A great idea emerged a few weeks back over at another startup, meebo. We thought it was so good that we readily jumped on board. The concept: With the big game approaching, why not make our own commercials, but instead of shelling out the big bucks for tv time, just post them on YouTube? Folks at other startups felt the same, and the list of participating companies kept growing. By yesterday, a total of six companies each had managed to shoot and edit a short video piece they were ready to share with the world.
I’m really pleased with how ours turned out. It’s great to see what a few volunteers were able to do with a tiny budget (fifty bucks) and only a few days for production. Without further ado, I am pleased to present our first ever “tv” commercial, “One Beer.”
If you dig it, please Digg it.
(Oh, yeah, and that is a new Plaxo logo and tagline at the end of our piece. A sneak peek of things to come.)
Also, please check out the great efforts from the other five companies: meebo, Meez, Multiply, RockYou.com, and Technorati. Some really great stuff!
meebo
Meez
Multiply
RockYou.com
Startup guru Guy Kawasaki is famous for his top-ten lists of do's and don'ts for aspiring companies and entrepreneurs. His latest is "The Top Ten Stupid Ways to Hinder Market Adoption". They're all good suggestions, but #8 caught my eye in particular:
#8. Requirement to re-type email addresses. How about the patent-pending, curve-jumping, VC-funded Web 2.0 company that wants to you to share content but requires you to re-type the email addresses of your friends?I have 7,703 email addresses in Entourage. I am not going to re-type them into the piece-of-shiitake, done-as-an-afterthought address book that companies build into their products. If nothing else, companies can use this cool tool from Plaxo or allow text imports into the aforementioned crappy address book. When do you suppose a standard format will emerge for transferring contacts?
Guy, you totally nailed it, and this is exactly why we created that widget. As I mentioned at MashupCamp, nearly every web site can benefit by giving ther users access to their address book info, but doing a good job is a hard problem that's not core to most of them. A situation like that cries out for a mashup (let someone else focus on the problem, and you can just drop in the solution), and we're glad to see so many sites are doing just that! Recent widget adopters include Renkoo and MyPunchbowl, who use the widget to help their users plan social events and parties, and loopt, whose members use it to get more of their friends "on the map" (on their mobile phone).
A couple of us from Plaxo went to Dojo Developer Day #2 (or 3D2, as the locals called it) this past weekend, hosted at AOL's mountain view campus. We've been making extensive use of Dojo in some of our new soon-to-be-released web development, and it's been really valuable.
If you haven't heard of dojo, it's a major open-source project to build high-quality reusable JavaScript code that solves many of the common problems you face when building an Ajax app (working across browsers, separating your code into modules, making API calls, etc.) and also empowers you to build cooler apps fastert (animation, drag-n-drop, widgets, etc.).
In addition to the general discussion about the future of dojo, highlights for us included chatting with the lfx-animation authors (which we've been really stressing in some of our work), Alex Russell's talk about improving performance (something we're focused heavily on right now), and some cool dojo-enabled show-and-tell projects, including a sweet real-estate search site that makes me want to buy a house in Colorado. :)
It's great to see the energy and sense of community behind Dojo, and we're glad to be along for the ride!
Of course, the big buzz at this year's CES was all about the other announcement, which I'm sure was galling to the organizers and to Bill Gates, who may be a lot richer, but will never be as “cool” as Mr. Jobs.
The big thing that struck me was not so much the endless big screen TVs, although they certainly made them loud enough. Nor the autograph signings by Hulk Hogan at one of the booths, although there was a loooooong line of people waiting for them!
The theme of this year's show seemed to be about integration and synchronization: helping people deal with an ever-growing list of devices in their homes, cars, offices, and now on their bodies, by making their music, video, and personal information accessible everywhere. tying your video, audio, computer, phone, and everything else together and keeping them all in sync. Moxi had a cool app to enable a next gen DVR, where you can schedule recordings over the Internet on your calendar. Vtech had some very cool cordless phones that allow you to access your address book on your cordless phone.
Let's hope this push towards more integration works. We all have way too many devices, and every day add a new one. If they all worked together, that'd be a good thing all around.
--Swami