April 6th, 2008
Jive Clearspace 2.0: a clear improvement
Jive Software is releasing version 2.0 of its Clearspace collaboration software today along with the announcement that is has acquired Jotlet, a calendaring service.
While others don’t see a lot of innovation in this version of Clearspace, that belies understanding what is regarded as innovative by the enterprise which to date has seen little choice in software that allows people to readily collaborate beyond project management tools. In that context I’d argue quite the opposite as Clearspace is starting to look more like the Facebook for the enterprise I envisaged last year.
Sam Lawrence, Jives’ CMO, has talked about the broad swathe of new features. I want to focus on usability and value.
I first saw Clearspace 2.0 several weeks ago and what struck me is how easy it is for people to set up workspaces that reflect the things that are of interest to them. A big part of that comes from the ability to drag and drop any number of pre-built widgets onto the Clearspace palette and then personalize those to suit individual needs. The video at the top of this article shows how that can be done.
That’s fine and dandy but I wonder just how easy it will be to implement and achieve high levels of user adoption. On the face of it, the choices offered and the manner in which they’re presented should help considerably but it is dependent on the business having a people centric approach to operations. That’s not the same as process centric software which is task oriented. Altering the focus of how people work is much harder than simply putting software in front of them. It requires a different way of managing the business that relaxes the command and control structures and hierarchies that dominate business organization. At the user end, the thought that anyone can follow others’ activity is scary for many people and I wonder whether people will be less or more inhibited by the introduction of such tools unless there are appropriate permission controls.
In conversation with Sam last Friday, he agreed that getting enterprise understanding of the value these collaborative suites offer is at an early stage which in turn lengthens the sales cycle. However, Jive has introduced features that should help, especially those that are heavily invested in Microsoft technology.
The ability to peel off a document for collaboration in the cloud and then pull it back into Clearspace looks similar to the way Google Docs works. This is a huge advantage for those who would otherwise be faced with dredging through ‘track changes’ in Word. Even so, I can’t help but wonder how long this advantage will last if Microsoft pushes Word out to the Internet.
The Jotlet acquisition allows Jive to provide seamless integration to Outlook so again, Jive is taking a step towards integrating to the real world rather than fighting it. Whether people will move from managing their lives in Outlook to Clearspace is another matter. I’d like to think so because the benefits of seeing everything that matters to the individual in one place far outweighs the limited view that Outlook offers.
While on the topic of Microsoft, Sharepoint integration was an obvious move that has value for those businesses that have significant Sharepoint assets and an active base of users. This would allow Clearspace to become the UI for document management systems while promoting the people centric view Clearspace espouses.
I’m currently using Jive on a project so have some affinity for the product. I like that I have what amounts to a clean looking dashboard where I can see everything I need. However, the text editor which is based on TinyMCE has odd formatting glitches and can be annnoying. Jive says it will have a Flash editor later in the year that will be much better for users.
As we see ’service’ supplant the provision of goods as the business differentiator that matters, collaboration software becomes increasingly important for activities like product development, information discovery and problem resolution. Introducing a product that not only offers collaboration but also takes elements of the ’social’ and then presents it as a choerent whole should be attractive.
Elsewhere, IBM is readying Lotus Connections for release in the June to Augiest timeframe. While not quite the same as Clearspace, it shares many of the same features. As such, IBM acts as validation that this segment is here to stay but it also sets up an interesting competitive landscape. What we now need to see is the melding of collborative tools of this kind with process and workflow. While SAP’s Duet represented an early iteration in this market, Clearspace could provide the impetus needed to take integration to another level.
April 1st, 2008
Controlling mobile costs with MobilityCentral
If there’s one thing that irks most of my Irregular colleagues, it’s getting hit up for long distance and roaming charges. The mobile operators offer a bewildering array of plans but it is all too easy for staffers to run up charges they didn’t know about or, in extreme cases, were just too careless to control. Visage Mobile hopes to end that with MobilityCentral, a newly announced on-demand service designed to help administrators keep on top of spend.
To date, most services have centered on the device. Visage focuses on the people. Key functions include: inventory tracking and control, spend and policy management. If all this seems too good to be true then you’d be wrong. The service provides an easy way for spend manager to for example expedite policy based provisioning based upon the criteria administrators choose to set. That means the right phone reaches the right perons on the right plan. Staff can send in requests for an exchange of phone, report lost or stolen and see reports on their usage. There is some integration to existing billing systems used by ATT and Verizon which in turn can be linked to procurement systems. This is a far cry from the plethora of spreadsheets and Access databases that characterize most organizations.
MobilityCentral leverages Active Directory, LDAP and HR systems to get at the initial ‘people’ data though the company admits the first data load is the most demanding, requiring reconciliation work. Once this is done, the system understands naming differences between say Tom, Thomas and Tommy. These differences are handles through a reconciliation system that allows for appropriate data matching.
For reporting, the system can spit out email via Outlook on a nightly batch basis at global, departmental and individual bases, depending on how the customer wishes to configure the system. For day to day administration, MobilityCentral includes a Flex graphics dashboard.
At the time of writing, early customers included Choridant, DemandTech and Visioneer. The company claims to have one customer with up to 50,000 users.
MobilityCentral is sold as an on-demand service with per user/per month prices starting at $5, but falling for volume.
While MobilityCentral won’t bring instant savings, it provides the kind of fine grained insight into how spend patterns operate which are essential to understanding which plan combinations are likely to be the most economical. Since its reports are exception based, disputes can be quickly picked up and processes inserted to ensure they are resolved before they get out of hand.
March 31st, 2008
Swarming around in HiveLive
Does anyone need another enterprise collaboration tool for helping get closer to the customer? How about if you had a collection of tools in one space that are people centric rather than task or functionally bound? This is the set-up for looking at HiveLive, a vendor I stumbled across as part of a sideways related conversation I had with Jeff Nolan, one of my Irregular colleagues.
HiveLive claims to take a people centric approach to architecting a set of solutions into which customers can dip to suit their own circumstances. The main parts of the system are Live Leads, LiveLoyalty, LiveInsights and LiveAnswers, each of which is designed to meet the broad needs of a particular community requirement. (see illustration above.)
HiveLive is built this way because while the company believes that most business purpose communities are unique, it needed to ensure that customizing is as easy as possible. In an effort to overcome what is usually a good amount of hand coding, HiveLive allows users to configure by mouse click to create both the functionality and required look and feel. This is not too dissimilar to building sidebars in blogs using widgets except that it covers the whole of the application. HiveLive provides a series of templates which can be cloned to quick start their efforts or the buyer can start from scratch.
The key to managing these types of environment is in fine grained access control and here, HiveLive provides the ‘hive’ administrator with as much control as is needed. The entire site can for example be made private to invited members, areas can be cvlosed off or shared as the need changes. The only requirement is that users must be registered to the system in order to gain any meaningful access. People who create spaces in the ‘hive’ choose who can participate to to what extent.
One of the early customers is Serena, a community for developers working on business mashups. At first glance it looks like any other website but includes a variety of elements like blogs, wikis, forums and private areas within the community framework that are all highly accessible and easy to use.
Pricing for HiveLive ranges $2,500 to $5,000 per month depending upon a matrix of scalars including number of seats, page views, any shared revenue arrangements. The company expects to sign initial 1-2 year deals.
I had a quick canter through the service, which is only offered as a hosted service at this time and can see obvious comparisons with Jive Clearspace and possibly Wordframe. This is a segment of the collaboration market that is set to grow rapidly over the next couple of years as enterprises realize that creating a viable customer community requires a rich set of capabilities that anyone can use.
HiveLive’s people centric approach makes for good marketing and its ‘fill in the form’ approach to building a community framework certainly makes it easy to get off the ground.
Offering the solution set in bite sized chunks should make it an attractive way of trialling community building at low risk. However, all these attributes will mean nothing if it can’t overcome the marketing clout of Microsoft and IBM and break out as a category killer. But that doesn’t mean it will not make a significant impression on the enterprise market. Right now there is plenty to go at and we’re very much in the early stags of seeing how this will work out among enterprises that are experimenting with different takes on community.
March 28th, 2008
Zoho releases invoicing service (sort of)
Zoho has released an invoicing service as its first step into making its fast growing suite of SMB productivity services a truly useful collection of business applications. I should warn readers that this is not a production release which was originally scheduled for April 8th but a work in progress. Therefore although most of the features work reasonably well, there are some gotchas and ommissions. You should not consider this release as suitable for day to day use. Having said that, Zoho has packed a lot of features into this service.
The screen is organized with major activities spread across a series of tabs and functions within those activities listed down the side the screen. So for example, if you click on the invoices tab then apart from creating a new invoice, you can obtain lists of amounts due, payments made, creating recurring profiles and dump things into trash. Almost straightaway I came across a major flaw in that there is no tab with which to make payments, despite instructions to the contrary.
Settings are tucked away at the top of the screen rather than being part of the tabbed matrix. This doesn’t make any sense because there are plenty of circumstances under which settings can change. Yet again, almost immediately I came across another gotcha. Entering sales tax rates is confusing. It asks for a percentage but steadfastly refused to let me enter any figure resembling a percentage. By this stage I was starting to get worried, especially as in my case, I could be invoicing across currencies at multiple rates of sales tax.
Creating templates for different types of sale: service, goods, fixed cost and custom is simply a matter of selecting the right type although there are no obvious instructions about how you design a custom template. Accessing the help files brings up a mess of code in the Zoho wiki. The service also allows users to create estimate templates - except they look identical to invoice settings.
It does have PayPal integration which will help make the allocation of receipts relatively straightforward - assuming it works. Similarly, the ability to set up email notifications for a variety of activities like estimates, overdue accounts and receipts are nice to have features.
Creating an invoice is confusing. Why for example am I asked to select a template type but then offered the choice of type in a drop down? It doesn’t make sense. You can select the currency against which you are billing (having already established your base currency in the settings area) and in turn it gives you the means to apply a conversion factor. That’s fine for larger businesses that need to triangulate currencies but for the very small business that trades internationally, it will be confusing and give rise to reconciliation problems.
In creating a service invoice, there is a choice to create an invoice from Zoho Project. That’s handy but I was unable to test whether it will work as I don’t have projects set up. Even so, it represents a nice point of integration. I would have preferred to see integration with the recently released CRM service and I do wonder how Zoho will overcome the inevitable data inconsistencies.
There is plenty of flexibility in applying sales items on the fly rather than creating a catalog. However, I found another gotcha. If you click over any of the tabs while creating an invoice and then click back, you lose the invoice upon which you were working. I like the fact it insists on a valid email and presume that this is the preferred method of transmission.
The best part of the service are the plentiful onscreen reports which are logically laid out and give the user an instant picture of where they stand. I’m presuming the service is sharable which means the owner of a business need only look at the reports and simply click on the amounts shown to access more detailed information.
It is disappointing that Zoho felt obliged to release ZohoInvoice early - although it could easily have retracted - after TechCrunch chose to discuss the service. The current situation leaves Zoho horribly exposed in a business critical area. A weak spreadsheet is one thing but a billing application with holes in it is an entirely different proposition. Assuming Zoho is able to clean up the application in double quick time then it deserves to do well although I can think of a myriad ways it could be better.
The competition for this type of application is hotting up. Blinksale remains a simple but underdeveloped service while Freshbooks is doing well. International competition from new entrants like Xero and FreeAgent (in which I have a tiny stake) will nip at Zoho’s heels.
March 26th, 2008
Can Eluma break Nielsen’s 1/9/90 rule? Try it and decide
It’s not often I see a product or service that comes directly from the consumer focusing side of the development house and then positions itself as a business productivity tool but that’s exactly what Eluma is trying to do.
Originally conceived as a tool to assist brand stickiness in version one, Eluma has taken the concept of creating collections of information found on the web and putting it onto the desktop for business use. This is not a new idea per se and at first glance, Eluma looks similar to a social bookmarking tool. Running against the current trend, this is a Windows only, desktop executable. It isn’t offered as a service and is meant to work as a personal productivity tool. I can almost hear the howls of derision among those who believe in the all sharing world of today’s Internet but here’s why. When the company undertook its research prior to development of its V.2 offering, it found that 90-95% of people don’t want to share information.
When I heard this, I instantly understood. Some while back I discovered that Jacob Nielsen’s 1/9/90 rule holds absolutely firm. In recent work I have done elsewhere, it is a devil’s own job to shift those numbers. There are many reasons why that might be the case but as at the early part of 2008, Nielsen’s rule is holding up well.
According to the company’s blurb: “Eluma shifts the emphasis from contributing for the benefit of the enterprise to organizing for the benefit of the self. As a result, Eluma gets used and populated more often than traditional knowledge management tools.” Eluma reports that management likes this idea but is helping employees along by doing a certain amount of pre-populating of what it calls ‘collections.’ These are the high level gobs of stuff in which employees might be interested. According to Richard Buck, CEO and co-founder of Eluma: “We had no idea that enterprises had made collections that were helping spread use of the product because we’re not providing an online service that allows us to aggregate download information.”
Despite this apparently reactionary approach, Eluma doesn’t prevent users from sharing with others through access to feeds it generates. It allows alert distribution so that important information doesn’t get lost or overlooked. This alert distribution mechanism was what encouraged users to take up the product.
This had an interesting side effect. Offered as a free download, it acts like an anonymous opt-in where the user can share as much or as little as they wish. They can therefore use it at home for private use or for other business uses outside normal activities. “One person used it as a companion service to help arrange an entire 10-day trip to a country she’d never visited. As it is available offline, she always had full access to her itinerary, booking information, in fact everything she needed for the trip,” says Buck.
Despite all the excitement around online services, I find these use cases fascinating. Eluma is reminding us there is a real world out there where assumed adoption of online services is far from a done deal in the business environment. Whether that remains the case is another matter. “If we were doing this again then we’d look closely at the AIR client for instance,” says Buck. I rather suspect they will need to re-engineer for the Internet but not for the time being.
In its current form Eluma works perfectly well, allowing me to organize any kind of information I might need. When I find an article of interest, I simply drag the bookmark into the collections pane or a folder in that pane for later use. Once I’m done with information, I delete the link or folder and start over. It’s very easy and perfect for someone like myself who is research based.
Today the company is relying on word of mouth and university campus activity. The company believes it can generate revenues from selective contextual search based advertising. I’m less sure of this model in the business market although I can see how it might work in situations where Eluma is being used both at home and work or where the using company is a retail based organization. The company also offers paid for services where the product needs modification for specific internal use.
Eluma is in private beta but here’s a link for the first 100 ZDNet readers to bypass the ‘wait in line’ process. It’s certainly worth a try for Windows only users.
March 26th, 2008
Nuospace: enterprise collaboration for the rest of us
Brightside Software recently launched Nuospace, an on-demand collaboration tool that claims to overcome the adoption problem by making the UI really simple. When I tried it, my initial reaction was one of alarm. When you first fire up the service there is almost nothing to see yet click around and it comes to life.
Although the service is pitched as a wiki, there is more under the covers. It has basic blog capability, document management/storage and forums. This is a nice combination of tools that is easy on the eye, once you get used to the minimalist look and feel. There is an internal messaging system that sends email to those you choose to include for specific tasks like document sharing, which you can make confidential. This invite facility is available system wide or you can make it document specific - good if you’re working on something confidential.
Right now there is no RSS which I believe is a glaring omission but then if there are going to be confidential areas of the site then Brightside needs to figure out how it adapts its current security model to accommodate both open and closed areas of the site. Speaking of security, Brightside has done a very good job of ensuring this service is ‘enterprise ready’ out of the box.
There’s a few ‘gotchas’ as you’d expect of a service that won’t go into full service until June. For instance on Mac, it only works on Safari. Given Firefox’s market share, that needs fixing. In some views, the sidebar navigation goes out of focus and despite saying it offers PDF export, that won’t be available until the commercial version is released. As far as I can tell, there is no multimedia capability such that I can attach say video or podcast files to blog or wiki pages. Finally, the linking mechanism in the page edits seems borked which right now would be a deal breaker for me.
I caught up with Dimitri Lisitski, CEO and co-founder of BrightSide to ask how the service is positioned and about future plans. “We’re thinking this will work well for businesses that have 20 to 2,000 people and especially those that have a history of using Office products and don’t want to be on a long learning curve.” On pricing, the service is free up to the first 200MB of storage and then you pay. “The precise plan has yet to be finalized but will be highly competitive,” he added.
I like the idea of Nuospace and I like it is appealing to those who don’t want to go through the learning curve of something like a SocialText or the more indirect competitors like Zoho. However, strong usability on its own is not enough and Nuospace will have to find a way of quickly reaching the mass market so that it gains enough traction to become clearly visible.
March 25th, 2008
TopCoder: breaking the development cost rules
According to my friend Vinnie Mirchandani, beating US internal IT development costs is tough going. He should know, it’s part of what he does day in, day out. But what if you need access to high quality development resource on an emergency project? What if you’re thinking of development outsourcing but want to do it on a true partnership basis?
I recently caught up with Mike Morris, EVP software development at TopCoder and Nic Perez, technical director AOL to find out what TopCoder brings to the table. The company takes the idea of community, applies a heavy dose of competition for skills and then applies that formula to the business of development. The result is a virtual community of some 140,000 developers spread among 200 countries, all of whom can be tapped for a variety of special projects, focusing on newer technologies like J2EE, .NET. Flash and Flex. The model is particularly suited to the developer market for the following reasons:
- It provides customers with access to a high caliber of talent where quality is peer reviewed
- The competition based model provides the kind of environment that appeals to developers and so ensures thee is a thriving and growing pool from which customers can draw
- The current size of the developer pool means TopCoder can focus on core solutions yet offer a partnership style model
- Concentrating on the development of standardized components provides TopCoder with an ever growing catalog of components from which to draw and which helps to drive down the end cost to customers. The current catalog listrs some 1,100 components.
Asked where TopCoder’s primary customers come from, Morris said: “We draw our customers primarily from Fortune 500 companies where there will be a decent amount of integration rather than building from scratch. This allows us to offer flexible terms, that can range from component sales, through to full projects on standalone or partnership terms. We’re also looking for companies that have a high growth style as thats’ a direct fir for our business model. We’re currently targeting 50% growth year-on-year for the next three years.”
The proof is in the eating and this was Nic Perez’ cue to explain how AOL is working with TopCoder: “AOL has been utilizing TopCoder for about 18 months, focused on Java development where we’ve used their people for the UI and widgets. As we’ve been building out the Open Mobile Platform, we found the US carriers force us to do what they want so that’s meant building out for around 1,700 different handsets. AOL looks at TopCoder as a captive virtual workforce where the catalog of components serve as Lego blocks for onward development.”
While AOL gains significant advantages in go to market, I was interested in the cost dimension. The two companies are working towards managing the development process as efficiently as possible. This is a work in progress but AOL believes that once process has been bedded down, the savings could be as high as 50% of traditional development costs.
Morris notes that: “We’ve got development competitive with the likes of Wipro and yes, consulting isn’t cheap because we’re constrained by US market conditions. But overall, we can be very competitive when compared with US internal development costs. That will improve as our process becomes more automated.”
TopCoder’s model isn’t new. Others like eLance offer much the same market driven approach. TopCoder differentiates itself on the way it is building out a fully engaged community that prefers the challenge of larger projects where there is plenty of potential for high earnings. The only question is whether TopCoder will safely weather what many believe is a coming recession. Its projections indicate otherwise but as always, these will need to be revisited over time.
March 18th, 2008
Taming Ruby on Rails with FiveRuns
According to Gartner, the number of Ruby On Rails developers will grow to some 4 million by 2013. While many of these will be hobbyists, Gartner believes the largest area of growth will be inside the firewall. There’s one problem. Until recently, there have not been any instrumentation or management tools, which IT shops see as a vital ingredient in getting things done. Enter FiveRuns, funded to the tune of $9 million by Austin Ventures.
FiveRuns is offering a hosted management service at $40 per server per month. Its Manage service lets users monitor performance deep into the application, helping developers understand how their application is impacted by databases, operating systems and other web services.
Today, FiveRuns claims 95 customers. I spoke with Investment Instruments, which is developing real estate solutions for the rental market. Its marquee offering for landlords is Rentomatic, which is used by landlords to manage rental units. Its other offering is Rentometer, a service that is designed to provide valuation transparency into the rental market for both landlords and tenants.
They say the value FiveRuns delivers comes from Investment Instruments developers’ ability to get visibility into the Rails environment without having to chase down server logs or find a support person. In other words, the developers can act as environment managers. Investment Instruments also says that FiveRuns gives them the means to take actions on flow queries which they see as an important part of what they need to do in order to optimize a complex environment that also includes integration to legacy systems. Net-net it means time and money saved in the development process.
FiveRuns’ goal is to become a complete Rails management provider but this is not necessarily going to be an easy nut to crack inside the enterprise. I spoke with industry analyst Michael Coté of Redmonk who said: “There is going to be a Rails explosion but there is no assured way to launch a scalable solution to the management problem. Right now, you’ve got to get the attention of the person who is deeply into Rails rather than thinking about the enterprise and that means entering the conversations that are going on in and around the Rails community. If FiveRuns can help stop developers shooting themselves in the performance foot then they’re going to get that attention.”
This is a space that is wide open but as noted, we are very early in the game. There is nothing to stop a Tivoli or CA from breezing into the space and attempting to eat FiveRuns lunch. My belief is that it is the vendor that successfully builds up the conversational community with Rails users that will outrun any incumbent player that tries to flip into this space.
March 18th, 2008
Veodia ups the video ante
Veodia, a two year old, venture backed narrowcast video play has taken a further step forward in helping proliferate its technology with the release of a Flash based widget that uses the MPEG-4/h.264 standard. The widget allows organizations to distribute channel based content direct into individual websites or to MPEG-4 enabled mobile devices. This overcomes one of the stumbling blocks for many other video services that rely solely on Flash as the delivery mechanism.
I spoke with CEO Guillaume Cohen about the service and how he sees it going forward. He explained that from the outset, the company focused on providing services to the business community and that the technology was developed as an alternative to on-premise production systems that frequently run many thousands of dollars. “But in order to compete in this marketplace we had to ensure that we built technology that overcomes the traditional problems of drop out that otherwise significantly reduces quality.” In response, Veodia developed patent pending technology that dynamically adjusts streaming for possible lost packets. Once streaming is concluded, Veodia re-assembles the content to eliminate dropout altogether.
While Veodia still offers a free service, this is more in the nature of a trial which the company still uses as a way of assessing the types of scenario where video has the greatest impact and demand. It has identified three markets where it claims to be making headway:
- 1. Outbound communications - the example given is APC which markets power supplies. In this scenario, Veodia is used to explain new products to the reseller channel.
2. As an extension of the above, Veodia has identified sales environments where customers may need a demonstration of product.
3. Training - where, for example, HR departments might wish to explain how policies work in sensitive areas like sexual harassment. Another example given is for auto manufacturers who are looking to change from satellite transmission to internet based dealership training.
Veodia provides companies with statistical information about what is being watched and for how long so they have an opportunity to learn about which content types work. But in a market that is rapidly becoming crowded, I wondered how Veodia differentiates itself. Cohen said that: “Quality is the number one thing but then we can assure confidentiality because we deliver full access control and have no ads-based revenue model. We’re also part of the Webex Connect platform so for those customers using that service, we act as a plug-in.”
Pricing is not publicly disclosed on the company website but final pricing depends on the types of feature required and the extent to which the customer requires customizations to fit into their environment.
Over the course of the next year, Veodia plans to double its staff to 30 people while concentrating on controlled scalability. “Our customers buy SLA assurance. Delivering on that is our number one priority today,” said Cohen.
Veodia is operating in a rapidly evolving space. Right now, many of the services on offer are little more than souped up consumer offerings. Veodia has not taken that route and its delivery quality helps it stand out: at least in the short term. My sense is that services which are capable of becoming embedded within business processes will stand a better chance of survival than those that are largely standalone. How this pans out remains to be seen.
March 11th, 2008
Qik and the Space Shuttle Endeavour launch
The market for video on-demand, streaming and other forms of video content production is set to explode. In the last year, I can think of at least seven new services that have grabbed attention: Qik, Seesmic, Ustream.tv, Mogulus, bambuser, Veotag and DailyMotion - all of which have some appeal. I’ve been playing with Qik, a real-time streaming video application for some time popular among the Twitterati.
Last month I met with co-founder Bhaskar Roy, who said that Qik has application in emergency services, insurance and healthcare. The company claims to have early contracts with law enforcement but would not be drawn into naming names. This style of application has value because of its immediacy and potential value in reducing cost and improving business process. It is early days but it is still worthwhile considering how these services might evolve.
Last evening I conducted a (unscientific) test to see how Qik stands up under extreme conditions. Along with Mike Prosceno and James Farrar, I visited Kennedy Space Center to see the first night time Space Shuttle launch in some two years. I live streamed the event - or rather what you can see at the equivalent of the bleachers at six miles distance - on Qik using a Nokia N95 and simultaneously recorded onto an Exilim EX-Z77 which I then lightly edited and posted the results to blip.tv, another video streaming service.
No-one could reasonably call the Exilim a pro quality video recording device but even so, the difference in video results quality is startling. Granted the conditions were extreme and live streaming in these conditions is always going to be subject to the quality of the 3G connection, but my sense is that video quality will have to improve for this type of service to proliferate. The saving grace is that despite the differences, sound quality was roughly comparable. Curiously, people will forgive poor video provided the sound quality is up to snuff but I’ll let readers be the judge.
Endnote: the video at the top is the Qik version, the Exilim version can be found at this location.
Dennis Howlett has been providing comment and analysis on enterprise software since 1991. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Recent Entries
- Jive Clearspace 2.0: a clear improvement
- Controlling mobile costs with MobilityCentral
- Swarming around in HiveLive
- Zoho releases invoicing service (sort of)
- Can Eluma break Nielsen’s 1/9/90 rule? Try it and decide
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- TopCoder: breaking the development cost rules
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