One of the things that strikes me as odd (from a trying to please users perspective, not so much from a technology or business perspective) is Apple CEO’s Steve Jobs’ reluctance to enable flash on the iPhone.
Naturally, with flash being ubiquitous in online video, and the iPhone become a increasingly important piece of the wireless entertainment landscape, it was a matter of time before someone looked at converting flash for the iPhone.
Enter Episodic, who did just that. Thanks to their help, check out WatchMojo.com’s videos here, enjoy and send me feedback. Note the URL http://iphone.episodic.com/watchmojo is available via iPhone only… in a web browser nothing will show up. If getting WatchMojo.com on your wireless device isn’t a reason to swap your current phone for an iPhone, I don’t know what is. Jokes aside, you have to wonder, is Jobs being wise by not enabling flash on the iPhone?
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a few weeks now, but as a content provider I figured I should shut my trap.
Anyway, Adobe just launched a new video player: “Underneath the hood, Adobe MP is a video RSS aggregator tuned for Flash media”. The navigation reminds me a bit of Joost’s (that’s a good thing), but the integration and ingestion was pretty impressive…
The company has always had an excellent track record in launching - then becoming ubiquitous in - new software segments.
This all the way back to Adobe Reader for PDFs and more recently Flash video. Of course, the entire suite of flash-based applications is something that Adobe inherited after it acquired Macromedia for $3.4B. Flash video really took off after YouTube enabled video embeds and it was only a matter of time before Adobe would think of capitalizing on the popularity of flash video.
Anyway, why I care so much about this is not because I think the industry needs one more player (though with the right bells and whistles, the market is actually ripe and open for a new contestant) but because WatchMojo.com was one of the many partners included…
I was going to mention this in our Q1 recap press release last week, but it was premature. But this past weekend, a few sources such as X, Y began to talk about it and I know that the company is very close to launching… so without any further ado, here is a screen grab of what it looks like.
A cool feature is that you can watch videos even when you’re not connected… more details to come tomorrow, I’m sure, but as a user, I can tell you that this makes Adobe’s player something I would have downloaded anyway…
I’m no techie, but here Adobe is leveraging one of flash video’s inherent advantages: being able to watch them even when you’re not connected to the Web… and with so many videos online being in flash, it will be able to amalgamate a dizzying array of content in a quick manner. How quickly? Well, WatchMojo.com’s entire catalog of 3,500-4,000 published videos are on it.
Here is a sneak preview of our content in the player (with the screen grab):
I’m no developer, but from vantage point, Microsoft scores one today against Apple for embracing Adobe’s flash. In fact, if the game was football, this would be a touchdown. How so?
1- As Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt is lobbying that a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo! would break the Web, Microsoft shows that it can embrace another standard on mobile that competes with one of its own.
2- Of course, for any handheld to function and thrive, it needs flash… because flash is ubiquitous in online video. Video will undoubtedly drive wireless entertainment and mobile advertising. I am not saying that Apple and its iPhone will not do well on this front, but it won’t do as well as it should due to its snobbish rejection of Adobe’s flash. So in this context, MSFT just gave its own mobile OS a shot in the arm by embracing flash.
To put this all into context, from News.com:
Flash Lite has several limitations compared with regular Flash, beyond the inability to support much of Flash 9. Apple CEO Steve Jobs rather emphatically declared his disdain for Flash Lite at Apple’s annual shareholder meeting, saying Flash Lite was “not capable of being used with the Web.” Murarka declined to comment specifically on Jobs’ put-down, but noted that Flash Lite ships on 500 million mobile devices.
He did acknowledge that developers using Adobe’s Flex tools can’t build Flash Lite Web pages, although the newer CS3 suite of tools does support Flash Lite.
But one huge advantage of Flash Lite is that it’s currently available for mobile devices. Microsoft’s Silverlight for Mobile is not.
Silverlight is Microsoft’s attempt to rein in on Adobe’s position in the Web development market with Flash. Microsoft is fighting an uphill battle, though, in trying to get Web developers to build sites using its technology as opposed to Adobe’s.
Then again, I am biased, because flash is integral to WatchMojo.com on our property… but on syndication network, we are as neutral and agnostic as you can get.
We’ll have a few pieces of news pertaining to Adobe ourselves…
Since 1994, we have seen many companies come out of nowhere, off the radar, only to grow into positions of leadership and dominate their sphere. Some go on and galvanize that leadership positions, others falter and let someone else pass by.The following is HipMojo.com’s list of Internet Company of the Year, based on growth, market leadership, traction, strength of management, prospects and overall accomplishments.
All right, time for the envelopes, and the winners are:
1994: AOL.com
The year 1994 marked the appearance of ISPs across the web landscape. By August 1994, AOL merged with Redgate (a multimedia publishing company specializing in CD-ROMs), and a couple of months later, in November, AOL declared war on Microsoft, betting the farm on an online strategy. This marks the beginning of the rise of the Web versus the desktop theme. AOL begins to mail out millions of CDs trying to win over the masses. It works. AOL becomes the fastest growing ISP ever, surpassed only by Japanese wireless service provider iMode a decade later.
1995: Netscape
Netscape was created by Mosaic Communicatyions Corporation on April 4, 1994 by Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark. On October 13 1994, Mosaic Netscape 0.9 was launched, and renamed Netscape Navigator shortly thereafter. But it was on August 9, 1995 that Netscape went public, offering shares at $14 and closing at $75. In doing so, it ushered in the first wave of the World Wide Web’s golden era.
1996: Altavista
AltaVista remains a poster boy for the “what could have been” lot. It was launched on December 15, 1995 by its parent company DEC, but given its pedigree, it was used primarily as a showcase for DEC’s computing power. In 1996 however, it became Yahoo!’s exclusive search provider, and by 1998 was sold to Compaq, who then began the even-more-misguided plan to remake the search engine into a portal. By then, of course, Google was rising amongst pure-play search engines. In March 2004, Yahoo! bought Overture, who had previously bought Altavista; Overture itself is the runner-up for the “what could have been” prize.
1997: eBay
The “Candy dispenser story” is created by eBay’s PR manager, which changes its name from AuctionWeb to eBay. In 1997, the company captures the imagination of the masses, the next year the stock goes public, like many dot com entrepreneurs, founder Pierre Omidyar becomes a billionaire. Unlike most, thanks to eBay’s 80% profit margins, Omidyar remains a billionaire to this day.
1998: Yahoo!
Yahoo! was founded in January 1994 and incorporated a year later on March 2, 1995. It grew reasonably quickly from the onset, and on April 12, 1996, the company’s IPO raised $33.8M for growth opportunities. The subsequent year, in 1997, it acquired Four11 and its Rocketmail service, which became Yahoo! Mail. The rest, as they say, is history: in 1998 the stock rose from a split-adjusted $4 to $40, cementing its spot as the future leader of web media. In October 1998, it made its first acquisition, that of Yoyodyne, by 1999 it was acquiriing larger firms, first Geocities (1999), then eGroups (2000). Yahoo! could have also been named 2003’s Internet Company of the Year, in all fairness, since that’s when it started its resurgence.
1999: Amazon.com
In December 1999, when Time Warner (still separate from AOL) published its end-of-year issue of Time magazine, it put Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos on its cover for Man of the Year. While cracks had began to appear in the Web facade, the fact was that no one, and we mean no one, saw the storm that was brewing around the corner. Amazon.com was still a money-losing enterprise, but one that was widely believed to be making a run to acquire venerable retailer Walmart. Yes, you read that correctly. Today Walmart is worth 10 times more than Amazon.com. But within weeks of that cover issue, publisher of Time magazine Time Warner merged with AOL, ushering in the beginning of the end.
2000: Lycos
Launched in 1995 by Bob Davis, Lycos grew to become the most visited portal in the world by 1999. It was sold to Terra in May 2000, for $12.5B. By 2004, South Korea’s Daum Communications paid $95.4 million - less than 1% of Terra’s buyout price. What could have been was, came and went and Lycos today is an asterix of the Web’s go-go days… but Davis legacy remains somewhat unscathed as the architect of one of the premier brands of the Web’s first era of prosperity. Today Davis is a VC, Lycos is Korean.
2001: Napster
Napster was built in 1999, it spread like wildfire in 2000, but it peaked in 2001. Shortly thereafter, it was forced into submission by the RIAA and the record labels, but the genie was out of the bag, paving the way for decentralized P2P file sharing sites like Kazaa, Limewire, iMesh and Bearshare. Napster was at the time the fastest growing consumer application, ever.
2002: Google
The year 2002 could be seen as an innocuous one for Google and in many ways, we’ll admit that we could have picked Google in any year. But since other companies had their standout years in specific years, we picked Google for 2002 for a few, well, innocuous reasons. After all, by 2002, the Web had just suffered its devastating crash, and while many dot com dreams had gone up in flames, one company emerged largely unscathed and perfectly positioned to benefit from it: hiring cheap and smart labor and investing in the super powerful computer it is today. That year Google’s revenue grew 409% from 2001, but 2002 was also the last year Google’s revenues were below $1B per year, coming in at $439M. Somewhat more interestingly, that year marked the last year Google’s ending headcount stood below 1,000, finishing 2002 with 682 Googlers, by the end of 2003, Google employed 1,682 people, and today it employs over 10,000. That year also saw the shift of Google from a “simple” search application to the search and advertising powerhouse it is today: the next year, it scooped up companies that added to its lethal search algorithm: first Applied Semantics in April 2003, then Sprinks in October 2003, right before it began to plan for an IPO, in August, 2004.
2003: Cisco
The network is the computer, and no company has benefited more from that than Cisco Systems, the stock that outperformed all others, and won our Top 10 Web / High Tech Stocks of Past, Present and Future (link below). In some ways, Cisco should not make this list, but since we’re looking at Internet company of the year, then it’s unfair not to give Cisco some credit, especially since they are the ones selling the shovels and hats to the many entrepreneurs and investors looking to succeed on the Web. In 2003, long after the bubble burst, Cisco’s stock rose from $13 to $24, nearly doubling and effectively ushering the return of the Web.
2004: Skype
Skype’s history can be traced back to 2002 when Draper Investment Company invested in the company, which was founded by the entrepreneurs behind Kazaa, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. The Skype domain names were only registered in April 2003, with the first beta version coming on the heels of that in August 2003. But by October 2005, eBay paid $4B for Skype. Oh, in between, Skype revolutionized communications and scaled to millions of concurrent users, after hitting 1M concurrent users in 2004, 2005 saw them hit 4M concurrent users.
2005: MySpace
MySpace was founded in July 2003 by Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe. As one of the leading and more visible players of the social networking landscape, it silenced all the critics many times over: first when it overtook Friendster as the largest social networking site, then when News Corp. paid $580M for MySpace parent Intermix in July 2005 and then when it went on to triple in size after Rupert Murdoch took over the asset and created Fox Interactive Media around it. Today, MySpace is the largest web property when measured by pageviews, with its 100 millionth user profile having been created in August 2006. We dubbed MySpace the greatest Web acquisitions ever after Google paid News Corp. $900M in an ad deal for rights to power its search engine and run contextual search ads.
2006: YouTube
YouTube went from 0 to $1.65B in eighteen months. Founded by three former Paypal employees and funded by members of Paypal who relocated to the Sequoia venture capital group, YouTube meshed user generated content with tagging to create the fastest growing startup, ever. The company secured $11.5 million from Sequoia and cashed out when Google made an all-stock bid for the company in Q4 2006.
2007: Facebook
Facebook opened its site up to the non-college crowd in September 2006, by springtime, when they announced their developer program, Facebook was clearly the “it” company of the year, despite being the second social networking site behind MySpace.com. Facebook’s growth spiraled rapidly as the 25-34 demographic connected with old friends via the site. Throughout the year, the paper valuation of the company spiraled from $2-4B, up to $6B, then $10B, ultimately settling at $15B with a $240M investment for 1.6% stake from Microsoft. Additional investors were Li Ka-shing - East Asia’s richest person - and then the Samwer brothers (in 2008). The company faced some turbulence with privacy woes, its Beacon advertising program was practically a disaster… but by year’s end, Facebook was breathing down MySpace’s neck and partnered with the world’s most valuable technology company.
Who’s your pick for 2008? Vote in the comments.
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Some time ago I wrote a post explaining why I sold Adobe. The company is great and I love their acquisition of Macromedia and all, but I just saw piracy and mainly free services as a major threat to their business.
Today their CEO Bruce Chizen came out and said that the company will launch a free, ad-supported Photoshop. This is wise and dangerous: it’s wise because the company realizes that nowadays no one is on a computer but not connected, and once you are connected, everything is a click away, including pirated versions or free versions of a company’s software. And since people nowadays spend 25% of their time online but marketers still only spend 10% of their ad budgets online, there is a large opportunity right there. But, for a company that is worth $20B to come out and offer free services for a one-time core, money-making application, it sends a message that it sees a major loss of pricing power and needs to react.
We’re probably reading a bit too much into this, but you can make sure that MSFT and Google are keeping a close eye on this.
When we launched WatchMojo.com, we decided to go with Adobe’s Macromedia’s Flash Video. Doing so meant more work, but sometimes you go with your gut.
This was January 2006, YouTube was about 7 months old, there was, in other words, no guarantee or real reason to think at the time that flash would prevail. All to say, over time flash video became the closest thing to a market standard online.
In terms of wireless video content, that was another story.
Some unrelated, then Disney bought out Pixar, and Steve Jobs sat on Disney’s board. Disney’s ABC launched its online video forays and employed flash, instead of Apple’s video standard, which said a lot about the future ubiquity of flash video.
Today Adobe announced that flash will support video for mobile handsets. Adobe - a stock I used to own and then decided to sell when it hit my target - just positioned itself to grow some more in the burgeoning wireless space, which I analysed in depth here.
In a related note, check out WatchMojo.com’s latest foray into wireless.
Yeah, sometimes Mondays are a great way to start the week.
PLAY
