Introducing Mediafly Airship

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I’m proud to have worked with my colleagues at Mediafly to beta-release Airship, the web-based content management system that we’ve been working on for almost a year.  It’s been a fantastic experience conceiving of, designing, and working with them to build the system.  I’ve learned a few things about introducing new products during this process.

  • Speed is essential. The engineer in all of us on the team wants to build a robust, scalable system up front. But doing so has gotten us into trouble in the past. So, this time, we opted to build super-fast, and worry about scalability when we need to. After all, while we may have a guess as to what the scalability challenges may be 6 months from now, we could be very wrong. So it’s better to kick the can down the road at this early stage.
  • Saying no to feature requests is hard. Very very hard. Especially to ones that are good ideas, but are not a part of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
  • Frequent meetings and checkins are important. We met 2-3 times/week in 5-minute standup meetings, and informally lots of times/week to hash out ideas.
  • What was hard in the old system is easy now.  With our old Publisher system, getting the media into the system took ages. Users had to use a user-unfriendly “filechucker” that we wrote years ago, to incrementally upload files. Or, they would have to paste a URL. This time we used highly developed open source tools, and as a result, importing is as easy as dragging and dropping into your browser.
  • What was easy in the old system is hard (for now). Assign security groups to a large number of files was relatively easy. Now, (at least in MVP), it requires making changes to each file independently. While this is a short term solution, it is incredibly error prone and time consuming.

Lots more thoughts coming soon. In the meantime, congratulations team, and keep on flying!

Why Android Tablets haven’t gained traction in Enterprise

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Apple is selling north of 10M iPads every quarter. Compare that to leading Android tablet manufacturers:

  • Motorola Xoom, the first real Android tablet, sold 250,000 in the first quarter of its release in 2011. No updated numbers are readily available since then, but given the lack anything resembling  marketing coming from Motorola around the Xoom since then, along with increased competition from other manufacturers, I would guess that last quarter saw no more than 250,000 units sold in the past quarter as well.
  • Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 sales numbers are not broken out. However, a Lenovo executive claimed that the device’s smaller cousin, the 7″ model, has sold no more than 20,000 units at retail.
  • ASUS Transformer Prime, the best Android tablet that I have used, revealed in a court case that they had sold 80,000 units in the first few months (~2,000/month).
In short, sales of Android tablets are measured in tens to hundreds of thousands, where sales of iPads are measured in tens of millions.
We experience the enterprise divide every day at Mediafly. Many of our enterprise customers want to support Android tablets, but when pen comes to paper, the iPad is all that managers care about. This divide is further driven home by recent research from Good Technology, makers of enterprise email solutions.  They find that 97.3% of enterprise activations for tablets in first quarter 2012 are iPad versions. The remaining 2.7% are for Android tablets.
The way this market is shaping out is quite depressing for an Android supporter like me.   (As you may know, I’ve been recognized for my work building Android apps, and have built the popular Chicago Transit Tracker in the Android Market.).  And there seems little that will change this in the near future. Below are my reasons for why Android tablets won’t come to dominate enterprise tablet usage over the next few years.
  • No price advantage. While Android smartphones have a major price advantage to the iPhone ($99 for an unlocked entry-level Android smartphone, vs. $549 for the iPhone), the same price disparity can’t be found with tablets. The Galaxy Tab 2 10.1, Xoom, and iPad 2 all hover around $399, while the Transformer Prime prices at around $499.
  • Phones are a necessity, tablets are not.  If you are going to spring for a tablet, or if your company will buy a set of tablets for you and your coworkers, you/they will usually buy the market leaders, the safe option. This means the iPad.
  • The iPad (3) is, frankly, better. I’ve used the Kindle Fire, NOOK Color, Samsung Galaxy Tab 7″, Motorola Xoom, Sony Tablet S, and ASUS Transformer Prime.  Of all of these, the only tablet that comes close to the usability and smoothness of the iPad is the ASUS Transformer Prime. And that device falls short as well: the keyboard is awful, the display is not a retina display, and there is no cellular capability.  And let’s not forget that ASUS’s marketing is hopelessly outmatched by Apple’s marketing.
You will notice that I don’t mention apps. Are apps important? For the consumer, absolutely. For the enterprise, less so. That will be a topic of another blog post.
Comments welcome.

Evernote is fantastic

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I was very skeptical when I first learned about Evernote, a service whose mission is to help you “remember everything”.

  • This seemed like another Web 2.0 company so focused on Free that they wouldn’t last. 
  • Their product sounded hoaky – a glorified notepad for (initially) iPhone.  I already had alternatives to that: emails that I send to myself or leave in draft form, Google Docs, and Word + Dropbox.
  • I like taking notes in a notebook – when you need to scribble something down or draw something, nothing is faster. Granted, the ability to search your notes is nonexistent, but I have my own rudimentary method of organization honed during my time as a consultant at Bain.

After a coworker showed me how he uses Evernote to take notes during meetings, and all the interesting features that go with it, I thought I would dip my toe in (while keeping my paper notebook close at hand for safety).

Now, 45 days and 74 notes later, I can safely say that this service is fantastic.

  • I use Evernote on whatever device I’m closest to.  This is the Number One selling point to me: whether I have my phone, laptop or tablet(s) with me, I have all of my notes in one location.
  • I organize notes into (currently) 11 different Notebooks, which are similar to GMail’s labels, loose associations of individual notes.  I have differente Notebooks for each of our customers at Mediafly, another for Prospect meetings, and a couple for other functional areas (Product, Marketing, Engineering, etc.).  I also have a few Notebooks for personal areas.
  • Oftentimes, as a part of product management, engineering, or marketing, we will have long whiteboard sessions. These will often result in a series of block diagrams, sketches, and notes on the whiteboard.  In the past, I would have to manually transcribe these into the notebook. Now, I simply take a photo with my phone or tablet and drop it into a Note in the correct Notebook, and I’m set.
  • Finally, Evernote has gotten me to write more.  In the past I struggled with where to jot down interesting stories about daily life. Do I send an email to myself?  I would never find it again. Do I create a Google or Word doc?  Those are still too cumbersome. With Evernote, I simply create a new Note in my personal Stories Notebook and jot it down.  A recent entry:

Biking to work today, I pull up to Milwaukee and Grand. While stopped, another biker pulls up next to me.
“Hey, can I ask you a question?”
“Sure,” I reply.
“Where can I buy some cheese?”
“Uhh…. there is a Jewel right up there…. what an odd question.”
“Well, I need to buy cheese for lunch.”

If you are on the fence, give it a try. It’s free to start and easy to shut down if you decide that it isn’t right for you.

Amazon uses Akamai

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This post is for those of you who are intrigued by web services infrastructure providers.  For the rest of you, apologies.

Amazon is arguably the leading cloud infrastructure provider, through its Amazon Web Services subsidiary.  Tens of thousands of companies, from startups to global giants use or have used AWS.  In fact, the largest users of AWS include banks, pharmaceutical companies, and technology companies like Netflix (and of course Mediafly).  Amazon.com itself makes use of AWS, as a way of eating their own dog food.

But apparently not everything has made that transition.  In the process of installing the Amazon App Store onto a new ASUS Transformer Prime tablet, I was sent an email from Amazon with a link to download the App Store application to the tablet.  The link is:

https://www.amazon.com/app-email
which redirects to:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/mas/get-appstore/android/ref=mas_em_dl?dl=1
which redirects to:
https://amznadsi-a.akamaihd.net/public/Amazon_Appstore-release.apk

Even Amazon App Store, one of Amazon’s most visible new initiatives, is using Akamai’s CDN to distribute media over the web, and not Amazon’s own Cloudfront CDN.

Mediafly’s Predictions for 2012

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(Cross-posted at Mediafly.com.)
We at Mediafly have a unique perspective on media consumption.  We have straddled consumer- and business-targeted media the entire year, and our conversations with customers and peers have given us a unique perspective on what each kind of customer wants.  Looking back, our predictions were fairly accurate, though they were made in private.
This year we’d like to change that.  Below are Mediafly’s predictions for 2012.

1.) iPad will continue to dominate as an enterprise sales tool, but Android tablets will finally start making inroads.
Nearly every tablet-adoption-in-the-enterprise story today centers around the iPad.  Our own data justifies that; while enterprise talk about wanting to be able to support Android, up through 2011 this hasn’t yet become a priority.  We believe that in 2012 this will start to change, as Android’s latest Ice Cream Sandwich operating system and beyond close the ‘sexiness’ gap between Android and iOS.

2.) Sales and executives will continue to be the first recipients of tablet devices.
No surprises here.  Mobile staff that interact with customers and decision makers have been, and will continue to be, the first to receive these devices within every organization.

2a.) These recipients will continue to carry around their laptops until they get a more robust feature set from their tablets.
While tablets today are fantastic for email, media consumption and gaming, their web browsers are mediocre and their enterprise app support is in its infancy.  As enterprise software and service makers continue to evolve their products for tablets, the PC will become less necessary.  But outside of a few key markets and their leading vendors (CRM: Salesforce, Presentation creation: Keynote, Business Media Presentation: Mediafly), we will not see the true migration in 2012.

3.) IT departments increasingly turn to vendor-supported solutions for enterprise apps.
For IT staff that typically work on backend systems, building an iPhone app is shiny and new. However, for IT managers with mandates of migrating to vendor-supported solutions, building an iPhone app in-house goes against the mandate and can be very costly.  We expect to see internal IT groups increasingly migrate to vendor-supported app solutions for critical business functions over the course of 2012.

4.) IT departments continue to migrate to cloud-based solutions, as costs continue to drop, functionality continues to grow, and service providers continue to mature.
Cloud computing functionality and reliability are still raw, but improving steadily.  2011 saw some severe outages from nearly every major cloud vendor, against which each of these vendors have honed their architecture to improve.  At the same time, each month reveals new features to make migrating to the cloud a little easier.  As these outages are mitigated, and as the functionality improves, traditional IT departments will continue the steady migration of data and processing to the cloud.

5.) Live streaming to mobile and TV devices will become more reliable, as Android and BlackBerry finally adopt HTTP Live Streaming (HLS).
Displaying live streaming video to iOS, Roku, and Flash work like a charm.  Live streaming to Android is clunky and awkward.  We believe that Google will finally fix its broken implementation of HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) in Ice Cream Sandwich or its successor, and finally enable the hundreds of millions of Android devices to seamlessly play live streaming video.

6.) While HTML5 will make further inroads in the web and on TV devices, native apps will continue to dominate on mobile (iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7).
Lots of talk has been made around HTML5 and how it will revolutionize cross-device development. Unfortunately, we are many years away from HTML5 apps providing as seamless a user experience as a native application. User interaction is less responsive, cross-device UI is inconsistent, support for advanced UI and CSS features is mixed, and other issues exist.  While progress will be made towards HTML5 surpassing native as the platform of choice, 2012 will not be the year of the tipping point.

Upgrading from Dentrix 11 to Dentrix G4

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Ah, the fun never stops with Dentrix.
As a part of the massive buildout of Forever Dental, we decided to upgrade from our aging Dentrix 11 to Dentrix G4 in order to better facilitate more than doubling the number of workstations that access the server.

A beautiful Saturday afternoon rolls around (one we’ve committed indoors to this upgrade).  We met the system requirements, walked through the Ten Installation Tips, and are ready to go.  We put the DVD in, cross our fingers, and press “Install Now”.

Programming note: If you need to convert Dentrix PDF reports to Excel, Google Sheets, or CSV, try Dentrix Report Converter. This is a simple service I’ve built to automate this. It is excellent for practice owners, office managers, accountants, attorneys, consultants, and anyone else who needs to quickly extract important information out of Dentrix. Dentrix holds your data hostage. Dentrix Report Converter unlocks it. Currently only $49.99 for 7 days of access, and your results are guaranteed. Thanks!

After clicking ‘Next’ a few times, we are greeted with this.

It reads “Database Conflict. The version of the database does not match the version of the DENTRIX program files”.

Since we had scheduled this upgrade on a Saturday afternoon, Dentrix Support was closed.

We were likely the first callers when Dentrix Support opened Monday morning.  After walking through the situation, our tech support rep told us that the issue is due to a couple of missing *.idx or *.dat files in the Dentrix/data directory.  We walked through every file that was supposed to be there (approximately 30), and, behold, it turns out that 3 were missing (LCM_Log.dat, LCM_Case.dat, LCM_Def.dat).  We would have to use Dentrix 11’s Selective Setup to install _only_ those three files.  The good news was that these files related to Lab Case Manager, which was never used in the practice.  The bad news was that this might destroy the entire database.  After completing the Selective Setup, we were to run Rebuild to rebuild the entire database, the continue with the upgrade.

We started the entire process again at 6PM, after the last patients left and after we backed up the system.  Selective Setup completed, Rebuild completed, and the data appeared sound.  We then ran G4 installation, and after a tense 20 minutes, it completed successfully.

Or so we thought.  Immediately after completion, I launched Appointment Book on the server.  Crash.  I launched Office Manager.  Success.  I clicked on Appointment Book from Office Manager.  Crash.  I wish I took a screenshot of that error that we got, because it was a scary looking one.

At this point the time read 6:58PM (Central time).  Dentrix Support closes at 7PM.  We called them immediately and thankfully they were open.  We spoke to another tech, and learned that Windows Server 2008 R2 does not by default install .NET Framework 3.5.1, and we had to do this manually.

I ran Server Manager and clicked on Features, then Add Feature.

I clicked on the + next to .NET Framework 3.5.1 and clicked the checkbox next to .NET Framework 3.5.1.  I specifically did NOT check WCF Activation (as indicated by the Dentrix Support tech).

I clicked Next and finished up the installation.
After completing this, Appointment Book opened successfully.

UPDATE:
Several days after the upgrade, everything seems to be running smoothly.

 

How to tether your Galaxy Tab (7″) to your Mac OS X

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Oh, how resourceful we can become!

Faced with an Internet connection reminiscent of the 56kbps dial-up days while at work, I dove into finding a way to tether the Galaxy Tab 7″ with its unlimited data plan to my Mac OS X (Snow Leopard). It turned out to be easier than I expected.

  1. Plug your Tab into your Mac.
  2. On your Tab, navigate to Settings > Wireless and network > Tethering
  3. Check “USB tethering”
  4. On your Mac, open System Preferences > Network. You should see SAMSUNG Android in the left.

    Select it and choose “Advanced…”.

  5. In Vendor, select Samsung.  In Model, select GPRS (GSM/3G). In APN, enter the APN for your Tab. You can find the APN on the tab in Settings > Wireless and network > Mobile networks > Access Point Names. Click OK.

  6. Back at the main screen, tap Connect. After a few seconds, the status next to SAMSUNG Android should turn green, and the Sent and Received bars should flicker green.

That’s it! Now wasn’t that easy?

Dropbox and Video are not a good fit

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(This post is cross-posted on Mediafly’s Blog)

DropboxDropbox is a phenomenal service. Over 25 million users agree. We use the service extensively within Mediafly for file transfer and syncing of non-sensitive files, and it has become a part of our daily production workflow. Most of our partners and customers use Dropbox as well, to shuttle files back and forth with us. In fact, several team members have reached the referral limit because of the number of other users they have brought onto the service.

We have received a question from a few companies that produce a lot of video: “how is Mediafly different than Dropbox?” Specifically, these companies want to distribute pre-production dailies, rough cuts, studio cuts, and more, to their executives, producers and directors.

At a high level, this seems like a great use of the service:

  • Installation is easy – users simply need to download the app, sign up with a credit card, and start using.
  • Users can download for offline playback
  • Publishing consists of a user that has access to the shared folder dropping video into the folder

However, there are a lot of problems with this approach:

  • Security: Dropbox has had a fair number of security holes discovered. While most services will have issues that need to be found, addressed, and appropriately apologized for, the approach Dropbox seems to take is “simplicity over security”. They prefer the service to be simple and easy to use, and if necessary security takes a back seat.
  • Content security: Dropbox is not built to keep your content secure. Video and documents are stored in exactly the same format that you place them into a Dropbox folder. The only form of device-level security is a four-digit PIN; beyond that, content can be easily retrieved from any rooted or hacked device.
  • Speed: Uploading a video to Dropbox’s service is slooooow. Even over fast Wifi connections. Even on paid accounts. The company is clearly limiting bandwidth, in the interest of constraining costs. We have seen speeds as slow as 30kbps. This translates into ~10 hours to upload a 1GB file. The system was not created for speed, and as a result transferring large videos will take a long time.
  • Playback: Playing video via Dropbox uses the simplistic progressive download method. High-quality videos buffer constantly, or require a large amount of time to fully download prior to playback. Meanwhile, modern adaptive bitrate technology like HTTP Live Streaming or RTMP is nowhere to be found.
  • Control: Dropbox offers rudimentary support for permissions. A folder in a user’s account is fully locked down. That user can share that folder to another Dropbox user. However, say you want to give 3 users read-only permissions to a folder? Or, worse yet, say you have two subfolders that should only be visible for one of your users? None of this is possible with Dropbox, and you are forced to constrain your choices to match the simplicity of the service. Worse yet, since there is no ability to give users “read-only” access, any user with whom you share files can then delete those files!
  • Branding: Dropbox’s website and apps are always under Dropbox’s name. There is no opportunity to use your own brand.

Vernacular

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We offer various different services to our customers.

The phrase various different is one I hear often amongst my coworkers. It doesn’t bother me in the least (unlike, say, irregardless, which to me sounds like chewing with your mouth open). I always assumed that it was a phrase that was isolated to the Mediafly office.

Imagine my surprise when, yesterday, I hear a customer use the phrase various different in conversation. I spent the next minute or so pondering how our phrases spread like viruses throughout our society; most die quickly, a few thrive within small circles, and a handful permeate our culture entirely. I then snapped out of it and continued listening to the customer.