More Clinton High School Aterium Press!

Apparently we're not the only ones who are excited about Aterium being installed at Clinton High School in Clinton, Mississippi. Here is an article discussing Aterium and how it has benefited Clinton High School:

http://www.clarionledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=201011210366

Only correction we'd like to make is that we're actually based in Boston, Massachusetts and not in Mississippi. We love Mississippi though and we have a sales team down there!

If you wish you talk to our sales team in Mississippi (or anywhere else) email sales@aterium.com.

We're on Television!

One of recent customers in Mississippi, Clinton High School, was featured on their local news broadcast. The reporter was pretty excited about the idea of using cameras in a high school for education instead of security so she put together this report. It's great to see how excited our users are and how excited people in the community are when they here about our product. This reaction is exactly what we hoped for when we designed Aterium and we see it time and time again from our users. The only downside is that we're mentioned only as "the company that installed the cameras" but that's fine with us-this is more about the potential for helping students than it is promoting us. The best part is that more parents know about it and can encourage their kids to use it. For instance today over eighty students at Clinton logged into their Aterium installation to view previously recorded classes. It's very exciting!

Have a look!

Announcing Version 1.1

We've been pretty busy around here lately. We usually have at least two releases worth of features in the pipeline so it's easy to forget to let everyone know what we've been working on. We just released version 1.1 which was updated on our customer's installations over the last few weeks.

Here are the highlights:

  • Viewing Catalog for videos with attachments only. This is part of a larger plan to encourage the usage of attachments associated with recordings. Students can easily find recordings with attachments so they can go back and find handouts and homework assignments from any point in the school year.
  • Customizable Interface. As much as we love our logo and color scheme we realize that schools like their logos and colors too. Version 1.1 contains a simple interface to allow the colors and the logo on your Aterium interface to be updated.
  • Remote Synchronization. This allows schools to automatically synchronize content to other Aterium servers. Larger districts with multiple installations will find this useful as well as school districts with separate alternative schools that would like to save the bandwidth costs of students viewing multiple recordings at the same time.
  • Camera Permissions. This allows administrators to assign teachers a camera so that they do not see a list of cameras for the entire school. This keeps things simpler for the teachers because it removes that option automatically when scheduling a recording. It's optional but highly recommended for teachers who make a lot of special recordings.

We have some very exciting features planned for version 1.2 which should be released in the next week or so. The focus for 1.2 has been to improve our existing reports and add three new reports. We also have some nice user interface improvements that we can't wait to get out to customers.

Spend the Time to Sell Your Programmers on Your Product

About ten years ago I was working on a video conferencing product at a startup. I don't think I'll ever forget the first release that I worked on there. I remember sitting around a big table with around ten people (only three or four of whom were actually going to be working on the release) discussing how we were going to design what was going to be our first big release of this product. It was the first time I heard anyone use the phrase "We're going to do this the right way". I'm not sure if anyone had a definition in mind for this but I think it just involved a lot of meetings and probably involved some QA. I seem to recall neither actually happening. Instead I think we talked about talking about the product which we all found lacking for obvious reasons. I think if I heard it again I'd run away screaming but back then it sounded like a pretty good idea.

So after this meeting someone mentioned to me that about 30% of the work of this project was going to involve me. I didn't really know what to think but I panicked and spent a lot of time working. I remember going to work on weekends and eating my Chipotle burritos at my desk working away on this project. I'm not sure why I worked so much but I think it had to do with me wanting to earn my place there. So far all I had done was fix some bugs and make some suggestions which turned to be not entirely bad. There was another guy who was always working there with me. He spent a lot of time working for the same reason I was; he wanted to prove himself and make a spot for himself on the team. His feature ended up working really well and he set a good example for the other members of the team. What was interesting about all this is that none of the more experienced members of the team seemed motivated to do much of anything at all. I didn't see one of the leads on the project around the office for weeks and I really needed him to do some things to keep the project moving forward. We weren't required to show up at the office at this company so a month could pass sometimes before having an actual conversation with other programmers working on your project. Most of the programmers didn’t abuse this policy but a few did and it made it hard on the rest of us.

So rather than ask them why they weren’t working I jumped to a bunch of conclusions and got myself all worked up about it. I think I assumed that they were just lazy, awful people who needed to get their act together. Maybe they were all those things but it’s never a good idea to go into a confrontation with someone thinking that you are 100% right and they’re 100% wrong. A few weeks went by and then I confronted them with a pretty angry attitude that was way over the top. The response I got was that they thought what we were doing didn't matter because they heard we were running out of funding any day now and even if we weren't that the product wasn't going to sell anyway. This wasn't true and the company is actually still operating largely on the basis of what would eventually come out of what we were developing. They believed that failure was imminent so why bother fighting it? I made some argument that they were getting paid, that they owed those of us they were working something which is all true but didn't really address their concerns at all.

The big takeaway for me from all this was that it's important for the leaders of the company to take the time to sell the product to the developers working on it. If developers are convinced that no one is going to use what they work on or that corporate failure is imminent they're going to put in an effort that reflects that. Sometimes the most important people to sell are the people who you are paying to build it in the first place. The product we were building filled a fairly big hole in the video conferencing market and leveraged our technology very nicely. Our sales people were feeling good about selling the product as it appeared on paper at least.

Unfortunately that release was a total failure. There were major bugs in it and we had to rewrite several components for the next release just to make sure the product was stable. I think someone left a branding placeholder message that was somewhat unprofessional. I remember when the new VP of sales came by the office and set us straight on the product's potential and its importance to the company as a whole. This product was going to be our bread and butter and it needed to be good he explained and we believed in what he was saying despite our being more jaded than any group of people in their mid twenties should ever be. After that a few of us got together informally and just started fixing bugs and testing like crazy. We rewrote the bad code and made a pretty reasonable product out of what we had. We made the decision that if this was going to be what decides the company’s fate that we were going to take it upon ourselves to make it the best product we possibly could.

That's why the focus here at Aterium is on building a product that people use every day. I'm betting that we won't have a problem keeping people motivated when we setup our product in such a way that to purchase it is to use it every day. For my part I just can't get excited about something unless I know that our customers are going to love what I'm doing. I work to make an impact in the world around me and if I'm making no impact at all it's just not really possible for me to get excited about it. I don't want to make a product that sells well but just gets forgotten about later. I don’t think I’m unique in this way at all.

That's why our new hires get sold on the product before they get started doing anything. We have a presentation on why our approach to our market is unique and why I think our product is great. It's not a list of features or selling points but rather just a guiding set of principles writing in plain English. It says that we're here to make a big impact in the world of education and here's how that's happening. The reaction we’ve had has been very encouraging. We get tons of very positive and enthusiastic feedback from everyone who goes through our training.

The suggestion I’m making might be obvious to but I seem to have been around a lot of companies where this isn’t done. Spend the time to explain to your employees not just what your product does but why it matters. This can’t be done with vision and mission statements but it can be done with honest communication about why the work matters to the company and to the wider world.

Designing a Product That Actually Gets Used

We were meeting with a business school down south about Aterium Education System. They loved our demo and immediately saw how it could help them. They went on to tell us that they had bought one of our competitors' products. I asked innocently enough "How's that working out? I've checked out their marketing materials and it seems like an impressive product." They told me "It is impressive-so impressive that no one uses it. All the cameras are in a closet now and no one has thought to touch them in months." Immediately my thoughts turned to the cameras and I asked "Why are they in the closet? Did someone remove them from the classrooms?" I was told that they were removed after every recording and that IT staff were required to man each camera for each recording. They just decided that using this product wasn't worth the cost. They had the money to buy the product but not the money to actually use it.
 
The biggest thing that stood out to me was the fact that they could even move the cameras at all. Why would you want to do that? It turns out that their cameras are actually the most expensive part of their solution so they need to be moved around to record your classes. The cameras are also very complicated to setup so someone has to do this each time. It setup this small school for failure. With Aterium the cameras are the cheap part so you install them in all the rooms you want to record in and then get to work scheduling your recordings. No one is wasting time moving things around trying to save money because the cameras are so expensive that you have no choice about it. Instead you just decide how many classrooms you want to record and then if you want more you add more later. It's not hard to do and there's no reason to spend time and effort moving cameras around.
 
We designed our product so that every class is recorded just easily as one is. We built a product that people use every day and that our sales people can feel good about selling to our customers. I'm not sure the salesperson who sold that installation would feel very good about returning to that school. We have no interest in building a product that isn't being used every day all school year long.

Version 1.0: Deciding What Makes It In

When you're defining what your product is going to be the first version sets a tone for what you hope for the product and what you think is most important. When we were designing the first version of Aterium Education System we decided to not include anything that wasn't vital and that was going to be confusing. Aterium Education System is a product designed to extend the reach of the classroom for both K12 schools and college. We do this by offering a very simple to use and powerful solution for recording classes and streaming them live. Our goal from the beginning was to take what is a complicated set of operations and make it very simple to use and understand. We build an appliance that does all the work and we work with a variety of IP based cameras to produce our recordings.

I spent a few years working in the video conferencing industry and from my experience it seemed to me that the product was always secondary to the technology itself. For example I didn't seem to come across a product that didn't include a lot of options for Multicast. I don't mean to dismiss Multicasting video as a feature but it always bothered me when those settings were easy to find and the settings I wanted to find (usually to make this video look good while not killing our network) were impossible to find. Sometimes I felt like I was going to find a setting that said "Work" that was just set to "Off" (I assume that this setting would always be off by default in video conferencing products). I came close once when I saw that the video options were setup on one product in such a way that they could never work with any other video conferencing product (not even another one just like it).
  
Here are some of the features we didn't include:
 
  • You can't change quality settings per recording--our recordings all look good for their file size by default.
  • You can't change streaming settings--we stream over standard ports and fall back to HTTP which should work for 99% of people.
  • You can't change the playback settings--students watch the videos in Flash and if they don't have Flash we try an HTML 5 player. This will work for 99% of people so we went with it.
All of these settings might help some people but they always confused me when I used competing products. The result of not including them is that non-technical people (specifically referring to our beta users) adjust recording schedules all the time. They setup their own recordings and don't think twice about it. By making the defaults all correct and workable in most any situation and removing the options that only confuse people we've made what I feel is a much more usable and complete product.
 
So here are some of the features that made it in (just to prove we actually did make a product):
 
  • Automated recording schedules that are easy to setup and modify.
  • Live streaming of classes enabled with just one checkbox.
  • User and group based permissions to recordings via folders.
  • A permissions model that is flexible and easy to understand.
  • Remote file storage support (if you have a large storage unit where you prefer to store your recordings Aterium will put them there).
  • Searchable student video catalog--where the videos are all viewable in Flash and HTML 5 players.
  • Teachers can upload attachments to associate with recordings (homework assignments, handouts).
  • Recorded and live views are all tracked and their viewing times recorded and are able to be reported on and exported to Excel. 
I think that's a lot of great stuff. It's everything you need to extend the reach of your classroom and nothing you don't. You can setup an effective solution in minutes and since we help you pre-configure everything you can just boot the server, run a few tests to make sure the network settings on the appliance are all set, and then you can just wait for the next day's classes to be recorded.
 
Looking back on this release I think that this defines a solid core product that we can build on in the future. I've worked on a lot of different projects in a lot of different industries but this is easily the proudest I've ever been about a product and definitely any release. When I wrote training material for new hires last month I couldn't help but start with a long section about why I love this product and why I think it's important to understand why we made the choices we did. We made tough choices and we're comfortable with living with those decisions.
 
We're betting that our users want a product that they'll use every day and not even think about. They might miss those settings but then again they might not. We'll add the ones that our customers really think are important but continue to leave out the ones that will just confuse everyone.
 
Thanks for reading. If you have any questions you can email me at jswinghammer@aterium.com.