You’ve probably heard the news that Google may leave China. A few folks asked me how the Chinese feel about it, so we dug around a couple Chinese Internet message boards to get some responses.
If you haven’t been following the story, these news articles provide great background informaiton:
In the following translations from a
tt.mop.com message board posting by azheng270, Harmony refers to Chinese government censorship and TG and Celestial Dynasty refer to the government.
I’ve been using google services, I like google, Google China has been working on it as well.
Many Chinese Internet users like me know the truth that google’s going to leave
In fact, no matter what, we do not want google really leaving us.
Everyone in type in google search bar “google Do not leave”
I hope google can fight on in Chinese Internet at this so called “harmony”
Replies
Bob_99
I’m using google and screaming: google, don’t leave me!
青衫女
This is sadness of Celestial dynasty
jerry8688
This is the feature of Celestial dynasty
猥琐中年
All should leave, this is abyss
DJ舞曲DJ
How does TG monopoly if google stays?
China can not not have monopolized industry!(must have)
http://www.kenengba.com/post/2257.html
一位Google员工及韩寒对Google退出中国的看法
I had also prepared the other manuscripts, but the recent release other information not in the mood. We still continue to focus on Google out of things in China bar.
And here is a transcript from a video interview of Han Han, a young Chinese car racer and writer, on China’s Tudou video sharing site. In this transcript, the fifty cents party refers to people who are paid half a Chinese yuan per Internet message board post supporting Chinese government policy, and Phoenix is a Hong Kong based broadcaster. His interview is no longer available on Tudou.
The following is the text Record, thanks @ chenshaoju @ melodyskiing @ zypatroon of labor:
I just want to tell Google, a good one.
Then I feel that Google itself, he was at home doing a lot of things, I personally have very much appreciated. Whether it’s to go and stay, I think this is it they have to decide.
I am of course sorry, in terms of Facebook, Youtube, is also included to assume that Google is now gone, then all of the international best internet stations have left us, but I personally In fact, for many of Google’s behavior with their spiritual, then do not bother you are a business holding head, not holding commercial purposes, which I think is not important, because if you are holding commercial purposes, at the same time you can go to the benefit of others, of course, the best.
It’s not like here in many parts of China, you holding commercial purposes, you go to harm others, being the case, we want people to earn money, why do not you choose a benefit of others do?
So I can say is quite regrettable that all the world’s best internet stations have to leave us, the Chinese Internet has become one the world’s largest local area network.
If so, I think anyway, quite unfortunately, we stepped up technology anyway - whether it is over the wall, or with other technologies, we are strengthening the bar anyway.
Because the trend is concerned, these, we have all of these, including young friends, the media, including young people grow up, you have a more open media, more voices, and this historical trend is not stopped, any block of this the historical trend, in a few years later, will be ridiculed by others, so a good go.
be careful with fifty cents Party
Google announced a possible withdrawal of China, and netizens have since discussed this topic. Allows Chinese Internet users to speak in the community, I see a lot of support for Google’s remarks, see a lot of people seen that the nature of Google to leave.
However, there are a lot of the media deliberately misleading Internet users, Google deliberately ugly, or even using some of distorted values to judge the matter.
Readers read the report online should be careful when these arguments:
1. Google Book Search can not because the Chinese writers to reach an agreement to withdraw from shame to China
2. Google’s technology, not strong enough, was been extracted China Baidu
3. Google tried to use business to interfere in China’s internal affairs
4. no Google, China Internet still strong
5. China’s Internet is fully open
A party newspaper editor told me that he could not stand the newspaper recently slandered Google, distorting the facts, intend to resign. I think we should give him applause.
The following article is about what really happened with google China, many people think it’s the truth why google is leaving, and the article got deleted not long after posted. A netizen saved the screenshot for more people to read. http://www.yupoo.com/photos/zoom?id=ff8080812626f15a012632dc592770f3
The main point of this article is that TG sent spies in google and they stole open source and coding send to TG for controlling the human right activist’s movements. The pornographic was the reason for them to leave. Because of this stealing code incident, google feels threaten about the whole company being destroyed and bankrupt. So they decided to leave China anyways.
Replies
wuluoyi
support google, it’s still possible to stay
windliao
Insert a team, I’v read the NetEase reported that the Ministry of Commerce in response to the comments there is a lot of disdain on google, ha ha.
Probably we should have an “illegal flowers” to google here.
Micky
I just saw this link, it might be the truth about what happened
xiaowan3
This article first comes from broadband Hill, the author called “Du Yuesheng.” It has been evaporated already.
Tatsuya
Even the sun can not stand what happened with google China and appeared in the event of the millennium a black hole. Shit.
Cary
Look up the news on Phoenix, we can not trust any of these ”media” anymore
Old
Do you know who owns Phoenix?
Irvin
I heard Phoenix has TG police background, just heard about it!
cj_sd
It’s a public secret for years
N7
Track Phoenix IP, it’s coming from the same IP of CCTV and it’s not in HK anymore, it’s in BJ
I think these Internet message board postings give a bit of insight as to how China’s Internet-savvy younger generation view this issue.
For my part, it’s difficult for me to imagine Google being allowed to stay in China. But I sure hope I’m wrong.
I’m in Shanghai showing NthCode Player to some connectors and potential partners. The meetings have gone well so far — I’m able to take people through a guided tour of our
Alpha release running on the
BeagleBoard, and it just works. And, oh-my-God, does it just work … and work … and work.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s still an alpha with rough spots that need to be worked out, but once I take people through a presentation, and then show it actually working on a real embedded device, I get very few ‘Yeah, but…’ statements. Instead things have quickly turned to “How do we get this running on our hardware,” and “Here are some people you should talk to.” A relief, to be sure.
I’m also getting a better hang on high-tech sales — show up prepared, smile, note questions you don’t have answers to, follow-up in time, and just keep moving things forward. I’ll claim to have it actually figured it out once I get a few signed contracts. That will hopefully soon.
In the meantime, I have a few notes about Shanghai:
First, I’ve traditionally been an anti-Shanghai expat living in Beijing (”Shanghai? You mean the Houston of the East?”) I think, after the past few days, I’ve decided to chill a little on that and be a bit more open-minded.
Why? Well, the city has changed since I first visited as a backpacker in 2000 (or even 2003 when I last spent any long amount of time here). It used to be that Pudong, the area across the river from Shanghai’s Bund was sparsely populated and dead at night. And I was underwhelmed with Shanghai’s so-called modernity.
This time, from the first-class table of the Vue Bar on the 32nd floor of the Hyatt on the Bund, I could see that Pudong has filled out; the developers have connected the dots over there. I also went to Xin Tiandi for drinks, and, I’m sorry to say, while Beijing has a few bars that would be right at home in Xin Tiandi, there is just no one area in Beijing that goes as high on the swank scale.
I’ve also changed insomuch as I’ve come to understand that in a city of 10 million people — whether Beijing, Shanghai, or New York — there is bound to be so much diversity and so many broad-based opportunities, that you’ll always be able to find people and activities that can make you happy. And it definitely helps that I have some friends here from Beijing who have kindly showed me around.
Oh, and 小笼包 (Xiao long bao, steamed soup-filled dumplings), a Shanghai specialty, are just little nuggets of mmm-mmm awesomeness.
Still, Beijing is home I’ll be glad to be back there Wednesday night and working with the team on Thursday. Because we do have lots to do between now and the next alpha.
After more than a year of active development, we are close to releasing our first alpha version of
NthCode Player for the
Texas Instruments OMAP3-powered
BeagleBoard.
Digikey electronics has sold over 7,000 of these BeagleBoard embedded systems to technology enthusiasts around the world. We are eager to get NthCode Player in the hands of these enthusiasts so we can get broader exposure to and feedback from the tech community. Once we’re ready, folks will be able to download an NthCode Player software image to their Linux PC and copy it to an SD card that can be plugged into the BeagleBoard and booted.
I can’t wait.
In the meantime, we’ve uploaded a new NthCode Player video to YouTube, which you can see below.
Note: If you are in China where YouTube can not be accessed, you can play the video from tudou
here.
Finally, if you plan to purchase a BeagleBoard and would like to run NthCode Player, you’re also going to need some accessories, such as a power supply, HDMI cable, USB hub, and USB-ethernet adapter. You can find more information on these accessories at the
BeagleBoard Shopping List.
Pitching, it’s the art of explaining something quickly and efficiently so that the listener buys into your idea. Asking your boss for time off at work? A client to buy more of a product or service? Your girlfriend to go watch Star Trek with you? You’re pitching.
The pitch people talk about most often in tech start-ups is the elevator pitch, which is a quick description of your company or product that should last less than the time it takes to ride an elevator — about half a minute.
Well, we have a product and I have an elevator pitch. It’s quick, it’s concise, and here it goes:
“So what do you do?”
“We have a product called NthCode Player, which is software home electronics companies can embed into televisions, set-top boxes, and other devices so that consumers can seamlessly find, stream, and play movies and music from their home networks and Internet services.”
“So … what do you do?”
Exactly. What do we do? No one understands. Here is a typical response:
“We are impressed, but we (I) just do not understand computer talk. So is this product for sale? I assume so. I hope you make big bucks!”
Okay, that’s not exactly typical, that’s a snippet of an email from my mother. If my mother — who other than being the greatest Mom on the planet is also a normal human being who sometimes reads my blog — says she doesn’t get it, then I have a problem.
And it wasn’t just Mom. It was also some of my geek friends. Pardon me, computer savvy professionals. I’d give them the elevator pitch, and, they, not wanting to look like idiots would try to understand it. “Oh, it’s kind of like X?” or “who are the customers?” and “what’s the business model?”
And it didn’t *feel* right in my gut. It was a bit of me thinking to myself, “Eh, that didn’t feel natural” and “what am I not saying right?”
So here are the symptoms of a bad pitch: People who should understand it are grasping to figure out what it is, it doesn’t feel right in your gut, and your Mom doesn’t get it.
What’s the solution: keep pitching, but keep changing it around — sooner or later, you’ll hit onto a way of pitching that works. That’s what I did, and now I have this:
“So what do you do?”
“It’s quite simple. All these television and set-top box companies are trying connect their devices to home networks and Internet services. We provide a software stack that does that.”
Joel Spolsky writes
Joel on Software, a well-known software development blog that he started after founding
Fog Creek Software in Manhattan in 2000. Joel is highly regarded for his well thought out pieces on what does and doesn’t work in finding and organizing talented software developers to create great products. Joel has has done well enough with his blog that he’s been able to turn his writing into five
books.
One of my favorite of Joel’s blogs is
The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code. In it, Joel lays out a set of questions with simple yes/no answers you can use to determine the quality a given software organization.
Example: “Do candidates write code during interviews?”
No? Yes? Sometimes? By the Joel Test, having candidates write code during interviews is a necessary but not sufficient condition for creating great software. At NthCode, much due to Joel’s writings on the subject, the answer has always been, “Yes.”
Over the past half year, we’ve steadily climbed the scale up to a 9/12. The, finally, last Friday, we installed the
Redmine bug tracking software at
dev.nthcode.com so that we can start formally tracking
NthCode Player issues (before we were using post-it notes on a
scrumwhiteboard). This finally gets us to a 10/12 on the Joel Test.
According to Joel:
“A score of 12 is perfect, 11 is tolerable, but 10 or lower and you’ve got serious problems. The truth is that most software organizations are running with a score of 2 or 3, and they need serious help, because companies like Microsoft run at 12 full-time.”
So we still need to start doing Hallway Usability Testing and hire a full-time tester to get a perfect score. But don’t worry, we’ll get there.
Why Redmine?
I spent two days digging through the Internet to find out which issue tracker was right for us — I also checked trac, Bugzilla, Mantis, and a couple others — and decided on Redmine because of its’ clean design, efficient workflow, and user-perceived speed. Redmine is a web-based
Ruby on Rails application that includes a Wiki and message boards on top of its issue tracker. We will use all these features going forward.
If you’ve used an issue tracker in the past, you might enjoy spending just a few moments taking a look at our Redmine install over at
dev.nthcode.com. It’s nice and working great.
Now to start copying those bugs from the post-it notes into Redmine.
I attended the
China Content Broadcasting Network (CCBN) Exhibition here in Beijing last weekend. The place was packed with booth after booth in hall after hall of video equipment used to record, edit, transmit, receive, and play television.
The show was great for me, because I’ve spent gobs of time in the past few weeks trying to get my hands on set-top box development boards so we can port
NthCode Player to the set top box chipsets potential customers are asking me about.
To make that a bit clearer, when you buy a cable or satellite TV box or DVD player, the circuit board inside is typically a cost-reduced version of the development board manufactured by the company that makes the CPU chipset. The development boards support everything the chipset can do (two TV tuners, 5 USB ports, a hard disk adapter, multiple network ports, etc.), only a subset of which is needed for any given product. By porting our software to those development boards, we are a big step closer to being able to sell NthCode Player to manufacturers.
Luckily, just about every chipset vendor in the business was at CCBN. So I talked to the folks at Broadcom, Haier, HiSilicon (Huawei), NEC, NXP, ST Micro, and Zoran. The two notable companies that were not there are MediaTek and Sigma Designs. And I already had useful discussions with one of those two before the show.
I’ll get into what I learned in a bit, but first, a bit about booths.
Trade booths are generally designed to be eye catching and get people inside talking to marketing and sales people. Tactics vary: Panasonic showed their 108-inch LCD and Sony had a halter-top clad Princess Mananoke model. However, most booths at CCBN looked like a nice, well-staffed electronics store.
The most interesting booth of the show goes to Broadcom, the number one set-top box chipset company in North America. It was a sizeable, but not too large, walled area with the Broadcom logo pasted around it, a single closed door, and a desk with three women from marketing to qualify anyone who came by as being worthy enough to go inside.
Their booth was intimidating enough that I didn’t even approach them until the second day I was there.
When I did finally get the courage to approach, I asked one of the women at the counter if it was really a booth, and she replied, “Oh, it’s just private meeting rooms.” (If you are thinking, “Wouldn’t it be cheaper to set up private meeting rooms at a hotel?” you are correct.) I told her a bit about NthCode Player and walked her through the details in my product flyer. She asked for my card and to wait a moment, went inside — carefully closing the door behind her — and came out a few minutes later with a colleague of hers.
He and I talked (outside the booth) for about five to ten minutes about NthCode Player, our business model, and what Broadcom and Broadcom’s customers are looking for. I’m not going to spill the beans, other than to say it was insightful. Yes, I will send him a follow-up email later.
Intel Inside?
The most frustrating booth of the show goes to Intel. They showed off their new set-top box chips with a ping-pong game playable on a Wii-like wireless controller. I wanted to find out some details and meet a contact, but, unfortunately did not, because the people wearing Intel shirts didn’t actually work for Intel, and told me that the Intel people had all left.
So I explained who I was, showed them our flyer, and asked, “Could you please give this to them when they come back and ask them to contact me if they think our product is of interest?” The answer: “I’m not sure if I can do that.”
Ugh.
ST Microelectronics
While talking with the set-top box manufacturers at the show, I quickly learned that ST Microelectronics was the number one chip supplier to the industry.
I searched my pamphlet and saw that ST had a small booth at CCBN and so headed over to find out what chips they had, which ones were powerful enough to run NthCode Player, and who I could talk to about development boards.
I talked with their one person manning the booth, and, after a short while, he said, “I’m just an engineer, you should go see this person at the hotel,” and he handed me a map to the Sheraton down the road, where ST had rented out an entire floor.
That was the highlight of the show, because ST, unlike everyone else, is trying to build an ecosystem of suppliers who can provide software components to the companies making products with their chips.
And ST’s high-level guy was happy to meet me and wants to get me a development board. I just need to sign some paperwork.
Yes, I will follow-up with him, ASAP.
So, other than development boards, what did I learn?
Overall, there things: First, DVD player and set-top box makers as well as cable and satellite service providers want to connect their devices to home networks and web-based services at HD resolution, which is exactly what NthCode Player does. Second, the latest chipsets for these boxes all look to have enough raw horsepower to run our software. Third, the traditional model of creating software for set-top boxes is to have a design house do it all, and what we’ve put together is a bit too complex for what the design houses are typically capable of doing (for now).
The other good thing was the feedback I received from folks in the industry about NthCode Player. There are some details I need to adjust and improve in our positioning and product definition, and I will do that.
But that’s minor compared to the need to get NthCode Player up and running on these development boards.
And, with everyone I talked to last weekend, we are now a step closer to reaching that important objective.
It’s a question I’ve been asking my friends lately, and they all seem to think that books will be around for a long time. Their arguments seem to center around, “Books are useful.”
Yeah, sure they are. But it’s hard to carry them all with you, unless you have an ebook reader, like an Amazon Kindle.
Oh, okay, fine, it’s difficult to imagine ebooks replacing paper. I understand, I do.
But I also remember when I used to buy music on CD. I even remember counting the number of CDs I’d purchased and comparing myself to my friends based on how many disks I had — yeah, I know, lame.
I also recall, in 1997, my ex-roommate, Toren, who was working at a lab in the Computer Sciences department at school, introducing me to mp3 audio. He’d downloaded a bootleg mp3 copy of the unreleased Anything Box CD, which was, as I recall, not coming out due to some kind of contract issue.
Afterwards, I saw mp3s as an interesting curiosity, but not practically useful. The Internet was mostly dial-up, Napster didn’t exist, and it took hours to rip and compress a single CD to mp3. That was a long time, even in 1997. Besides, my stereo had a new 5-disk CD changer and my computer was in the kitchen. My music was just meant to be on CD.
But I was also working at my first job out of school as a newly minted Software Engineer hacking out firmware for 3D graphics accelerators (ask me about fixed-point math and perspective correct texture mapping sometime) and was spending about half my time at the office and half at home.
Taking CDs back and forth between home and work wasn’t as satisfying as I liked, so, after some thought and research, I decided to go mp3. I bought a big hard disk and portable hard disk enclosure — you know, the kind where you can slide the disk in-and-out of a computer — and a high-speed Plextor CD ROM drive, which was known for ripping accurately at high-speeds.
And then I started ripping and compressing.
Most days, I’d return home, and while reading a computer book, rip three CDs to 1.8 Gigabytes of my 2 Gigabyte hard disk and then let the compressor run for about 20 hours (yes, for just 3 CDs of music). After about three months, I had everything ripped.
Hard for me to believe I was spending my time doing that 12 years ago.
Today, now that mp3 music has neutron bombed the music industry into producing nothing I actually want to buy, I haven’t bought a CD in three years and the CDs I did buy are stuck rotting in a drawer below my expensive and gorgeous Shanling CD T-100 tube-amplified CD Player. And I look at my bookshelf and wonder what we’re going to do when our books are all ebooks. Because I can see exactly the same thing happening there.
Luckily for all of us, the publishing industry — probably because of some combination of better margins by going digital, better technology that protects their copyrighted material, and utter fright at what happened to the music industry — is actually making ebooks that can be purchased online.
Which makes me hopeful that in a decade we will be able to read all the world’s books (and lots of great new books) from the convenience of an ebook reader and no longer need to purchase these inconvenient, tree-destroying paper books.
Which brings me back to the question of the shelves. What are we going to do?
NthCode … an embedded Linux consultancy … a contract software developer … and now (finally!), a product company.
That’s right, we just announced our first product, NthCode Player. NthCode Player is software electronics companies can embed in their DVD players, TVs, and other devices so consumers can seamlessly find and play media from their networked home computers and the Internet.
It’s really cool. Trust me. I designed it. My team built it. And I’m using it to listen to AC/DC on my Nokia N810 right now.
So, what’s it do? To get the basic idea, you can go visit the
NthCode website or jump right to the
YouTube video.
Or you can read my non-press-release about it from the NthCode website:
Hollywood creates movies, television, and music for big screens and big speakers — not laptop computers and mp3 players. Yet here we are, with our expensive TVs tuned to boring programs while we use our computers to watch videos and listen to music.
It shouldn’t be this way. And soon, it won’t need to be. Because, today, we’re announcing a revolutionary new product to solve this problem: NthCode Player.
What is NthCode Player? NthCode Player is software that electronics companies embed in their devices so DVD players, televisions, and other electronics can play videos and music from network-attached PCs and the Internet.
It’s super cool. Let me tell you why.
First, it’s zero configuration. Devices running NthCode Player automatically connect to home networks and don’t require installation of cumbersome PC software. Instead, users only need to enable sharing on the media folders of their Windows, Mac, or Unix PCs and NthCode Player automatically finds, indexes, and organizes all the videos and music inside.
But putting all the media on people’s PCs and laptops at their fingertips wouldn’t be great if they couldn’t play it all back. So NthCode Player supports just about every audio and video format used today (MPEG1-4, h264, rmvb, WMV, xVid, aac, flac, mp3, ogg, avi, mov, mkv, and more) at up to 1080p HD resolution on sufficiently capable
hardware. (Just about the only thing NthCode Player won’t play is DRM-protected content.)
Finding and playing videos and music in such an efficient and simple way provides a quantum leap in usability over other solutions existing in the market today. This is a huge, huge win for consumers.
In addition to playing media from home network devices, NthCode Player also plays videos and music distributed over the Internet. To do this, we’ve integrated our own web browser with a powerful streaming, download, and subscription engine so people can connect to Internet-based media guides to find and play the media they want.
NthCode Player’s browser uses the poweful WebKit engine, so sites like Gmail and Facebook all work great. But, more importantly, NthCode Player makes it possible for media portals to use the same HTML, CSS, and JavaScript they know and love to create media guides that can be navigated using a remote control or touch screen.
Our media streaming and download engine supports all the common protocols: RTSP, HTTP, MMS, and BitTorrent. So consumers can navigate to the video or music they want inside NthCode Player’s easy to use browser and then click a link to start download or playback. And NthCode Player’s RSS subscription engine makes it easy to subscribe to
the growing number of audio podcasts and video shows on the Internet today.
Because NthCode Player is based on open Internet standards, content owners and providers don’t have to cut a deal with anyone to get distribution, and electronics companies aren’t limited to a single content provider or narrow geographic market. This means consumers will finally be able to stop cuddling up next to their laptops and start enjoying PC and Internet media on bigger screens and speakers.
Finally, at NthCode, we’ve leveraged our combined decades of embedded software development experience to engineer NthCode Player from the ground up to run efficiently on the same low-cost, low-power ARM, MIPS, and x86 hardware that powers home electronics today.
Like I said, it’s really cool.
NthCode Player is currently under active development. We are announcing NthCode Player now so that we can reach out to content and chipset partners as well as potential customers who are interested in building products using NthCode Player.
The screenshots and videos at NthCode.com form a demo of what NthCode Player can do today. Our target is a fully quality-assured software solution that manufacturers can leverage to quickly create affordable home media products that people love to use.
To find out more about NthCode Player, please contact us at player (at) nthcode (dot) com. Additional information, including our opt-in NthCode News mailing list, can be found at NthCode.com.
I published
NthCode’s first white paper,
Porting Android to a New Device last week. The paper explains what we accomplished and learned porting Google’s Android mobile operating system to a Nokia N810 Internet Tablet.
I wrote the paper to build credibility for NthCode as a software consultancy and, hopefully, make it easier for people to find us via a Google search of relevant keywords. I also wanted to share what we had learned in the process for other people who are attempting to port Android to other devices.
And I held some vague hopes that we might end up getting talked about on the Internet.
After publishing the paper on our website, I contacted the editor of
Linux Devices to ask if he thought it would be useful to their readership to publish some of what we had done. The next morning, I had a reply from him saying that he thought the paper was great, and he would be honored to have the opportunity to run it in the publication.
Honored? While writing, I’d been a bit too close to it to know if it was any good, so, with a fresh breath, I quickly reread it and decided that it wasn’t half bad.
Later that day, I sent two messages: One to Qwerty12, the hacker who had ported an earlier version of Android to an N810, and another to the
message board google runs that discusses ports of Android to other hardware platforms.
At the end of the day, I borrowed a video camera and recorded a 52-second silent video of an N810 booting Android. I uploaded the
video to Youtube and embedded the video at the end of the white paper so that people could see the result of our efforts.
On the advice of a friend of mine who uses Youtube to market his wares, I set the information at the right of the video to link to the white paper.
After that, we finished up the
Chinese translation of the white paper and posted a few messages to Chinese message boards that we previously had targeted for recruiting purposes.
I’d aready installed Google Analytics, a tool that allows you to track traffic to your website, and was now ready to see what effect publishing my white paper had on our traffic. First, you can see the flatline number of visitors from before the article was posted jumping to a height of 600 for the day the article ran in Linux Devices, with it then coming down to a still reasonable 300 visitors/day.
Here is the breakdown on where the visitors are coming from:
And here is where they are getting referred from:
We aren’t selling advertisements, we’re selling software development services, so we care much more about people who might be buying the kind of work we do. Many of those people read Linux Devices, so it’s wonderful to see people coming over from there.
KLDP, a Korean software development message board, surprised me.
Here’s the most satisfying part if the analytics report — people are actually searching for NthCode by name in Google!
Now, onto the Youtube video.
The primary purpose of putting the video on youtube was to make sure I didn’t have our ISP yelling at me because people downloaded a video from our website. As a secondary purpose, I was curious if anyone would randomly discover the video in Youtube and hop over to our site.
Here’s the Youtube Insights summary:
That’s right. In five days, 12,134 people viewed the video. Someone gave it a five-star rating. And six people commented.
Again, it’s a 52-second silent video.
That still blows my mind.
Here’s a day-by-day on the number of hits:
Note: The number of hits drops to zero on December 6th, because that day hasn’t finished, yet.
Here’s a rather unsurprising demographic breakdown:
(Too bad more women don’t find Android fascinating.)
And by ‘interest,’ which I think is the number of page views from a country weighted for the number of internet users in that country (but I’m probably wrong about that).
The above data are greatly satisfying and make me feel that the effort I spent was not at all wasted (now, the true test will be whether or not this leads us to more sales leads — it hasn’t, yet).
So far, I’ve had a few people contact me with questions about what we’ve done and what we plan to do. I also had two folks I know in the industry contact me to say they saw the article run in Linux Devices, which was nice.
So what did I learn?
First, as you can see above, Youtube and Google provide lovely free information about who is visiting your site or watching your video. I highly recommend that anyone who is marketing on the Internet leverage these free resources.
Second, it’s exciting that other people find what we did interesting. I mean, wow. People care? I guess so.
Third, it’s interesting to see the power of social news sites and tech blogs to get exposure. I never thought we’d make Engadget, that’s for sure.
So far, I’ve had no negative feedback. I think that’s because I wrote the paper with the primary goal of sharing what we learned, kept our claim of success modest, and acknowledged the people whose work we leveraged.
Next steps
My head is now spinning about how I can better user Internet marketing to reach our potential customers (decision makers at tech companies) and continue to share our work with enthusiasts who find it useful.
For example, what’s the right way for us to interact with the open-source community? What about follow-on papers? How can I leverage these types of marketing efforts to improve our recruiting? Would a mailing list make any sense?
Anyway, I think this first step was a big success. Now, to iterate and improve with the goal of making our marketing as good as our technology.
Hi, I'm Peter McDermott, an American who's been living in Beijing, China since 2002.
I founded and am the CEO of NthCode. We make software electronics companies embed in their devices so consumers can seamlessly find and play media from home networks and Internet services.
This blog is a creative outlet for me, and a place where my friends can keep up with what's going on in my life, work, and interests.
