Posts tagged Next
Doink: Could This Animation App be the Next Instagram?
Apr 17th
DoinkExpress is an odd-sounding term for a mobile social network based entirely around short-form animations, but we’ll go with it. Designed for users ages 12 and older, the Doink Express iPhone/iPad/iPod app adds a social component to the solitary practice of animating short clips for the Web, otherwise known as “doinks.”
Calling the mini animations “doinks” actually makes sense. They are not quite video animations or GIFs. Doinks only take a few moments to make, and they can express a moment that you may not be able to say or even write. Because why should images stand still when they can move, ever so slightly?
Doink is recommended for ages 12 and up, which is almost the same age range as Facebook’s 13 and up. The free version of the Doink app is targeted at preteens, and to comply with COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act), it does not allow for a community Web component at all. Doink Express is aimed at a wider demographic, and the social community Web component is a big part of that.
Using homegrown images, “props” (sticker-like drawings provided by Doink), various colored brushes, text, shapes and sounds, users can create their own doinks, or mini-Web animations, and share them in an Instagram-like stream. Users can like them with a heart, or leave a comment, which builds community in an innocuous kind of way.
“I have seen guys in their 60s making anniversary cards for their wives, girls in their teens lamenting the loss of boyfriends,” says Doink CEO Karen Miller. “It really runs the gamut of ages and genders.”
In terms of usability, animations are fairly simple to make and share out to the Doink community, Twitter, Facebook or all of the above. The Doink stream features all of the users you follow, and functions much like the Instagram stream. There’s also a news component and Doink staff picks. Refresh the stream as often as you wish; or leave completely to go create your own doink.
Depending on what type of visual imagery you prefer, you may want to animate actual photographs that you’ve taken with your smartphone camera, or you might want to just draw and animate thick, pixelated lines. Create your doinks, and then build your community.
During the past few days, I’ve discovered various small, miniature animals standing by water wells. I took photos of them using my iPhone camera, and then decided to turn them into doinks. DoinkExpress is being used in 88 countries around the world, and 40% of the users are outside of the U.S.
Other animation platforms such as Xtranormal focus more on templates and conforming to what’s available. You’ve probably already made your own Xtranormal and emailed it around to your friends at the office, or shared it on Facebook. GoAnimate is more focused on helping users create viral videos for work or school. Much like Xtranormal, it functions more as a meme-maker (if you’re lucky) and less like a homegrown community of fellow makers. It’s a curious situation.
Now consider this: Facebook bought Instagram largely in part because it presented a simple, useable format and had a strong, dedicated community of users. If Facebook is truly going the way of visual communication, DoinkExpress or a platform like it could be the next acquisition. That is, if they’re willing to sell.
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What Companies Are Next on Facebook’s Shopping List?
Apr 12th
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says Monday’s purchase of Instagram isn’t likely to be repeated, but Wall Street will beg to differ. As Ben Foster, vice president and digital strategist at Ketchum, notes, “Once a public company, there will be pressure for repeatable profit and revenue growth.”
With user growth slowing, one of the quickest ways for a publicly traded company to show quarterly growth is through mergers and acquisitions. We asked Foster and other experts what companies and types of companies would make sense as likely Facebook acquisition targets.
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Revenge of the DevOps: Microsoft Targets Next Visual Studio for Admins Too
Mar 27th
You’ve heard this from ReadWriteWeb for the past several months: The exodus to the cloud for enterprise services and resources is moving control of everyday work away from the IT department. So what happens with all those displaced IT workers and administrators who are no longer managing applications and services day-to-day?
Well, if you ask the folks producing the next edition of Visual Studio for Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8, they become developers.
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“One of the things that we think about is like, hey, there is a world of development and there is a world of operations. In some sense, those worlds have been far apart in the past. [With] Visual Studio 11, we are taking the next big steps in terms of providing a tight workflow between the dev world and the ops world – we call it the ‘DevOps loop.’” This from S. Somasegar, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for the Developer Division, during the recent rollout of the first public beta of VS 11 – historically its principal developers’ suite.
Not Those Two Worlds Over There, But These Two Over Here
Over the last five years, Microsoft has operated under the notion that there are two separate classes of developers, which it once called “Web developers” and “apps developers.” The former group has been addressed with a product line called Expression Studio, which was originally geared toward the Web designer that Microsoft described as hailing from the world of graphic design – someone more experienced using Photoshop than Eclipse. Now, with the Windows 8 design motif hinging upon Web apps that it wants its mainline developers to embrace – the workers who know C# and Visual Basic – it can’t exactly afford to treat Web apps developers as sous-chefs.
So it did not go unnoticed that the latest VS 11 beta not only has extensive support for JavaScript app developers, but also contains the Expression Blend component – the tool from Expression Studio for devs to design CSS stylesheets. If Microsoft still has two audiences, two worlds, in mind for its developer product lines, their characteristics are evidently both in flux. Coming into focus ever so gradually is a concept called DevOps – essentially, the admin or system operator who either dabbles in development, or has already taken the dive and who Microsoft is only now discovering.
“We’re looking very heavily in bringing in another role, as part of the software development team: That’s the operations professional,” said Corporate VP Jason Zander during the VS 11 rollout event. “DevOps is a good example of that. We have the developer in the operations cycle – sometimes it’s the same person, sometimes it’s different departments… We recognize especially as we all start going out and building really advanced services and sticking those out in the cloud, it’s necessary for us to really get that loop working very tightly.”
Windows 8 will ship with two worlds of its own: one which encompasses the new and emerging world of touch-capable apps, and one which most Windows applications will run on today. Microsoft doesn’t want these two models to align with separate developer classes – and that’s a smart decision. If the “Expression” realm aligned itself with Metro-style Web apps and the “Visual Studio” realm with Desktop-style .NET applications, Windows itself would split into two competing ecosystems.
So think of this latest product cycle as “open-ecosystem surgery” – a route to cross-pollinate Microsoft’s existing dev groups, with the result (hopefully) being that a new pair of groups emerges along a different dividing line. Planting some new seeds in this reconfigured garden, Microsoft will be offering an express version of its premium Visual Studio tier. The SKU that used to be marketed to large teams will now get an Express version, hosted within the Windows Azure cloud, for smaller teams.
Worth noting is this new TFS project dashboard, which is supplied by the cloud-based team server. It’s not just that it incorporates Microsoft’s corporate-wide layout – it borrows its on-screen gadget concept from the upcoming Server Manager tool for the next Windows Server “8.”
“The Team Foundation Server Express product uses a lot of the core technologies from the full-fledged [TFS] product that a lot of our developer customers love and use today,” remarked Somasegar. “As a result, you get a lot of the core functionality like work item tracking, source control, [issue] management tracking… being able to have task boards that allow you to follow agile practices.” Like the developer division’s other Express tools, the new TFS Express will be free; but unlike the others, it will support teams of up to five.
In an interview with ReadWriteWeb, Jason Zander tells us to expect some, though not all, DevOps-oriented features from the existing Team Foundation Server to become incorporated into the Express edition. But routing work items between two roles – for example, starting with a developer role and delegating to an operator role – will be enabled within TFS Express.
A Broader Mix of Both Worlds
Microsoft will be taking further steps than we had been told last September to bring the existing .NET developer base into the Metro-style world. Although it’s already an accepted fact that Silverlight development is at a dead end, Microsoft is building additions to the .NET Framework that will enable C# and Visual Basic developers to build what Microsoft will officially call “Metro-style apps.” This is important because when we were introduced to the Metro concept last September, it was characterized as the style of apps you create using the WinRT runtime library. WinRT is not .NET; and at that time, there were elements of Metro-looking layout that you could incorporate into a .NET app, but it might not be something that runs in a tile on the Start screen.
That has changed: With these new additions to .NET Framework 4.5, including .NET for Metro-style apps, C# and Visual Basic apps can be created using VS 11.
Jason Zander tells us more: “The core subsystems that you want to rely on for a Metro-style application are provided by the Windows Runtime. It’s the same one that’s sourced up, whether using C++, JavaScript, C#, or VB. There is still the Common Language Runtime [from .NET] in there, and there’s still some of the core base class libraries that I need to write code… but one key difference, just to demonstrate this point, is that there’s already a communications stack in WinRT, and we just use that one.”
For now, Zander says, this will not mean that Metro-style apps will be available to the entire multitude of .NET languages, though he does not discount the possibility that other contributors could change that in the future. The Metro-style additions will be exclusively for C# and Visual Basic.
“To the extent that you’re a JavaScript developer and you’re writing a Metro-style application, then of course you can just use JavaScript. We do enable the ability for that application… to call out to C++ or .NET assemblies,” Zander explains. One example he offers would be a physics library written in C++, which may then be called from JavaScript code in the Metro app. “That’s kind of a hybrid application that has both components in it,” he says.
“If I’m a Silverlight developer today, and I’d like to author a Metro-style application, probably one of the most direct routes to being able to do that is to target XAML and C#, for example, as a Metro-style app there. And then taking a Silverlight app with the XAML, using some of the code that you have, and being able to retarget that inside of the new Metro project that you write. We do not have tools that will automatically convert those assets over,” Zander warns. “And because you are targeting the Windows Runtime, there are some differences.” There are new markup items for using XAML with touch and hover gestures, for instance. Windows Phone 7 apps will face a similar transition to Metro and C#, he adds.
But if the developer wants to transition his skill set from Silverlight to JavaScript/HTML, “in that case, you’re rebuilding the application. We’re not going to try to automatically map anything over. My experience with those types of tools is, they generally have a hard time giving you the fidelity that you’d expect. Sometimes the apps kinda work; and if you’re targeting a new medium, like from Silverlight to JavaScript/HTML, those are different enough that I feel you’d actually be more productive as a developer to use [the Silverlight base] more as inspiration than as core assets.”
It’ll be a difficult set of bridges to build, but in this particular department, Microsoft does have one factor squarely in its favor: It does not have much competition for building Windows apps. Right now, the competition is from the cross-platform development realm, but that realm will not have a leg up on WinRT and the new .NET Framework additions. Microsoft has juggled the order of elements in the universe before. For the converging worlds of apps developers and system operators, don’t count it out yet.
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Next Gen YouTube, Mobile Marketing, SEO & More at SES New York 2012 – ReelSEO Online Video News
Mar 16th
 ReelSEO Online Video News |
Next Gen YouTube, Mobile Marketing, SEO & More at SES New York 2012
ReelSEO Online Video News Oh, and it's presented by Lee Odden, which means it'll be good for sure: Online marketing is increasingly competitive, and brand marketers worldwide are seeking real advantages that will improve the efficiency and impact of their social media and SEO … |
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The Next Wave Of Google Algorithm Changes
Mar 16th
It sounds like Google’s algorithm is going to change again, and while I don’t believe in chasing the algorithm, I do find the impacts on our industry interesting, but even more so the impact it has on user behavior. The Wall Street Journal’s coverage of changes to Google to get people to stay on site [...]
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Next, Salesforce Aims to Obsolete the CMS with Site.com Launch
Mar 15th
Here’s the proposition: If your business fronts a marketing Web site, perhaps with a digital storefront and probably with additional content on Facebook, Salesforce.com is now offering a service – not a software package, but a cloud-based system – for you to compose the entire site, including layout template and content, and host the site including the database on the Force.com platform, for a flat fee of $1,500 per month.
It is exactly the type of business model that Salesforce is aiming directly at another huge competitor with dominant market share: this time, WordPress. Salesforce is betting that businesses give WordPress its 50-plus-percent market share in the content management system category because it’s the most convenient product to adopt, not because it’s best suited to the task. And just like before, Salesforce is doubling down all its chips on a simple domain name: this time, Site.com.
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If this picture looks like an ordinary Web site… well, frankly that’s the point. It is – it’s Salesforce’s example of taking information that it ordinarily delivers to internal users of a company, and presenting it to customers externally.
“We are extending the social enterprise out to all of your customers, all of your partners, and all of your prospects,” says Andrew Leigh, director of product management for the Force.com platform, in an interview with ReadWriteWeb, “by allowing you through a single cloud-based platform to be able to basically publish any data or any content out to an external audience.”
Leigh demonstrated a front end for Site.com that would be generally familiar to anyone who has ever used a forms or site layout tool. Although the user can access the CSS style sheets directly, the front end would prefer to let him drag-and-drop components where they should generally appear on the page. Some components, like “Menu,” are smart enough to know the layout of the site, so they can present the right menu to the user at the right time. And as Leigh tells us, Site.com manages the process of selecting the right layout template for the end user’s browser and device, so the same site appears on a PC as on a tablet as on a smartphone.
“If you look at the Web sites that are built and run on Site.com, they use all the latest social widgets, all the latest multimedia, they have the freshest and most compelling content – it’s coming instantly from the back-office systems of the company. They’re the most compelling Web sites on the Internet today,” remarks Leigh. One live example, he tells us, will be HP’s promotional site – some 3,000 pages which have already gone live using the Site.com beta, and which have already increased HP’s site traffic, according to Leigh, by 30%.
The structure of the site is determined through a simple menu system, where classes of “Site Map” pages are assigned to specific templates just as any site designer would expect. “Landing Pages” pertains to resources whose URLs use specific filenames, as opposed to general classes. Obviously from this angle, Site.com is more geared toward publishing static content. However, the dynamic components you drag into place do gather dynamic content from elsewhere in the customer’s Force.com stream of assets, including from Salesforce.com itself and from its Data.com resource.
“If you look at the platform that runs the social enterprise, you’ll see an amazing amount of common data that’s being shared across that enterprise, both with the internal employees and the external customers, partners, and prospects,” explains Force.com’s Leigh. The roles that employees play in an organization, he adds, may be published externally as descriptions of possible future careers, for a Web site directed toward prospective employees. All the products managed and maintained by a company, and the retail pricing attributed to it, may be integrated into the external site. “Just about anything, whether it’s shipping information, order information, billing information – any kind of information you’re tracking and managing inside your company, is at some point in time being exposed out to your customers and your prospects to communicate what your business is doing. And that’s what Site.com is all about.”
Leigh tells RWW that some surcharges may apply in extreme circumstances, to a minority of users for whom bandwidth use explodes. But from now until April 30, all charter customers can sign up two publishers and two contributors for the first site, for a discounted rate of $825 per month. The regular price is $1,500 for that package, plus $125 per month for each additional publisher, and $20 per month for each additional contributor. He reminds us that this is not a beta; Site.com is generally released today.
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Nervous Medical Students Await Next Week’s Match Day
Mar 9th
Imagine looking for a job at the same exact time that everyone else is doing it, and you have to adhere to rigid interviewing and application standards. Now imagine that to get the job you have to be matched with your prospective employer by a national computer system. The program is designed to take into account your preferences and your prospective employer’s. That is precisely what is going on next week, when medical students from all over North America participate in what is called Match Day. For more than 50 years, Match Day has happened in March, on the third Thursday, which is next week.
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Medical students around the country are finishing up their studies and have spent the last several months trying to figure out where they will next spend their residency years: going to interviews, studying the online reputations of their schools, and filing out applications. The program is administered by the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) out of Washington DC, part of the American Association of Medical Colleges that represent the 150 North American accredited academic medical schools. To give you an idea of the numbers involved, there are 38,000 applicants, 27,000 positions to be filled in 4,000 residency programs. Each school has several specialty programs, such as internal medicine or surgery, for example.
Future physicians in both the U.S. and Canada must decide what program to apply to and rank their top five choices of residency programs they desire according to a rigid schedule. The tens of thousands of students all submit their preferences and hear about where they have been chosen next week, and as you imagine it is a nail-biting sleepless night for many of them.
There are actually, two pieces of software behind the matching process, according to Mona Signer, the Executive Director of NRMP. The first is the outward-facing registration software that is used by both schools and students to specify their preferences. Once everyone registers this information, the data is then downloaded into a separate PC that sits behind NRMP’s firewall. This runs the actual matching algorithm itself. As you might imagine, this PC isn’t connected to the Internet for security reasons.
“The matching algorithm is unique,” said Signer. “It handles couples as participants and links their lists to the requests of both partners, and it also matches applicants simultaneously to both of their first and second year training requests. Plus, program directors can donate unfilled positions in one program to other programs. There are a lot of subtleties.” She told me that the actual software run takes about 10 minutes, but that is the easy part. “We have to verify everyone’s credentials for each applicant, and do other clean ups of the data. That is what takes some time. Once we processed the algorithm, we have to create individualized emails and Web pages and prepare a lot of reports that we post on our Web site. All of that is done before Match Day begins.”
The results are available electronically for all concerned parties. The schools receive a special secure file with the consolidated results, which they then download and print out and mail to their prospective students. Many schools plan Match Day events so everyone can open their envelope together. “I like the fact that you still get to open an envelope, at least for your residencies,” said Dr. Jeff Lowell, a Professor of Surgery at Washington University Medical School in St. Louis. “The old school touch is still nice and has more drama than just logging into a website and you get to do it with classmates and family.”
Fortran and Visual Basic
This is actually the second version of the matching algorithm. The original one was written in Fortran, it was rewritten a few years in Visual Basic, and this was done for maintenance reasons: “Few people know Fortran anymore.” NRMP is in the process of looking for a new outsourcing partner for its IT and operations. Currently, they are using the services of the medical college association but haven’t been happy with the service disruptions. Plus, the outward-facing software is a decade old and in need of refreshing. They will make the decision later this year.
As Signer said, one of the interesting factors of the algorithm is the way it matches couples who want to have their matches considered together as well as singles, and she is proud of the fact that the success factor on couples is close to what it is for the single students. Dr. Karl Weyrauch is a former family practice physician who met his wife in medical school. She is also a family practice doctor. “We had a lot harder time because we were trying to match as a couple to go to the same program. It wasn’t as stressful as initially applying to med school because we had both applied under an early decision program, but it was still a bit tricky to understand the process and make sure that we both filled out our matches exactly the same. While we were both attractive as potential residents, it could have been a problem if my wife and I weren’t close in terms of our rankings.”
The residency matching program is just one of 25 other matches that NRMP runs all year, including matching for fellowships and other medical programs. We hope all the students get their first choice next week!
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Effective B2B Link Building – Webcast Next Week Features Debra Mastaler
Mar 7th
Search Marketing Now will host a webcast next Wednesday, March 14 at 1 PMEST. “Effective B2B Link Building” will feature Debra Mastaler of Alliance-Link and Scott Fasser of Optify, who will discuss the various ways that B2B marketers can create an effective link-building strategy. The…
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8 Things to Think About Before You Make Your Next Product Pitch
Mar 1st
St. Louis became the 22nd city to have a branch of the Founders Institute today. The operation helps entrepreneurs in a very structured four-month paid mentoring program. It involves intensive coaching and has resulted in more than 700 startups, with over 40% of them receiving funding. We have written about FI before here.
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At the St. Louis kickoff meeting last night, I heard about one of the group’s signature tenets, what you need to know before you make your next pitch to a similar entrepreneurial group. These come from FI’s founder, Adeo Ressi. He launched his first business at the ripe old age of 22 back in 1994, and eventually sold it for $600 million.
As I was listening to local VC Kyle Welborn go through these items, I was struck how these can be used the next time you are thinking about making any pitch for something new, such as a product idea or a project for your own company. So let’s take a look and see what they are.
- First, share your idea frequently. This really isn’t a question, but gets at the heart of what anyone who is trying to do something new is all about. The more often you try out your idea on others, the more you tend to think about it and rephrase or reformulate it. And don’t worry about someone else stealing your idea. You might even find someone else who is simpatico to partner up with.
- Simple ideas win over complex ones. This seems pretty obvious, but is worth repeating.
- Have a single revenue stream. The best businesses, and the best products, have focus. Don’t muck things up with making it more complicated. This isn’t to say that you can have multiple products with different revenue streams.
- Identify your ideal and hopefully sole customer. This doesn’t mean that you are trying to make a sale to a limited market (see below). Just that you again focus on someone who you know in your mind is the ideal customer. As a writer, I started out my career with similar advice, keeping in mind a particular reader as I was writing my stories.
- Small markets suck. While you want focus, you also want your idea to find a large market with plenty of potential customers. Many firms have died trying to find a very small niche. That isn’t to say that you can’t find a niche and dominate it – just make sure it is a sizable market.
- Explain your idea in less than 10 words. Keep this short and sweet. At the pitch meeting last night, prospects had a minute to do their pitches. Some did it in less time, which was pretty awesome.
- Have a secret sauce. You need to find something that you can do better than anyone else, to establish your own street cred and also the value of your approach. Explaining that sauce (you don’t have to go into details) is what makes the pitch come alive.
- Be original, be new.
At the meeting, Welborn put together a MadLibs kind of structure to the ideal pitch:
I am developing (my idea) to help (my intended audience) to solve (my particular problem) with (my secret sauce).
Good luck with your pitching!
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Apple’s Next Privacy Scandal: Apps That Steal Your Photos
Feb 28th
It’s only been a few weeks since the last major iOS privacy scandal. In case you were getting bored, a new, somewhat related controversy just started brewing thanks to reporting by Nick Bilton at The New York Times. This one comes three weeks after Path apologized for a privacy loophole that allowed developers to access users’ entire address book without their knowledge.
Not only can iOS apps access and upload one’s address book, but they can apparently do the same with the photo library on any iOS device, according to the Times.
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That’s right. For whatever reason, Apple has made it possible for developers to upload your entire collection of personal photos to their servers, without necessarily making it clear that that’s happening. To be fair, no real-world examples of this have been uncovered, but it is very possible from a technical standpoint.
To demonstrate, the Times asked a developer to build a fake application that replicates this behavior and sure enough, it worked. Granted, this demo application was never submitted to Apple and thus never put through the thorough approval process the company employs. Still, as many developers know, Apple’s historically strict process for approving apps seems to have been relaxed somewhat, as bogus apps have occasionally been able to find their way into the iTunes App Store.
Apple’s Walled Garden: A Blessing in Disguise?
Even if it has become more lax lately, the App Store is still not as easy for developers to get their apps into as, say, the Android Market. If no major privacy exploits have unfolded as a result of this loophole, it’s by virtue of the fact that Apple is so notoriously strict about what lands in its app store.
That characteristic is something that is sometimes criticized by developers and more tech-savvy consumers, who view Apple’s ecosystem as more walled-off and restrictive than it needs to be. As much merit as those arguments may have, it appears that by occupying the opposite, more radically open end of the spectrum, Apple would be inviting potentially serious privacy and security exploits onto its platform.
As it so often the case, Apple has declined to offer any comment on the issue, at least until it blossoms into a bigger controversy.
There are certainly legitimate reasons why an application would need to access certain data about one’s photos, such as location information. However, why a developer would actually need to upload photos from somebody’s library to a remote server is unclear. Photo-sharing apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic only need to share the images passed through the app itself. If a user wants to apply an Instagram filter to an older photo sitting in their library, they can do that on a per-photo basis.
Of course, the natural concern for users here is that not every photo they snap with their phone is something they’re willing to share publicly, or with anybody else at all. As smartphones have proliferated and their cameras have become more powerful, they’ve begun to replace point-and-shoot cameras and simple camcorders for many consumers. They’re used for photos intended for Facebook and Instagram, but they’re also used to casually photograph family events and, one must presume, much more intimate subject matter.
The most obvious solution here would be to either remove the functionality or to tighten the restrictions around its use to ensure that users are clearly notified should this feature ever need to be utilized.
Last year, Apple made headlines when it was revealed that the iPhone was keeping a record of users’ physical whereabouts in an unsecured file on the device.
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