Everyone knows that business video is growing – you needn’t look much further than YouTube (News - Alert) to see the evidence. Every day more businesses are adding video to their strategy: They’re using it for marketing, sales, employee training, educating customers, and a variety of other purposes. Considering the social media aspects, most companies would be foolish to ignore the huge opportunities business video presents.

Helping to propel the growth of business video is that fact that bandwidth is no longer an issue – with today’s high speed broadband networks and advanced video compression technologies, video quality and reliability has improved significantly.

One of the things that continues to limit business video’s potential, however, is the inability to quickly and effectively search and find specific segments within a particular video: For example, if you have a YouTube video that’s 30 minutes long, but you only care about a certain section in the middle that’s only 30 seconds long, until recently the only way to find it was to watch the video, isolate the section you want to use, and mark down the time at which that section begins and ends.

In other words, up until recently there’s been no way to do what’s called “deep tagging” in online video to make it easier and faster to search for specific content. “Deep tagging” is the concept of indexing not just a video as a whole, but being able to index within the video. As you might imagine the lack of this capability has been a hindrance when doing certain types of video production.

For example, suppose you were asked to compile a training video about ladder safety for your company. You are given a bunch of videos that show improper or unsafe use of ladders. But you only have a short amount of time to put together your presentation. How do you go about quickly searching, finding and isolating just the clips of “ladder mishaps” that you want to use for your training video, without having to manually search through every video you received?

Now think about the vast libraries of video content that many businesses are compiling today. What good does all that video do them if they can’t quickly search and find what they really need, among all those hundreds or perhaps thousands of hours of video they have archived?

Start-up technology company Momindum has a solution. It offers a business video authoring software solution called Momindum Studio that allows users to capture video for trainings, lectures, presentations and live meetings, then edit and enrich the video – including the ability to synchronize the video with any type of document (such as a PowerPoint slide or presentation) – and then broadcast the finished product either online or offline. This powerful business video authoring software solution, which is available both as a licensed on-premises and SaaS (News - Alert)-based solution, is ideal for creating, editing, enriching and broadcasting rich media presentations, plus it is offered for free.

What makes Momindum’s solution unique is its “deep tagging” technology, which enables users to isolate an exact section of a video, include it in a presentation and share it with an audience. More unique still is the fact that this indexing can be carried out on an automated basis by way of keyword spotting (on the audio side).

During a visit at TMC’s (News - Alert) offices, Thierry Manissol, company CEO, explained that when Momindum first started out in 2006, its solution was primarily being targeted at law firms which needed a faster and more effective way of indexing and searching video depositions. For example, a defendant might say something during a video interview which is relevant to a specific aspect of their case – so how does the paralegal or defense attorney quickly locate and isolate just that section, when the deposition is three hours long?

Fast forward to 2010 and business video is exploding all over the place – hence why this small and innovative company’s solution is now starting to get noticed by businesses operating in a wide range of market segments (including in particular – as you might imagine – those operating in regulated industries). Suddenly, everyone needs a fast and effective way to search through video content.

But this solution isn’t just about video search, you can do a lot of other cool things with it too: For example, as soon as a certain keyword or phrase is mentioned in a video, you can program the software to present a slide from a PowerPoint presentation at the moment that keyword or phrase is mentioned. Basically you can annotate any video with any type of file you wish and have a wide range of files associated with that video.

Manissol said what also makes the solution unique is that any end user can annotate any video any way they wish, based on their personal needs or preferences. For example, suppose you had a training video that was two hours long and you had two different groups of employees to train. Suppose only a certain section of that video applied to group “A” while another section applied to group “B.” Using this software, two different trainers could use the same video to train each group – without making employees sit through sections that have no relevance. The point is, the end-user has full control over how the video is edited and annotated – any video content that lives in a company’s video library can be used by any employee (who has access) for any purpose they deem fit – and they have the ability to search through all of the videos and isolate just the content needed quickly and easily.

Another cool feature is that the software allows a presenter to quickly and easily update their presentation based on audience feedback. For example, if you are doing a live online presentation, and attendees are asking questions which are not addressed through the content, the presenter could in theory automatically update the presentation in real time and then provide audience members with the answers to their question right within the content being presented (this “updating” could come in the form of additional video or perhaps some other file that could be added to the presentation for viewing).

The platform has a lot of other cool features too, such as the ability to resize the video, configure the screen a wide variety of ways, and the ability to quickly and intuitively jump around from place to place within the presentation (presenter can just click on pre-set “tabs” within the interface). Yet another cool feature is the ability to track and see what users are doing with the software – which videos they are accessing (and which sections within those videos) and which files they are using in association with those videos.

You can view a demonstration of the software here.

Momindum also offers a companion tool to its Momindum Studio solution called Momindum Timecoder, which is used for recording and timecoding PowerPoint slideshows. This simple-to-use tool automatically generates a list of keywords and an outline. Once downloaded, you can launch a slideshow from the toolbar in PowerPoint. This saves a significant amount of time for recording PowerPoint slides.

The public version of Momindum’s solution is available at Deeptagging.com.

The company also offers a hardware solution that comes bundled with everything you need (including Timecoder) with its Winnov Cbox S1 appliance. This compact appliance gives presenters all the tools they need to record every aspect of a presentation and transform it into a rich media experience. With this appliance, companies can reduce set-up time and eliminate the need for audio/video mixing and editing know-how.

Finally, Momindum is targeting the education market with its new Momindum K-base 2.0 offering. The company claims this learning and collaboration tool is “the first knowledge management system to capitalize and share your rich media presentation, created exclusively of deep-tagged contents.”

With this powerful solution, college students can “easily jump to a video instant, quickly find relevant articles and documents, take notes, ask questions or exchange ideas.”