Tag: beta

Bonfire beta

Posted on June 25, 2022June 25, 2022 by Doug Belshaw

In my weeknotes over the last few months you’ll have seen reference to Bonfire, a federated app toolkit. Today, I’m delighted to be able to share that the core team behind Bonfire have launched the beta, and you can go and give it a whirl in the playground.

You may recognise my dulcet tones from the screencast video. It’s been my pleasure to be able to help with that, as well as the Zappa project and some user testing.

Bonfire has a big future ahead of it, and as more than just a microblog! Read more on what you can expect from the Bonfire beta.

OpenBeta: a publishing model.

Posted on December 30, 2009 by Doug Belshaw

Update: I’ve attempted to elaborate on the OpenBeta model here.

Image based on original CC BY-NC-SA imaginaryGirl

I want to write a book, but none of the traditional models really appeal to me. Seth Godin puts neatly the opportunities available in The magic of dynamic pricing:

When you produce a physical good like a book, it’s really hard to change the price over time, especially if there are retail stores involved. But changing the price on an electronic good is trivially easy.

So, for example, you could charge $24 for the Kindle edition for the first two weeks, then $15 for the next two weeks and then $9 for the year after that. Once it’s a backlist classic, it could cost $2…

…

Technology puts a lot more pressure on your imagination and creativity, even in pricing.

I think Godin has missed a trick here as there’s no reason why dynamic pricing can’t be used for physical media as well. Taking the Software release cycle as inspiration and Lulu.com as a method I’d like to expand on the idea of creating an Unbook as understood by Dave Gray. Dave’s creating a book called Marks and Meaning and releasing it as one would with software. As I write this post it’s up to version 0.5.

Whilst I admire the Unbook model, it’s not what I want to use in 2010. Why?

An unbook is never finished (but I want mine to reach version 1.0 and then be ‘complete’)
An unbook is a community product (whilst I respect the views of my readers, I want to be the author)

So I’m going to call the model OpenBeta. Here’s how it works:

I’ll be releasing v0.1 of my upcoming OpenBeta book early in 2010. Want to give it a go yourself? Feel free to use the logo:

(click through to larger sizes on Flickr)

Wixi: a bizarre yet useful free file-sharing / web-desktop hybrid

Posted on March 31, 2008 by Doug Belshaw

I stumbled across Wixi today. It’s a combination of desktop operating system, file-sharing application and personal file repository. It reminds me of EyeOS with which I experimented a year or more ago. It’s currently supposed to be in invitation-only beta, but you can sign-up using this page and get unlimited storage!

Wixi desktop

Once you’ve created your account and logged-in, you can create folders and upload your media to the site. This can then be tagged and set as ‘private’ or ‘public’. If you set, say, some video as ‘public’, it can be streamed (but not downloaded) by visitors to your Wixi profile page. You, however, as the owner of the content, can both stream and download it no matter where you are. Wixi does not require any special software to run, other than a web browser (currently only Firefox and Internet Explorer).

Although I experienced a few minor and not-too-irritating bugs whilst uploading, I’ve found it a great (free!) service so far. I’m stumped, however, as to how they’re going to deal with potential copyright infringement law suits. A quick search for ‘DVD rip’ brought up a whole host of films uploaded by other users that I was able to add to my Wixi page and stream (full-screen!) almost immediately:

Wixi - films

Wixi is definitely one to keep your eye on, especially as you are able to embed widgets to share your content in blogs, wikis, etc. I’m certainly not recommending this one for educational uses. I think this one’s for personal use only… 😉

Give it a spin, and add me as a friend – I’m on there as dajbelshaw. 😀