Tour Our Office!

We recently had an internal competition to create some interesting scenes. Congratulations to one of our web developers, Owen for winning the contest with his amazing re-creation of the our office here in Richmond Hill, Canada. Amazing stuff that you will really appreciate if you ever visit. You can view Owen's scene here, or on Facebook here.
Owen took home a sweet iPod Touch for his efforts. Maybe we'll see a SceneCaster iPhone app soon as he tinkers with it ;)

Halloween models

It's almost Halloween, so we've added some appropriate models to the SceneCaster catalog to help you express your ghoulish intents!

Mac/Linux support questions

OK, I've been getting private questions from some of you as to when you can expect to get Mac|Linux support. Here's the scoop.

Our first deliverable as part of our multi platform strategy will be an embeddable Mac|Linux|Windows viewer. This component will allow you to view your scenes in 3D on Os X and on Linux. It will be a low footprint download with minimal functionality including animating from camera view to camera view. This is actually the first step in our mutli platform strategy. We released the Beta version of our scene editor for Windows only and the message came back loud and clear from you that you wanted multi platform support. We're committed to doing that and here's how we're actually going to do it.

First we will deliver the embeddable multiplatform viewer. This will allow you to add a SceneCaster scene to your blog or any web page with copy and paste functionality directly from your web page editing tool. You can expect to see this in a release towards the end of this calendar year.

We're very excited about this and the effort doesn't stop there. We will release full editing capabilities on OS X as an extension to this in the first half of 2008. We're currently undecided vis a vis the Linux support for editing. If you need Linux editing support and can't live without it (that means simply that you refuse to use OS X or Windows to edit your scenes), post a comment here and we'll take that as input for our product strategy.

=Alain

Mac support is on its way

Today I spotted a comment on a Mashable post about the SceneCaster facebook app from a reader named Kristin saying that we seem to not like Mac users.

Ouch! That hurts!

I use a Mac Book Pro as my principle computer. I have personally been a Mac fanatic ever since color QuickDraw launched and I could finally write applications like Artlantis. So rest assured: we are definitely launching a Mac version of SceneCaster. We simply decided to go to market with the Windows version only, rather than waiting for all of the targeted platforms to be supported.

Good news for SceneCaster!

Today was full of great news! Rodney Rumford reviewed us today on Facebook Reviews. Read the review at the following link. I talked with Rodney at DEMO fall 2007 and he was very enthusiastic about our solution. Talking with him gave us many ideas about how we might increase the acceptance of our solution in Facebook. Rodney pointed out that we were being way too well behaved Canadians in our approach;-) We've "fixed" that since to take a more aggressive approach. Rest assured, we still won't spam you. We're simply giving you the ability to tell your friends about what you've created with ScerneCaster. Look for the "share" button on your scene description page. We're also making it easier to sign up on the scenecaster.com site, What we've changed is that we don't require total info to let you continue past the sign up page. We're looking at doing even more to make the sign up process ever easier!

Don't forget to send us your feedback on the service we have just released.

we're at Virtual Worlds in San Jose next week!

We're getting the message out. We will be very present at Virtual Worlds next week in San Jose. I won't be going (too busy working on improving the current solution and preparing the next steps), but our founder and resident visionary, Mark Zohar, will be there to talk about what we're up to. The launch has surpassed all of our expectations in terms of coverage by the online community and today we're at 276,000 pages covering SceneCaster when a little over a week ago there were less than 200. This is very cool. It tells us that the online community gets what we're doing and seems excited.

If you're attending Virtual Worlds next week, do plan to attend Mark's sessions. He'll be talking about what we're doing with SceneCaster and where we're taking this technology!

One major thing tha happened today is that SceneCaster has been chosen to be Rob Enderle's Product of the Month! We are very excited to get this level of recognition!

OK, we're at 204K today...

Better and better. We haven't yet launched our second wave of marketing for next week's Virtual Worlds conference in San Jose and we've almost doubled in number of references to SceneCaster in a single day (105K to 204K). I can't check what this corresponds to: it's just way too many hits to manually check. I tried restricting the search to English only posts to account for translations of english language texts into other languages, but that only accounted for less than a quarter of the total hits. Guess I'm still wondering what to account this sudden doubling of the number of references to...

We've improved the facebook presence today. After talking to several facebook developers and critics, a unanimous suggestion came back asking us to provide Share links on the scene details page to allow users to easily share scenes with their friends. It's done thanks to Owen, our resident Facebook guru. Users can now share their favorite scenes. We'll be adding the ability to tell your friends about us when you sign up for SceneCaster on facebook over the next few days. It's a bigger change so I'm waiting for our QA team to bless the changes before we release them.

For those of you who ran into issues trying to run SceneCaster in FireFox on Vista, the good news is tha the development team is on it and we hope to identify the source of the problem and release afix shortly.

Over 100 thousand Google references in a week

We're now a week after the first posts started appearing on SceneCaster around the launch at DEMO fall 2007. I checked again today and we're now at 105,000 references on a Google search for the term scenecaster.

Today was a busy day as we prepare for the next steps. We'll be at Virtual Worlds in San Jose starting October 10th. We're gearing up for that after the initial launch at DEMO. The feature requests from early users are pouring in and we're sorting them to stay on top of them.