January 14th, 2009

No more free Sprout Builder

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 4:53 pm

Categories: Rich Internet Applications, Rich Widgets

Tags: Ecosystem, Tool, Marshall, Sprout Builder, Productivity, Ryan Stewart

Marshall has the news up that Sprout Builder will no longer be offering free accounts. Sprout Builder is one of my favorite applications on the net and I always thought what they were doing for the Flash Platform was good. So while I share Marshall’s sadness at the loss of the free service, I think this is much healthier for the ecosystem. In my talks with Carnet Williams, the CEO of Sprout Builder, they were getting a ton of demand from companies that wanted professional created widgets as well as a “white label” version of the service called FanKits that they could brand and let people easily build widgets around a specific campaign. Both provide direct revenue to SproutBuilder and I think show that there is money to be made in the widget business.

And as Marshall notes, the prices are far from daunting. When SproutBuilder first came out there were some whispers that this might be an interesting online version of the current Flash tool. It’s not going to replace Flash in any way shape or form, but by having a very targeted model they’re showing that it’s possible to make money from web based tools that leverage the Flash Platform. I think this is good news for everyone in the RIA space as it shows there is a fairly robust ecosystem to create targeted tools on top of any given platform.

December 1st, 2008

The widget conundrum

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 7:47 am

Categories: Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media, Rich Widgets, yourminis

Tags: Advertisement, Microsoft Silverlight, Mobile, Rich Internet Application, AdAge, Widgets, Desktops, Hardware, Ryan Stewart

There’s a pretty good article in Advertising Age about the benefits of widgets and the fact that not a lot of people are using it. AdAge says that “entire segment” will amount to around $100 million. That sounds like a chunk of money, and especially one for an industry that I consider a subset of rich Internet applications, but as the holy grail of advertising, it’s not much money. And AdAge talks to people that bring up a number of issues around widgets including non-standardization, cost, and scale. All decent reasons, but I think we’re just now getting to the point where the technologies are viable for widgets on a wide scale.

I consider widgets a subset of rich Internet applications mostly because of the technology behind them. Almost all widgets tend to be pretty interactive which makes platforms like Flash and Silverlight ideal for deployment. The fact that the embed model works so well with those technologies makes it easy to port them. Adobe AIR provides desktop functionality that lets you persist and create notifications. Then think about Flash and Silverlight’s move into the mobile world and how easily it will be to repurpose widgets across devices.

That last part is key. There is a fairly sophisticated ecosystem building up around monetization of widgets. yourminis was one of the first companies to the space and have focused on customization and working with partners. Since being acquired by AOL they’ve been busy adding customers and partners. The other aspect is being able to analyze this content and provide analytics. That’s where repurposing the widgets becomes more interesting. You could automatically track your widget across devices, social networks, and desktops with the same tracking back end.

There are also more complicated engaging widget platforms emerging. Sprout Builder is a great example of this. Something a bit more complex than a traditional widget, they provide a framework that can be customized with interactive content and then placed anywhere widgets can be. They provide the same kind of analytical tools so you can track where your widgets are going and even limit them by domain.

Widgets are a great way to engage users and the most powerful thing about the is that users can consume them in ways they control - desktop, web, Facebook, mobile, etc. So their value as an advertising engine is significant and with the ways the infrastructure is moving, it’s going to be easier and easier to create and deploy widgets.

March 12th, 2008

Sprout the easy-peasy Flash editor launches to the masses

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 1:12 pm

Categories: Adobe Engage, Flash, Flex, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media, Rich Widgets

Tags: Asset Management, Corporate Communications, Productivity, Operational Planning, Business Operations, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

Update: Had the wrong video for a bit, should be fixed now. Sorry about that.

Sprout, one of the coolest Flex applications I’ve seen recently has opened their doors so that anyone can sign up. They “launched” at Demo and they also presented at Engage. They initially let in about 5,00 beta testers and after a pretty short beta period have decided the application is ready for prime time.

I blogged earlier about Sprout and I’m still a huge fan of the service. It takes Flash content and puts it into the hands of basically everyone. You won’t start cranking out sophisticated rich Internet applications with Sprout but it’s a powerful tool for building widgets and other interactive content with a simple interface. I think Sprout also does a great job of showing off the diversity of Adobe’s platform. You can incorporate your video, animations, graphical assets, voice and even documents all in one SWF that can be seen by basically everyone.

Cote’ and I sat down with Carnet Williams at Engage to talk about Sprout. That interview is below.

February 21st, 2007

Yourminis gets a makeover, starts talking Apollo

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 12:47 am

Categories: Flash, Goowy, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Widgets, yourminis

Tags:

Yourminis released a new version of their site today to focus more on widgets and themed based pages that contain information all relating to a single interest. The new HTML based start page also looks like it's aimed at introducing users to the yourminis experience and allowing them to pick and choose parts of yourminis that they want to explore.

Official "competitors" to yourminis are Netvibes and Pageflakes, but because yourminis is flash-based, it's much easier to incorporate rich media into your startpage than with the others. It also has a very polished look and feel that sets it apart from the two sites above. I actually think it competes more closely with Scrapblog, a site I covered just yesterday. As RIAs move into a more creative space, sites like yourminis and Scrapblog are bound to become more competitive.

The new look yourminis also adds a social aspect to widgets that I haven't seen elsewhere. People can compile and customize widgets then display and share them on the themed pages mentioned above. For instance I can use the RSS widget and have it serve up hockey information or set up the YouTube widget to play hockey-themed videos. Then I can customize my page with those widgets, adding a background and other bits to create a personalized start page that is shareable. The widgets also work independently so that any yourminis widget can be embedded on a blog or MySpace page. The new homepage is set up to reflect this new, more independent approach so that users can easily browse widgets or public pages.

In addition to all this, yourminis is also talking more about how they're using Apollo. They are going to present at Adobe's Engage conference and talk about how they're using Apollo later this month. Right now, they are building out functionality with Apollo that lets you use widgets on the desktop. You can take any one of the widgets and add it to your desktop. It means you can access yourminis content on the web, or the desktop, exactly the kind of hybrid Rich Internet Application that I think adds the most value.

One thing that I think makes yourminis very interesting is that by using Flash, they allow you to embed bits and pieces almost anywhere. You can take an entire themed page and embed it or you can choose to embed a specific widget. The flexibility means that yourminis can cater to a lot of different tastes. Flash gives the users a rich experience that they can make their own. It's an exciting time for RIAs as yourminis helps lead the charge to Apollo and widgets. I think this launch is going to be great, and I can't wait to see what others think of it. Marshall already seems to be impressed.