As I work on more video projects, particularly for online, I am apt to track the interactive video platform providers. I have some experience from my days with Symbol Technologies and Motorola evaluating small, custom video platforms (sometimes with no CMS behind them, oy!) to larger, varied providers such as Accela, Vignette, WebCollage, Feedroom and Brightcove.
Interesting how in this marketing spot from Brightcove, they are positioning themselves as the Windows platform of video. Hundreds of developers, they claim, add additional value to the platform with bolt-on applications.
The applications allow things such as links to Wikipedia and related video (from an Apture application, for example) to embedded commentary and more.
All these apps make the front end look shiny.
My question is, however, based on my dreaded experience with CMS: What's the back end look like? How cumbersome does all this get?
My experience with integrated marketing leads me to ask: what do we do with these varied additional channels and how do we track their usefulness?
If it were just about delivering cool to the customer, then additional apps are a no-brainer. But you do have internal processes and internal resources to be mindful off.
Just something I like to keep in mind, to keep my app lust in check, during these dazzling presentations.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Video Apps Dazzle, But They're Just Another Channel to be Managed
Friday, September 18, 2009
Value Creation is on the Ground, Not in Washington
I'm not the world's greatest entrepreneur. But participating more actively this time in entrepreneurship than ever before, during this economic downturn, is teaching me something I never realized before, when I had a merely abstract understanding of and respect for the creative energies of the free market.
Value creation is damn hard work.
The government's "value destruction," in the mismanagement of wide swaths of the economy; from regulated and politicized finance (easy, printed money, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, etc), heavily mandated health care, the rampant inflation of government-funded education and tax and pork barrel energy policy, and the value destruction wreaked, are causing millions to lose their jobs, re-evaluate their value, and seek new work or ventures.
They are out there, with me, each day, attempting to navigate the marketplace and renegotiate their value. I see it in my friends running agencies. In my networking meeting with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. And in my own sales or "business development" meetings.
And it is at that level, not in the rarefied air of Capitol Hill, where the economy is being resurrected. I feel it in my bones at the end of each day.
I have talked to more people, interviewed more and done more new types of work than ever in my life.
And I have a new respect, at the gut level, for the "underemployed" millions who are grinding it out every day in this marketplace, exploring, questioning, negotiating, and ultimately creating new value, which will eventually re-ignite this economy.
Not to mention the millions of experienced entrepreneurs and venture capitalists already out there unlocking similar new value.
Anyone with an ounce of entrepreneurial experience has to watch the bluster and baloney of Washington about who is at fault for our downturn, and feel in their very guts that these people are not only full of it, but that they probably haven't worked very hard at much of anything in their lives. Except rhetoric and vilification. In that they are highly skilled. And there seems to be a market for it.
But it's not where the real action is in this economy.
