Bootstraps

Ben Werdmuller February 10, 2012 | Leave a comment

In the comments to this 37signals blog post (which is excellent), dhh and commenter Dave Christiansen collaboratively coined a term for startup companies that aim to go into the black as soon as possible and grow under their own steam: bootstraps.

I’m in love with this. Bootstraps give entrepreneurs full control over their businesses, without interference from venture capitalists or other interests, and put the onus on finding an actual business model that works on day one. To me, it seems like a responsible, autonomous way to create a product and grow a business.

Right now, startups are sexy, and maybe they always will be – but watch the people hard at work bootstrapping, and take note of their reasons for doing it. The risks are great, but so are the potential rewards. And there’s a lot to be said for doing business on your terms.

  • General | 37 signals, bootstrapping, bootstraps, business, startups | Leave a comment

    Profile: a serialized novel for email, web, Kindle and ePub

    Ben Werdmuller February 3, 2012 | Leave a comment

    This is an excerpt from a new kind of project for me. Profile is a serial thriller about identity, the Internet and what happens when we trust companies to tell us what is and isn’t true. I’m going to treat the whole process – from writing through promotion – like a lean startup; more on that later.

    Interested? Subscribe to receive news updates via email. It should go without saying that your email address is safe and won’t be shared with any third parties.

     

    I huddled in the dark, under the wooden stairs leading out to the backyard, the metal of my unsheathed flash drive digging into my thigh. I could hear them in the house, opening drawers and moving furniture. They spoke to each other in a low murmur, an indistinguishable bassline while my Spotify playlists ran their course in the background, silently pushing unknown songs to my Facebook profile.

    Through the clouds, an aircraft’s engines announced its descent.

    I knew I would have to run. My backyard was surrounded by tall fencing on three sides, the result of neighbors jealously guarding their privacy. If I was going to make a break for it, I would need to climb over on one side, and I wasn’t sure if I could make it without drawing attention to myself.

    Creaking floorboards. Inside, the men were moving from room to room. I wasn’t sure how many of them were, but it sounded like five at least: enough to keep guard while the others looked around.

    From the glimpse I’d had of them when I looked through my bedroom window and seen them marching towards my house, they were police of some kind. They weren’t uniformed, as such, but each wore an identical suit, and each of them had been reaching for something as they approached my front door. It could have been phones, or documents, or anything, but I didn’t want to risk it. Particularly now as they’d forced their way into my home.

    My breath caught the reflected light from the house in front of me, hot clouds of condensation reaching out into the cold of the night. I realized I was panicking.

    “He’s still here,” one of them said, his voice urgent and raised enough for me to hear. “His phone’s on the network.”

    The wifi! I whipped my handset out of my pocket and pushed down the power button to turn it off. Its screen lit up the yard, turning the grass and my weeds unnatural shades of blue and orange as the men ran through the house in an avalanche of heavy footsteps, down to the back door to find me.

    Quickly, I set my phone on a ten second timer, and threw it over the fence to my left as hard as I could. Panting, my heart in my throat, I scrambled past the trashcans and garden debris to the alley beside my house, flung my back against the wall, and waited.

     

    Coming soon.

  • Data control,Profile | data ownership, fiction, identity, novel, privacy, profile, serial fiction | Leave a comment

    Private, easy, affordable enterprise video management. Hi.

    Ben Werdmuller February 1, 2012 | Leave a comment

    We spent a lot of time testing the upcoming latakoo iPhone app today. It’s neat: you record video footage using the app of your choice, then click into the latakoo app to send it. Optionally enter a description, tags, destination groups and anyone you want to send it directly to, and the app shrinks the video to a fraction of its original size without losing visible or audible quality, and uploads it over your phone’s connection. The result is a faster upload, and because latakoo is designed around privacy, the video is seen by only the people you’ve given access to. They can comment or attach files, and you can audit who’s seen and downloaded it to make sure it hasn’t fallen into the wrong hands.

    In short: latakoo is a cloud video service that gives you full control over who you share and manage your video with.

    Here’s an overview of how it works:

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    Let’s say you’ve got a minute-long piece of uncompressed 1080p High Definition video. That can easily run to 2Gb, which would take forever to upload on most connections – and running your video through compressors like Sorensen Squeeze or the Handbrake client can be similarly painful if you’re not familiar with the right settings to use.

    We’ve got a simple app for Windows, Mac and Linux, with iPhone imminent and both iPad and Android to follow. Just drag your video file into the window (or select it from your camera roll on mobile devices) and hit “start”. The file is compressed using the most appropriate settings, and sent to our cloud servers. (If you’re interested: it ends up as an h.264 MPEG-4 file, and we upload using our own API via HTTP over SSL. The result is maximum compatibility with both video applications and Internet connections.) The tool accepts most major video formats.

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    You don’t lose audible or visible quality, although we do provide quality settings. Users on latakoo’s professional and corporate tiers have access to better settings – but the cheaper version is also good enough to already be used on broadcast television.

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    Once the video’s been uploaded, it’s in the latakoo private cloud. By default, it’s completely private: only you can see it. But we’ve got a few options that let you share it with the people who need to see it, while making sure you keep full control.

    Direct shares. You can send your video to anyone with an email address. They’ll get an email containing a link that gives them access to your video via a private inbox. There’s no way that they can share the email with anyone else. If they’re already a latakoo member, they can just log in and visit their inbox. (They’ll still get an email notification.)

    Video networks. Or, to put them another way: collaboration groups. These are shared areas that let you pool video with groups of your contacts. You get to choose who can upload and download. For example, you could set up a video network as a dropbox where people can upload video, but not see anyone else’s contributions. Education and crowdsourced news: I’m looking at you guys.

    Hangars and Wings. For some people, standalone video networks aren’t enough. Hangars and Wings are nested groups that allow larger organizations to share within their existing corporate structures. Each group has its own access permissions and individual settings. Appropriately, these are part of our corporate payment plan.

    Auditing. You get to see usage throughout all the spaces you control (video networks, hangars, wings and your own private video space).

    Finally, each shared video can have notes, tags, comments and files attached to them. These then become part of the search index – so if you post a video’s script to your notes, you can search on its contents.

    Coming imminently: the ability to push directly to Facebook, YouTube, Brightcove, Dropbox and many more. Upload once, share anywhere.

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    All of latakoo’s paid plans allow you to download HD video for use in offline editing. As well as the h.264 MPEG-4 files, the latakoo tool allows you to download in some popular editing formats, including MPEG-2, DV, DVCPro, Avid DNxHD, and more. The idea is to maximize compatibility with peoples’ existing workflows – and although h.264 is pretty great, some of the older editing suites don’t work so well with it. If you’re using Avid, Final Cut Pro, Edius, or many more, we’ve got you covered.

    One of the other things that makes us different is that we don’t alter the resolution of the video at all – or its audio tracks. Often, professional video will contain a bunch of different audio tracks for natural sound, speech, sound effects, music, and other useful things, and latakoo will keep them separate. We’ve optimized the tool for editing and professional use rather than broadcasting on the web – although you can do that too.

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    How’s the quality? Amazing. It’s passed the smell test from many very large video media companies who pride themselves on their quality (trust me, you’ve heard of them). But despite that, the file sizes are very small, making it easier to move them around.

    The best way to decide, of course, is to try it.

    You’re uploading to a server and then downloading from a server. Isn’t that slower than sending it directly to someone? No – and it’s more secure. With latakoo’s user-centric access controls, you know your video’s being seen by the right people, and the compression means that it’s still faster than using, say, FTP or a file sharing app.

    Can I integrate this as a platform with my own service? Watch this space – or get in touch.

    What’s that iPhone app like? Take a look:

  • latakoo,Web | android video, cloud video, email video, enterprise cloud, enterprise video, iphone video, latakoo, send video, video management | Leave a comment

    How Europe can save the Internet

    Ben Werdmuller January 30, 2012 | Leave a comment

    I wrote a piece about ACTA for Imperica:

    When the French MEP Kader Arif stepped down last week from scrutinizing the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, declaring that he “would not participate in this charade”, it was the culmination of eight years of political lobbying, back-room deals and undemocratic conniving that now threatens to undermine the entire global Internet economy.

    [...] Despite declaring an intention to prevent piracy, the agreements once again represent a significant infringement of civil liberties and undermine the principles by which the Internet works. The agreements’ intentions appear good at first glance – who doesn’t want to protect the rights of artists? – but actually represent an irreversible erosion of personal freedoms.

    Click here to read the whole article.

  • Politics | acta, civil liberties, free speech, pipa, sopa | Leave a comment

    Die, Hollywood, die!

    Ben Werdmuller January 22, 2012 | Comments (18)

    spacer Paul Graham’s Y-Combinator request for startups that will kill Hollywood has opened up a can of exploding radioactive mega-worms – and this time, they’re angry. In the wake of the Internet industry’s fight against SOPA and PIPA, he posed the problem:

    The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they’re resorting to such tactics. [...] How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What’s going to kill movies and TV is what’s already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?

    Cue pitchfork-wielding posts about how the studios are broken and we should be funding movies using the startup model.

    In my opinion, these miss the mark in a fistful of ways.

    Paul didn’t ask for new ways to make movies. He asked, what are people going to do for fun in 20 years? That’s a separate problem. Think about how storytelling has evolved through motion pictures: one-off shorts, full-length movies, talkies, serials, TV shows, video games, web shorts. Each of these advances was made possible by technology, but has art at its core. How can a connected medium like the Internet create new narrative experiences without disappearing into the mindless clicking of Zynga et al?

    By the way, movies are awesome – and can’t be replaced by games. They’re ingrained as a deep part of our culture in a way that digital narratives have mostly managed when movie people get involved. (My favorite game of all time is The Secret of Monkey Island – a LucasFilm production.) Movies are also a collective experience in a way that digital culture can’t yet manage. Film nights – themed house parties where people watch a curated series of movies – are one of my favorite things in the world. The digital equivalent is probably LAN parties, where everyone has to bring their own computer and play a game together. Admittedly, that was fun when I was 15, but do you have the same conversations? Movies evolved from theater and literature – from pulpy paperbacks all the way through high art – whereas most games can still be tracked back to sports. They’re both important, but occupy different cultural niches.

    Also, Raiders of the Lost Ark is five minutes shy of two hours long. Can you imagine sitting and watching someone play a game for that long? I’ve done it, and by the end of the first hour I’m usually half a Goomba jump away from going feral.

    You can’t make a minimally viable movie. It’s tempting to treat a movie like a startup – and, of course, most movies are individual businesses with their own profit and loss sheets. But imagine what would happen if you tried to invent a whole plot and script based on the kinds of audience research and iterative demographic analytic analysis we all claim to practice on the web. You’d get the kind of forgettable paint-by-numbers movie that we’ve all seen a thousand times. No risks mean we never get to see anything new. (The same goes for startups, in my opinion.)

    (Edit: the community over at Hacker News make an excellent point about this: that test screenings are commonplace, and that I contradict myself by saying that these methods lead to poor movies, which shows that it can be done. I guess I’m saying that movies can’t be made by lean methodologies alone.)

    (A further edit: I don’t consider a low-budget movie to be a minimum viable product. This post by Anthony Panozza does a good job of explaining what the difference is, in my opinion.)

    Distribution is the weakest link – and the real gatekeeper. Anyone can make a movie, especially now that cameras and professional editing suites have fallen into a price range that ordinary people can afford. The trick is getting a distributor to pick it up. Studios are legally barred from owning movie theaters; in other words, they haven’t owned the whole vertical chain since 1948. It’s distributors who ultimately control release dates and distribution, and who are blocking more innovative models from being established. These companies are the pink elephants on parade. What’ll we do?

    The final reel

    Movies aren’t going anywhere in the face of digital, just as novels weren’t killed by movies. The incredibly creative people who make them aren’t going away either, although decreasing technology costs mean there may be more of them. Instead, we need to look to the next new model for narrative entertainment: a kind of social experience that we can experience together, passively, holding each other’s hands and laughing at the jokes in unison. That’s the only thing that’ll really kill Hollywood.

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