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The Student News Site of Palo Alto High School

The Paly Voice

The Student News Site of Palo Alto High School

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Start-up CEO brings the future of video to journalism students

Meograph founder Misha Leybovich talks to Paly Voice webmaster junior Max Bernstein. Photo by David Raftrey.

The CEO of emerging video creation start-up Meograph.com visited Palo Alto High School on Oct. 21 and met with Paly journalism students to demonstrate Meograph’s classroom potential.

On Meograph.com, users can set up free accounts to create presentations integrating Google Maps with text, video and audio. Meograph was released in March 2012 as a tool for vacationers to document their travels, but has since been adopted by journalists. This October, an English news agency used Meograph to make live updates to the story of an eight day search for a missing girl.

“Meograph is for anywhere where people need to tell stories,” company founder Misha Leybovich said.

During his visit, Leybovich demonstrated Meograph’s capabilities to student journalists from several Paly publications. He noted the value of discussing Meograph with students who have grown up around technology.

“It’s useful for us as a company for us to get feedback from digital natives,” Leybovich said.

Meograph videos use Google Maps to zoom in from a  satellite view to a pinpointed location anywhere on earth. Each location is accompanied by a description of what happened as well as the time of the event. Additional information such as links to relevant sites, audio narrations, pictures and YouTube videos can be included. A finished Meograph will play a video jumping between multiple locations to tell a complete story.

The site includes buttons for sharing Meographs on Facebook and Twitter as well as embedding them into websites.

InFocus, Paly’s broadcast publication, plans to incorporate Meographs into its work in the future.

“I think it’s very useful,” senior InFocus executive producer Ethan Cohen said. “It really allows you to get more into a story than just a normal video piece.”

“It’s a really easy way for us to add in text pieces or photographs into stories we would already have,” Cohen added.

However, Cohen noted that Meograph lacked some features he would like to see developed.

“There’s just certain things like making mobile uploads faster,” Cohen said. “I’d love for them to be able to upload video into a Meograph in more of a one-step process. Right now they will only take video from YouTube or Vimeo.”

Leybovich said that his company is continuing to develop its website, which is currently in beta.

“Meograph is growing faster every day and we have a lot of things coming up,” Leybovich said.

Below is a sample Meograph presentation from Meograph.com describing the Trayvon Martin case.

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