New Web Project, Confabio.com

This article is better explained on my new joined entrepreneur blog: digigen.nl

Ok I think I will blog my idea’s more openly. Being afraid that someone might steal it is just stupid, for several reasons. As Clive Thompson correctly points out in the latest Wired businesses are starting to realize the importance of getting naked. Sharing the secrets, mistakes and hardships. Also in the great manifest Getting Real there is this simple equation:

idea can be:

• -10 really dumb
• 1 stupid
• 5 ok
• 10 smart
• 20 excellent

execution can be:

• 1 almost nothing
• 10 bad
• 1000 ok
• 10000 good
• 10000000 excellent

If you multiply these two variables, you will get the amount of cash you earn (in euro’s I recommend).

Confabio.com

This idea is not a 20, but it could be at least a 5. It happened while I was doing two things:

• communicating a lot overseas, for work and private matters
• playing around with my hot sexy black macbook (named burakubuuku) and its cool built-in webcam
• playing around with Adobe flex

This let me to make a little website that does the following:

• Show your head on the screen
• Recording your nasty head and broadcasting it to a Red5 server
• Showing your head again by streaming that same broadcast

Confabio will be as simple as possible. First it was intended to be an arty farty project, but I think it can actually be useful. When a person goes to confabio.com he will see his own video. When another internet user opens confabio.com a second video-stream will be displayed, a third, fourth and so on. Of course, the more people join, the smaller the screens become.

I haven’t really looked at so-called competitors yet and I don’t intend to. The only features I’m willing to add is:

• displaying your location discretely under your video-stream
• having tags/channels/rooms: confabio.com/dominiek_room, confabio.com/cooking

Techniques

Mochiron I will use RubyOnRails, but most of the stuff I will need to use flash for.

• RubyOnRails will facilitate metadata to swf: geo-location information, IP
• RubyOnRails will use the weborb plugin to facilitate serverside data facilities for the swf app
• Adobe Flex will be used to compile .swf files (using .as, .mxml and .css files)
• Red5 is a Java server that facilitates video play/publish streams (Note: I really hate this piece of software because it solves a solution and not a problem, checkout these 5 pages hello world)
• Adobe Flash Player > 8 is needed in order to access microphone and webcam

Why will Confabio.com work?

I don’t know and I shouldn’t care. Primary focus should be: getting this working and actually start using it. The factors that could make the execution a success:

• Simplicity, this is relatively not-complex as long as we don’t add too much features
• the need to use it, I really need a tool like this so I will start using my own product

Why will Confabio.com not work?

There is no business-model yet, and I think a nice extra in this project will be a bandwidth monitor to project expenses. Also, we need a good design and perhaps a better name.