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.

Google, Pay TV?

What's the hype?

Matt Rosoff is doing a good job on concisely focusing on Google and what they seem to be doing as far as becoming a content distributor.  This piece complements the other stuff that I've been posting about Google recently.  As an armchair quarterback, to me it seems what will ultimately determine Google's success in the longterm is whether they can recognize that online TV is about more than how content is distributed. They do have the social platform in place for complementing online content, but it's a big if as to whether they can position Google Plus as a product that is so ubiquitous, like Facebook, that it becomes a natural extension of any online distribution products they create.

From Rosoff's article, it seems as though they're taking a cable TV-centric view of what they're doing.  Here's to hoping that they don't end up just recreating what already exists, only more and through a different portal.  Otherwise, it could end up in the Google Graveyard.  Strangely, this list doesn't include Buzz or Orkut.

State of Internet TV

 The Cloud knows what you want

This article (TV in the Cloud) is a good companion to the link I posted at the end of my last post.  That article discusses how Google is quietly becoming an online TV powerhouse by directly buying over $100M of their own content for YouTube and supposedly trying to acquire Hulu.

TV in the Cloud is one of the better summaries I've seen recently about the state of online TV recently.  And, I buy Erick Schonfeld's view of social's integration with online TV.  He believes that it will  be useful as a TV guide, showing you what people you know or respect are watching.  This is a logical, concrete and most importantly, likely to be successful step towards integrating social with TV.  But please, no clunky cable-like user interfaces.  It is also worth noting his observation that the TV Industry is still largely resistant to these changes and, importantly, don't seem to understand that online TV is about more than how content is distributed.

If you want to read how that resistance is affecting what you can watch, read this very good article from the Above the Crowd blog about why Netflix changed its pricing structure.  Netflix cracked the code about how to make money with online streaming content when everyone said it was impossible.  Now, everyone (understandably) wants a piece of the pie, even though many of them do not really seem to still understand how to make it work.  What does that mean?  Get used to fracturing in the delivering of content, that is, for the immediate future it seems like you will be looking more places (and paying more providers) for the same type of content you found in one or two portals making it more expensive and more difficult to locate.

Netflix, The Innovator's Dilemma and the Golden Egg

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.......

What is Free?

OK.  This is the last product post for awhile.  The reason why I am including it is simple.  We, as media producers, are always yammering about how to actually make money off of our creations. Recent theory seemed to be: give it away now and then someday you'll be able to charge for it or get ad revenue...... now everyone is talking about social and using social to make money.  I still think that sometimes it's just better to make a good product and for people to PAY FOR IT.

Red Giant (and Stu Maschwitz) created a neat product awhile ago, Plastic Bullet, the first (that I know of) iPhone app for easily applying looks to your iPhone photos.  Totally worth paying for, yes?  Hmmm, then some other company came along and made a "free" product along the same lines, supported by annoying adds in the interface, promoted the heck out of it and got some VC money.  It's a fine product, and if you want to get tied into that company's social media experience (which they are no doubt working very hard at monetizing) go for it.  But do I really need a log in to play with some images I've taken with my phone and then wonder how yet another area of my life is being harvested electronically?

Personally, I just want to take pictures and use a clean interface to have fun with them.  And maybe send a couple to friends....and not have every aspect of my personal creativity/relationships commoditized.

Anyway, Plastic Bullet is on sale for a few days at the iTunes store for $.99.  I own it and, despite the recent spate of Red Giant posts, have no relationship with them.  Their products just keep crossing my path recently and I still like to root for the little guy because, well, I'm a little guy.

Also, I recently completed a substantive project using Colorista II.  A post will be coming soon about the good, the not so good and the just plain different of using it versus other color grading products.  I have sent a couple of emails to Stu asking about some technical questions I have about the product. My biggest concern is how it clamps video to make it what appears to broadcast safe.  Hopefully, I will hear back from him before I do the post.