. “Everybody has a digital life … because your music doesn’t come on CDs anymore, it comes on MP3s, shortly your movies will not come on DVDs anymore thanks to IPTV, your cellphone, camera and camcorders all have hard drives. Although the devices have advanced, the ways an average person has to handle their digital life has been left up in the air. HelloWorld is an aspirin for that headache.”
According to Ellins, the HelloWorld Web site (www.helloworld.com) offers the social networking capabilities of MySpace and some instant messaging software, the video sharing abilities of YouTube, and a slew of other specialty Internet services not offered anywhere else – and all for as little as $10 a month.
“It’s a whole suite of really rich media tools that kids today might want to go out on the website, they need to go to five or six different sites to get what we’ve got under one application,” Ellins said. “The beautiful thing is that it’s all one application so you don’t have to go to multiple Web sites … and there is no software download.”
Of course, it’s not the site itself that does all the “magic.” Ellins said the majority of the work comes from something he calls “The Studio,” and that HelloWorld is just the icing on an already amazing cake.
“The HelloWorld site is a social networking – a place like YouTube to show off your goodies and go for your 15 minutes of fame,” Ellins said. “But the HelloWorld product is called The Studio. The majority of people on HelloWorld use The Studio, because The Studio is an aggregation of video and audio podcasting, of video and audio and picture blogging, video and text e-mail, all of them fully integrated. You can send and receive video e-mails as well as text.”
So what keeps this juggernaut going? Ellins said that his company’s revolutionary new “file transcoding” system is the cause. According to Ellins, the company’s servers can convert one file type to another in seconds, even across operating systems.
“We are a universal translator [of file types.] Our servers are leading edge, and we are able to take in up to 120 different audio and video codices and translate them into any of the other 120 flavors,” Ellins said. “We put together the ability for even the novice … to have the same power as only corporations have had in the past.”
“We are looking to the future, and it’s not far off,” he added.
The company’s headed in the right direction, if its financials are anything to go by. The company reported revenue of just over $22 million for 2006 – an amazing 350 percent increase over their 2005 revenue.
Lorne Walker, the company’s CFO, attributed the increased revenue to the company’s recent expansion into Australia and New Zealand, along with significant growth in the number of products and services DigitalFX offers.
“Things just really got charged,” Walker said. “We’ve got momentum from all the features and the technical aspect you’re looking at. We have approximately 26,000 users as of December, and we’re growing each month.”
Walker also said the company is planning on expanding into non-English-speaking countries, and that it will be releasing a business-oriented version of its Studio services called FirstStream within a month.
“A small business would buy our [FirstStream] set of products for its employees, and it would have all the technical aspects,” Walker said. “So if you’re selling a product, or trying to train all your personnel in the field, or if the CEO wants to send out a newsletter to his employees… [it could do] a myriad of things.”
So is DigitalFX worried about losing its position as the frontrunner of the Web 2.0 pack? That it would be lost amidst the already established sites like YouTube and MySpace? Not in the slightest, Ellins said.
“Right now, we are the competition,” Ellins stated. “We’re the people everybody else is worrying about. We’re an aggregation of all of them in one spot.”
Stock prices for DFXN held steady at $4.15 a share today – a sharp $1 increase over its prices for last month.
For more information, visit www.helloworld.com or www.firststream2.com.
