I pitched and demoed Practisimo tonight at the end of Startup Weekend – Education at San Francisco’s Dogpatch Labs. Practisimo is a foreign language practice service. Practisimo brings native speakers to people who already know language who need to practice to keep their language skills alive. We started from scratch Saturday night, after killing our language lab product 24 hours into the project.
Joining up, speed-dating style, to form new business teams was entertaining. Getting the business design right was hard. Trusting strangers was spiritual. Decisiveness at top speed exposing your ignorance was unsettling. Keeping our collective eyes on the-very-next-thing-to-do was tiring.
Leaving Skype out of this real-time, just-in-time, find-someone-to-practice-with service was really easy .
Our requirements:
We need technology like Chatroulette’s, where we pair two users so they talk to each other.
We want to serve some users on mobile phones.
We want to serve 1-to-1 video chat and text chat inside of our web site and inside of other sites like facebook.
We don’t want to pay for bandwidth for our first million users.
Skype just couldn’t get us there.
We might have been able to use Skype network APIs, still under construction. But that’s for another year.
We thought about building it on SkypeKit, but I’ve been waiting for 125 days to even see the secret SkypeKit SDK documentation.
So we’re using other technology to help people talk to each other.
Video chat ran on the TokBox API. For the telephony part, between Twilio and Voxeo we chose Twilio; it was more familiar to one of our programmers (and Twilio co-sponsored #SWBAY). In-browser text chat used a little open sourced PHP. Forms and surveys ran on Wufoo. We cobbled a barely working, unlikely-to-scale, first-draft experience together using less than four hours of programmer time.
Today was Skype’s 7th birthday. Happy Birthday, Skype!
I wish I’d had a different story to tell. The new practice of entrepreneurship taught at #SWBAY ruthlessly focuses on doing the right things, right now, with the tools at hand, in ways that teach you what you need to move forward. Dear Skype, wish you were there.
I wanted to follow up on my Monday post about the importance of collaboration products to Skype’s business strategy. The great thing about collaboration is that it is very hard. Collaboration is less a discipline than a catchall term. It’s peopleware more than technology, anecdotes more than evidence. Universities have no Collaboration Studies department in schools of business, humanities, engineering, or medicine. Industry and governments study collaboration but produce narrow benefits, poorly shared.
Frankly, there’s no Collaboration Science to inform the design of the next generation of tools like Skype.
Society needs it. The web needs it. I want to do it.
So what questions about collaborative behavior and collective productivity could investigations answer? Which avenues could radically improve the ability of live and time-shifted talk to become work effort? What collaboration patterns and social software designs can break down barriers and bridge teams and connect project stakeholders?
Talk systems are part of a larger interconnected network of information systems
Work adds constraints that help focus conversation
Collaboration as collective productivity
and the topics fell in three clusters:
Getting Started (Ridiculously Easy Group Formation; Group Goal Forming; To Do Lists, Calendars, Personal Time Management, and Getting Things Done Together; Fame and Reputation)
Being Better Together (Augmenting Inline Conversation; From Discovery to Action; Decision Making and Decision Support; Collaboration Afoot; Situational Awareness; How Collaborators Use Search and Personal/Collective memory; Gestures of Tomorrow)
Crossing Boundaries (Intergroup Collaboration; Earning Trust and Using Whuffie; Collective Presence and Project Presence/ActivityStreams; Transparency and Collaboration; Backchannels; Scaling Collaboration from Tasks to Projects to Programmes)
It’s a quick read, needs pictures and I consider this a rough, incomplete draft. The questions are a sample to get a feel for the space to be studied.
How can we answer the questions? Research. Each topic is amenable to a different blend of usability testing, instrumented communication tools, prototyping, field ethnography of high function collaborative teams, and analysis of data from virtual teams.
I’d like to assemble a body of knowledge that turns our digital tin-cans-with-strings into engines of effectiveness.
Help me kick start this. (Yes, this is a bit self-referential.) What topics are missing? Prior art? Can this research occur in an open space or must it happen inside a corporate firewall? Of all the research topics, which ones are low-hanging fruit and which are harder to reach but outstanding value? Here’s the pdf.
Remote participation via Skype in television production is disruptive technology: vastly more convenient, orders of magnitude cheaper, and lower but tolerable quality than other forms of electronic field production.
Cost. Today’s remote live video shoots might cost $25k+ for satellite time, gear, van, and a crew (camera operator, sound recordist, producer, hair & make-up artist, lighting technician). This is more production value than a field reporter
On the other hand, let’s say it costs $10k for a high-end Mac including free Skype software, webcams, insurance, geek time, mobile Internet, and a mobile phone for the control channel. Spread the cost over twenty guests/interviews, you might spend $500 for a shoot where the guest hooks themselves up in 15 minutes (power into the laptop, plug in the webcam, turn it on, fire up Skype, press the green "Video Call" button). And now guests like Kutcher are Skype-ready; no cost to you.
Convenience. With broadband in many places, with laptops and webcams benefiting from Moore’s Law, you can overnight a Skyped-up laptop with a good webcam and a good microphone, ready to go tomorrow. Or your guest runs out to Best Buy or RadioShack for a webcam and is back and ready in 90 minutes.
Acceptable Quality. Skype doesn’t capture in hi-def and most webcams don’t use the widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio. Skype can reproduce 640×480@30fps with high end webcams, good enough for talking heads. You can see that Ashton’s end of the show is poorly lit, color balance is off, he’s not been through hair or makeup (or wardrobe), his office is badly decorated to get unlicensed art off the wall behind him. Nobody cares.
Skype’s dialtone made that show possible without blowing the show’s budget, without flying Kutcher from his office at Katalyst Films to Chicago for three days, spending five hours hosting a remote crew at his office, or even three hours to drive to a local television station for fifteen minutes of air time. It was almost as easy as having someone phone in. But with better audio and with live two-way video.
This changes the economics of television production. Don’t ration your remote guest spots because they cost too much or take too long to prep. Just Skype them to your studio, enrich your program with live, just-in-time feeds on the cheap.
People are bringing Skype into the workplace. Millions solve problems, lower costs, create new services, work more effectively, and unleash human talent. The O Show is just one of the most visible.
Practisimo is a foreign language practice service. Practisimo brings native speakers to people who already know language who need to practice to keep their language skills alive. We started from scratch Saturday night, after killing our language lab product 24 hours into the project. 
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