Dear beginner, technology frightened soul, wayward one afraid you’ll screw it up

Ok look it. I am you. I know you. I get you. Everytime I get a new app I stare at  it and wonder why I’m so dumb that I can’t figure it out. It’s like there’s an “ON” button that everyone else sees that magically my brain can’t seem to discover. So I stare and I stare. Then I stare some more. And yup, I turn the app off.

So the idea of getting my photos, audio and videos into some form of organization throws me into supreme panic. I literally want to reach for scotch and a Xanax. I don’t do order. I don’t do structure. I hyperventilate at the thought of folders and spreadsheets. I create things. I do not coordinate or house them. And yes, It’s embarrassing when others seem to gravitate to technology with such relative ease and I don’t.

Good news my disorganized flock of seagull friends. Starchive does it for you. 

Literally. I’m not bullshitting you. If Tyler can find order you can too. You sign up for the app, hit upload and Bob’s your uncle … your files start to find themselves. I tell you, that Peter Agelasto is a cross between Beehtoven and Steve Jobs.

If Apple and Dropbox had a baby it’s name would be Starchive.

How? You see when you put media files into Starchive they find connections and connections make you organized. It’s some sort of martian AI metadata stuff Peter has dreamed up. All I know is that it works and I can find my files. And after ten years of podcasting and a lifetime of abstract painting I have a lot of files.

One more thing … It’s actually fun. It’s like watching all your little kids (media files) form relationships. You actually enjoy the act of getting organized. So literally all you have to do is take a page out of the NIKE handbook … “Just Do It.”

Upload your files into Starchive and watch the magic happen. It’s not work. It’s fun

Do More. Creating.

The other Tyler the Creator

There are no screw ups in Starchive.

Use your quarantine ‘downtime’ in a positive, productive, and valuable way.

You’re an artist and your gigs have been canceled. You’re a manager scrambling to support your artists during this unprecedented time. You’re a content creator stuck at home staring at your stacks of hard drives and thinking about what to do next. What can you be doing to set yourself up for success right now?

Gather your media, curate it, and share it – we’re eager and ready to help you. We know that you mean a lot to your fans, that your tribe wants to hear from you, and that right now the safest way to connect with them is online.

It’s time to finally pull together your creations – your songs, beats, videos, photos, lyric sheets, logos, merch designs, etc. – to build the content library you’ve always wanted and that your creative projects deserve. And, we want to help you get started for free.

If you’re like most artists and/or artist teams, your Dropbox account is full (or a total mess), your hard drives are at risk, your media is scattered across several distribution/publishing channels and media-specific tools like YouTube, Vimeo, iPhoto, iCloud, G-Drive, and more. Does this sound familiar and perhaps give you anxiety?

It’s ok, we understand and we can help. It’s why we made Starchive. Starchive is a simple, affordable, private content library in the cloud that empowers you to preserve and share your valuable creations.

   Right now, we are feeling compelled to lean in hard to support the

   creative community through this unique and uncertain time.

Whatever tool or tool(s) you use, we encourage you to use this time to think and act productively and positively, and we’d love to connect with you to share our thoughts, tips, recommendations and more. A few tools (in addition to Starchive) that we think are worth checking out:

• Use Canva to help you make beautiful designs easily
• Set up a Patreon account to establish a direct relationship with your fans via membership
• For our videography friends, look into Seed & Spark as a way to crowdfund your work 

What’s the next step? Choose your own adventure (with our support):

1. Signup for a 30-day free trial of Starchive and dive right in (no credit card required and no commitment required); if you need more time than that to get going, reach out to us and we can work together to craft a plan that works for you.
2. Email us at: [email protected] to schedule a time to connect and talk. We’d love to answer your questions and provide support & recommendations for building your content library (Starchive account not required)

P.S. And, seriously, if your hard drives are 2 years old (or older, yikes) then your media is at risk – please get that media to a new home asap!

Wishing you safety, health, peace, and productivity,

Your Starchive Tribe

We love Starchive and We know you will too!

Try Starchive FREE for 30 days — no commitment or credit card required.

 One of the biggest challenges in getting your media off of your random storage devices and into a secure cloud storage environment is HOW DAMN LONG IT TAKES.

It doesn’t matter what platform you’re using to manage your digital media: uploading files to a server is a universal challenge. If you’re looking to move your media into the cloud, you might be wondering how long you’re going to have to babysit your upload. Three minutes? Three hours? Three years? To help you get a sense of how long it will take for your media to make the journey, here are five things you need to know about upload.

Size matters.
Well, file size matters, anyway. This is just basic math: bigger files mean longer upload times. And because uploads that take a really long time are more prone to errors due to dropped connections or other web traffic issues, we highly recommend that you break down large uploads into smaller chunks if you have a lot of large files..

That superfast broadband you just signed up for only advertised download speeds.
And here’s the catch: download speed and upload speed are almost never equal. Information about your upload speed is usually buried in the fine print of your contract…so while you may be enjoying that killer 75 mbps download for video streaming, your upload speed might be hovering somewhere around 2-5 mbps. Not sure what your upload speed is? Run a quick test here. 

Your server might be in Hong Kong
It might be faster to get to China via server connection than a regular economy class jet, but the information still has to travel a long, long way. If you’ve ever been on an international phone call where there’s a little delay and you keep talking over each other…transferring information to a far-away server is a similar experience. Longer distance = more time to communicate. So before you invest in a cloud storage solution, know where your server is physically located.

FYI, Starchive uses Amazon Web Services for all of its cloud storage, and our servers are located in northern Virginia.

Even file transfers have overhead costs
You can have the fastest connection speed available, but there’s a lot of overhead in the upload process of that’s just out of your control. Your files aren’t just being shipped — they’re being packaged, secured, addressed to the right place, bumped around on various networks to avoid traffic jams, and to be honest, sometimes the internet superhighway is just plain congested and inefficient. Plan to lose about 10% of your upload speed to navigating all these overhead costs.  

 So given these factors, what’s the bottom line? How long will it take to upload your media to the cloud? Well, you could thank your ninth grade math teacher and do the calculation yourself:

• (Upload size in MB x 8) / Upload Speed in mbps = time in seconds
  (100 MB video file x 8) / 5 mbps upload speed = 160 seconds (about 2 minutes and 40 seconds)

Or, if you’re lazy or algebra challenged like me, you can use these handy calculators to do the math for you:

GoodCloudStorage.net File Transfer Calculator
Upload Time Calculator

Thinking about moving your media to the cloud? 

Try Starchive FREE for 14 days — no commitment or credit card required.

You’ve got media. Lots of it. 

If you’re anything like me, your approach to media organization might currently look something like this: 

• a box of 4 MB thumb drives circa mid-2000s
• a collection of 10-year-old DVDs from when you were super proactive and had your 8MM tapes “digitized” 
• a computer desktop that looks like a filing cabinet exploded on it
• a random assortment of files someone once shared with you via Dropbox
• a proprietary work server with 10,000 folders named something like, “082014_Projects_MediaAssets_Originals_Vectors_ForPrint_ClientApproved_DONOTUSEAFTER102014”
• a handful of external hard drives (admit it: at least one of those hard drives has a power cord attached to it that you have to plug into the wall) filled with photos, videos, work files, art, and that one document you need to access like once a year but can never find

Yeah. More like digital media chaos than digital media mastery. 

The thought of having to sit down and organize all that stuff is…well, let’s just say that I’m likely to put off that fun task as long as possible. The thing is, our media collections are only getting bigger, not smaller. So the longer we wait to get the mess managed, the more time, effort, and money it’s going to take to get the mess managed. 

And if you’re running a business, that can have a huge impact. I recently heard from one marketing manager that they often re-license stock photos they already own because they can’t find them — and it’s not worth their time to have one of their staffers spend hours digging through servers and hard drives. Easier to just buy the photos again. 

Ouch. 

Fortunately, tech is finally catching up with the world’s need to get its digital act together. There are dozens of companies out there offering solutions for “digital asset management” (frequently referred to as DAM, which provides an endless supply of witty, dual-meaning headlines) — but what does that even mean, and which one is going to best meet your needs? Where do you start? Is it even possible to get everything in one place? 

We’ve got you covered on this one. Take our short quiz below to figure out what media organization tools are likely to be the best fit for you and what next steps you can take on your journey out of digital media chaos. 

(FYI, I proposed the idea of a naming this post titled, “What flavor of ice cream are you based on the type of media you have?” but apparently that’s “unprofessional.” Also, most of us are likely to be Confetti Cake Batter With Rainbow Sprinkles. Because Cake Batter ice cream is the bomb and nobody just has Word docs.) 

Like all moms, I have a million things going on at once. From incredible work projects, to capturing amazing family memories (my baby crawling for the first time, my daughter registering for kindergarten, my husband slaying a guitar solo — ah, life is good!), to managing household paperwork (finances, health care, registration forms…you know, the less fun stuff), to passionately engaging in volunteer projects — I’ve got a lot of media to keep track of.

Starchive gives me one easy place to collect, access, and share all the digital stuff that I care about. Recently, while on the go, I had to find and deliver my kids’ most recent vaccination records and the clock was ticking. While in the past this would’ve required a trip to the file-cabinet-of-doom (ok, a little dramatic but seriously, physical files still?) and an attempt at remembering how I would’ve filed those records, Starchive made this ridiculously simple with a quick search and share. What would’ve taken me 15-30 minutes took me 3 minutes. Saving time? Easy to use solutions? Yes, please.

#starchiveforallmoms

If you’re on the front lines of marketing, you know how frequently we face that frustrating search for the exact image, presentation, or video we need. When we lose 1 out of 5 days just searching for the right files, an opportunity to get back in control of our digital content and bottom lines is top of mind.

As we get ready to launch a new and affordable version of our Starchive platform, we are looking to stay on top of digital content trends in our product development. Here’s a peek into what we see as the most important considerations for digital content management in 2019. Head on over to Marketing Land for the full story.

• Content marketing moves beyond marketing for easier access
• Growing video content leads to more metadata and automation
• Privacy and security grow more important along with cloud storage
• Old content becomes new again
• Analytics become more important
• Content is optimized for new uses
• AI helps add context to enhance content
• Move to the cloud accelerates
• New high-value uses of digital content emerge
• Predictive asset management will improve bottom and top lines

How are you leveling up your content strategy in the New Year? Let us know in the comments below.