October 28th, 2008

SlideRocket opens up to the public

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 5:46 am

Categories: AIR, Flex, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Adobe Systems Inc., Adobe AIR, Marketplace, SlideRocket, Investment, Finance, Ryan Stewart

One of the most impressive Flex-based applications out there, SlideRocket, is now open for anyone to go and sign up. (Screenshot Gallery) They’ve been doing a private beta for the past few months but they launch today with some new features and a business model.

In talking with Mitch Grasso, the founder of SlideRocket, the plan was always to do a fremium model. They’ve got a free version which lets you have up to 250 megs of storage and gives you the basic online editor functionality. Then for more business users there are a couple of tiers - one for individuals and one for a group of people at a company - that includes more advanced features like collaboration and access to the offline presentation viewer which they built in Adobe AIR. It’s one of the first examples that I’ve seen of Adobe AIR being used as a pay-for extra.

Another notable feature is the marketplace. They’ve got a few partners including a stock photography site that will be populating the marketplace with content. SlideRocket users can purchase credits which can then be used to bring assets from the marketplace into their presentations. SlideRocket takes care of all the usage rights. In theory this could also end up being a way for other SlideRocket users to monetize their content but Mitch said right now they’re not opening it up for the general public to upload content.

The interface and the functionality remain mostly the same, but they’re still very impressive. SlideRocket supports importing from PowerPoint and lets you create more interactive applications by enabling SWF embedding. It remains one of the best examples of creating real applications inside of the web browser. Congrats to the team on the launch. You can sign up for a free account at SlideRocket.com.

October 24th, 2008

New York Times rolling out HD video content with Brightcove

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 10:21 am

Categories: Advertising, Brightcove, Rich Media

Tags: New York Times Co., Brightcove, Video, Andy Plesser, Andy, Corporate Communications, Portals, Branding, Marketing, Internet

Andy Plesser has the scoop that the New York Times has launched a new HD video portal using Brightcove’s service, something I’ve covered recently. With news that the New York Times is in trouble, this couldn’t come at a better time. Online video continues to explode in popularity and it’s becoming arguably the best way to reach new audiences and keep those audiences engaged. The New York Times doesn’t have a brand problem or even a content problem, but newspapers just haven’t been adapting well to the web. Video is one way to counter that.

The New York Times is using the new platform which allows for dynamic streaming so that users get the best quality video stream that their bandwidth allows. The portal looks like it has a lot of great content across all of the New York Times’ categories. They look like they’re using preroll ads. With the impressive brand of the New York Times, advertisers could be more than happy to jump in and advertise on the site, especially with the economic downturn looming. This is a good move for the Times and another indication of rich media becoming more important in every facet of content creation.

October 22nd, 2008

What the iPhone says about user experience

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 10:54 am

Categories: Experience, iPhone

Tags: Software, Apple iPhone, Tools & Techniques, Web 2.0, Management, Internet, Ryan Stewart

It turns out the iPhone is pretty damn popular. Those of us following the digeratiy scene could probably have told the analysts that but even these numbers are impressive. 6.892 million iPhones sold in the quarter for a total of 12.992 million and more importantly, it gave Apple a revenue boost to the tune of $806 million. Not chump change by any stretch. And what made iPhone arguably the greatest gadget of a generation? The user experience.

Sure the multi-touch stuff is great, and it adds, but the iPhone is a nearly flawless device from the silicon to the software. It’s exactly what most people want in a phone and it helped show that the vision of “one device that does almost everything” was actually possible. Some of that is good hardware engineering, but largely it’s due to software and how that software links all the pieces. Look at how easy it is to sync the iPhone with your music, photos, or applications. And how easy it is to purchase those things. That’s good software design.

When you nail the user experience, you go mainstream and you make a lot of money. Web 2.0 has given us a ton of great building blocks. Social networking, the web as a delivery mechanism, real time collaboration, the cloud - all of those things really started becoming realities during the Web 2.0 boom. So from a technology standpoint, we’ve established a good baseline. But in order to really make a difference you’ve got to put a better experience on it. That’s essentially the promise of rich Internet applications. And as more and more companies pour money and resources into design, you’re going to start seeing real, tangible dividends in terms of user adoption and revenue.

Web 2.0 came along and turned software on its head. The software business is having to rethink how it does things. And as part of that transformation, design and experience are taking center stage. With the plethora of design-centric software development platforms out there, it’s never been more fun and interesting to build software. It’s one reason why I’m excited about RIAs and also why it’s great to see the iPhone do so well. If you put the design time in, you are going to be more successful. Keep that in mind as you’re looking to build the new generation of software.

October 15th, 2008

360 degree virtual reality training RIA

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 8:02 am

Categories: Rich Internet Applications, effectiveUI

Tags: 360-degree, Rich Internet Application, Video, Training, Hardware, Corporate Communications, Virtual Reality, Marketing, Emerging Technologies, Ryan Stewart

SitePoint and TechCrunch both have some information up about something that EffectiveUI is building for Intelligence Gaming. It’s a video-based virtual reality training simulation for the army. It’s one of the coolest RIAs that I’ve seen. The application uses a combination of high quality video and hardware to immerse people in the training environments. The hardware uses an accelerometer of sort so that when you move your head, the video moves with you. They’ve also done a lot to the audio processing so that as you move, the audio changes just like it would in a real situation.

When I was at the EffectiveUI offices in Denver I got to try the glasses on a check it out. It was one of the most fun things I’ve seen built on top of RIA technology. I’d love to see this become a wider trend. The combination of rich media power and easy interface design makes RIAs a perfect medium for this. As both Flash and Silverlight start to add more functionality around video processing and start to take advantage of the hardware more, we could see more scenarios like this enabled. Now we just need to make it easier to hook up to external devices.

There is a video that TechCrunch posted below.

October 14th, 2008

Brightcove overhauls UI with Brightcove 3

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 6:34 am

Categories: Brightcove, Online Video, Rich Media

Tags: Brightcove, Video, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

Today Brightcove is rolling out a new application as part of their web platform for content creators (Update: here’s a post by one of the Flex developers who worked on it). The new user interface and features are some of the coolest things that I’ve seen in the ever popular rich media space. There are a few highlights of the new platform but the biggest takeaway for me was that Brightcove really wants to put people in control of how their content is displayed. To that end one of the things they’ve done is overhauled how people can create new video players. Using a XUL-like language anyone can create a template for video players that includes things like a horizontal list of related videos, meta data, and various other aspects of the video player experience. That can be saved as a template and then used across an entire network of sites. What’s nice is that you can then build on top of that template to customize the experience even more. In the demo I saw they used a nature show to demonstrate how you could add a playlist of rainforest videos and skin the original template with rainforest assets. You could then take that same template and customize it for an ocean themed show. They really nailed the branding aspect of video while allowing reuse of assets and a ton of control with the XUL-based interface language.

A couple of the other highlights include new APIs and dynamic streaming. The new APIs are expose in both Flash and JavaScript so that regardless of the technology you’re using, you can still get in and manipulate or access various parts of the video. Using the APIs you can pull out metadata, make changes to the playlist, or even alter how the video plays. It’s going to mean that developers and site creators can easily customize what and how they want things to appear on their sites. Dynamic streaming lets content creators encode multiple versions of a video at different bitrates so that the user gets the highest quality version available. Brightcove detects the bandwidth and then based on settings that the content creator establishes, the user gets the best possible quality video stream.

All in all Brightcove 3 is a big leap forward in giving the people who create video a ton of control over how that video behaves. It’s a good step for the rich media world and a great example of where the industry needs to go.

October 14th, 2008

Digging into the Silverlight 2 announcement

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 12:01 am

Categories: Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications, Silverlight

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, Eclipse, Numbers Game, Linux, Java Development Tools, Microsoft Development Tools, Open Source, Operating Systems, Software, Development Tools

(Update: It also looks like you can grab the final bits as of 12:01 this morning: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/resources/install.aspx?v=2.0)

After listening to the Q&A from the press conference today (recording here), digging into some of the details, and reading some of the commentary on various blogs, there are a few things that I don’t quite understand about the announcement today. I think part of this is because there wasn’t a whole lot of new news from the announcement and it was more of a direction announcement than anything. Of course, I work for Adobe, so I look at the world differently. The end result is that it’s great Silverlight 2 is finally out in the wild. As an RIA enthusiast and an Adobe employee I’ve witnessed that Adobe does its most innovative work when both our community and our competitors push us. But there are a few things that struck me as odd from the release.

The 1 in 4 Number
Scott Guthrie said that “already one in four consumers worldwide has access to a computer with Silverlight already installed” but I’m not quite sure what that number means. Ben Romano from the Seattle Times noticed it too and it seems like an odd metric to use. The numbers game is a little bit bogus everywhere because there are so many ways to measure things: downloads, penetration, etc. The other numbers show that Silverlight is gaining traction, but it’s hard for developers to do a direct penetration comparison with Flash right now.

Linux
In the Q&A, Tim Anderson asked about Linux support. Right now Silverlight has partial support for 1.0 (though it doesn’t include video or MP3 playback, two of the main features of Silverlight 1.0) and there is no support for 2 on Linux right now. As Tim notes, it’s misleading to tout the cross platform aspect of Silverlight without an actual release. It’s also surprising that there was absolutely nothing in terms of a roadmap for Linux. My hunch is that they wanted something to announce for PDC and this may be it. As Brian Goldfarb mentioned in the Q&A session, Miguel de Icaza, who runs the Moonlight effort, has a session at PDC although his session doesn’t say anything about Silverlight/Moonlight so I’m not sure what to make of that.

Eclipse Support
This is the one I was most bummed about. The announcement about Eclipse support for Silverlight is a big deal. As a Mac developer I’ve been waiting for a way to build Silverlight apps on my Mac (what better way to scope out the competition than to start building apps on their platform). But the release of Eclipse4sl is currently Windows only with support coming from others “soon”. I agree that it makes sense for Microsoft to woo developers outside the Microsoft ecosystem, but why use Eclipse on Windows when you have Visual Studio? Ask any developer and they will tell you Visual Studio is basically a gold standard for IDEs. Even more, as part of the press release they announced that Silverlight support extends to Visual Studio 2008 Express, the free version of Visual Studio. So if I can use the free version of arguably the best IDE out there to create Silverlight 2 apps, why do I want to use Eclipse? Hopefully “soon” really does mean soon for Eclipse Silverlight support on the Mac.

The other parts of the announcement are significant. Opening up the components is great, especially considering the gigantic ecosystem of Microsoft developers out there. Nick Hoover asked about Silverlight inside Microsoft and the response was that over 100 campaigns had been run with Silverlight. Most of these seem to be very video centric, but I can only assume more actual applications will be coming from the world’s largest software maker.

Now that Silverlight 2 is out, the RIA battle heats up more. As I mentioned above, that’s a good thing for me or anyone who wants to watch Adobe and Microsoft add features and functionality. I’m looking forward to being able to start talking about Silverlight 3 and Flash Player 11 soon.

October 13th, 2008

Silverlight 2 is released, available for download tomorrow

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 9:16 am

Categories: Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications, Silverlight

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, Silverlight 2, Productivity, Corporate Communications, Linux, Open Source, Marketing, Operating Systems, Software, Ryan Stewart

Microsoft announced this morning that Silverlight 2 will be available for download tomorrow. So after a long beta period that included big events using Silverlight including the Olympics and the DNC, the bits are going to be out there. The press release includes some impressive numbers:

Silverlight adoption continues to grow rapidly, with penetration in some countries approaching 50 percent and a growing ecosystem that includes more than 150 partners and tens of thousands of applications. During the 17 days of the 2008 Olympics Games in Beijing, NBCOlympics.com, powered by Silverlight, had more than 50 million unique visitors, resulting in 1.3 billion page views, 70 million video streams and 600 million minutes of video watched, increasing the average time on the site (from 3 minutes to 27 minutes) and Silverlight market penetration in the U.S. by more than 30 percent. Broadcasters in France (France Televisions SA), the Netherlands (NOS), Russia (Sportbox.ru) and Italy (RAI) also chose Silverlight to deliver Olympics coverage online.

The 50 percent penetration in some countries is what jumps out at me right away. I’m not sure if that’s for Silverlight 1 or the Silverlight 2 beta. I’d assume the latter. But there are a few other very interesting announcements in the press release.

One is that Microsoft is going to be working with Soyatec to bring Silverlight development capabilities to Eclipse, which in theory means that we could finally have Mac and possibly even Linux development tools for Silverlight. According to the press release this will also be free. A technology preview of the tool is available now (I’m downloading as we speak - but the current tool is only available for Windows).

There was supposed to be an event with Scott Guthrie this morning but the dial in doesn’t work for me. I’ll be watching the recording later and should have more info later today.

October 10th, 2008

Is Google working on the synchronization problem?

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 7:55 am

Categories: Adobe, Google, Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Google Inc., Rich Internet Application, Microsoft Corp., ReadWriteWeb, Zoho Mail, Ryan Stewart

ReadWriteWeb has a post up about the fact that Zoho has added offline access to Zoho Mail using Gears. Zoho continues to do a really good job of innovating when it comes to Ajax-based RIAs. They were very early to the game in creating offline support for Zoho Docs before Google beating them by almost 5 months.

As I’ve mentioned before, the hardest part of the online/offline problem is synchronization. I’m not exactly sure how Zoho is implementing that part of offline Zoho Mail but I have to wonder if one of the reasons that Google hasn’t added support for Gears yet is that they’re spending a lot of time on the synchronization problem. Both Adobe and Microsoft have products that help handle online/offline synchronization. Adobe has LiveCycle Data Services and Microsoft has the Microsoft Sync Framework. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Google was working on something similar and looking at how to bake it into Gears.

An open source synchronization platform would be a big deal and would go a long way towards blending the browser and the desktop. In a lot of ways I think that’s one of the major problems that has to be solved before we move on to the next generation of RIAs. I’ve been doing some thinking about the cloud and RIAs recently but you can’t fully jump into that unless you make it easy for developers to use the same piece of data wherever they are.

October 9th, 2008

RIA podcast goodness

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 7:28 am

Categories: Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media

Tags: Rich Internet Application, Podcasts, Internet, Ryan Stewart

There are a couple of news bits on the podcast front that should make anyone interested in RIAs happy. One, Coté and I are getting back in the routine of doing RIA Weekly. We’re celebrating by rolling out a brand new RIAWeekly.com domain. Now that summer is over and we’ve got things like PDC and MAX coming up, there should be a lot to talk about.

David Tucker over at InsideRIA is also doing a podcast titled the Weekly RIA RoundUp. It’s basically a rundown of the biggest RIA-related news so it’s a great way to catch up on what you may have missed during the week.

October 8th, 2008

AdSense for Games: Could RIAs be next?

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 6:23 am

Categories: Advertising, Flash, Google

Tags: Google Inc., Advertisement, Rich Internet Application, Google AdSense, Games, Personal Technology, Ryan Stewart

Google today announced a public beta for AdSense for Games. What’s unique about it is that it’s primarily targeted at Flash games with partners like Mochi Media, Konami, Heavy Games and others. This is significant for a number of reasons. First, because the online casual game market is growing quickly. According to Google’s blog post 25% of internet users play games every week. But perhaps more importantly this is really the first time that AdSense has been incorporated into Flash. Google has built in hooks that allow content creators to show contextual advertising at the beginning, the end, or in between levels.

Using AdSense inside of RIAs has been all but impossible until now. Scribd had a hack that allowed them to show AdSense inside of their Flash-based iPaper but beyond that there haven’t been a lot of good examples of using AdSense inside of RIAs. In fact advertising inside of rich Internet applications is something that continues to be difficult to do based on the current web model. Matthew Johnson from blist has some good thoughts on this.

My hope is that AdSense for Games can be a driver for helping bring together Google’s advertising platform into the new real-time RIA experiences on the web. It continues to amaze me that a platform like Flash which is so much a part of advertising on the web has yet to really find away to incorporate that advertising in its applications.