Centernetworks’ Allen Stern has a nice write up of client Assemba, pointing out many of the new features announced last month.
Assembla is easiest to describe as a project management service. They have an interesting blog which combines product announcements with other important industry conversation similar to how AdaptiveBlue’s blog combines product announcements with semantic web discussion.
You can read the whole shebang here.
I’ll be joining my buddies from The Mac Observer and BackBeat Media in two weeks for a week of Mac-mania.
If you are going to Macworld or are around the Bay area, watch this space for news.
Sorry, couldn’t resist the pun.
New client Assembla launched a new service for managers of global software development teams and we saw some great coverage in their hometown Mass High Tech and Read/Write Web.
In preparing for this launch, founder Andy Singleton put together a one page discussion of how Assembla sizes up against its competitors. You can see this page here. And all the way at the bottom, Andy’s comments about one competitor in particular were picked up by Marshall Kirkpatrick of Read/Write Web who said:
That page alone is a good read - while some competitors are described in warm and generous terms, that’s not always the case. oDesk, for example, is described as a primitive, intrusive and nasty piece of spyware. (I’ll add creepy to that list, myself.) Assembla says it regularly sees oDesk customers do their software dev management using Assembla instead.
Sometimes it’s a good thing to have a client who’s willing to speak his mind. Andy’s full take on the launch and the coverage is in his blog.
Last week Johnny Boston of Raw Digital sat down with Allen Stern of CenterNetworks for a conversation on the state of online video.
Raw Digital’s main differentiation from other production houses doing online video is its background in film and television. This is not just a guy with a HD camcorder shooting against a blue screen. This is high production values. So inevitably the conversation came around to monetization. Here’s Allen’s take:
One of the discussion points we disagreed on was around monetization. From what I gather, Johnny believes that you must be able to completely monetize (on a large scale) before beginning production of the video show. While I believe having some monetization in place, it’s also important to move forward. Though I understand that creating a video production is different than a blog or Web application.
Video costs money. Even if it’s going on YouTube.
We had an even longer conversation about advertising, and web start ups (especially videobloggers and podcasters) who think that by attracting a pile of viewers and putting up an ‘advertise with us’ page, that advertisers will come knocking down their doors. But that will have to wait for another post.
Here’s the full story.
Congrats to Johnny Boston, big cheese at client Raw Media and director of “My Name is Alan And I Paint Picture,” for two great reviews of said documentary.
The Times had this to say:
(W)hile Mr. Cowan’s story is sympathetically told, it’s ultimately a springboard for the movie’s lucid explanation of how creativity and mental illness interact within the brain. The film insists that there’s medical proof of art’s healing power — that with the right mix of medication, therapy and routines, schizophrenics with substance-abuse problems can make creativity their sole addiction.
And New York Magazine similarly raved:
Johnny Boston’s involving documentary about Alan “Streets,” a paranoid-schizophrenic artist from Britain trying to make it in New York, walks a fine line between easy sentimentality and dry, clinical analysis. But despite the obvious pathos of its subject, the film somehow manages to avoid both pitfalls, thanks mainly to its foregrounding of the artist’s imaginative and vibrant work, which often comes alive through simple animations.
My Name is Alan is currently screening in New York and will be in Los Angeles later this month. For more info, go to the web site.