Akaalias caught a picture of me at last Saturday’s MobileCampNYC. Here it is tooned:
I’m in front left having a good time. This was part of Amit Gupta’s HalfBaked.com competition - design a startup in 10 mintues and pitch it to judges, including Dennis Crowley, ex-Dodgeball cofounder, whom I enjoyed talking to later. Our group’s presentation was the slickest, but arguably not the most creative.
I’m heading out to MobileCampNYC this Saturday, a BarCamp oriented towards Mobile applications. It’s a bit of a truck from the Philly burbs for a day trip, but I’ve had good times and good luck at NYC BarCamps before. There are some obvious ways Toonamation photo and video manipulation could be applied to enhance the mobile experience, both in terms of making it more fun to share content among users (any providers listening?) and for increasing the impact of prepackaged ads. I don’t know yet if this would be a Java phone ap (Seth has some experience writing them) or server-based. That’s TBD. This is an exploratory new direction and like at other BarCamps, I get to enjoy the communal vibe and networking and playing extroverted geek for a day.
Eric Skiff of GlitchNYC, whom Seth and I met last year at BarCamp Boston, graciously contributed our initial site design. I didn’t get at the time why he wanted to do it in WordPress. Now I do (having proudly almost finished The Cluetrain Manifesto), so I grok how participating in a blog could achieve corporate promotion in a hopefully unobnoxious way, as a positive side effect of engaging in a dialogue with the larger world, helping us better understand our potential users and what features they would like to see. Since then I’ve thought of additional features that I’d like the site to have, and like many before me, I couldn’t locate a theme that fully manifested our design requirements, e.g., customized photo and video galleries, and intended corporate identity. So in between the conference trips and cross-platform coding, I’m learning enough WordPress PHP to roll our own. Not much more to say about this (showing is better than telling), except that it’ll incorporate at least one of the following Toonamation logo designs:
We’ve been off the air for a while now, but not because we died. Seth and I have been focusing on growing our company behind the scenes, including working hard to enhance the capabilities of our software. For example, the photo and video demos we previewed last year were created using Image and Numeric Python/NumPy. This combination makes for a very flexible prototyping environment, which I still prefer for brainstorming 2D graphic effects, but image manipulations coded in it don’t run particularly fast, especially when applied to large images or videos. Relative to where we were last year, we now have a wider variety of effects, including several automatatic rototooning methods to give images and videos a hand-crafted “A Scanner Darkly” rotoscope look, and they run more than an order of magnitude faster.
Here are some examples of our new effects. Click on an image to see several different videotoon demos made using that same content. FYI, the source for the first three sets of demos was iStockVideo, and the source for the fourth was MotionZoneHD.
We also reworked our business model. Seth and I initially thought our main business could be B2C, such that we could evolve this site to be the center of a community where people could upload their photos and/or videos and enjoy applying cool Toonamation effects to them online on a Freemium basis. Tara Hunt, a generous person in correspondence and in person, liked this model and offered to help us develop it. However, we ultimately moved away from it for several reasons. For one thing, it took a long period of arduous hacking for us to get the effects fast enough for realistic online use, and even when we did, the server costs would still have been daunting. We decided that we prefer to grow Toonamation as a startup by bootstrapping (at least for the moment) and retain our autonomy, rather than giving it up in exchange for VC funding. For another thing, we didn’t want to be seen as or to compete as one among the current crop of hundreds of photo-sharing and video-sharing sites, when we’re something more, but also something less. It would take a long time for us to do the community-building thing well enough, if we ever could, but we’d also be entering into what increasingly looks like a commodity market - where can I get the most features for the best price? We’re different in that we’re offering unique tech that no one else has been able to duplicate, and we should keep that as our main focus. As a third thing, both Seth and I are introverts and being an outgoing and interactive community advocate is not a good fit by temperment or something that I, in particular, would naturally enjoy. I groove on the idea of people using my stuff, but I’m a researcher/loner by nature and whenever I’m too long in the midst of a community I feel restive (and restless) and start edging towards its periphery. “Hey what’s that shiny thing over there?”
In light of all that, it made more sense to us to focus on licensing our capabilities B2B to pre-existing photo-sharing and video-sharing communities, along other kinds of licensing, such as the ToonIt! plugin for After Effects and Final Cut Pro we’re releasing with Digital Anarchy. Toonamation tech could then be incorporated into their sites and run on their servers to enhance the experience of their users. This would be win-win in that we’d be offering them something cool that they don’t have, and they’d be offering us an outlet and a way to make money that we’d have a lot of trouble developing on our own, even if we could. It lets both parties do what they do best, especially freeing us up to focus on developing our next round of out-of-sight effects, which is where we’d really like to be. So, now we’re finally open for business and actively pursuing licensing contacts. If you have interest, ideas, or suggestions along these lines, we’d appreciate it if you could let us know or drop us a note. Comments are good or you could write to us at stan at toonamation dot com or seth at toonamation dot com. Thanks.
Last, but not least, Seth and I are now officially incorporated as Toonamation.
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