Xprove goes live! Thanks guys!
Xprove: Online review and approval for video professionals. The elevator pitch is that the service pays for itself in FedEx and gasoline savings every time you use it. Try it. The first month is free.
Well, we did it. We beat Gmail out of beta, and Flickr out of gamma. Not bad at all for a team of three. In the spirit of full disclosure, Dan Sharp and Dave Bryand deserve the credit. After sketching the business plan on the back of the proverbial envelope, I got out of the way and they ran with it. In fact, except for a few scraps of code mistakenly pasted in IMs to me, I’ve not seen any of the code that powers Xprove. I do know it’s been written in Ruby on Rails. I bought the books, took the tutorials, but no go — they won’t let me even peek under the hood. Takes me off the hook for tech support.
It’s really kind of cool to think that we conceived a business and built it. Just three guys in three different parts of the country. In fact the only time we worked together, face to face was in Vegas at NAB ‘06 (pictured above). If Xprove makes us a few bucks, we’re way ahead of the game. Because the real value in Xprove is that now each one of us knows that we can get a viable business off the ground.
It’s been an amazing six months. All three of us had to learn to let go, and learn to work outside our comfort zones. Each of us had our own successful businesses, and we were all used to wearing all the hats. But we figured it out. Being the oldest dog, I think I had the toughest time.
People ask me if I needed to go to b-school to get Xprove started. I’m not sure. Although knowing how to project monthly cash flows is pretty darn handy. Maybe it was simply having entrepreneurship demystified that was so important.
Who knows how far Xprove will take us? But it doesn’t really matter as much now as I thought it did. Getting this far is pretty damn rewarding.
Apple Buys Silicon Color
All can be forgiven in quite a hurry (see previous post). For the single-seat, end-to-end shop Avid’s greatest advantage over Final Cut Pro has been in color correction. FCP has always required a third party tool to meet Avid’s color correction capabilities.
My guess is that Silicon Color will be much like Shake. It will remain a separate product, and not be rolled into Final Cut for some time. Avid will maintain a significant work flow advantage for a while, but how long is anyone’s guess.
Apple’s focused acquisition strategy is very impressive. The company addresses specific weaknesses in its product line. Avid’s cast a much wider net by going after new markets with its acquisitions. Is Apple pushing Avid out of its preferred space, or is this by design? Probably a little of both.
This marks the second time in recent years that Apple has not just addressed a shortcoming, but leap frogged its biggest competitor. Buying Shake put Apple in the compositing and effects space after Avid had moth-balled Illusion, Matador, and Elastic Reality. Avid argues that those features got rolled into D|S, but D|S is irrelevant to most of Avid’s customer base. It also positioned Apple to go toe to toe with Adobe After Effects, and we’re seeing some negative fallout there. Adobe is clearly less interested in supporting its Mac video user base than it previously was.
The turbulence in the post production space will continue a little longer.
Hey Apple, Fix Rosetta
It’s also time for Adobe to get off Rosetta. Every time I attempt to use the pathfinder tool in Adobe Illustrator, the application crashes. This is a well documented OS X 10.4.8 issue without a workaround short of downgrading to 10.4.7.
It’s pretty obvious that Apple maintains a Soviet-style beta program. While it’s easy to spot an Adobe or Avid or Microsoft beta tester, Apple beta testers are nowhere to be found. Yeah, I know, the NDA says you can’t tell anyone you’re a beta tester, but we all know who’s beta testing what – except with Apple products. Either they don’t have very many, or those they recruit aren’t really well situated in the industry. I suspect both.
Based on that cheery Cupertino culture, I can’t imagine telling Apple something’s broken. “That’s how it’s supposed to work.” “No it’s broken.” “You’re no longer a beta tester. Say anything about this publicly and we’ll turn our lawyers on you.”
Every Apple software update is followed by a chorus of “Has anyone tried this?” Like the Life cereal commercial from the 1970s… “I’m not gonna try it. You try it.” No one wants to play Mikey when it’s his business on the line.
When Final Cut Pro 5.1.2 was released a bunch of very common plug-ins and drivers caused it to crash upon launch. This tells me the beta testers were a pretty homogeneous bunch. I waited until the OS X 10.4.8 update got the all clear from video community. Unfortunately, I didn’t follow the discussion in the Adobe InDesign community. They discovered the Illustrator issues pretty quickly.
This is not all Apple’s fault. Adobe’s known the Intel machines were coming for a long time, yet the company still offers no timetable for Universal applications to be released. We can guess, but that’s about it. At least Avid’s been candid about how long it would take to get on Intel. (Sometime in December)
Am I going to switch to Windows? Probably not, unless the problems continue well into 2007. Am I going to ditch Illustrator, Photoshop, and After Effects? Probably not. Apple’s solutions are a ways away in image editing and motion graphics, and non-existent in illustration.
I guess that makes me an enabler of both companies’ bad behavior.
Mobile video model emerging?
This week’s AdWeek has some good news for the mobile video industry. A survey commissioned by Enpocket, a mobile advertising tech firm, says that the vast majority of those polled would accept mobile ads. Well exactly what would you expect to hear from an advertising industry publication and advertising technology firm? That mobile ads are dead in the water?
Let’s assume the survey is to be trusted. That means that advertising is a better revenue model for mobile video than these insanely priced subscription models the carriers have been pushing.
Of course the carriers need entertaining content to advertise around, and GoTV’s “Laugh Riot” is anything but. Jimmy Kimmel? He’s still around?
Entrepreneurship 102
Tag this “TotallyGetsIt.”
Found it on Slashdot. Since getting a business degree – What the hell was I thinking for two years and the price of Porsche? – I get a lot of business ideas thrown my way. For all the frameworks and models I’ve learned, my executive producer at American Experience pretty much gave me the same advice a decade before enrolling in an MBA program – for free. I should have cut her a check on the spot.
I especially like Myth 1, A brilliant idea will make me rich.
A brilliant idea is neither necessary nor sufficient for a successful business, although all else being equal it can’t hurt. Microsoft is probably the canonical example of a successful business, and it has never had a single brilliant idea in its entire history.
And Myth 3, Someone will steal your idea if you don’t protect it.
No one gives a damn about your idea until you actually succeed and by then it’s too late. Even on the off chance that you do manage to stumble across someone who is as excited about your idea as you are, if they have any brains they will join you rather than try to beat you. (And if they don’t have any brains then it doesn’t matter what they do.)
I can’t tell you how many people want to spend gazillion bucks on a patent before doing anything else, or the number of people who ask me to sign an NDA. Believe me. I’m busy enough with my own crazy ideas. I don’t need nor want yours, even if it is better than mine.
