Carmen Ferrara’s Weblog 2.0

Earlier this week, I made available the first “public” beta version of iPresent Presio. Prior to this release, Presio had been used primarily by FFF (friends, family, fools - to borrow a term from angel investing parlance). While I value the feedback of those close to me, it was time to release Presio out into the wild.

To truly understand where your software is at, you need to conduct a proper public beta. Finding beta testers for a brand new product is not easy. As with most things in the sofware biz, you’ll want to properly target your users. The goal is to find “quality” beta testers, not just warm bodies. For me, that meant finding users with a familiarity of web authoring tools, streaming media, e-learning, etc. Fortunately, I have been blogging and participating in various forums over the past year and was able to collect a list of interested users through my site. I’ve already received some great feedback as well as some reported issues that I’m working through.

I’ll be blogging about some of things uncovered by beta users and will start publishing more Presios (that’s rich media presentations) on a variety of topics so you can get a better feel as to what you can create with Presio. For a quick overview of how Presio works, take a look at this presentation:
Windows Media version or Flash Version

If you’re interested in trying out Presio, please visit the beta program site. The site has all the information to get started, and includes link to download Presio.

Great post over at the “Creating Passionate Users” blog on creating graphics for your blog, book, or presentation. Incorporating graphics into a presentation can really help enforce the message you are trying to convey. However, creating graphics for the non-artistically inclined can be challenging. Kathy offers some great resources, tools, and tips for those of us that are not Photoshop gurus.

At the heart of Presio are narrated slides, which can come from a variety of sources including imported graphics. Moving beyond just PowerPoint bullet points and sprinkling some creative graphics can really add to a web presentation.

When I started out with Rails, I was using Notepad++ and it served my needs fine. Recently, I made the switch to the excellent RadRails IDE. I’m still learning my way around this Eclipse based tool, but overall I’m very impressed. I just discovered another excellent Ruby on Rails blog - Dr Nic. In his latest post, he has put together a config file for using “snippets” within RadRails. I’ve read lots of praise for the defacto RoR editor on the Mac, TextMate, and one of its best features is snippets. Well, now RoR developers on Windows have snippets too. Great stuff!

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that there were a variety of topics I’d be discussing to provide more clarity around my new product - Presio. Well, I’ll be covering Topic #4 - “How it fits in with existing presentation and training tools” in this post.

One critical aspect of building a successful software product is interoperability. Most software products will rarely operate in a silo. In most cases, your product will have other dependencies that, when combined with your application, provide true value for a user. There may be hardware or software dependencies. For example, a word processing program needs to be able to print documents to any printer. Contact management software needs to be able to import (and export) data from common formats or tools such as spreadsheets.

Creating a software package that allows users to create web presentations that combine audio, video and slides certainly has its share of dependencies. Presio needs to not only work with a variety of hardware devices; web cameras, dv cameras, usb microphones, 1/8″ microphones, soundcards, etc, but it must also work well with a variety of multimedia and image formats.

A sofware maker needs to understand that their paricular product is usually a single tool within a larger toolset that their customers pull out when necessary. So, Presio is not the end all and be all for creating rich media web presentations. Instead, it allows you to assemble a set of “assets” (which may come from a variety of sources) quickly and easily. For example, Presio does a good job at capturing talking head type video. Assuming you have decent lighting and a good background Presio will meet your needs. However, Presio is not a video editing application and as such it does not allow you to create fancy transitions or effects. But, Presio will allow you to import an avi, wmv, or mov file and will automatically synchronize it with an existing slide. This allows customers to continue leveraging their investments in existing tools (whether it be previous cost or knowledge gained). So, if you are more comfortable working with video in say, Windows Movie Maker, Final Cut Pro, Premiere, etc., no problem. Just import your clips into an existing slide and you’re good to go. See below:

This is just one example of how Presio “plays nice with others”. For audio, Presio can import wav, mp3, or wma formats as well. So, Audacity combined with Presio provides a very powerful solution for creating audio narrated web presentations. Presio also works nicely with all the major web image formats as well as with Microsoft PowerPoint.

Equally as important as being able to get data into your software application from other sources, you must make it easy for users to get data out. Presio allows any clip (whether recorded with Presio or not) to be exported out to a file as well.

So, keep in mind how your users will use your product within an existing ecosystem of other products and formats.

Just a couple of quick items. I’ve been moving along building out iPresent Online, and I wanted to quickly mention a couple of of interesting items from a technical perspective. After careful consideration (too much actually), I’ve decided to build iPresent Online on top of the Ruby on Rails framework. Personally, I do not subscribe very much to the programming language/platform wars that fly across the blogosphere on a daily basis. When choosing a platform, what matters most is: 1) selecting “the right tool for the job” AND 2) what’s makes the most sense for your business. Along those same lines I’ve also chosen to integrate with Amazon’s S3 storage service as the primary repository for published Presio presentations.

Thus far, building on top of Rails and integrating with the S3 API has been going fairly smoothly and I am pleased by the progress to date. In the future, I may post more on some of the reasons why I chose these respective platforms and my short list of other technologies considered (if anyone is interested). At the end of the day, customers only care that the software solves their problems and could care less as to what the underlying technology is. The selection of these 2 platforms will hopefully allow me to achieve that end.

When describing a piece of software to potential users, it is imperative that you speak in terms of “solutions” as opposed to features. All too often, software companies provide laundry lists of product features sprinkled throughout their marketing materials. People don’t buy features, they buy solutions.

I’m going to describe how Presio solves specific user problems thereby creating true value for its users.

One assumption I am making is that potential users have already decided that utilizing rich media web communications will benefit their business or organization. With that said, here are some of the problems I set out to solve with Presio:

1. User Problem: I’d like to create multimedia content for the web, but the process of creating and editing multimedia is too complex and/or time consuming

Presio’s Solution: Ease of use - The interface of Presio is very compact. There are only a handful of screens and functions, yet it is a very powerful program. I did not bloat the software with lots of configuration options, settings and menu options. In fact, the main interface does not even have a menu. I built the interface for users that simply want to record a rich media presentation for the web and don’t want to be fiddling around with timelines, markers, script commands, and trying to figure out how the software works.

Intuitive workflow – there are basically 2 simple workflows within Presio 1) Create New Presentation Wizard, 2) Edit Existing presentation. When creating a new presentation the user steps through 3 screens, where they 1-upload files, 2-capture audio/video, and 3-publish. In edit mode, there are only 2 screens; 1-Edit and 2-Publish.

Bottom-line: Presio is truly a rapid web presentation authoring tool.

2. User Problem: I have a wide variety of users I’d like to have view my presentations, but I’m not sure which format to provide

Presio’s Solution: Multi-format support – At the end of the day, a viewer just wants a presentation or video clip to just work. They want to hear and see what it is you are presenting, period. With all the different web media formats this has become a challenge. Most sites standardize on one format or another, be it Flash, Windows Media or Quicktime. Presio provides the ability to publish audio or video presentations in one or multiple formats. This allows you to start off with one format and move to others as you better understand your viewer’s needs. You are not locked in to a single format. Additionally, Presio also allows for publishing single file presentations (MOV, SWF, or WMV/WMA) OR embedded HTML presentations, allowing for even greater flexibility for your viewers.

3. User Problem: I’ve created some great content, now how to I distribute it to my viewers. I don’t have a web or streaming server OR trying to get my IT department to help me set this up would take forever.

Presio’s Solution: iPresent Online. Presio comes with a fully integrated content distribution system built right in. With a single click, presentations can be published to our Tier1 hosted service, iPresent Online. Presentations can be tracked and managed via an equally intuitive web interface. Each presentation is stored on our highly reliable network and is accessible via a simple URL. You can distribute this URL however you’d like, via a link in an email, posted to your company’s intranet or on your website.

There you have it. iPresent Presio and iPresent Online were designed to solve these 3 problems. These 3 issues were my guiding principles during development as I added “features” to come up with an end “solution”.

I finally upgraded to Wordpress 2.  Migrating over was very painless.  I’m always impressed by this software.  So far I’m liking it very much.  I think the UI is quite a bit cleaner, and doesn’t get in your way as much.  I decided to upgrade mainly because I was looking for a new theme.  Most of the best themes are only compatible with WP2 so that pushed things a bit.  I was also having some pretty serious comment spam issues and WP2 comes with the Askimet spam plug-in ready to activate.  In the last few days, not one piece of spam has gotten through.  Very nice.  Here’s what I had been dealing with (1 month of spam):

I have been woefully allowing this blog to languish for quite some time now. I intend to change that. As I get closer to launching Presio I’m going to begin posting more about the product. Here’s a short list of topics I’ll be covering:

1. How it works
2. What it can be used for
3. What problems it solves
4. How it fits in with existing presentation and training tools
5. What markets and types of users I envision for the product
6. Design decisions that were made
7. Some history as well - Why I decided to build it

I’d like to mention one other item. I’ve recently made the decision to simultaneously roll out Presio along with its “companion” product: iPresent Online. My initial plan was to launch Presio, get feedback, improve things, repeat. Then when the time was right (ie. there was identifiable market demand) - I would launch product #2 - iPresent Online. iPresent Online is a hosted service for storing Presio generated web presentations. Well, things change, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it makes sense to offer both products at the same time.

One of the things that swayed me was a discussion with my very first beta tester. He owns a small medical device company and has a sales team distributed throughout the country. After creating his first Presio presentation for training his sales team he said, “This is great, I’m looking forward to having my team view this. Could you host if for me?”. I have had similar discussions with others since, and thus the decision to release iPresent Online along with Presio.

That’s the thing, lots of folks (particularly in my target market) don’t have a shared network server, or web servers, or ISP accounts, or “IT guys”. These leading edge users understand the value of creating web-based multimedia presentations to get their message across, but they just want it to work, period. Well, a big part of “making it work” is distribution. iPresent Online solves the distribution problem.

Stay tuned.

Excellent list of sites and resources for entrepreneurs:

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/20-great-resources-on-entrepreneurship.html

Some of which I do read, many I had not.

I came across this stock icons review site today. This is why I’m an avid reader of the BOS forum. You always come across gems like this.

I’m in the final stages of readying my beta and I’m in need of some well designed icons. This site just cut my research time down significantly.