For more than a year Big in Japan has been building and hosting social tools for various brands. Initially we assumed that large corporate clients would want to ‘house’ our tools in their own state-of-the-art data centers, but soon we realized that the opposite was the case. 100% of our clients require that we provide our tools as managed services, instead of simply delivering them executable code. We realized that as our client base grew our data center needs would grow as well and as a result we acquired an operational data center from McLeod in late 2006.
Our managed environments include:
- multi-homed IP transit (internet access)
- UPS and generator protected AC and DC power
- Cisco PIX & IronPort security systems
- HP Dual Xeon servers (occasionally Dell servers)
- Managed DNS (multi-site and geographic diversity)
Don’t call us for hosting, but if you need social tools built and managed we can provide a turnkey solution ~ no need to call a third-party hosting company. That said, if your brand is the next Second Life we have great partners such as NeoSpire who can handle huge, million+ user virtual worlds.
Our team has been busy working on various social interaction tools for Courtney Cox’s new television series, Dirt. The launch is scheduled for January 2nd, but the premiere is December 9th. The Big in Japan team will be out of the offices Friday the 8th so please excuse our absence. We will let you know how we like the show (of course Jake has already seen the pilot ~ darned social media experts get all of the perks!).
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You may have noticed that FrankenFeed rarely works. For quite some time it worked fine. We had over 40,000 users merging more than 600,000 RSS feeds. Then someone built a bot to attack the system. Suddenly we were merging several million feeds bogging down the system. We would shut him down and then he would pop back up again from a new IP address. Finally, we stopped trying to stop him, but let the system bog down to a crawl (basically not working). We figured that eventually he would go away when whatever he was trying to do (Google SEO we think) stopped working. He didn’t go away.
Rodrigo began work on a new version that would prevent various types of abuse that we had seen in the first several months of use. He completed his work this summer, but we never got around to bug testing it. Today one of our clients needed the public version functioning for a project and we made the decision to launch the new version (in true alpha) immediately. You will need to recreate your feeds (sorry about that ~ but surely you were not actually using the system since it didn’t work constantly).
We will report here on the blog regularly on the new system and let you know what we are working on. In the meantime, enjoy FrankenFeed 2.0.
Certainly click-to-call has limitations and risks for abuse, but implemented correctly it can offer clear advantaged for certain web service providers. Contrary to some reports, Google’s click-to-call was not pulled (it is still functioning).
Integrated into web based services such as Salesforce.com, Mailroom (woot!), Basecamp ~ our Podcall functionality can offer unique social interactions and services previously difficult to implement and afford.
Yesterday I had an interesting call from a prospective Podcall customer and a feature we had previously not announced came up. While we provide the phone system, network interconnection and API hooks we don’t necessarily have to provide the minutes. If you want to negotiate your own wholesale minute rate we can simply connect to your provider and let you pay them directly. No need for us to markup the dial-tone costs. (our pricing for North America is currently around 2.5 cents per minute)
In a move that reflects the current direction of the Big in Japan business, we are launching our first true tool set ~ an API to allow web applications to build in robust voice features that are built, managed and hosted by Big in Japan. Big in Japan doesn’t want to build the applications you use, we want to make the applications your deliver better! Think BASF for web services.
We have been providing Voice 2.0 integrated applications as dedicated services for quite some time. Now we are offering a robust API (application programming interface) that allows any web developer or application developer to integrated custom phone features into their application. The first API provides hooks into our Podcall system. The API work regardless of the web technology (Ruby on Rails, PHP, Flash and of course simple HTML to name a few). Want to offer this sort of functionality found on Google:
Originally built to allow for quick and easy integration for Courtney Cox’s new television show Dirt, the Big in Japan team is opening the API for any developer who needs access to a telephone system. What can it do? The possibilities are endless. Start with simple functions like providing messages or wake-up calls to your users or clients. Then build interesting dating applications to connect people together. Or create robust identity verification system for your services for payment processing or demographic data collection. The system is robust and the applications are limitless.
Earlier today we announced that we would release the source code to several web applications built and hosted by the company in a post titled, “Opening the Source at Big in Japan.” TechCrunch even picked up on the idea. The source code is being released using the GPL.* Each tool was written using Ruby on Rails. If you review the code you will note that each tool was built at a different time. See if you can guess which tool was first and which was last. As promised:
The repositories can be accessed either by browser or via the svn client. The svn username is “anonymous” and the password is blank.
* To be clear, it is our intent that anyone who modifies the code MUST release those modifications publicly. If you modify the code for use as your own hosted service we require that you release the modified code. Get it? There is some confusion about this point in the open source community. The license explains that you are required to do so if you distribute or publish the code and some argue that a hosted application does not constitute “distribution” or “publishing” of the code and as such you are not required to release the modifications. We understand the confusion, but want to be very clear, for the purposes of our license hosting the source code for other’s use constitutes distribution or publication of the binary code. This is detailed in the source code files as well. Enjoy!
The Big in Japan team is growing and our mission is becoming clear. This morning while I was driving to work I was considering how much time we should invest in the free feed tools we built over the past year including FeedVault, PodServe, FrankenFeed, elfURL, InstantFeed, QwikPing and SocialMail. They need a lot of work to be relevant, but we are super busy working with our paying social media clients. Do we have the time to support a suite of tools that were very hot a year ago, but cooling off by the day?
We learned quite a bit about development, rss, social media, web 2.0 and ruby on rails while developing them. We learned even more about how hard it is to keep web services relevant. We are still using custom versions (i.e. mash-ups) of the tools to support our own clients.
So here is our proposal (instead of selling them on ebay). We will open up the source code for each tool (with the exception of PodServe for now) using the GPL just as we did for SimpleTicket. What do we ask in return? That anyone using the tools (i.e. building something from our initial work) contribute that work back into the SVN for that tool (FYI – the license requires it). If you don’t want to, or can’t contribute your modifcations back just let us know and we will sell you a modified license. The name Big in Japan is the property of our company as are the trade names associated with each tool. Oh, and we will keep them running as hosted services as well (don’t email us ~ your data is safe).
Check back soon for links to the SVN for each tool. Hope you enjoy taking a look at the code…
To help promote our Fancast service, Fox has been running short promotions on its various channels. Jeremy Pepper IM’d me this afternoon after he saw our promo on Fox News. To see the promo visit Fancast on YouTube.
After our initial launch for Nip/Tuck, users told us that our registration system was annoying. We took their comments to heart and relaunched last night allowing users to simply request a call without creating an account. Now all you need to get on the show is a phone number, email address and a name – no password or registration necessary. Users now get “instant gratification” and that is a good thing.
Fancast Before UI Simplification.
Fancast After UI Modifcations.
Today is a big day at Big in Japan. Together with FX Network, we’ve launched the Nip/Tuck Fancast. Update: For clarification FX Network is a client of Big in Japan.
The Fancast is live on the Nip/Tuck site, or you can access it directly here. We’re really proud of this project, and would love to get your feedback. It’s running smoothly and we don’t expect any problems. If you have any feedback, please drop us a comment in this thread. We’d love to hear what you think!
