Market7

A Blog Post Too Late To Pioneer Our Own Clever Pun

Since we work in video technologies and publish a blog, it is obligatory that we post on Cisco’s closure this month of the Flip video camera line obtained through its 2009 Pure Digital acquisition, that was followed immediately by an ubiquitous celebrity-driven ad campaign. And now, the product is gone. And we’ve got some thoughts. But since it’s taken us a couple weeks to express those thoughts we can’t pioneer such clever blog puns as “Flipping switch on acquisition”, ”Cisco flipflops” nor  ”R.I.P. F.L.I.P.” — others have beaten us to all of those.

Around the time of the Pure Digital acquisition a lot of credit was directed towards the company for achieving the Flip’s popularity by taking quality equipment, an HD video camera, and refining to an enormously simple experience driven primarily by pushing a dominant centralized red button, on a compact & rugged device, that connects to computer with a buildt-in, flip-out USB dongle.

In video production there’s an oft-cited axiom: “good, fast or cheap — pick two”.  Pure Digital made a similar determination in its positioning by putting together good quality HD with easy use, at expense of providing a versatile device. And that initially worked as people frequently reserved a pocket for constant availability of capturing HD content, offsetting everything else (email, web, music, personal information management, games & more, even photography) being on smart phone on opposite pocket. But all those other things coming together elegantly seem to present Cisco the conundrum for Flip’s future. With increasingly good video capture & management on phones (better resolution, longer footage, immediate ability to sync & upload content wirelessly), just a couple years later consumers now seem to be able to “pick three” among quality, ease and versatility when recording video on smart phones.

The last few years have been breathtaking in the pace of technology impacting life, with Flip / Pure Digital a great case study. A “revolutionary” (per Wired magazine) leader in distilling multi-button handheld cameras to just a few prominent aspects on an even smaller device, seems to get truped within just a few quarters by what may have initially seemed an entirely different category of product.

We can relate to such challenges in building our own business. Market7 brings together applications for the content collaboration involved in pre-production, the content collaboration of post-production, and the project management throughout, believing that media production professionals don’t just want easy and good solutions for each of these in isolation — today’s technology user demands ease and quality for all of their needs integrated together in singular options, whether such considerations relate to handheld devices or collaborative workflows.

Ending Project Management By Reply-All

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.

Seth Spills Some Video Collaboration Knowledge On The Spidcast

Spidvid founder Jeremy Campbell recently asked Market7 founder Seth Kenvin to participate in brand new podcast series Spidcast. Hop over to the Spidcast site to check out the pretty in depth interview covering the genesis of Market7, Seth’s philosophies on the collaborative video space and what challenges/opportunities are coming down the road. Warning: Seth’s vocal chops get seriously upstaged by those of great interviewer Michael London.

Hear a portion of the interview: [Spidcast interview snippet], or listen to the entire interview here.

Lastly, Spidvid themselves have some pretty cool thoughts around collaborative video efforts and you should definitely take a look at what they’re up to as well.

PS – Hey, nice to meet you all. I’m M7’s faithful PR guy and you’ll hear from me every now and then with updates like these moving forward!