Coach Thrasher

jipCam for sale?

I was asked a very interesting question this week about jipCam that totally caught me off guard: Why did you give this away by open sourcing it?

The answer is that it wasn't thought to be the core competency of the company that created it. It wasn't the technology that we were driving for. jipCam was just code-roadkill on the way to delivering video search. So, with limited value to the company, and the potential to get many more people involved in testing it, it was released to the community. But today I met the CEO of a very interesting media company (actually I met several), and while reminiscing about the internet in the late 1990's remembered what a success Hotmail was and how it came about.

Hotmail was an artifact of a non-email related project. It was being used to communicate with people in an email-ish way. After all, who would use web based email when you had Eudora or Outlook? Then some investors viewed a presentation by it's creators in which Hotmail was just a "gee-whiz", and the investors lit up when the saw this little web-based email feature.

I wonder how many road-kill artifacts are created to solve larger rocket-science problems that, taken alone, are sufficiently valuable themselves to release as products? It must be a huge number.

Posted at 11:00PM Aug 18, 2007 by jason in General  |