Really great talk from my favorite VC on the Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps. The main points that hit me are below but definitely hear it straight from Fred Wilson on Vimeo.
Speed – “speed is more than a feature, it is a requirement” … “see’s this more with main stream users than power users” … uses pingdom, reviews weekly for every one of their portfolio companies
Instant Utility – “instantly useful to you” … “useful right out of the box”
Voice – “software is the new media” “it has to have a personality”
Less is More – “do one little thing” .. “that you do all the time”… “really well”
Programmable – “others can build on top of, connect to, add to, in some way” … “if it is not read/write it is not an API”
Personal – “infused with your user’s enegery” … the more that your users can contribute the more ownership they will take and advocate for you – backgrounds, data, skins…
RESTful – “in a REST architecture your resources have a URL and they can be called at that URL” “what I mean by this is a bit of a bastardization” everything has a clean URL, everything can be accessed by an easily comprehensible and memorable URL – it can be sent by email, posted to social media…
Discoverable – “your application has to be built from the ground up to be discovered by Google” … “social media” … “viral” … “you can’t pour virality into an app, it has to be built from the ground up to support this”
Clean – “the application cannot be busy on the page” … “big fonts” … “very inviting” … “people know right away what to do” … “tumblr login is a good example” http://www.tumblr.com/
Playful – “the ability to play in an application is really important” … “make it a game” … Foursquare badges, LinkedIn relationships, Twitter followers, Facebook friends
Sometimes you find yourself treading water. Just staying afloat, going nowhere, and no one’s coming to throw you a life buoy. Your stuck. Patience can be a virtue but at some point it becomes a vice, it becomes wishful thinking. If your the only one trying to make it better, make a change, everyone else is stalling, sabotaging, coasting, looking the other way, or just plain pretending that this just isn’t their problem, you have to wonder, is it time to get out of the water and try something new? Me, I think so. I think the risk of change is far better than the death spiral of patience and tolerance in intolerable situations. Sometimes things need to get broken, abandoned, left behind, to make something really worth keeping.
There are a lot of questions floating around about our next release, but probably the second biggest one, right after “when will it ship?” is “what’s the target OS?”.
Here’s what we’re testing against and barring any major setbacks, we will release with:
Our supported operating systems are Windows XP and 7, Linux and Mac OS X.
On each of these OS’s we are testing the web management app user interface under the Chrome, Firefox, Safari and IE8 browsers and the actual Player that drives the display can work in any of the above operating systems and it uses the Chromium browser.
Yes, you will be able to reduce the operating system costs of your Players to zero and everyone can work with the web app in the OS and browser of their choice. Once the Chromium OS ships we see no reason at this time to not support it and further reduce the footprint of our Player.
As I’ve mentioned previously I’m a huge Apple fan but not when it comes to the proprietary nature of iPhone apps and the approval process that one has to go through. I’m just too much of a browser guy to sign up for that so I have been following pretty closely what people are doing with Web Apps for the iPhone and I just happened to launch the Buzz URL (very cool Google app in my opinion despite the lousy launch – just search on my name to follow me) on my iPhone and this popped up:
Neat way to guide users to put Buzz right on their Home Screen, I may have missed it before but I haven’t seen a provider do this up till now. One more reason to think that Web Apps can replace iPhone apps and with one set of code run on as many smart phones as possible. Good news for us and other providers who want to create interactive mobile applications for their digital signage networks.
I just picked this up from one of my favorite VC guys – Fred Wilson in NY. I highly recommend you follow him.
He just pointed out changes that are coming down in the US banking reform bill that could devastate entrepreneurs in my opinion, a group that are near and dear to my heart. My American friends and anyone who has American friends or interests should really check out his post - Startups Get Hit By Shrapnel In The Banking Bill.
I’m a Ted fan and I am a wannabe healthy guy, yes I slip more than I gain when it comes to a healthy lifestyle but I’m trying and feel strongly that we need to make it easier for guys like me to slip less. So… this has nothing to do with digital signage, software, business, organizational structures, nope, nada. It’s about us as people and people are what makes all of those other conversations happen. So, people, check this out:
Dear Global TED Community,
I need your help with something. This won’t take long… but it’s a big deal.
Today, Friday, TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution comes to America. His show premieres on ABC tonight. The show is *awesome*. If people watch it, it’s going to change their lives.
Here’s what I need you to do:
- If you’re in America, please watch or record the show. I promise you won’t regret it. Here are the program times. Here’s the trailer.
- Whether or not you’re in the US, please encourage your American friends to watch. Forward this email to at least five people. They will thank you for it.
As a reminder, America, along with much of the rest of the world, is suffering an obesity epidemic. Millions of people are literally in danger of eating themselves to death. Jamie Oliver’s food revolution tackles this head on… by helping families rediscover the thrill of delicious, healthy, freshly-cooked food. He is a magnetic spokesman for one of today’s most important issues.
Please help make a TED Prize wish come true.
Very best,
Chris Anderson, TED Curator
P.S. While you’re at it, please add your name to Jamie’s petition. We’d love to get to a million signatures within the next six weeks.
The greatest disservice the web has given us so far in my opinion is video. Don’t get me wrong. I use / search for video all the time on the web, but I have also lost an inordinate and non-returnable portion of my life trying to get some video with some crazy codec or another to play just the way it was meant to. That’s just my personal frustration. Now multiply that by thousands of displays on our network with hundreds of users all trying to do the same thing. You get the idea.
Now, having said that, and knowing that our next release is moving away from a proprietary file format for our presentations and that we are going to standardize on HTML5 (why 5? we’re following Google from Gears to 5 manifests for the caching) I am really hopeful that the gods that set the standards for HTML5 settle on one video format that we know we can expect every browser to understand and support. However, I may be pipe dreaming here as it still appears to be quite the raging debate as to what standard, if any, HMTL5 will settle on for video – current contenders are Ogg, Theora or H.264. One of the best synopsis of the situation that I have seen comes from my favorite crowd sourcing – a users response on a YouTube forum – check it out here. And some of the craziest arguments raging right now are which format is going to be sued the least. Check out John Gruber on one of my fav blogs for his thoughts and the counter argument here.
Other considerations include integrating an online service for codec conversion. Just found a really neat one from the Y Combinator pool, check out zencoder if your interested in a cloud based codec conversion service.
Given the debates above, our limited resources and the fact that our
next display player is based upon Chromium
we are probably going to
follow Google, but thoughts, opinions and advice are more than welcome!
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A few revisions to the Rise Vision website went up today. To be honest, long overdue. Too many references to old stuff and broken links everywhere. We tried to simplify things and make it really clear about what we do. If you’re a reseller, what do you need to do to join the program, and if your an end user how do you go about finding a reseller so that you can subscribe to the Rise Display Network with all of the added benefits that your reseller brings.
Still not completely thrilled with the end result, but we’re getting there. Any suggestions or reports of things not working are more than welcome!
Next up is tackling how we manage and showcase images. Our goal is to use a readily available service, like Picasa as the repository, and let everyone who wants to, post their favorite installs, content examples, etc there – feel free to watermark them so that you get full credit for what you did – and we want to use a Google Gadget (yes, this is the target content for our next version!) for showcasing them as carousels, galleries, etc. on the site. Would like to have this up by mid April. Will keep you posted.
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