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In this interview, DMN contributing editor Mike Jones speaks to Greyfirst CEO and Celtx originator Mark Kennedy about the new perspective Celtx brings to creative software development, its open source base and future directions as a software application focused on Services rather than Product.
Mark Kennedy has a science, education, legal and business background. He has worked as a laboratory chemist, taught high school chemistry, and was managing partner for a private law practice where he specialized in commercial litigation, before finally giving in to a deep rooted entrepreneurial spirit. An interest in technology, especially in all things related to the Internet, led to his co-founding the software development company Greyfirst Corp. with his friend, and extraordinary programmer, Chad House.
With the stated goal of building semantic-compliant Internet technologies that people found useful and used, Chad and Mark decided to focus their attention on the media creation business. Early development efforts were focused on supporting the film making process, but after recognizing that all media involved telling a story, the development strategy was expanded to include support for creating any media â?" film, theatre, radio, AV, game development and even comics.
An active gamer, media junky, and lover of gadgets, Mark leads the small team making Celtx the first, Internet friendly, end to end solution for the pre-production of media.
Mike Jones: Celtx represents a very different business model to traditional software development. Can you tell us about the approach Celtx takes to the business of software development?
Mark Kennedy: The era of buying shrinkwrap software is over. In fact, outside of some niche enterprise markets, the idea of buying any client side software application, even as a download, is coming to a rapid end. The future of the business of software is in selling web services - or "software as a service" as it is sometimes called. We knew when we started Celtx that our revenue models would have to fit in to the new paradigm, which is why the Celtx software is free and why we will make our money by selling commercial web services that augment the free software.
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| Celtx overview |
MJ: Celtx is based on the Mozilla framework which most people know as the Firefox web browser. But Celtx seems a long way from a humble browser, can you tell us about some of the challenges of building Celtx from its Mozilla base.
MK: The greatest challenge was not technical. It was, and still is, largely about getting new users to understand how Celtx works. Its unique hybrid architecture - acting both as a desktop client and a Web app - makes it a very powerful tool but it also has the potential of confusing people. So, we have striven to make Celtx behave more like a desktop app then a web app, but of course, given that we plan on generating revenue from the latter, it is critical that we bridge the information gap and educate our users on how Celtx does both. Otherwise, building on the Moz platform has been a very positive experience. The Firefox code base, which Celtx is built on top of, has only gotten better and better. And the Moz team are really good at laying out their development roadmap so we get a head's up on what they are doing in future versions. This helps us in our own development cycles.
MJ: Celtx is designed as a professional film and media production system and yet being Open Source Celtx is free. How have you found the culture of professional users toward open source and free tools? Is is it more difficult to convince professionals of the worth to Celtx when they donâ??t have to pay for it?
MK: We have never pushed the Open Source aspect of Celtx. It is important to us, but not to the majority of our users. They just want it to work. And fair enough. Meanwhile, "FREE!" is a two edged sword. People obviously love when things are Free, but then they have a tendency to think there's a Q&A issue when it is. This is a challenge - to explain and educate users about WHY Celtx is free and how we'll make revenue form it. The latter point - revealing an identifiable source of revenue, whether the user contributes or not - is the ultimate salve for any misgivings about the free nature of the offering.
MJ: Celtx is arguably the most diverse and feature rich application of its kind covering a wide array of production needs. What has been the development process? Is there a clear roadmap for how Celtx will be developed? Or do you take a more flexible, even community driven, approach?
MK: It's probably an understatement to say we are flexible in our development process. We've always been very clear in our own heads about what we wanted Celtx to become - the default application for the pre-production of any creative media - and how it would do that - the hybrid architecture. However, other then the broad brush strokes of what key features were needed to make Celtx in to that Pre-Production application, we relied heavily on our users to tell us how exactly each feature should get implemented. We avoid roadmaps per se. They lock you in to paths that may not make sense shortly after setting them in stone. We instead prefer to do our feature reviews for future versions immediately after shipping the last one. This lets us take in to account the most recent feedback on the most recent version when designing the next.
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| Project Central |
MJ: Now that Celtx is in v1.0 what future directions are on the cards? There has been mention of Commercial Web Services, can you expand on what these services might encompass and how they will be accessed?
MK: The release of 1.0 allows us, among other things, to begin offering the planned commercial web services. The first such web service, called "Merge" will allow larger groups of people to collaborate on a Celtx Project without worrying if they have the latest version of the Project or whether they are offline when doing their work. The Merge service will form the anchor for a suite of commercial web services that weâ??ll be adding over the next while. We're looking at a few ideas, including some API related plays that leverage some of the other filmmaking software in the market.
About Celtx
Celtx is the world's first fully integrated software solution for media pre-production enabling media collaboration and development across the world. With over 250,000 independent media creators in more than 160countries working in 20 different languages, Celtx is the global standard for media production for the next generation of media creators to create and develop their own content regardless of location or language. For more information, visit http://www.celtx.com.
About Greyfirst Corp
Celtx is developed by Greyfirst Corp. -- an independent software development company with expertise in Semantic Web and Open Source technologies, committed to developing innovative standards-based software for the next generation of the Internet. For more information, visit http://www.greyfirst.com.
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Mike Jones is a digital media producer, author, educator from Sydney, Australia. He has a diverse background across all areas of media production including film, video, TV, journalism, photography, music and on-line projects. Mike is the author of three books and more than 200 published essays, articles and reviews covering all aspects of cinematic form, technology and culture. Mike is currently Head of Technological Arts at the International Film School Sydney (www.ifss.edu.au), has an online home at www.mikejones.net and can be found profusely blogging for DMN at www.digitalbasin.net
Related Sites: Digital Producer , Hollywood Industry , Digital Post Production , Film Imaging , Oceania
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