Apple’s launch of iBooks Author ups the ante for what’s achievable in content creation. It appears to be a fluid and elegant tool for bringing together text, animation, video, images, audio and interactivity. Certainly seems more fluid and elegant than my use of WordPress right now to craft this blog post. Providing environments for content creation, we at Market7 are pleased by enhancement of how people can extend rich, media-based experiences to other people. Yet, the iBooks Author launch also exposes several areas that could be improved:
There is the well covered limitation of distribution techniques via iTunes and to iPad devices for consumption. It is indeed ironic to leverage technological advances in order to elegantly bring multiple types of media together, and then unnecessarily restrict how the results can be consumed.
Collaboration is vital in bringing together substantial works, and especially in mixed media situations because of the varieties of skills and perceptions related to the different kinds of content, but currently collaborating on iBooks Author requires saving and sending files for teammates to work on in isolation.
While iBooks Author may be great for bringing media together, it’s more for high-level assembly of content built in other applications, and is not a comprehensive or consistent suite for the different types of content in isolation. Granted this is an unfair criticism of a new environment sure to take on more context and deeper functionality over time, but this tool coming from Apple does cast highlight on the fact that the same company has gutted its Final Cut franchise that had emerged as the leading environment for accessible work on video content, and that never seemed to benefit from the same stewardship prioritizing great usage experience that seems clear in the results of Apple’s newest applications.
Took a moment before the family awoke the other day to record some thoughts on what this year’s been like for our company. It’s been especially exciting to engage with customers who along with their work on our established annotative player, use Market7 software-as-service just as much (or even more) for tracking tasks, or developing a scripts, or handling production requests from clients, with accruing benefits when multiple modules are used together.
Before Market7 started, I was a frustrated in the customer role of getting video produced. These projects tend to involve people not used to working together, each bringing different areas of insight and ignorance, and needing to bridge the gaps and get productive quickly. The problems are of course most stark when the project starts. We are working with some customers on great ways to launch projects with key information conveyed and materials organized, without confusion, from the start.
We met Christopher Smith at a San Francisco event for people with media interests a few months ago. He is director of marketing of SFSDF, and a pioneering practitioner of augmented reality, and he blew our minds with what he shared about progress happening in that realm, and our mutual interests about facilitating better collaboration in work around this highly distinctive art form.
In the beginning, we communicated with each other through grunts. Life was OK. Eventually we developed language and life was better. Then the written word, the printing press, and the telephone evolved and life was better still. In our lifetime, some smart people invented e-mail so we could respond when it was convenient and life was great… until someone developed a feature called Reply All.
My favorite Reply All story occurred when I was with Hewlett Packard. Every once in awhile the HR department would send a note to the general list for the Colorado part of the company and some busy cubical dweller would hit reply all to tell the 10,000 people she had some problem and couldn’t be at the meeting on Thursday. To which another dozen people hit reply all to tell her not to reply all. Which resulted in a few hundred more people replying to all that replying to all to not reply to all is idiotic and at some level post-modern. Usually at this point HR sent another note out telling the employees that continuing to reply all would result in a write up since it was causing problems with the mail server.
Incredibly, Reply All has become the de facto system by which companies collaborate on projects. Why would we use such a clunky, outmoded, gaff prone system for mission critical work and revenue generating project communications? I’d have to say first it’s an easy way out. Everyone already has Reply All on his or her computer. But it’s even more the result of not being aware of better alternatives.
So here we are in 2010 an Market7 offers a better way to collaborate and communicate on projects. By being web based anyone can be offered access to the projects without installing any software. It’s easy to use, easy to set up and designed specifically for improved communications and efficiency. If you’re already using it, you know life is now better. If you’re thinking about it, sign-up free at www.market7.com/free and allow your life to get better too.
When I used to produce and production manage video, I’d hire hundreds of crew members and contract with dozens of vendors. Eventually I got to the point where I established relationships with certain crew and companies and they became my preferred production team. After ten years producing, I had a great set of resources to call on for each project. Unfortunately, there were two crew people who always came on board that I could never get rid of. They had odd names. One was called Somebody and the other was Someone. I never did meet them in person, but they were always around.
Once I looked out onto the set at wrap and saw the security guys were no longer around. I called over the 2nd Assistant Director who would normally know what was up. She informed me that Somebody told them they could leave early. I of course asked who, only to be told again, it was Somebody.
Another day the caterer was short ten meals for us. I know how many I had authorized on the call sheet so it was a mystery as to why we were short. Well, apparently Someone told the caterer the wrong head count.
These two trouble makers were responsible for many rumors also. Someone once told the crew they would be having a short day. Somebody, on another occasion told the crew we’d be working a 20 hour day.
It sure would have been nice to have web based collaboration tools like Market7 in those olden days of the 90’s. If we had such tools, the crew, the security guys and the caterer could all see the website for the production and would know that Somebody and Someone were wrong about almost everything said.
Market7 colleagues weary of me nagging with them with, “Can you please put something up on our company blog?” will from now on hear a different favorite phrase from me: “Why can’t you be more like David?” That’s in reference to our newest colleague, software engineer & blogger David Ackerman.
David starts with us as a contractor from Edmonton in what he himself phrases as a sort of “grand experiment” as to how well our software development can work across a 1,000 mile gap. A big part of our mutual determination to try it was spurred by David’s observation that the practice will help orient our own efforts to facilitate collaboration in video production, often across distances. Such deep thoughts, and overall documentation of the grand experiment, are being eloquently journaled by David on his blog http://www.dsackerman.com/.
So, enough of me yapping. Here’s some of David’s own wisdom from his blog, all compiled over just the past 48 hours:
There’s always a struggle between being comfortable and being free.
It’s an amazing time to be a software developer . . . we are the architects of the future, not simply building tools, but rather writing the binary-based rules that will effect the way we socialize, collaborate, create, and consume for years to come.
information can travel around the world in seconds. Does a programmer really need to be local these days to be effective?
extra discipline involved in making a telecommute situation work . . . Will it work? Who knows? What I do know is that I’ve got a company that’s doing great stuff and that’s willing to meet me half way on this new grand experiment
application for a home business license (especially for what I’m doing – nothing that creates loud noises, strange smells, etc.) is relatively pain free
I don’t have a lot of experience in video production (besides low budget music videos with gaudy effects), I found that I could grasp the necessary collaboration aspects fairly easily. The Market7 product is meant to bridge that gap between business types who want hard data about what’s going on and more creative types who don’t necessarily fit into easy schedules
a lot of trust was put in me right away, and that helped a lot in terms of making me comfortable working from afar. In my mind, it re-affirmed that, “Okay, we really are doing this thing.”
We really are doing this thing. Welcome David, great writing! We’ll get you up here in video soon too.
As described in our annual (2 years running!) July 4 blog post, our company’s name has roots in Revolutionary times. The intersection of Market & 7th streets in Philadelphia is where Thomas Jefferson boarded and probably did most drafting of the Declaration of Independence, with collaborative input provided by the likes of Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. Notable teamwork towards a creative deliverable, much like we aim to facilitate in media production.
The literal origin of the name as an intersection is of course represented in the square where “M” and “7″ meet in our logo, and figuratively the golden tone selected indicates the brilliant collaboration that can happen at such a coming together. Moreover the logo highlights how such great results are especially achievable when the collaborators are themselves diverse parties, in seven different ways:
A letter & a number
One’s blue, one’s red
One’s higher / other lower
also, left / right
One form is half of the other
but stretched out with about twice as long a diagonal element
and it’s rotated 90 degrees
Likewise, our biggest focus is leveraging diversity of parties involved to facilitate the best interaction. Business types with stylistic types, Mac and PC users working together, people whose work applications are based on Creative Suite collaborating with those principally familiar with MS Office.
T is for “turkey”, “Thanksgiving” and, and to some, a special kind of “person”. The case for hiring & working with “T-shaped” people is one I’ve encountered a lot lately. I think it’s a good description of the sort of person with whom I most value working and engaging. If you want to know what it means, and why I think it’s so great, including for our customers, watch the video that follows this paragraph. You can even play a little game: see if you catch my mistake, revealed below the video. Also stay tuned for Shannon’s cameo at the end. In spirit of holiday, I’m thankful for him always being on-the-spot with video equipment for recording my takes. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
As integration among our modules rises, I don’t anticipate too many users will “write a script about the task” as I mistakenly said on-camera. I meant more that benefits accrue when our software can allow contextual assignment of a task-about-a-script from within that script’s page instead of having to navigate away from it to a Tasks module page.
The past five weeks I’ve been taking an evening class on how to market & sell software-as-service or “SaaS” (the second “a” stands for “a” but for some reason it appeals to me more to leave that out). It’s the term for leveraging the Internet such that customers use their web browsers access software functionality hosted and maintained by vendors like us. It is the model that Market7 practices. Having worked this way for a couple of years now, the class has provided good opportunity to reflect on some of the advantages of this model, both for us and our customers, compared to my prior experience of customers physically taking on and managing technology products.
So far for us, two particular great advantages stand out:
Immediate responsiveness to customers’ needs and interests.
Market7 provides an expanding array of functionality to serve as a single resource for all of the ways people work together in the production of rich media, spanning the whole duration from conceptualization to approving final deliverables, and encompassing every mode of collaboration from strategizing about content to tactical logistics arrangements. So, at any moment, there is typically on the order of a dozen initiatives we are contemplating for introduction, mostly based on how our users and prospects tell us what they want. The SaaS model allows us to consider such initiatives flexibly, and to implement them rapidly. Instead of months or even years between releases, with the burdens of customers having to implement the changes on their own premises, we are able to deliver new functionality every few weeks (sometimes more than once within a week), and what’s new becomes seamlessly available to our customers, ready for them when they’re ready to discover it, without disrupting how they’re already using our software.
Just last night we released some new functionality after accelerating its development because two prospects had been requesting our growth in that particular area. One of those prospects has already become a customer, and we are advancing in our work with the other one to refine our future roadmap in this functional area, hoping to land them soon as well. That new functionality will be demonstrated in an upcoming blog post within the next few days. Later today we have a meeting with a long-time (by standards of a 2-year old company) customer that is eager to see some new developments in a different aspect of our offering on which we have just started some development. While that effort is in process, and a week or two from availability, we’ll be able to use a browser and the Internet to indicate the progress we’re already making towards this goal.
Granular scalability so customers can start at level comfortable to them, and vendors can leverage success towards expansion.
We endeavor to make our software as intuitive as possible, with the most basic features obviously positioned and based on familiar motifs, plus a lot of explanatory resources integrated within and provided as supplements as new users start. Combined with there not being requirements to install, configure and maintain code, it is easy for our customers and for us, when they get started with use of video.Market7 at any level of usage. Many opt to start by trying for a single project and then consider expansion with success. We would love for them all to start big, but our track record of success in these expansion trajectories is a good one. One of the customers we’re visiting today, that actually started with a pretty substantial commitment, has scaled up to three times their original subscription level in one year of use. By usage scaling granularly, we are able to land paying customers without the arduous sales cycles of deals that must start large, our customers can economically get a feel for how well we work for them, and we can both easily grow our work together over time (with the added benefit of our being able to be immediately responsive when their usage spurs great ideas of what else we should be doing).
