Living vSocial

Marcia can't copy & paste

2007-11-21T10:41:00.000-08:00

Contest!

2006-11-28T11:18:00.000-08:00

So, we relaunched the website, as well as DIY product #1 -- MyBrand, and so.. we're giving stuff away!

First off, the fact that there's a point-and-shoot camera, that with 1GB of storage, is under $200 is amazing to me. Maybe I'm getting old, but that just blows my mind. My first 4 computers didn't have that much storage! But we purchased one of these units for each of the employees of the company, and they've worked out great. It's also another one of those "eat the dog food!" things, that usually ends up having some really positive unintended consequences.

So! That being said, YOU can also get your mitts on one of these cameras! Whatcha gotta do? Upload a video and configure a MyBrand player. No, seriously, that's it!

Here's the signup, and the press release is right here.

Featured Video...

2006-11-02T10:34:00.000-08:00

Find this video and thousands of others at vSocial!

Mmm.. dog food!

2006-10-31T11:33:00.000-08:00

So one of the phrases we've kicked around since our inception is eating our own dog food -- or drinking our own kool-aid. It's been awhile since I've done one of these, and man does the dog food taste great!

I think key to any small company's success is it's employees -- ALL of them -- buying into what the company is actually doing. If people don't get, don't care, or don't know about the products, how the heck are they going to make them amazing? I'd expect to see a big wave of posts from the team on the community site in short order.

New Beginnings

2006-10-26T09:29:00.000-07:00

Isn't it funny how most times when you push and push, and grow and grow, and race and race, and it pretty much just takes you to the starting line?

I'd love to say the redesign of vSocial was a multi-month process. But it wasn't. It was a ten day process.

Let me say that again:

IT WAS A TEN DAY PROCESS

Just like the chevy microsite we pushed out in 3 days, this does nothing but reinforce the power and agility of the platform we've designed and built. I'm more than excited about the new site, and the abilities we've built into this platform, as well as the product suite we're announcing later today: vConnect MyBrand, vConnect Pro Publisher and vConnect Enterprise Community. They each hit a specific market segment, and a specific product segment, all of which are underserved today. Someone fire the gun, we're ready to start the real race. Er, or at least the next one. :)

AdPlayer - Emily Walking

2006-10-11T12:24:00.000-07:00

Ever have one of those days?

2006-10-09T18:11:00.000-07:00

You know, one of those days where someone in the same industry as you, started in about the same manner as you, got bought for 1.65Bn in Google shares?

Yeah, I haven't either.

Needless to say, today was hectic. Hectic good, though, for a plethora of reasons better stated by our CEO, Mark here.

From my perspective, specifcially, this is *AMAZING* for us as a company. It validates the space, our specific take on it (If Google buys it, why aren't you?) and our path as a company. This week is going to be effing crazy. I love it.

Growing and Changing

2006-09-27T22:10:00.000-07:00

So we've grown as a team and a company by a considerable margin over the past 13 months, and we've hit some big milestones in the product, process and personel departments recently, and we're moving our Main Digs to a bigger/cooler/better space this weekend. I'm super excited, it feels like a big step in a series of big steps that just continues to get me jazzed every single day that I wake up that I get to work for the company that I've helped build into my model of an amazing environment -- the company I'm helping build, and the engineering/development org I'm building, is the same one I'd want to be in regardless of my level or where I'd fit into it. I think that's an important distinction. If you're building a company based off of someone else's philosophy, someone else's framework, and it's not what an org that you'd LOVE to be a part of, in any capacity, what the hell are you doing?

I only bring this up because so many folks we've brought in have been so shocked that I wasn't trying to sell them a line -- that this actually IS a haven for passionate, motivated and dedicated nerds. Now we have the palace for the nerds to live in, and I intend to live it up to the fullest.

Interview? Me? Huh?

2006-09-18T18:12:00.000-07:00

So, the good peeps at Grid7 pulled me down to their office (conveniently located about 2 blocks from the Palacial vSocial Estates) to do an interview. I sound like a goofball, but my message is super clear -- I love where we're going, what we're doing, and the company we're forming.

Check out the interview here.

In the case of Products v. Services

2006-09-06T09:05:00.000-07:00

So, the latest Refresh Phoenix meeting was last night. I showed up about half an hour into it, as some of us have to actually work. Ahem. Anyways, the topic of conversation was surrounding the Refresh Conference that AP, Ritz, Josh and Archer have cooked up, and it spawned a lot of interesting discussion as to how and what it should be.

I'll be honest, I was pretty disheartened by the whole thing.

Let me explain that, because I'll probably piss a few folks off with that. The focus for the main planners to this point has been about bringing SMB owners, developers, designers, et al. together to have a big day of talking and networking.

ARG!

I gave my speech about how the Valley (Phoenix, that is) is still primarily a service-focused tech industry. People want to custom and one-off everything. Guys, I hate to pop your buzzword bubble, but that's not what Web 2.0 (hate that term!) is about! We should be busily working towards the point where professional services are pretty much about just design and implementing products that are hosted by folks that do what they do and do it far better than your/our/anyone's one-off is going to be. Integrate things that folks have built into a product that you roll out that's self-service. Would you rather have clients that demand pixel-specific changes and are whiny "I know what I'm doing" babies, or 10,000 people using a platform or product that you can iterate and service across your customer base -- but they maybe only pay you $30, $100, or $250 each a month?

I really take issue with the short-sightedness of my peers here locally. I think they're realy smart guys, but man are they missing the boat on how to really apply that talent and those smarts to being long-term succesful. Trying to rope a local company into a $50K custom web build is just less and less honest every day, and eventually that's going to be really obvious. Plan for the day when those services just are complete fiction, guys, or you're going to be doing a lot of catching up.

Some people...

2006-08-04T14:15:00.000-07:00

So Brent brought in an article this morning by Joshua Greenbaum titled "Why I HATE Web 2.0" which I read voraciously because I'm not a big fan of the term, because it's been so marketing-weenied to death that it has no meaning.

However, this wasn't the point of the article. The point of the article was that, effectively, Mr. Greenbaum doesn't like advertising and sales being a part of websites and services. Basically his read on the entirety of Web 2.0 is the transition of, in his words, "...what are becoming increasingly essential daily activities for business and personal use can only be transacted within the context of more advertising and marketing."

Well, sorry Comrade, but the reason these things are (and have been) "more advertising and marketing" laden is Average Man not wanting to pay, with currency, for anything online. The fact that PornoTube.com shot up Alexa so quickly is even more proof of this (and should be sounding off alarm bells for every pornographer in the world, but I digress...) -- and precisely why attention data has so much value these days, for most folks it's the only easy/quick way to monetize a really cool (and usually not cheap) product.

He goes on to point out that he'd be willing to pay for a non-commercial, non-attention data gathering Web 2.0! That's great! Convince the other 99% of the browsing population to agree with you, and we'll have ourselves a deal. Mainstream people, the ones making people money, will not pay for content, or "basic" services, it's simply a matter of fact. They think that paying their bandwidth bill should cover the whole internet experience. Clearly that's not the case, but perception is reality. This backlash against "Attention Misuse" is really starting to bother me, because -- and this may shock some folks -- NOTHING IS FREE (dollar free, that is)

That being said, ads piss me off too. Which is why my non-dumb brain can ignore them most of the time. Unless it's something I really need or really grabs my interest. Then you know what happens, Mr Greenbaum?

I buy their stuff. That free content just found me something I needed to buy. That is very Web 2.0, says I.

Working in a bigger world

2006-07-21T10:44:00.000-07:00

Part of "Web 2.0" -- DON'T SHOOT ME! -- is working within an ecology of applications. My stuff has to work with your stuff, otherwise what's the point? Unfortunately, the MySpace folks seem to forget this constantly.

Their arbitrary move to Flash 9, and the implications of how they've implemented that, is horrific. They're effectively cutting the knees off of many viral applications that their users love, and love to use. In reality, the problem of why the "flash worm" worked was their inability to build a secure system. Look, folks, when you pass your authentication token around in URLs, it becomes really, REALLY easy to bend your authentication system over like a drunk co-ed. Fix your real problem, don't chop yourself out of the ecology. This is yet another in a long string of what the hell's wrong with MySpace. Instead of fixing their problems, they've begun isolating themselves into their own applications and cutting off the very freedoms that their users exploited to make them such a breakaway success. You cannot, and will not, be the end-all be-all for your users. The fact that you weren't is what made you so amazing.

SixApart's VOX is doing something similar, albeit it's upfront and from the starting line with their approach. You can only insert content that you either have on your harddrive -- which is transcoded and/or resampled on their server -- or is on a rare, few, select "approved" API vendors. I cannot simply put content from a source of my choice in. AJAX, big fonts and cool transitions do NOT Web 2.0 make. C'mon folks, inter-op and user choice is what this revolution is about, not walled gardens and forced habits. These patterns are what lead to where we're at, and we're going to do them all over again?

On Being Agile

2006-06-27T17:33:00.000-07:00

First, some words from some smart guys:

We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.

(from agilemanifesto.org)

So, what's this all about? It's about being able to develop -- both applications and the business that they sit inside of -- in a way that's relevant to a white hot market and fickle consumers and customers.

Our CEO, Mark looks at applications in terms of "jobs" -- that users hire applications to do a specific job. I think this is a wonderful analogy. One that I'll extend, and relative to my previous post, applications in today's world need to be like working for a startup. That job they have to do is going to change and need to pitch in doing other things. There's no way to do this with a traditional SDLC model, as far as development goes.

This is relevant because we've recently run across a few companies who have still been using such techniques, and they're finding it extremely hard to keep up with "the market" -- I still don't know what that means... but who does -- with 60 day build and QA cycles. I'm entirely unshocked. For me, if a feature's cycle is longer than 10 business days, it's not a feature, it's a project. A feature should be cycled in and out of development -- and put into a sandbox/showcase for users to test and QA for you -- in terms of hours/days, not weeks. Now, yes, I'm sure there's folks saying how there's cases that won't work. Clearly, if you have no sandbox and/or users, that doesn't work. But... it does! You have friends, peers, other coders, etc. If no one's testing this but you, not only with there be bugs, but you'll probably miss the usability issues that engineers tend to cause.

So... how's this relevant to business? Well, guess what, making strategic bets that you ride for 2 quarters without revisiting on a regular basis... that doesn't work anymore. At all. You need to be willing to adjust your focus and roadmap accordingly, or you're going to miss your mark and opportunity. Don't cause opportunity loss to the cry of "commitment to idea!" -- you have a core group of principles as a company, stick to those. Everything else is/should be market, people and time driven.

Zone Coverage

2006-06-26T18:32:00.000-07:00

This is somewhat more of a management-centric post, but it has some applicable theses for building apps and being an engineer in general.

Start-ups aren't about very, very specific tasks for specific people. They're really about having an 80% core competency, and a 20% zone skill that can cover for someone else. Unless you're the CTO/CIO/VPoE, then you're doing whatever you have to do to get things to fly. ;) Anyways, back to Zone. If you're an employee in a start-up, and you expect to code specific functionality 100% of the time, you're delusional. Maybe. It could be that the folk that hired you didn't make you aware of how these things go. I know, I know, it's hard to believe that there's an engineer worth his salt out there that hasn't been involved in a startup (/sarcasm off) but it's important to recognize this important fact. If you hire someone, and you tell them "Suzy, you're going to be a PHP engineer. I expect the best PHP out of you that you're capable of" and a week after starting, Suzy starts having to write copy because it's the necessary task of the day... Well, Suzy may not like you very much, and may slack on delivering on that -- albeit an extraordinarily important deliverable -- unbeknownst, to her, job. Now, if Suzy had been told up front, that part of her time was going to be spent "chipping in," or "helping out" with the rest of the team, there's a much higher chance that she's going to do her best to deliver what she can to help the team/company meet it's overall goals. It will also let her feel like she's a part of the overall business, not just the X lines of code she's expected to create on a daily basis.

This also comes down to who's got what skills. Guess what, I'm a pretty good writer. I'm not as good as our CEO -- not even close -- but I'm damn good. If he's swamped, I'll grab the ball and make sure it gets over the finish line if we have some document(s) that need to get out in a timely manner. Why? I'm the friggin' CTO, why should I write? Because my primary job -- just as any employee at a startup (or an established company, but that's a harder sell) -- is to make the company succeed. Not help, not hope, not pray -- make. Same deal with Mark, same deal with Brent, all the way to Steve. We're all here to win. Granted, I'm terrible on the phone, so if there's a phone-centric task that may or may not involve me, that can be better accomplished by Brent -- who's amazing on the phone -- I have no problem handing that off to him. I know he's going to do a better job at it than I am.

So... how's this apply to you, Engineer Guy? Well... duh! Dependencies. Working in a team environment, as much as we'd all love things to move at the same pace, it's simply not going to happen. Throw a hand to that guy who's module really should have been spec'd an extra week. Or help the designer who might have Photoshop-block. Get yourself more involved in the blood and guts of the project you're working on. That kind of interest rubs off, and you may find your counterparts extending the same hand if you find your module overloading your days, too.

Content Form Factor - What are you trying to hit?

2006-06-25T23:43:00.000-07:00

So I've been putting a big part of my "off time" braincycles into determining where our roadmap fits into the big picture of video -- or as our CEO has hammered into my head (and I wholeheartedly agree) -- this "Year of Internet Video" which I expect to extend beyond this year. I think I've come to somewhat of a thesis.

Video, as it sits, has two branches, form factors if you will. There's short clips -- segments, clips, quotes, "videobytes," etc. Then there's more traditional "show-length" form factors, these are generally 22 minutes, 44 minutes, or longer -- what you'd find from any typical old media content provider; broadcast network, cable network, movie studio, etc. Without question, we fall into the first form factor. More to the point, however, until there's a *real* consumer electronics convergence, i.e. I can hit a button on my remote (without having spent multiple hundreds or thousands of dollars on specialty equipment) -- the second form factor is simply not a reality.

When I'm at my computer, like the majority of users, I have a plethora of things going on, many of them requiring my attention, and most of those are non-entertainment related. When I *do* have a few minutes, I like to sneak in a few clips, or maybe a quick read of a blog, or sending/reading a few IMs. Quite frankly, I have far too much to do to watch a half hour -- or longer -- episodic saga. This reality has spawned a term (Webisode) which really speaks to the fact that users, on a computer, in a browser, really aren't looking to spend 2 hours watching someone's content.

This is important when building any app -- not just one that's video-centric. You have your user for a limited amount of time per go. Are you building it as such?

Super

2006-06-25T21:04:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I've definately been slacking in the blog department for about the past, oh, 6 months. So, that being said, I'm going to make a concerted effort to post on a regular basis.

This blog is specfically around daily lessons and business logic that I learn being in the midst of a 2nd Gen web startup. (Is that politically correct enough of a term for everyone?)

Hopefully I don't reveal anything that'll get me fired, because I rather like my job. :)