Monthly Archives: January 2006

Flash and Lead Generation

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My boss sent me a white paper written by Desilva and Phillips on Friday and after reading it during my trip to Philadelphia, I think that RIAs and especially the Flash Platform have a huge niche to fill in the Lead Generation space.

If you’re not familiar with the lead generation space, you can read the same paper I read here [PDF], but essentially, lead generation is the business of driving specific traffic to a website in order to get contact information for interested parties and delivering it to customers. In our space we’re driving people who are interested in more education to our website, EarnMyDegree.com. We then pass that information on to the universities who are our clients.

So how can the Flash platform increase our bottom line? Because as the lead generation space becomes more and more crowded, it will become imperative to provide the people coming to your site with a fun, interactive, and high quality user experience. Essentially, they’re just filling out a form with their contact information. But in order to build brand loyalty and to make the experience more interactive, we can use the Flash Platform.

The applications we built at Wharton were phenomenal, and still are, but it’s exciting that this space is just as cutting edge and that we will be able to experiment and forge ahead with advancements. We’re supplanting traditional media and it’s cool to be a part of that.

Living in Seattle

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I’m writing this on a flight from Philadelphia to Seattle the day after my 24th birthday feeling pretty good about things. Normally, I dislike my birthday. I try to keep it a secret and I don’t like to make a big deal out of it. Maybe I just don’t want to get older, maybe I don’t like the attention. But as I thought about it, this has been an amazing week.

We had a very haphazard move to Seattle, but now that we’re there, we both love it. My job is going to be awesome and the people I work with are cool as hell. We’ve got foosball tournaments all over the place and there’s always a football or something being thrown around. They also all seem to be really smart and driven, so it’s a great environment to be in. The fact that WorldClass Strategy seems to have all the tools to take advantage of our niche and eventually expand doesn’t hurt either.

Barring the quick trip today when I took the redeye on Friday out to Philadelphia and this evening flight on Saturday night back, our move went smoothly. I didn’t realize how much I missed being out West, but after seeing friends and visiting the REI mother store, it hit home. The view from our office building makes life pretty bearable as well – I’m right on the edge of 99 overlooking Puget Sound. The sunsets are beautiful.

All in all it’s going to be an exciting time. Hopefully I’ll be very busy with work and also very busy with play. Seattle is the kind of place I can work hard and play harder. Between backpacking, hiking, climbing Mount Rainier and learning how to sail, its going to be a fun time. This could turn out to be the best birthday year I’ve ever had.

MySpace Launches Video Sharing Service and it Uses Flash

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I think Flash Video is one of the most exciting parts of the Flash Platform. I remember seeing the demos at MAX 2004 and being wowed at the things it could do.

And today, looking at PaidContent.org, it seems that MySpace has soft launched their video sharing service and they’re using Flash Video.

I think this could be huge. I know MySpace gets a lot of grief in some circles, but it has a huge, huge user base. And it has a young user base, the kind of user base that is extremely fickle, but extremely enthusiastic.

As they get more and more creative, there could be some cool videos there. And if they start to realize they’re using Flash, it could help the market for Flash based mobile phones. In many ways, the people on MySpace are the first adopters, and this is a big win for Flash Video. It just keeps popping up everywhere.

Note: I realize that YouTube also uses Flash Video. Flash Video seems to be on the road to being the standard for sharing video on the web.

Edit: The link for the MySpace video sharing service is: http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.home not what I linked before. I forgot the fuseaction information.

Flash Platform Week in Review (Jan 16th – Jan 20th)

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I’m going to try this for a few weeks and see how it goes. Richard McManus does something similar on his website, and I thought a good weekly roundup of some Flash Platform stuff would be a good idea.

Usually it will be things that I find interesting. Sometimes it may cover Web 2.0, other times it may be pulled from interesting posts on MXNA. If you have news to suggest, drop me an e-mail and let me know. With that said, here’s the first edition of Flash Platform Week in Review

Ben Forta released his speaking schedule at various user groups across the country on Monday. He’s making his first trip to Seattle, but is covering a lot of ground as he talks about ColdFusion and Flex 2.

On Wednesday Bryan Rieger had a great post about understanding the Flash Lite rollout from a developer/business perspective. I have had the same concerns, and he did a nice job of convincing me that the plan is working. My favorite quote:

It really doesn?t matter if mobile OEM?s and carriers license Flash as a mobile application platform in the short-term. In all reality they may not have much of a choice before too long as users will eventually demand playback of movies, animations and other such media created in the standard swf and flv formats – with the interactive/application side of things coming along for the ride.

There were a couple of things on Thursday. First, Christian Cantrell had a good post both explaining what the term “Flex” means. It made me realize that in many ways, I’m kind of in a bubble when it comes to Flex. A lot of people just don’t know much about it, or have old conceptions. If you point them to this, it should clear some of those up.

Last, on Thursday, Peter Elst announced that Object-Oriented ActionScript for Flash 8 is headed to the printers. It looks like it’s going to be a great book and that many of the concepts are going to carry over to the next version. It’s worth a look

Zeldman’s Web 3.0 Shows Why Web 2.0 Can Still Be Great

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Jeffrey Zeldman wrote an article that most of you may have read, entitled Web 3.0. It’s a smart, well-written take on the world of Web 2.0 and though he does a bit of lashing out at some of the Web 2.0 concepts, he does ultimately get the point and conveys it to his readers: Web 2.0 is about creating web applications that are well-made and easy to use.

That’s why I’m so excited about “Web 2.0″ not because of the buzz words or because the venture capitalists are throwing money around like it’s 1995, but because we have all kinds of amazing tools that will let us create web applications that are fun more easily than ever before.

Flex makes this easy, and it empowers creative people to build the kinds of applications that Web 2.0 is about. There are absolutely going to be horrible examples of the Web 2.0 bubble, and some of them may be built on the Flash Platform. But in the end, the great developers will really shine and we’ll see more and more applications like Flickr and Basecamp. Applications that make the web fun in a whole new way and also make our life a little bit better. That should be the Web 2.0 tagline.

ColdFusion Podcast and CFEclipse

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The ColdFusion Podcast guys had a great, great episode today about CFEclipse. As a big supporter of CFEclipse I really enjoyed listening to it. I think they do a good job of talking about the pros and cons of using CFEclipse and also adding some of their personal stories. They also give a run through of other IDE options and the pros and cons of those. It’s an excellent overview and anyone who is thinking about switching IDEs or even just wondering about the differences between all of the options.

For anyone who is currently using CFEclipse they also mention some good plugins. They talked about JSEclipse, which I thought was awesome since I’m using JavaScript in my new job more than I’ve ever done before. They also mentioned OxygenXML, which I used for all of my Flex 1.5 coding and thought was a very powerful editor. One thing they didn’t mention was the Web Tools Platform for Eclipse. It’s a full suite of editors for CSS, XML, HTML and a bunch of others. It’s a pretty hefty download, but well worth it.

Great job this week guys.

Which ColdFusion Team Member Would Make the Best House Guest?

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Today during alternate happy hour Dan, Terry and I were talking about the prospect of MAX being in Philadelphia this year (under the auspice that they switch east/west). Because alternate happy hour consists of significant drinking and because the three of us rate pretty high on the geek scale, we ended up wondering which person on the ColdFusion team would make the best house guest.

The official question over at Terry’s blog is:

Which ColdFusion personality would you invite to sleep on your guest bed?

Head over and vote on the comments at his blog.

My vote goes to Mike Nimer. Mike seems like he can party pretty hard which is really the most important trait for a house guest.

Newsvine

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A while ago there was some buzz about Newsvine, and I’ve been doing some reading about it since then. It seems like a pretty cool project, and I’ve always liked Mike Davidson’s stuff, so I’m putting out a call. If anyone has an invite, can I get one from you?

On the front page, it mentions a signup with an invited e-mail box, but I’m not sure if the invite actually bumps you into the beta, or you still have to languish on the waitlist. If anyone knows anything, I’d love some info (even if you can’t invite me).

MobileCrunch – FlashLiters?

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Michael Arrington just announced a new TechCrunch network blog, MobileCrunch, which will be “heavily focused on profiling new applications and technologies” in the mobile space. He’s just got a couple of posts over there, but I think anyone who is working with FlashLite should stop by and let him know what you’re up to. If it is as good as TechCrunch, it could make for a great way to see what other people are doing with mobile applications. Hopefully the Flash Platform will make up a lot of his content.

New RSS Feeds

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I finally bit the bullet and created a FeedBurner account to track my RSS feeds. There are two parts to this. First, I’ve tried to specialize my feeds. If you’re interested in everything I blog about, you can subscribe to the full feed, http://feeds.feedburner.com/ryanstewart. If you’re just interested in the technology, which is what is aggregated on MXNA and consists of most of what I talk about, you can subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/digitalbackcountry. If you’re interested in only the outdoor posts, subscribe to the Outdoors category. Finally, if you just want the personal posts (few and far between), subscribe to the Personal category.

Hopefully this will allow people to only subscribe to what they want to. This will always be primarily a technology blog, but with the move to Seattle I’m planning on doing a lot of blogging about my hiking, backpacking and mountaineering trips. I don’t want those to clutter the feeds of people who just want the technology stuff.