Tell your customer service experiences whereever you are
People want to hear about customer service experiences so put in ones that you may encountered, especially your technical experiences.
Archive
Archive for February, 2010
Planning to Stream video to Phones?
Well, think again. I have been researching and speaking to some of the best minds and have concluded that creating a VOD or Video On Demand page that will stream on every type of smart phone will be a real challenge.
For example, as of the date of this post, the IPhone is one of the most popular phones with an ever increasing viewership, a close 2nd (depending on the demographics) to Blackberries .
The IPhone does not support flash, but will play a Quicktime video from it. Next you go to the Black Berry, on Verizon’s platform and they want 3gg video formats. Most broswers will support MP4 and the IPhone will play most but not all videos and plays best with Quicktime as a file using the Iphone’s player. As a layman, it is hard to parse out all these variables and frankly I am ok with looking at this from the clouds and it is messy on the ground. (so to speak)
I think that IPhone will have to come to the party by Summer when Flash Player 10x comes out. Steve Jobs cannot stand Adobes arrogance and their buggy Flash tool, but I do not see Apple coming up with a player of their own that will be adopted in the next year like Flash. Flash was a slow adoption, and still has people arguing over why use it and will HTML 5 take it’s place. HTML 5 does not have the adoption and you cannot monitize it like you can Flash. I just posted another article on Flash vs HTML 5.
Add to that, TMobil and other services that have different codecs and browser handling techniques…Nothing is standardized. Every phone needs some kind of player.
In a perfect phone PDA ITouch world, in theory, a company that wants to stream to all phone, one needs to to have files in many formats sitting on a server, and when that file is called, the server “sniffs or figures out what format” the phone needs and serves it up…. Most companies either straddling one side of the fence or straddling it to satisfy its viewers.
Maybe you have seen YouTube’s HTML5 demo which claiming good but is found to be be unsatisfactory and slow.
We are still in the Wild West when it comes to streaming and platform-player adoption. It is pretty messed up if you ask me.
3-5-2010 update -
I was talking with one of our partners at www.DigitalRapids.com about the IPhone and streaming challenges. The challenge is to try and serve up the video live or VOD stream and Digital Rapids has been working on this with Adobe, whom we all love.
None of the stream boxes out today will allow you to stream to an IPhone, and I use IPhone as an example because of its popularity and it’s Flash challenges. Even if the Apple opened it to Flash, there are streaming delivery challenges. Digital Rapids has come up with a box they call the “ABR” box, which uses the Adobe’s “Adaptive system” (just learned this word today) technique of streaming to the many different codecs and platforms on the market today. In one move, this streaming piece of hardware solves most of your cross-phone-platform viewing challenges.
Did I mention it was around $16,000.
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Mobile Devices, Mobile Devices Web Design
What is an RSS feed and how can i use it?
RSS feeds are defined as (Rich Site Summery) and it is a way of delivering updated and changing web content.
Many news-related sites and publishers use RSS feeds to syndicate their content to anyone on the planet that has an interest.
Many news-related sites and publishers use RSS feeds to syndicate their content to anyone on the planet that has an interest.
I want to go into many different areas of blogging but let’s first see if we can get the RSS feed understood. What benefit is it to your reader? They save time as they are connected to your site updates without having to regularly visit your site just to see if you have added articles and or content that is appealing to them.
If you have not been to a page with the RSS feed symbol and want to experience it got to an example at the New York Times and click on the RSS feed you like.
What Live Stream format do I use? Flash vs. HTML 5 vs Silverlight
At the time of this blog, it is clear that when picking a video platform, you should know your audience. Armed with this knowledge, you can determine what format or platform the majority of your users will be accessing. (platform meaning Windows or Mac, Flash vs. Windows media, Silverlight).
Windows is cheap and does not require the licensing Flash does, but on the other hand, flash provides the ability to wrap more controls and monetization. Alright, so what about the IPhone and why it will not play Flash……yet.
For you who are deep into it, there is HTML 5, which at the time of this post, is not as robust as Flash for pushing and controls, and monetization.
Must Listen – CNet HTML 5 VS. Flash > Discussion – Podcast
Our bet is on Flash for many reasons, which are -
- powerful and available run-time,
- ability to monetize, DRM (Digital Rights Management)
- no reboot for PC updating
- mac and PC friendly… and many many more
- high percentage of browser compatible
- browser backward compatibility
HTML 5 Benefits
- media
- interactivity
- native resource/storage access
- location
- cannot monetize
- video formats battles H264 vs ogg
- does not have the history and backward compatbility as Flash does
Geek – Speak > Adobe Open Source Flash Discussion
More to come
Internet Retailer Feburary 2010 – Orlando, Florida
Just got back from the Internet Retailer conference. Not like other shows where your getting sold by every vendor that comes. (we are guilty of that also).
This was loaded with practical, useful workshops interlaced with interactive one-on-one meetings, along with a smattering of workshop-specific vendors.
I went with a one of our customers, Scott Ramspott,
founder of the parent EshopsDirect.com Company. YourHost.com is engaging to completely revamp the sites over the next few months, after we complete the new endeavor, which is a related site selling unique, high end Teak Furniture.
Scott’s company is in Iowa, yeah it’s cold there so this was a great time in Florida and his team is driven to provide the best customer product and experience, which is inline with YourHost.com’s ethics.
Scott has 20+ years in the patio fireplace and hearth business, has defined his market and made relationships to bring products that will offset the seasonal cycles.
Meeting your customer in a one on one setting is one of the best thing you to better understand each other, allowing for better trust and understanding during and after the ecommerce web site process.
The show opened his eyes to the multiple of elements and processes that go into making a great site and partner.
We did meet the Bold Chat team, specifically Shea and the tech team, and we enjoyed a in-depth discussion on how we can incorporate this tool for Live Chat. Bold Chat allows the vendor to make changes and modifications without engaging the developer each time.
They are just on the edge of an Iphone app and they use HTML instead of Java, which means it will not break in the browser like some other chat tools do.
HardRock Cafe and Best Buy were one of the most impressive company that was there. HardRock displayed some of the most cutting-edge memorabilia tools with user and community interaction coming very soon.
When developing a web site, especially Ecommerce, you need to be cautious to the degree of cutting-edge you become as you can loose the late adopters leave dollars on the table.
Stay tuned, we will be reviewing some of the things I learned. Of course, most of our development team already knows what I learned but they cannot tell you from the basic owner or marketing person. So, we come back to the office with our “Pom Poms” in hand, realizing that you definitely need to be cautious and responsible when pushing technology to your customers.
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