Saintify, the App

St Nicholas of Tolentino, Patron of Animals

Oh boy, I am pretty bad at self-promotion.  I forgot to mention that the app which I produced, Saintify, is now available in the iTunes store.  It is a contemporary re-imagining of patron saints, with 100% original visual and written content.  I'll share a few of my thoughts about the process, hopefully it will be useful for others out there toying with the idea of trying something new, creatively.

As you can see, the artwork is beautiful and is what really makes the app stand out.  It was created by the very talented Gary Amaro, who is better known for his concept art as well as his comics work for Vertigo/DC.  Gary makes great use of the back lighting on mobile devices.  As with most good creative commercial work, it took a lot of collaboration (Anna Mieritz art directed the visual content), from spit-balling the original concept to the final art.  This process takes time, nearly always longer than you think it will.  If you're lucky, it will require a fair amount of going back and forth because you're working with a creative who cares about what they make.

The "rear" of the card

What are some of the lessons learned?  Quality, original content costs money, or your own personal time, to create. That's why a lot of the apps you see out there are aggregating information, or having the users create the content.  It's a rough road for a small content producer to create original content for which people will be willing to pay.  This is no different than music, films, art or any other creative endeavor these days.  I think that the answer often is to give away some content and then to charge users for either "premium" content or for some advanced functionality.  This is why nearly 2/3 of the money earned in the Apple App Store is from in-app purchases, not for initial app purchases.  Frankly, I'm still a little confused by the fact that we live in a culture where people want original, handcrafted creative work for free, but will pay to have a shiny doo-hickey added to the mix.  But that's the way it is, and unless you have created something so amazing, or have a huge marketing team behind you, you'll need to learn how to navigate it.

When you are bootstrapping something like this on your own, you savor the small victories.  For me personally, it was a great learning experience in UI design.  My own little victory was creating a very flat user experience, while still providing a lot of functionality.   Our ability to implement these ideas was only possible because of the inimitable Kaolin Fire, writer, developer and general creative mad man (and new daddy).  Having great developers, and having a great relationship with them, is essential if you want to be able to try new ideas which require original code.  Kaolin delivered far more value than we could afford to pay him for, partly because he's an awesome guy and partly because he's interested in solving unique problems (ditto for Gary Amaro).  This is the point at which I have to say, if you aren't curious, driven and just generally want to try to make awesome things, you are wasting your time by doing this kind of work.  In the end, it shows in what you create.  You also have to be resourceful.   I taught myself how to design icons, three of the navigation bar icons shown above, I created.  The only other option was to pay someone else to do the same thing.

Saintify's Social Solution

The other victory was creating a solution for sharing content across Facebook, Twitter and email, using the same content.  That is no small deal, if you've navigated in these waters you will understand, and took a lot of thought and skill (and a brilliant coding solution by Kaolin).   We ended up creating a social "card" for each patron saint, generated within the app, which allows users to share some of the original content within the app.  The social card again required a lot of collaboration to make it work.  Lesson learned?  Things that appear simple, or obvious, usually required a lot of thought and effort to get there.  And, help from talented friends like the designer Fiel Valdez, who is a master of elegant, understated design.

Sharing on Facebook

If anyone has any questions about the process, or would like for me to elaborate more on aspects of creating interactive content, feel free to email me directly or leave a comment.  To manage this kind of project well, from creating wire frames to designing the app store listing and creating the necessary marketing materials, is a complicated undertaking.  And, again, you really need to love the act of creating because the odds are slim that you will end up making a profit.

Even a Broken Clock is Correct Twice Per Day

Fast Company seems to be going full-on into the media/tech battle I briefly discussed a couple of posts ago (and earlier).  They refer to it as The Great Tech War of 2012.  I am very interested in learning about Amazon and where it is headed.   Hopefully this article will fill in some of the blanks, particularly with regard to how each company is using its data.  Amazon seems to be building its empire the most quietly, with the exception of the cloud data loss debacle.  It also seems to have a maniacal attention to detail.

I can attest to receiving in-depth customer service with regard to a complaint I made over the intricacies of the Amazon MP3 download system: how annoying it was to constantly update the downloader, how the whole system feels jury rigged, how it creates a media folder separate from the iTunes media library folder and just generally messes with the whole "it just works" juju of my Mac.  My point: do not underestimate any company that is willing to listen and respond (more than once, and nicely) via a living human being to the cranky complaints of a customer over a $.99 download.

The Big Three?

My enemy's enemy?

With Facebook's recent announcements, I will repeat my armchair opinion that the three companies fighting it out for dominance in the new media (we need a better term for it because I'm not talking about what is stereotypically thought of as "new media" but rather the new world of media consumption we are beginning to see) world are Apple, Facebook and Google.  They are profiting primarily by either taking (or will be taking someday soon) a piece of media sales within their platforms or by selling user information, usually to advertisers.  Facebook looks like it will be unique in that it has no commitment to hardware, unlike Apple or Google (depending on what they do with their Motorola assets).  This is going to be a very interesting fight.

If Facebook can leverage their digital scrapbook concept later into an intelligently curated stream, they will be a very formidable force.  They do have the advantage of being somewhat more focused than the other two on this particular area.  They seem to be on the forefront now of breaking down the concept of what media is, how it is delivered and how to make money from it.  No doubt, they will be busy analyzing user behavior, perfecting algorithms that are predictive and pull in content from a much wider range of sources.  The big question with the Facebook model is whether people are going to be willing to do all of their media consumption in public.



As I've said before, I believe the future of media consumption is going to become smaller chunks, provided via algorithms that not only find the content but also reconstruct it in a way that provides a meaningful narrative to the viewer, consumed more or less constantly.  We will consume more media than ever.  However,  less and less of it will be what we consider now to be professionally produced.  Yes, the higher-level content will still exist, there may just be less of it. Unfortunately, there will be less of the low to mid-level content that provides so much employment for my friends.

What's New Is Old

Project Runway 3000: Inter-Galactic Social Edition

Is it just me, or is new media and certain aspects of social starting to feel old (as opposed to mature)? Facebook, Twitter, to me they are feeling tired and too time consuming.  Quora, very interesting if you belong to the church of the startup.  Google Plus?  It seems even key Google execs have stopped posting. Google is finally getting ready to make it open for "everyone."  I haven't exactly heard a wave of excitement from the masses.

What is the payoff to hundreds of millions of people broadcasting unedited and often incoherent bites, aside from contributing to our understanding of truly newsworthy events like the recent Arab revolutions?  Yes, there is also some interesting work being done on meta-analysis of these streams of information, say to track the spread of influenza. However, it seems that most of it is self-broadasting as a means of personal marketing. Who really thinks that people who subscribe to 300 plus Twitter streams are doing anything other than trying to get those people somehow interested in themselves?  Who has the time to monitor that many streams and to what benefit?  Social media seem to be a net-sum game: time spent on Twitter is time not spent on Facebook, etc. How much self-marketing is really healthy and how far do people really need to go down the road to developing personal brands?  Ultimately, whether you represent a large corporation or yourself, social media is only effective if you are providing useful, timely information.

I have been through quite a few apps meant to make some kind of coherent personalized narrative out of social and/or news and they all have all failed, either as businesses or in their functionality.   I've given apps permission to interpret my Facebook, Twitter, RSS and pretty much anything else to which I subscribe and ended up with nothing but nearly generic results.  They were definitely much worse than manually scanning RSS feeds or Twitter streams. Believe me, I am a true believer: whoever gets the next step right, curating content automatically and in a way that tells a story to the recipient combining news, video, social, etc., will be the next Big Winner.  I want it to happen. And yet,  I am coming closer to the opinion of a good friend, in explaining how they use their Facebook account: "Facebook is the perfect delivery platform for baby pictures."  That may explain why Facebook is the largest online image hosting platform, I'm guessing larger than almost all the others combined.

How long will  the idea that "social television" is a clunky TV interface tied to chat rooms, or check-ins to your favorite shows or tweets from show stars hold sway?  Someone, please help me understand how any of this is an interesting way forward?

The most interesting aspect, at least for me, is that the mid-1990's promise of interactive media is quietly coming to fruition without CD's or DVD's.

The future of media: it's in your hands

I do want to talk about Google soon, and how they are silently changing the way content will be delivered.  Now, if they only could implement super fast broadband nationwide.......

Personal Brand Schizophrenia

I am just back from Brazil.  It was an amazing experience, I will write about it further when I have a little time to digest it and write about it intelligently.  I realize now that I have not even spoken about the substance of the project.  Let's just leave it at now that I am very fortunate to be able to participate in documenting a sustainable development project in the Amazon facilitated by this organization.  It was energizing (and a real privilege) to meet people who are doing so much right to improve a piece of the world through hard work, brains, humility, stamina and more hard work.

Beautiful, but not always easy

There is so much happening right now in my world, I will try to touch on a few important other thoughts today (against the advice of the experts who warn about keeping a focused personal brand--rather than corporations becoming more human, it seems as though we are increasingly assuming their attributes).

I wanted to post a link to this: Flipboard, a subtle, but important step forward in how I see us all consuming media in the future.  Media created by people you know and curated/repackaged for your consumption.

I will leave today's post with a few questions:

1.  Is there any reason to think that in the future visual media will be any more highly valued than music has become?  In China, it seems as though literally no one pays for music now.  People there are scrambling to try and create anything that people will pay for surrounding the consumption experience, especially using social media.  Indie filmmakers, is this sounding familiar? Once the bandwidth logjam is broken, and it will be broken, unless we are willing to become completely uncompetitive as a nation in the global marketplace, how will media producers stop visual media from becoming as valueless as an mp3 in China?   It seems like a survival strategy that madia producing companies like NBC/Universal are being consolidated into pipeline providers like Comcast.  As someone who creates visual media, and knows the dedication, skill and hard work that goes into its creation, this is not an easy question to ask.

2. Will the future of paid media production involve largely only a few high-end producers of technological wonders (like Batman, Ironman, etc.) which can only be produced with a lot of capital and organizational/technical expertise?  Will most of the rest of the media consumed be produced by, well, everyone and curated through Facebook, YouTube and other online social repositories?  It seems as though we are well down the path to ever-increasing media consumption, however, rather than being consumed as a separate viewing experience it will be consumed nearly constantly, in small bits, and much of it created by people we "know" (at least online).

I'm not leaving until I get my $.99 for that download

Update

I am now tweeting, mostly about technology and the future of media consumption: @cmieritz.

Also, here is an interesting article that clearly explains how Facebook and Google have become direct competitors (include Apple on the list as well).  Essentially, it is a battle to see which company will become your everything.  I am guessing that Facebook has replaced the Trilateral Commission in the paranoids' minds-eye by now.

O.K., back to my Amazon trip preparations.