the labs @ laan thoughts and other ramblings

Silverlight – closing ceremonies

The olympics wrapped up today and I have a few wrap up thoughts on silverlight as I was forced to use it to get any Olympic coverage online. Again, I have nothing against Microsoft (unlike some of some septic responses I see with the younger developers), but they have such a clumsy hand when it comes to web and this required use of silverlight 2 beta was just another example in a clear pattern of behavior.

From my background in rich media advertising, I have witnessed first hand Microsoft throwing their huge cash behind trying to get their technologies implemented by a less than interested market. Because they dominate the OS market, they have such a trickle down effect on all their products. They have the big shops (schematic) and big players (nbc olympics, mlb).

With all the potential the olympics had to offer had to offer as a rich multimedia experience, this year failed to deliver. Was silverlight to blame, no, but it definitely was a major factor in a degraded experience.

I see silverlights blame taking three forms.

Staunching Creativity — what does this have to do with using silverlight – well it takes top designers. Top web designers work on macs. I know this seems like a silly point, but the design community has amazing loyalty to apple and within the last few years many of have moved back onto mac after a good 10-15 lapse. Not to mention expressions (i.e. what you need to develop silverlight applications in) is a bit of beast. Every one the designers I know that take a look at silverlight and go right back to flash.

UX – The install process for silverlight is horrible and on a mac its even worse. Plus all the UI/UX I have seen in silverlight is very basic (maybe with the exception of the MLB player). Obviously this will improve, but is not a good start.

Brand Communication – People hate Microsoft. Its visceral at this point. Whatever designers, developers and users can at this point to avoid ms products they usually take the step. Maybe having Seinfeld as their pitchman  will change all that.

Sure silverlight is going to be a major player and this last little you-must-have-silverlight-to-watch-the-olympics is going to help the technology out, but I really see silverlight being a viewing technology for wmv and movenetworks player rather than a complete UX platform.

Oh – and if you are on a mac, you might need this:
rm -rf /Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/Silverlight.plugin
rm -rf /Library/Receipts/Silverlight*.pkg
rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/Microsoft/Silverlight

Summer ’08 wrapup

The issue here is really big ideas vs little ideas. We (i) went into this summer with the full belief that we would have a fully functioning site up and running by late june and july and august would be spent refining it for a for a big fall rollout. I jotted down some goals when we started:

• Define our idea – some beyond just online video is a big space
• Build / launch a beta-esque site
• Feedback loop
• Market, market and market…

Now that the program has “officially” ended, I have spent the last few days taking stock of the situation. Basically I think the whole think comes back to big ideas vs little ideas. Summer is a great time for little ideas – things that are simple – simple to execute, simple to market. I had a confidence in our ability to refine and execute on “big” market idea. We are close now, but goal was definitely not met. On the plus side we have a strategy that I feel very strongly about and I believe is being validated in a number of spaces and we are going to be the ones to execute in the video space (it’s the feed/activity stream concept for those of you who haven’t been paying attention).

When I did corporate projects most everything has a 18 month rollout schedule, agile development the internet pace has changed all that. People are routinely putting out prototypes in a matter of weeks (e.g. we did tinydb.org in an afternoon). But big ideas need a lot of thought.  More akin to newtons law on inertia – they take a long time to get rolling as there are a lot of factors involved in their execution.

The summary for the summer here is that now we have some real momentum – the idea is strong, the underlying tech is worked out (mostly) and we have some solid feedback on how to present the UI/experience in way that creates value.

So what has the summer been worth, well for us  (and again in my opinion) its been us finding our stride and building our momentum for the race ahead.

say hello to the cheese

Check us out over on … http://cheese.snackfeed.com

So we have been trying to ‘blog’ about our thoughts / experiences / products here for almost two months now – the output has been kind of  interesting…. (wait for it) but we really think we are more suited to the tumbling (as in bling) style of product updates – our tumblr log is hooked up to twitter snackfeed account (http://twitter.com/snackfeed ) so if you are so inclined follow us there as well.

Our strategy is to mostly use video on tumblr (again as we are a video play) so ask us in a month how that is working. This blog will still be used for product entires that are not related to snackfeed directly or long essays on stuff (i.e. we are brilliant so why aren’t you using our products already)..

the snacks are coming

We are getting very close to putting out our preview release of snackfeed. This is really more of an evolutionary step to what we want. Our new approach is that snackfeed is not going to be built in a day (thanks rome) and that we just need to put a basic version of the site out there with a more utilitarian feature set then start organically developing user path to the “sweet” spots of how people are going to get real value from the site. more on this later…

Uncertainty is an 853lb gorilla

Uncertainty in a startup is that 853 lb gorilla in the room. He is in the corner and for the most part just seeming to bide his time quietly until you are in a pitch session and he decides now is the time to pound his chest.  What do you do?

I think there are two basic reactions one can take to this. One (which seems the more common route in the world of techie startups) is to try to shout above him with answers for every question with a just plain cocky attitude to your idea and position in the market (i.e. I rock, my product rocks and everyone else out there is an idiot). A position to which v.c.’s and angels seem attracted to for some reason.

Or. One can take the approach to admit, understand and control uncertainty. That gorilla is just how the urban dictionary defines him, “An overbearing entity in a specific sphere of activity.”  So, know he is there, publicly admit it and know when to say “we don’t know, but lets look at that.”

There is nothing wrong about being uncertain of particular “what if’s” - One of the first speakers we had a dreamit, stated one hard line fact that when it comes to business plan they all have one thing in common “They are all wrong.”

They key here how to control this “853lb Gorilla of Uncertainty” -  be confident about what you have control over and start to make the “what if” issues simple and testable. Build quickly, then prove or fail quickly.

Let’s close out with some Rumsfeldien poetry on the matter….

The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

Dashblog - why you need it

Why we built it and why you should want it.

First – why you want this?

If you don’t already have it. Get it now.

Dashblog is all about making blogg’n/twitter’n easier – so you’re out there doing your thing on the interweb and you see this really awesome thing. What do you do. Well first, don’t panic. Second you think how cool it would be to share with everyone, but then you think about how much work doing a screencapture or copying some embed code and then copying that to your blog or twitter (and don’t forget all the loggin’ in, creating post, saving post) whew! I got tired just writing about it.

Well with dashblog its all about one click (actually more like three) to getting what you see onto your blog/twitter. For you more professionally minded it has a ‘save as draft’ feature so you can save a video/image to a blog post and work on it later.

Second – why did we build this?

A couple of reasons. One, we knew we needed to blog more to promote this latest startup and being programmers we thought we could build some tool to speed up that process. Rather than write a bunch of text about something – screencapture it, draw some arrows and you done – clever insight to share with your friends.

On a more strategic level, snackfeed needs a tool for users to collect content that is out on the web.

Next – what is coming?

Some bug fixes, additional blog support and Channels! (more about that later….)

Online Video Explained.

You Got Questions, Ninja Got Answers. | Ask A Ninja - well it took a ranting man in black mask, but finnaly someone has explained online video (damn those ninjas)

Your Brand In Realtime

The punch: a simple little twitter reader (using summize api) to track your brand/concepts/friends in real time. This app is very early stage so use with care.

The backstory:
We are in the age of twitter (hopefully it wont last too long because I have trouble explaining anything in less than 140 characters) and as of this moment it is the ultimate barometer on your brand.

I never thought much of twitter (A] because I am over 35 and B] I have no interest in sharing everything) until summize.com and other such services came along. Now with these tools we have immediate feedback and reading on anything.

CC made this awesome little app over the weekend to help track topics (mainly things we had released). Though it was its was primarily for personal use, we have decided to put it up mainly because of an interesting rant/challenge from the mashable guy (those crazy british) and mr techcrunch himself.

If you don’t want to install the app, definitely check out summize.com. Their deal with huffinton post is gonna be interesting

Stuck in the cable box.

So we moved to Philadelphia last night and are getting close to kicking our summer off with dreamit ventures. But what is most interesting, the people that we are subletting from have the cable box with all the works (ondemand, dvr, etc, etc). It has been well over a year since I (we) had regular cable. (sidenote: when we set up shop in Brooklyn, we got business class internet, netflix and nothing else).

Now we are trying to find something to watch browsing through a channel guide as well as the on demand content. What is this cable box? It took me 10 minutes to carefully study the remote, orientate myself with all its options and browsing methods. First let’s start with the channel guide. Yeah, there is a listing of all the shows and what network they belong to, but do I care anymore? Plus there are a million new channels that have seem to take category viewing to a quantum level. The worst part is they have now integrated a banner ad into the guide that makes the whole screen refresh when it refreshes. On-demand makes more sense, but the response time on any command is sooo slow. Who would make a device that had such slow rendering time (yeah I know the digital compression, cost savings, etc, etc).

The whole experience reminded my when I was a kid and would go to my grandma’s house and would have to make a phone call. There was the rotary dial phone. You could use it and in the end you did make a call, but your fingers were worse for the wear. I remember asking a family member why grandma still had the rotary phone and was exposed to my first taste of monopoly; the phone company owned the phone and they had no reason to change it.

So here we are today with the same problem. The cable companies own the last mile. Innovation is not a real priority (unless it increases their inventory). So to this meme there was a really nice article in the NYT today - - In the Age of TiVo and Web Video, What Is Prime Time? – a good read.

My favorite was how CW’s big move was to pull episodes from the web to improve their broadcast ratings. I understand their logic, but these clustertards are taking their queues from music execs via 1999. I know so many 20 something’s girls that can hardly cut & paste, but do most of their viewing via their laptop.

Back to point, Mark Cuban (my least favorite internet billionaire boy) wrote an interesting piece last year that the internet is dead — I think he is right in a lot of ways. Possession is 9/10th’s of the law as our schoolyard bully used to say and the cable companies are the ultimate bullies. They’re thinking if they can keep the product just good-enough we are just to lazy to start using the computer as entertainment.

But the argument is in the numbers. As the NYT’s article points out, numbers are way down. Cable companies are content providers and have their ads as part of that inventory. They are going to have to make it up somewhere. In a year or two when things like Hulu really start making a dent are they going to realize they brought the lion into the den.

I hope they wake up and realize they are in competitive environment and that if “content is king” then experience is definitely queen.

Google – our gentle giant?

Yesterday, kortina and I attended hack-a-thon here in nyc. It was a good day all-in-all. The app engine is really nice. In the space of 10am to 6pm we were able to concept, develop and deploy a fully functional app, tinydb.org (not to mention do a little presentation on it).

Being in the google offices, it got me thinking about them again. They own everything - all our info is indexed on their servers, most all of our online advertising goes through them now at one point or another, they are recruiting all the best and brightest and continually announcing placements for what seem ludicrous additions. They are one of the best known and most liked brands and are consistently listed as the top place to work.

Now with app engine, their partnership with salesforce.com to take the CRM/enterprise market not to mention all their other amazing apps, they are Wal-Mart of the internet world. They are the nerdy middle school kid who grew up to be the high school football star. They have it all.

So who are they? Are they the Wal-Mart model, where their momentum is turned them into what many industry people describe as a “runaway semi-truck” which will dominate all in its path without obligation to anything but shareholders?*

Or are they our gentle giant? I sure hope so.

A case in point. We had lunch the other day with a friend of our that is at one of the biggest media buyers in new york and her comment about the doubleClick deal finally going through is that 80% of the ads they serve online now go through some part of the google network at some point either for serving or reporting. Should we be scared or be thankful that some intelligence is finally coming to rich media advertising.

I had a chance to work with google way back in 2003 when google was going at the local listing with their now defunct “phone:” function. My little job was to help an investment bank that owned a bunch of phone books throughout Europe integrate with google results. We started with the dutch phone book (it’s still up at http://www.detelefoongids.nl/). Google (or at least google in Europe) didn’t know their head from their @ss then. I even went so far as to call up the VP of European operations and give him a piece of my mind (probably not the best idea since if I had taken a different tone and suggest I could help things might be very different).
But back to my point. They are a great company. They lived up to the hype. They were able to get past the whirlwind of explosive growth an organize the creative chaos that is their organization into something that continues to amaze all of us in the internet space.

So what now. From my perspective as a technologist who get most of his income making rich media apps, google is benevolent (at least for now). With google app engine and some decent api for google data, many of us see them as more of a patron who are giving us the tools to deploy application without having to concern ourselves with many details. I just did a job for a major airline. Had the app engine been primetime it would have cut our workload in half. We also do tons of little widget apps where a simple deployment and costing structure that can basically infinitely scale if the campaign goes “viral” would save me from those dreaded midnight call for some account executive that thinks internet is powered by gnomes (maybe it is).

*not my analogy – it’s from an interview I some wal-mart documentary that I cant remember the reference to.