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.

January 12th, 2009

Brightcove adds some new leadership talent

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 11:22 am

Categories: Brightcove, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media

Tags: Talent, Leadership, Brightcove, Blogging, Media Players, Corporate Communications, Internet, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology, Marketing

This morning Brightcove made an announcement that they’re adding a few new faces. A couple of those faces will be familiar to anyone who has been involved in the RIA world for the past couple of years. Jeff Whatcott, who was vice president of marketing at Adobe, is joining as senior vice president of marketing for Brightcove. The biggest news in my mind was that David Mendels, who was senior vice president at Adobe, is joining the board of directors. I was devastated when David left Adobe because he was a great outward presence on blogs, email, and every other form of communication. As an SVP it was always impressive to see him leave a comment on someone’s blog and I can remember thinking how cool it was when he would leave a comment on my blog when I was still a community member.

Brightcove has a ton of old Allaire/Macromedia/Adobe people, so it isn’t surprising that they would draw from that pool again, and both David and Jeff were based in the Newton office. There may be some more old Adobe faces popping up at Brightcove down the road. In part because they seem to be doing so well. As Jeremy’s letter said, they released Brightcove 3 which included a chance in direction away from individuals uploading content to more polished and branded work. It seems to have been received very well.

They’ve also don a ton of work on the developer side to make it easy to use and integrate the Brightcove platform. They’ve got an XML-based BEML langauge which lets you create and customize Flash-based video players. They’ve got a Media API which lets you use REST-based web services to get actual content and metadata out of your Brightcove account. They’ve also got a number of custom components and hooks for you to build your own, so that you can add basically anything you want to your video player like stock quotes, news tickers, or anything that might enhance the experience around your content.

Brightcove continues to do a good job. As I think we’ve seen with Hulu, content is king. Brightcove has a ton of content and they’re making that accessible in a number of different ways and letting people get in and customize it to make the experience their own. The addition of Jeff and David is yet another step in the right direction.

January 7th, 2009

Looking ahead to 2009

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 3:24 pm

Categories: Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Rich Internet Application, Ryan Stewart

2008 was a big year for rich Internet applications. We saw companies like Curl and Appcelerator make big pushes into the RIA mindshare. We saw a significant release of Silverlight - a release that most people excited about Silverlight were very happy with. We saw Adobe push more with Flex and Adobe AIR and watched Sun get into the game with JavaFX. Perhaps more importantly, rich Internet applications really came out and became a mainstream part of the tech world. It’s taken for granted now that people want to have great experiences and that they want those experiences to span across a number of devices. We’ve come a very long way in the past few years.

2009 is going to be no different. With some major players in place, both Microsoft and Adobe entrenched in the RIA game for a long time, and companies like Google working on their own version of RIA technologies, whether it’s Native Client or Gears, are going to have a big impact on how people interact with the web and think of rich Internet applications. It’s also going to be exciting to watch as more and more companies - small and large - start rolling out RIA-based solutions. Think about the impact RIAs have had on video - that’s what I want to see happen to web applications.

I think 2009 is also going to be the year of performance. Our runtimes are going to get faster, our data is going to get bigger and companies are going to demand performance. There was already some talk of the real-time web and RIAs have a huge role to play in that. As robust client side technologies, RIAs can do things that normal web applications just can’t, and as people demand more data faster, RIAs are in a great position. Just look at Curl’s announcement to support AMF and you’ll see evidence that the back end is becoming just as important as the front end when it comes to rich Internet applications.

I’m really looking forward to 2009 and getting back to focusing on this blog. It’s been a little bit difficult not being able to write specifically about Flash and Silverlight because that’s where a lot of the action is. But as RIAs have matured it has become very important to detect and discuss both the fundamentals as well as the high level concepts behind what drives RIA adoption and features in the runtimes. We’re in for a big year.