From a little office above his garage Joe Weiss has single-handedly created soundslides a sound based slide show, kind of the equivalent of imovie for photos and audio, with the sheer elegance of an application normally developed by Apple.
What is simply amazing is that Joe Weiss has done all this without the trappings of venture capital nor the expense of third party design outfits. Unlike the many upstarts that are trying to hustle their way into the arena with VC funding such as Slide OneTrueMedia, SplashCast, RockYou Fliptrack and Photobucket/Adobe.
Sure spending a fortune on offices, programmers, managers and advertising, may win you more retail space on Myspace faster than everyone else, but what happens when you run out of cash? That is the fear haunting these big spenders and their fast-food answer is to sellout quick and let someone else have the hassle of actually making the money.
But such moves are fraught with danger just as PhotoBucket discovered today when News Corp blocked Photobuckets videos out of Myspace mid-track during alleged buyout negotiations and many would argue devaluing Photobucket significantly overnight!
These are the inevitable consequences of get rich quick schemes that rely on uncontrollable foxes for their footing and who are yet to establish sound business models of their own.
These troubles aren't going to be faced anytime soon by the likes of SoundSlide (compiling photo journalism extravaganzas) or Doc-Art-Net (focused on artists and documentary makers) both self funded projects created to fill a specific void in the marketplace and both targeting quality content as opposed to 2 second dribble.
See subtly but even more importantly than market share there is a vast gap in the quality of the content being produced by the little focused players vs the big flashy VC backed players with their massive user base. Having 1 million portfolios showing pictures of utter tripe is not going to win over the hearts and minds of potential advertisers who would want to focus on that demographic if they could access it!
Maybe these quotes from Daniel Sato (a photojournalist and potential user of such devices) summarize the underlying problem that the gold rushers are yet to fully grasp.
"I am not a supporter of showing multimedia presentation after multimedia presentation simply because it is the new hot thing to do and without any real analyzation in the end."
"Please don’t show me another SoundSlides just for the sake of showing multimedia. Teach me how to tell a story."
And when we contated Doc-Art-Net for comment they kindly made this special presentation for us in consideration of Photobuckets current troubles...
Agentbleu - web applications developer, living in south of France, originally from London.