Jon Oakes '94, Founder and CEO of OpenVision, Launches Cruxy 1.0 Media Marketplace

Cruxy is a media marketplace providing independent content creators with a rich set of tools to promote, monetize, and distribute their digital work. Cruxy publishers are creative, eclectic, and emerging filmmakers, musicians, record labels, film studios and artists of all kinds. On Cruxy you'll find a range of content including break dance instructional videos, original songs, human-rights documentaries, biology animations, short films, screensavers and more.

Cruxy acts as the online marketing and distribution partner for these original content creators and serves as the dashboard for their sales and outreach efforts. You can learn more about Cruxy, some of the Cruxy artists and the people behind it in this blog post and video.

Team Cruxy is three full-time people with lots of folks providing advice, design assistance and quality assurance. So many have worked long and hard to make Cruxy a reality. We created Cruxy with no venture funding which makes us all the more proud of the site and the quality, authenticity and passion of the Cruxy artist community.

No gimmicks, just powerful tools to help digital content creators sustain their creative efforts.

We envision Cruxy as a combination of the openness of Craigslist, the idea exchange medium of TypePad, and the digital content vending capabilities of iTunes. The service provides an open environment for digital creators of all types (from filmmakers to musicians, experts and artists) to sell their work as digital downloads on their terms, at their price, and in their chosen format.

Going beyond "friending" and viral hype, Cruxy provides a new path to
commercial success by giving creators the tools they need to market, distribute and sell their original music, videos, writing and more online and on their own terms.

Creators set their own price for the work they wish to sell and buyers can use Google Checkout, PayPal or any major credit card to purchase digital content. Creators can choose from a range of copyright licensing options for their work (including Creative Commons licenses).

• Cruxy does not employ any digital rights management (DRM) or dictate lower-quality file types, providing creators and buyers with the greatest possible flexibility in formats and playback. According to Nick Huntington of Attack Nine records "Cruxy allows anyone to promote and sell their digital files without a lot of rules and red tape."
  
  
• Cruxy offers creators and their fans a robust and customizable Social Player that can be easily embedded on blogs, social networking sites and web pages. According to Brit Wolfson from How To Do the Robot, "The Cruxy Social Player gives us an easy way to showcase our dance instructional videos on our website and MySpace page and gives our fans a way to promote us as well".
  
  
• Cruxy provides artists with real-time data on their sales and Internet buzz through robust reporting, and offers audience-connection capabilities well beyond the "number of views" metric so popular today. And unlike other "black box" providers, Cruxy tracks sales as they happen so artists can see their sales performance in real-time.
  
  
• Cruxy enables rich media syndication across the web and virtual worlds by employing the XSPF standard across the site. According to Lucas Gonze of Yahoo! Music, and creator of the specification, "Cruxy has made XSPF a central element of their architecture enabling very powerful and flexible playlisting and content syndication. "
  
  
• Cruxy goes a step beyond traditional web-based media widgets and players by offering the Virtual World Widget technology, allowing media to be distributed to virtual environments like Linden Lab's Second Life and opening up even more distribution channels to the content creator. Virtual merchandising and marketing are fast growing industry segments, and Cruxy tools are pioneering virtual world media marketing and commerce.

Underlying Cruxy is core technology built upon leading web services and standards. Cruxy uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) from Amazon Web Services to support all media processing, storage and delivery functions. "We are pleased to see Cruxy using multiple solutions from Amazon Web Services to build such an innovative solution for consumers," said
Steve Rabuchin, Director of Developer Relations, Amazon Web Services.

Some other services we have developed include:

• ION – A cross-platform social media player currently available under the Mozilla Public License and recently featured on https://ion.dev.java.net./
• Mux.am – A hosted video transcoding service that powers the conversion of web video between a variety of video formats.

More about Cruxy:

Cruxy was founded in 2005 to reinvent the way ideas and information are shared, discovered and commercialized in a digital world. Cruxy is headquartered in Brooklyn New York.