The Z Axis

SceneCaster Selected by Industry Standard to Top 10 List of Web Services That Will Succeed

2008-03-31T13:51:00.000-07:00

We're pleased to announce that the Industry Standard, a well respected technology journal and website that covers emerging technologies and companies, has selected SceneCaster as one of the top "10 'Net Services that Will Succeed". In selecting their top 10 list, the Industry Standard focused on services that "operate under the radar and prove themselves over time by creating compelling, unique products and sustainable business models."

In support of their selection of SceneCaster to the top 10 list, the Industry Standard commented that, "user generated 3D content is getting bigger, and SceneCaster is well positioned to capitalize on this trend." We're flattered to have been selected though we continue to be focused on improving and extending the SceneCaster 3D experience to our global user base and to our brand sponsors and partners.

The full article can be viewed here: http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/03/27/opinion-10-net-services-will-succeed-and-10-will-probably-fail and the SceneCaster selection review can be read here: http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/03/27/scenecaster-setting-and-sharing-3d-scenes-easy-way.

SceneWeaver technology is now live on SceneCaster

2008-03-26T12:14:00.000-07:00

We've now gone live with our SceneWeaver technology. Basically we are offering 3 new features:

You can now add links to objects in your scenes. These links can be to other scenes or to any page on the web. Follow this link for instructions on how to set a link.
You can embed your scenes in any web page or blog that allows you to insert JavaScript. See the example below to get a sense of what this looks like in blogger. To embed scenes, go to the scene description page (that's where you're taken when you click on the thumbnail of a scene in any of searches on SceneCaster).
Your scenes can now be viewed in our Universal Viewer without requiring a download. That means that anyone can view your scenes and interact with them on any standards compatible browser.

=Alain

A new dawn is near...

2008-03-11T20:31:00.000-07:00

A little while ago Alain posted the DEMO '08 video announcing SceneWeaver technology and how we're going to be integrating it into the SceneCaster exprience. Well we've been grinding away for the past couple months implementing these great new features and we're a-l-m-o-s-t ready to release it. This is without a doubt, our biggest release ever and you can expect some major improvements in all areas. We've been playing with a near complete version internally and I guarantee you that this will change the way you think about SceneCaster and 3D on the net. In a matter of days you'll be able to experience it for yourself and I can't wait to see what you do with it.
Stay tuned...

DemoCamp Toronto presentation tonight

2008-02-25T20:38:00.000-08:00

We did a presentation at DemoCamp Toronto tonight. There was a hefty turnout (you couldn't sign up to attend last week because all available places had been taken) and the demo went well. Looked like about 400 people to me. We got a lot of questions after showing the upcoming version of SceneCaster. Final testing is underway and we expect to be releasing it in the next few weeks!

=Alain

Unbelievable growth over the past month!

2008-02-12T16:43:00.001-08:00

Last month, on January 11th, I announced that we had reached a total of 150,000 FaceBook users. We're now a month later and we've grown even more! In fact we've just today crossed the milestone of 300,000 users on FaceBook! We've DOUBLED in number of FaceBook users in one month! We'd like to thank all of our user community for the wonderful scenes you are building with our software. That, more than anything else, is driving other users to try SceneCaster out. Please continue designing creative scenes and driving more users to SceneCaster. When, a month from now, we release the SceneWeaver technology that we announced at DEMO 2008 two weeks ago, you'll be able to embed your 3D creations anywhere on the web and link to anything you can imagine. We're excited to see what you do with this and expect that you'll knock our socks off with your creative concepts!

=Alain

DEMO '08 video

2008-01-31T21:26:00.000-08:00

Here's the DEMO 08 video embedded.

=Alain

Video On Line And Some Great Write Ups

2008-01-30T10:19:00.000-08:00

The video of our DEMO 2008 presentation is now available on line We had a major scare when the stage WiFi system stopped working just as we were about to get on stage. Luckily, it came back up very quickly.

We're already seeing some great press coverage. My favorite quote so far is from the 3Dwalkthroughs blog: "3Dwalkthroughs.com believes we will look back on SceneWeaver in a few years as the application that helped us take the first big step towards a completely 3D internet." Here are a few links:

=Alain

We've just announced SceneWeaver

2008-01-29T21:27:00.000-08:00

The SceneCaster team is attending DEMO 2008 where we're announcing our new SceneWeaver technology that we'll be releasing at the end of February. SceneWeaver extends the reach of SceneCaster in three ways:

You will now be able to add links to objects. These links can be to another scene, a specific camera in your scene or any web page on the internet.
We are adding the ability to embed your scene in any web page or blog on the internet. You can see an example of this below.
We are making these scenes universally available so that viewers can interact with them whether or not they have a plug in. The software automatically detects if you have the plug in or not, and adapts its behavior accordingly. In the example below you can see what this looks like for someone who doesn't have our plug in.

We'll be making this technology available to all SceneCaster users at the end of February.

=Alain

A new review and a new look

2008-01-19T07:55:00.000-08:00

We've spotted another SceneCaster review in the blogosphere. Natalie's Blog writes about her SceneCaster experience after discovering the service through FaceBook. She also shows a snapshot of a wonderful scene that she's designed, depicting a hotel room. She links the picture to her scene description page on scenecaster.com Thanks Natalie!

We've updated the look of this blog with a new template design. We had used one of the standard blogger templates to start this off and now felt that it was high time to get around to actually designing something more in line with the SceneCaster experience.

=Alain

150K FaceBook users and counting...

2008-01-11T22:40:00.000-08:00

On December 26th I announced that we had hit the milestone of 100,000 FaceBook users. Today, I am happy to announce that we're 50% higher than that and have now crossed the milestone of 150,000 current FaceBook users (that means that 150,000 FaceBook users currently have the SceneCaster app installed!).

We're awfully proud of that and would like to thank all of you who are actively building SceneCaster scenes. You're the ones who are driving others to participate in the SceneCaster experience!

In a little over two weeks we will be at the DEMO 2008 conference in Palm Springs where we will be announcing the new features of our upcoming release. We hope to excite you and entice you all to create ever more interesting 3D scenes with our technology!

I will be posting a description of all of the new features live during my talk at DEMO 2008 on this blog on January 29th. Stay tuned for the announcements. We feel certain that you'll be excited by what we announce!

=Alain

Great SceneCaster review at online-tech-tips.com

2008-01-05T15:25:00.000-08:00

We're all excited about the glowing review that Aseem Kishore has posted about SceneCaster in his technology blog. To quote his blog "Overall, it’s probably the best 3D sketching and environment creation app I have used which is SIMPLE yet creates realistic scenes." Thanks Aseem! You can follow this link to read the full post.

=Alain

Happy New Year!

2008-01-04T17:50:00.000-08:00

In my last post on December 26th we celebrated the first one hundred thousand SceneCaster users on FaceBook. Today we have crossed yet another milestone. We just went over 130 thousand SceneCaster users on FaceBook today. It took us roughly ten days to add 30% more users. We're totally impressed by what you are all doing with the software. We're pumped and we're excited about what you are creating. But we're not expecting to simply rest on our laurels based on our initial growth.

We've been invited back to the DEMO conference at the end of January and can't wait to show you all, at that point, what we have been busily working on at SceneCaster HQ since DEMO Fall 2007. We hope to amaze you and inspire you to new levels of 3D creativity that have never before been available on the web. Keep watching this blog to see what we launch at the end of January. We firmly expect to knock your socks off, both in terms of ease of creation possibilities and breadth of reach.

=Alain

The first 100K

2007-12-26T15:42:00.000-08:00

On Christmas Eve we achieved a significant milestone. SceneCaster is now installed on over 100,000 FaceBook accounts. What a way to help the SceneCaster team celebrate the holidays! We would really like to thank all of you who have signed up for SceneCaster and especially those of you who have been actively pushing it and giving us feedback. Your suggestions and comments help us make the product ever better. We've taken all of your requests into account to help craft the feature set of our next release. We expect that you'll be very excited by what we deliver.

The number of users keeps on growing steadily and we are constantly amazed at the creativity that goes into the many scenes that we see you creating!

We're looking forward to a very exciting year in 2008 and hope to amaze you with the next release of SceneCaster!

Our favorite pass time right now at SceneCaster HQ is to pore over our growth curves to try to predict when we will go past the 1 million user mark! If you're feeling adventurous, feel free to add your guess to the comments here! As a basis for your guess, you should know that we went from a handful of users at launch on September 25th (mostly the SceneCaster staff), to over 100,000 users three months later on December 24th. A hint for those of you who might be mathematically inclined: the running assumption that most people are making is that this should be some form of geometric progression (you get new users proportionally to the number you currently have).

Happy Holidays to all and have a wonderful New Year in full 3D!

=Alain

Apologies for the outage on December 12

2007-12-12T16:09:00.000-08:00

At half past midnight Eastern time on December 12th, our site started generating server side errors that prevented users from being able to use our service. Unfortunately the outage wasn't a full outage. The web site was operational, but would serve up error messages instead of fulfilling user requests. As a result, our monitoring system, that, at the time, simply tested to see if it got a response from the web server, did not send a page to our network staff to let them know that there was an issue at hand that needed to be taken care of immediately. This incident only got resolved when our staff came to the office in the morning and noticed the issue. It was quickly fixed after that, but left tens of thousands of you stranded in the interim.

That's not the experience that we would want you to have when using SceneCaster and we are taking concrete steps to make sure that this scenario can not occur again in the future. More specifically, we have now set up monitoring that checks the content that the web service returns rather than simply making sure that it returns something.

We understand that many of you were frustrated, especially the new users that had just signed up for the service, and would like to apologize to all of you who experienced difficulties using SceneCaster as a result of this outage. We're putting the necessary changes in place in our processes to make sure that you never have to experience similar circumstances in the future.

=Alain

SceneCaster earns the #1 spot on FaceBook

2007-12-10T11:36:00.001-08:00

This past Saturday SceneCaster was the #1 Most Active application on all of Facebook. This ranking is judged by having the most daily active users as a percentage of the total user base, and having over 10K users. SceneCaster took the top slot with 80% daily active users. Read more about our growth in this article.
Thanks for making us #1!

Stability release, upcoming feature release, a new Facebook group and plenty of new holiday objects

2007-12-07T19:58:00.000-08:00

It's been quite a while since my last post. We're going gangbusters here at SceneCaster HQ, getting ready for the launch of our next release, scheduled for end of January. Two days ago we deployed a stability release to address many of the issues that you have raised since we launched at the end of September. We're busily at work on the next version which will be a feature release. We'll be posting more info on what is new when we get closer to the release.

Given the time of year and the success that we had with our Halloween collection, we've also released a holiday collection with all sorts of objects that you might use to make 3D greeting cards to send to your friends for the holidays. How about sharing what you build with me (use the share link at the scene description page) and I'll post about the holiday scenes that I find most interesting!

Michael, our eminent Scene Master, has started up a facebook group where you can learn directly from the Master. He's accessible and he's open to your questions! He's also posting "How To" videos there to show you how to do the more difficult operations with SceneCaster. You can visit Michael at our FaceBook group page.

Jonathan should be posting about the fact that we are number 1 on the Most Active list of FaceBook apps today. We want to say thank you to all of our users because what that means is that you are using it a lot!

=Alain

Tour Our Office!

2007-10-29T12:15:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-22T19:24:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-17T20:00:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-08T10:56:00.000-07:00

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!

2007-10-05T18:44:00.001-07:00

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!

2007-10-03T18:20:00.000-07:00

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...

2007-10-02T19:44:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-01T18:45:00.000-07:00

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.

bigger and bigger...

2007-09-29T20:17:00.000-07:00

I checked again and we're now at an estimated 78,500 pages talking about SceneCaster today according to Google. The good news for me (I'm expected to make sure that our service is up and operational 24/7) is that we're not doubling every day any more. From 54K to 78.5K in one day yields a daily growth rate of 1.453. Doing the math once more (can you tell I was trained as a mathematician?) with this rate of growth I have roughly 20 days ahead of me, instead of the 10 I was guesstimating yesterday, before we hit 50 million references to SceneCaster on the web. I still need to throw a heck of a lot of machines into rotation to make sure that we handle the associated growth in load appropriately, but so far we've handled the spike very well and our servers are handling the current growth without a glitch

My nightmare scenario going into this launch was that we might not be able to meet the load requirements. My nightmare scenario was definitely brought to light just before our launch. Mint.com was awarded the techcrunch top company award a week before we launched. As a result of the interest in their product their site went down under the barrage of requests.The last thing I wanted to see was a landrush of new users being able to choke our servers with their requests. We took precautionary measures using Akamai's EdgeSuite to help us absorb most of the static data serving we might get hit with and focused most of our effort on scaling the dynamic aspect of our service. That included doubling the number of database servers we expected to need for our projected growth, just in case. I look at our statistics right now and can see we were right in doing so. The load is heavy, but manageable. No outages to date.

The interesting thing that I note as I look at the growth patterns is that almost everyone jumping on the SceneCaster bandwagon right now is doing so via our main web site rather than our facebook app. The ratio of new users is about 10 to 1 main site versus facebook app. What this tells me is that the majority of new users are coming in due to the press releases (which all mention the URL for the main site and never explicitly indicate the URL for the facebook app). What I'm watching for is when that trend inverses. Once people start using it, I would expect that the major vector for new users to be existing users and the best way for that to happen is on facebook.

If we were to do this again, and this is a suggestion for those of you out there thinking to launch a service that has a facebook app component to it: publish the facebook app URL explicitly in all communications about the product. Facebook users can then directly hook in to your solution from facebook itself. It makes the startup cost minimal and lets you rely on the work that the folks at facebook have already done to validate that each user is a real human being as opposed to a spambot, so you don't have to do that validation yourself.