Tjoon is an interesting webcam app aimed at, I suppose, musicians. It let's users create a 30 second split-screen video with up to 4 participants. Tjoon can be used to jam with friends or create a 4 part harmony with yourself -- or maybe just to recreate the opening credits to the Brady Bunch (sorta).
Unfortunately, there are a few limitations to Tjoon that effect its usefulness. First and foremost, there isn't any real-time collaboration going on with the application. Jam sessions must be done asynchronously by each participant recording their piece separately and passing the Tjoon along to the next guy. Second, 30 seconds really isn't enough time for a band to get their ideas on paper, er, video. Last, they only offer 4-way split screens -- a number of videos on the site just have empty third or fourth spots, which looks silly.
HP announced a slew of new licensing partnerships this morning as part of their on-demand wholesale DVD service called HP Video Merchant Services. The service allows business customers to order on-demand production and packaging or digital downloads of niche video content that would be unfeasible for retailers to sell otherwise. Online storefronts for digital downloads appear to be included in the list of retailers supported by the service. It sounds like a pretty cool idea to me.
Today's announcement, first covered in the San Jose Business Journal (press release here), was that HP has made deals with 30 video content production companies for more than 4,000 titles. Classic TV, religion, independent film and geographically targeted content were among the examples of provided of available content.
As points of consumption for video content proliferate and the cost of production falls, the market for video content is sure to expand substantially. Lingering brand fears around user generated content have kept demand high in distribution channels for professionally produced content. Facilitating a supply chain and market for small producers is a smart move by HP reminiscent of other large companies' offerings in the independent film and music markets. Related startups include digital content brokers Mochila, iAmplify and video licensing platform ImageSpan, among many others.
This is the second post in our series on how to run a startup and develop a product. In part one, How To Bootstrap Your Startup, we outlined the process of bootstrapping your company into existence. In this post, we show you how to go from idea to specified product. By the end of it, you’ll know how to build a mock-up of your business idea and write the most important document you’ll write for the company: your functional specification.
For a simple system the process outlined in this post should take you a month. For a complex build, there will be a lot more research and your mock-up and functional specification will be big - so budget 3 months of full-time work.
Every good business begins with a solid understanding of the proposition and business plan - in short, your strategy. It's worth reading Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 Rule of Powerpoint; it’ll provide you with an idea of what should be included in your business plan and strategy. Your actual business plan should be in a lot more detail than Guy describes in his post – his rules relate only to how the results of your work should be presented, not how the content should be derived.
Read/WriteTalk has an interesting podcast interview with Dan Saffer, Experience Design Director at Adaptive Path. In the podcast, R/WT host Sean Ammirati and Dan discussed the process of designing for new types of Web-enabled devices - such as Nintendo's Wii, Apple’s iPhone and the new touch iPod. The background is that Saffer wrote a blog post a month ago, calling for a set of standards for "gesteral interactions". He also launched a wiki for collecting gestural patterns.
Also note that a few days ago Apple released a brand new guidelines doc called iPhone Human Interface Guidelines. So it is an important time for the design community, as they grapple with new forms of Web devices and interfaces. Apple itself says (in the Guidelines intro) that the iPhone presents "a revolutionary user interface and interaction model."
The Web 2.0 world is looking increasingly like a giant petri dish. There are so many experiments, so much innovation and, as yet, relatively little real revenue. Within this petri dish are a few ideas that will turn into billions of dollars, at which point we will all say “why didn't I think of that”? There are also lots of “what on earth were we all thinking” ideas out there. Numerically of course, there will be much more of the latter - but in $ terms the few big winners will mean it'll all make some kind of sense in the end.
The few places where we are seeing real revenue, such as at MySpace and Facebook, are enough encouragement to everybody else to keep experimenting. Henry Blodget, a man who knows a thing or two about the valuation of disruptive innovation, said something very insightful when commenting on the Facebook/Microsoft story:
Microsoft announced this morning that the source code for its .NET framework libraries is being opened to the world, allowing outside developers to see inside when developing their own software in the .NET framework.
It's hard to say what the incentive was for this move, it could be that .NET adoption in the developer community has been so small that a drastic step was needed or this could be a strategy to prepare for a big push of SilverLight, Microsoft's new runtime for Rich Internet Applications. The .NET framework is also at the center of Vista, which so far no one has wanted to use at length.
We're still chewing on the significance of this announcement; hopefully some .NET developers can chime in in comments. Update: Unsurprisingly, Mary Jo Foley's All About Microsoft blog has excellent coverage of this announcement. See discussion as well via Techmeme.
The best explanation of Twitter that I've heard yet is as a tool for "continuous social intelligence." If you like Twitter then you'll see a lot of potential in a service launching today called Slifeshare. Unfortunately, potential is just about all the service has at launch.
Slifeshare captures your Attention Data; it records what applications you use, what web pages you view and for how long. You can post messages and share media. It's supposed to be a social experience and it's got limited value before you build a network. Steps need to be taken to deal with that problem. Think of Slife like a combination of Twitter, the Facebook wall and del.icio.us all wrapped up into one service. This is a complicated enough proposition that lots of little touches are needed - clear communication, tool tips, friendlist prepopulation of some sort- Slifeshare doesn't have any of that.
Layer Tennis is a fun Friday-afternoon diversion and just may be the most intriguing sport of the computer age (take that competitive video gaming!). This past Friday (Sept. 28) marked the start of the Layer Tennis season, kicking off the first of 12 weekly matches and pitted noted designer Shaun Inman, of Mint fame, against seasoned illustrator, Kevin Cornell.
Originally called "Photoshop Tennis," Layer Tennis is the brainchild of Chicago's Coudal Partners. They changed the name this season because with the arrival of Adobe's Creative Suite 3, it's about a lot more than just Photoshop.
Web Office suite vendor Zoho is continuing its rapid pace of new product releases, with an online database and reports app called Zoho DB. Zoho is making a habit of one-upping their competition, because as of now none of Google, Microsoft Office Live, or ThinkFree offer a comparable online database product. The closest competitor to Zoho DB is the startup DabbleDB, which is an impressive "part spreadsheet, part database, part collaboration app" that I reviewed when it launched in June 2006 (see also my May '06 post).
Some of the main features in Zoho DB are:
Zoho DB
Netvibes, the French startpage near the top of the startpage market, is launching a new service this morning called Netvibes Premium Universes. The service allows companies to offer Netvibes functionality (reading feeds, posting widgets) on their own website with their own branding and domain. It's essentially a Netvibes page in an iframe on your website.
It's a great idea in theory, but I don't know how many companies will go for it. At launch the flagship customers include spam-factory Tagged.com and "the toolbar and content division of digital media company MIVA Inc." - they sell ads, including those despicable double-underline link ads. Fortunately two leading French newspapers, Les Echos and Le Figaro are part of the launch - without them you'd have to wonder why the product couldn't be sold to any legitimate businesses.
