crowdsourced application development

 Posted by on March 10, 2011 at 16:44  applications, internet, mobile, startups  7 Responses »
Mar 102011
 

You want an app and it isn’t in Apple’s App Store or Android’s Market? Order it and get your order fulfilled by a team of people that forms to respond to your order. Better yet, be a part of that team.

We’ll be at a couple billion smartphones with broadband Internet access within a few years. That will fuel an incredible demand for apps. An on-demand, crowdsourced type model of app development will evolve over time to respond to that market.

I want a custom app so I float a description, mock-up or prototype across the internets and build a specification with the feedback. My app spec then goes into a queue of sorts with 50 customer names behind it. Or maybe 5000. Folks that want to help develop it – design, architecture, programming, testing, documentation, support, GTM…any part of the life-cycle – can then form a team to build it (and as the “requester”, I may also be a part of that – a dev, a tester, etc. – the traditional boundaries between product type folks and dev type folks start to go away). The traditional product or dev cycle becomes more open, peer-produced and crowdsourced.

From another perspective, I’m a pure application developer. I review a queue of requests (ideas) that are looking for a dev to join the team and hand-pick the ones I want to develop – the ones I care about the most, the people I want to work with. I have at least one customer that has expressed interest, maybe 5000, so I also have some requirements, a pilot user group, a feedback loop, a QA group and people to market the app if I get it right.Inefficient layers between idea and execution are eliminated.

Product shops will be disrupted, at least the weak ones. We don’t usually know what we want, and we tend to extend our current world, rather than leap into new ones, so the truly innovative, game-changing, reality-distorting product shops will still thrive – e.g. Apple, Amazon, Netflix etc. It is the shops that build the other 99% of software-based products that will be disrupted.

We need software in the middle to make this really tick. A combination of GitHub, Amazon, oDesk, Elance type layer to optimize collaboration, manage the queue and transactions, provide reputation and recommendations, manage signal to noise, etc. Probably done by a start-up. Similarly, start-ups will evolve to take care of the business, operational and support models.

Most of the rest of the ingredients are coming together: high velocity software dev enviros, third party components, libraries and platforms, open source, market of billions, ability of people to virtually work together across the world, ability to market and distribute without enormous budgets, cloud computing and storage, etc.

The software product industry is going to be disrupted by this type of disintermediation, democratization, unbundling and crowdsourcing that we’ve seen in media, entertainment and news.

    batman friends facebook

     Posted by on March 8, 2011 at 15:01  applications, internet  No Responses »
    Mar 082011
     

    Facebook is about to do an interesting experiment on a potential path towards Flickbook, offering another movie ordering/viewing experience, starting with a trial of The Dark Knight. Done the right way, this could be huge.

    The wrong way? Don’t blast me with Batman ads and promos every time my friends use the words “baseball bats” in their comments. Give me one click to order (with virtual cash or credit card), slick social features around the view and consistent, reliable quality. You have 600M users – focus solely on the best UX possible for us – and the revenue will follow.

    Done the right way, this is the type of initiative that could help Facebook re-invent to address the dilemmas that Facebook’s current business model and growth expectations create. FB could jump into a boat with Amazon as the first two viable Netflix competitors (sorry, Wal-Mart, Hulu, etc. you are in a different boat).

    And, no, Netflix isn’t dead, they’ve executed in their space every bit as well as Facebook has executed in their space, but they’ll need to continue to innovate and execute to stay on top. On the other side, FB can’t build all the Netflix competencies overnight, but the FB user base, and possible ways to improve the social layer on top of the movie content, makes the prospect viable enough to be interesting.

      purple video and distance independent interaction

       Posted by on February 9, 2011 at 10:51  telepresence, video calling, video conferencing  4 Responses »
      Feb 092011
       

      Video is the new voice. Great marketing terminology but for now the marketing cart is ahead of the horse (although the immense marketing and sales muscle behind Cisco telepresence has been enough to convince some not to worry about where the horse is). But the good news is video can be better than the new voice; it can be a critical part of the new converged, multi-modality communications/applications world.

      Jeff Pulver, VoIP evangelist extraordinaire, coined the “purple minutes” term as a way to describe the use of voice to spawn, extend and enrich other apps, and using other apps to extend voice usages. Purple minutes were important for VoIP such that VoIP wouldn’t “just” enable cheaper phone calls, it would enable a more robust voice experience, meaning VoIP would disrupt both business/cost models and user experience. For video, purple video sessions are analogous to purple VoIP minutes, and the session can leverage multiple voice, video and data services and apps.

      Video – especially telepresence quality video – is paradigm changing in that it facilitates distance independent interaction. This is a hard concept to grasp unless you actually experience telepresence – telepresence is not just better video chat or improved enterprise videoconferencing – it is an entirely different experience that is not quantified in terms of pixels, bandwidth or codec technology. Webcam video and traditional videoconferencing simply add a dimension to voice; telepresence is a separate dimension – one which can be a substitute for face to face and facilitate distance independent interaction.

      There are already extremely interesting use cases for purple video sessions, and most we won’t even identify until video sessions are more pervasive. These purple video use cases apply to both telepresence (immersive) video and non-immersive video, powerful in its own right. On the immersive side, think of purple education applications and purple healthcare applications for a start.

      Before you close this tab and dismiss it as purple pie in the sky gobble gook…this doesn’t mean that all interaction becomes distance independent, or all apps and services incorporate video (this is a non-zero-sum game and these statements aren’t binary). My head is in the clouds but I can still see the ground ; ).

      However, if the video industry (the entire video ecosystem) prioritizes “purple” and executes properly, then it does change the world, and video will be more than just the new voice, video will linchpin deep purple unified communications applications.

      Back to current reality for a second though – right now video calling and telepresence is fairly close to where VoIP (voice over IP) was in the late 90s from a technology perspective – leading or bleeding edge. For me personally, it is eerily similar. Working on video calling interoperability causes flashbacks from trying to get VoIP interoperability working between Cisco, Vocaltec, Clarent and Lucent in the ITXC labs to implementing in production with millions of VoIP minutes per day of customer traffic. Then maintaining the interop through new features, new releases, session border controllers, etc. Buckle up, video world, it is a rough road. But purple video sessions await and they are paradigm disrupting.