Welcome Sclipo, farewell Visuarios … a little history of our young firm

Posted on April 16, 2007

We love the name Visuarios. Visuarios stands for visual user in Spanish (usuarios visuales). Since our launch, Visuarios has become the world’s leading community for user-generated skills-videos. Millions have visited and used our site, and we received lots of great feedback. One was that the name Visuarios was hard to pronounce and remember internationally. So we decided to find a better one. We decided for SCLIPO: Skills + CLIP + a Spanish touch with the “O“. We hope you like our new name.

Well, and a change of name kind of demands a little about the history and vision of our young company:

Visuarios was the name selected for a project back in June 2006, not a public web. The project was to explore how visual or video web applications would change and benefit the life of Internet users. At that point, video-web was all about entertainment, yet we thought it had a much larger potential.

A finding of said project was that our life is - in many ways - all about skills: we all depend on the skills we can acquire and promote. Everybody has an inherent need to learn skills and to show the world that we are damn good at these to achieve recognition, respect, a job and - if our skills are really outstanding - fame. Kids dream of joining a celebrated soccer team, teenagers of becoming a rock star and college students of winning the Nobel Prize (well, some of them).

Ok, but how does Internet video change the way we handle our skills? Well, it makes learning, sharing and promoting skills much easier, faster and cheaper than before. Before, anybody could video-tape skills, but sharing them with an audience larger than the one that fits a living- or class-room was practically impossible. To share your skills with a wide audience - for teaching or promotion - you had to convince experts of some kind to invest a lot of money into the production, distribution and promotion of your skills-video. Now, you can upload any skills-video and promote it yourself at no cost … for example by posting it to your blog and social-bookmarking sites, or just emailing its URL. Now you can also build a network related to your skills beyond the boundaries of your local friends, family, club or school: you can create a community with people from anywhere on the globe with whom you share those skills that define - in one way or another - your life.

So we decided to build and launch Visuarios, as of now Sclipo, a social web utility that helps you share, improve and promote your skills through video.

Your Sclipo Team!