We have joined the Deck, the premiere advertising network for reaching creative, web and design professionals.
The Deck advertisements only appear on Aviary's blog sections (both product blog and idea blog), not within the Aviary website (or applications as you work).
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We've been extremely fortunate to surround ourselves with team members, advisers and partners of the highest caliber in terms of their experience, reputation and accomplishments. Our new adviser, Patrick Lor is no different, having been the first employee at the very successful iStockPhoto.com in 2001, where he served as EVP and director until its sale in 2006. Together with founder Bruce Livingstone, he turned a community of photographers into an innovative and disruptive business model where the community could profit together with the company.
And a successful model it is. In 2006, iStockPhoto sold to Getty Images for $50 million. Last year, iStockPhoto had $72 million in revenue, sharing $20.9 million of that with its community. Amazing. It's exactly that kind of cooperative partnership with the artistic community that we're attracted to.
Oh and in case you are wondering: Patrick is the caricature circled in red from our About page:
We're super excited to announce that we are winners in CNet's 2008 Webware 100 Awards in the Publishing and Photography category! 
I've got to admit that the idea of bragging about winning an intangible award makes us feel a little weird, especially as I'm not normally a fan of online awards sites (and no, the irony of my founding Worth1000 isn't lost on me). But we really respect the way that Rafe and everyone at CNet run the entire process. Sites don't have to pay to be included in the nomination process, there is some professional editorial preselection and the rest is up to the Internet. Very Cool.
Here's a partial snippet of the email we received from CNet that explains how we were chosen:
The 2008 Webware 100 Awards recognize the best Web 2.0 sites, services, and applications on the Web today. After receiving more than 5,000 nominations for inclusion in the Webware 100, our editors selected 300 finalists. But the Web's users decided the final cut, voting nearly two million times to select the 100 top products--10 each in of 10 categories--from our list of 300 finalists.
So we really have our awesome user base at Aviary and Worth1000 to thank for helping us go all the way!
Congratulations to all the finalists and winners - we were in amazingly good company.
Hey eggheads, it's been a whirlwind here since we opened the doors here a bit and we've been thrilled with some of the fantastic press and buzz we've received around the web, from USA Today to 5 articles in the NY Daily News and a whole bunch of Digg homepages. Rather than bore you with yet another exciting video it's time to make our publicist* happy and share some of the awesome mainstream coverage we've received since opening our doors a crack in early February.
Full press list and quotes after the jump.
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We've seen quite a few blogs commenting on the irony of Aviary "competing" with Adobe using their own platform. The truth is, we're not direct competition at all. To date everyone we've met at Adobe has been incredibly supportive of what we're up to, especially on the Macromedia side of the company, as Aviary represents one of the largest testaments to the capabilities of the Flash Player (and Flex) out there.
In effect, we're a third-party evangelist for Adobe. Every time somebody uses our software, they are marveling at what Flash is capable of.
Different Markets
From a business perspective there is also no competition because our target markets are completely different. Adobe targets the niche creative professional market with a suite that is robust and comprehensive (a niche group that can afford to spend hundreds/thousands of dollars on software). Aviary targets the creative hobbyist with a suite that is streamlined and accessible (a larger group with less direct capital to spend, per person).
What about Adobe's initial forays into the web app market? Different market as well - those are completely consumer focused tools. Adobe Premiere Express and Adobe Photoshop Express are both deliberately lightweight offerings that bear no resemblance to the powerful brands of their desktop counterparts. My guess is there is some fear that by offering something more advanced that would appeal to hobbyist users they would cannibalize their high-end software sales... but I think that's unlikely. Web apps, (in their current state), cannot compete with professional desktop software used for professional publishing purposes.
Web-apps fill a different role. They are better suited for enhancing collaborative work flow during the pre-production phase, than desktop software. But it cannot replace desktop software for actual production. It's complementary to the Pro market.
Upselling & Combating Piracy
As for the hobbyist market, there is a direct gain for Pro-providers like Adobe, by other companies offering hobbyist-targeted web apps: Namely lowering instances of piracy.
With viable and affordable Photoshop light alternatives available, there should be a steep decline in piracy amongst hobbyist users - the largest group of software pirates (from my experience in the space). Why would that matter to Adobe? Simple. Once software is stolen, it generally remains so. A hobbyist who stole Photoshop to try it out for fun is not going to go out and purchase a full license once he/she is ready to go pro. (It's a lot easier to rationalize away a crime that's already been committed).
But someone who used legal web-apps and learned advanced concepts that exist in Pro software (i.e. layer-based editing) will eventually want to upgrade to pro software when they are ready for production-level work. If they haven't pirated Photoshop yet, they will be more likely to purchase it once they reach this level of expertise. And Aviary would fill an important role as the broker of that purchase.
Exciting news for Aviary users! CNet has nominated Worth1000 for the 2008 Webware 100! We were chosen by CNet from a pool of almost 4,600 websites.
It's a huge honor, especially as we're listed in fantastic company along with the likes of some other web apps and sites we personally love, like Picnik, Scrapblog, Flickr and Twitter (among many, many others).
If you love what we've been doing for artistic communities, first with Worth1000 and now with Aviary, then please show your support and vote!
You can vote here (Worth1000 is located alphabetically, at the bottom):
http://www.webware.com/html/ww/100/2008/vote_publi...
You can cast up to three votes in each category.
Even if you don't vote for Worth1000, please show support for any 3 of the wonderful sites that are listed. To encourage people to participate, we'll make an offer: If you do vote (for anyone) and leave a message here indicating you voted, we'll make sure that you get into our private beta.
We've been quite busy the past couple of weeks (well, months)...
On the Design Front
On Sunday, we finished a redesign of the Worth1000.com site and are busy adding a lot more functionality to it. We're now going to expand on the core base by exposing Worth1000's library of original images through an API. We picture lots of fun reusability like Flash slideshows and games, not to mention instant access in the Aviary tool suite (when the user allows it). Integration between the Worth1000 community and Aviary is going to be a primary driving force going forwards.
Today we activated a special holiday design of the Aviary site to compliment the holiday cards we are sending out.
(The holiday site is temporary though, so take a look now before we take it down!)
We've been busy on expanding the current Aviary website itself so that it includes a way to manage your files when we launch and has plenty of room for key social networking features.
On the Software Development Front
On the development end we've been perfecting the framework that will allow all of our tools to communicate data between each other, as if Aviary were one giant application.
- We've added a universal resource browser that lets you access the Aviary library directly in any Aviary application.
- We finished a key component of the Aviary platform which allows our Flex applications to stream their file data to Rookery (our distributed file network) seamlessly, which means efficient bandwidth use for the user and quick save times in the actual applications.
- We've added chat directly to the Aviary platform which means that you can now access live help (or find fellow remixers) while you work.
- Raven, our vector editor, is being released as an alpha to an initial set of beta testers.
- Hummingbird, our 3D modeler, now supports texture mapping and light placement.
Of course, saving the best for last, here's another of Brent's additions to our advertising campaign (this one for Peacock, our Flash based Pattern Generator).
We're really excited... launch of the entire platform is right around the corner!
If you haven't signed up yet, do so now to get a chance of inclusion in the next wave of invitations.
Every day as we work we discuss business concepts in general: what's going on in the industry, what kind of practices we have evolved and what insights we have learned from other people.
We've been wanting to share our thoughts as a team for a while and decided that rather than keep everything on our own personal blogs, we'd share them directly on Aviary.
We're mostly visual thinkers here, (in case you couldn't tell by all the imagery on our website), so when time permits, we'll include some visuals to accompany our thinking as well.
Our RSS feed will be split up into two - business ideas and products. The product blog will keep it's URL:
http://a.viary.com/blog
Our new business ideas blog will be located at:
http://a.viary.com/bizblog
You can access the RSS feed for both blogs on the right hand side of the column.
We hope you enjoy the read!
Yesterday we changed how our blog URLs are formatted. We changed them from numbers to sentences so search engines could read and index their content better.
For example:
http://creationonthefly.com/blog/24 became http://a.viary.com/blog/posts/get_bezier
Some RSS feed aggregators like MXNA seem to have interpreted the changes as if we had made entirely new posts and reindexed us. I also saw that happen to our Feedburner RSS feed subscribers.
We apologize for any annoyance this may have caused.
We've returned and recovered from the TechCrunch40 conference in San Francisco (and a quick stop in Seattle) where we got to demonstrate our suite of tools and marketplace to the public for the first time.
The reaction was fantastic! Industry people with any kind of background in the arts really loved what we are trying to accomplish with Aviary and requested beta invites.
We even got some press interested too. Here's some coverage from the first day of the conference.
The San Francisco Chronicle said:
"For those on the creative side of things, a new tech platform called Aviary was being touted by representatives of Worth100 LLC, a privately held firm in Long Island, N.Y. The reps said the site has "rich Internet applications geared for artists of all genres." That includes people who do image editing, typography, music, video and so forth. Apply to participate in the beta version at www.creationonthefly.com."
Ars Technica said (while discussing their favorite picks of the conference):
"Aviary.... a surprisingly capable cross-platform image editing, 3D modeling, and vector editing suite, Aviary is written completely in Flash 9. The 3D modeling portion of this suite also allows users to sell and market their creations."
ABC 30 in San Francisco said (while discussing their favorite picks of the conference):
"The creators of Aviary, an online graphic arts site, came here to learn and also for the exposure.
"We'd like to see what other people who are in the industry think about our tool, and we'd also like to get some feedback on ways we can improve it and are also here to practice our pitch for later on."
Other trip highlights:
- We saw MC Hammer walk by our booth, dress like a normal human being. He's funded a dance social network.
- I checked out ImageKind's cool Seattle digs.
- I spent a few hours with Ryan Stewart from Adobe and let him play with Aviary. It was like watching a kid in a candy store. (You'll all know the feeling soon).
We'll be joining Adobe's On AIR Tour tomorrow for their New York City stop and plan on showing a demo of Phoenix on AIR at around 6:00 PM. The audience is already sold out, but if you're planning on attending please do drop us a line and let us know at aviary(a)worth1000.com.
[Sidenote: We really lucked out with our bird metaphor working so well with the AIR brand].
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