You know, Flowzit isn’t the first time I have built a “send and receive with ease” application. This is actually the third iteration. The third completely separate code-base…
That’s how I know we nailed it.
Notice that I didn’t say how we nailed it, “this time.” This isn’t “the third time’s the charm.” The previous two apps were very successful in their own right. They were just private applications built by a private company for their own use with their clients. We couldn’t resell them.
The first version I wrote using Perl (mod_perl actually) in the span of two months in the waning light of 2001. It ran virtually unattended thereafter until 2004 when it was superseded by the second version. One moderately priced machine served terabytes upon terabytes of multimedia files to over 25,000 user accounts!
The second version was part of an enterprise suite that managed all client and agency interaction. I won’t go into much detail on that now. That application suite took years to build (and is still being added to actually) and the file sharing portion was really an evolution of the first application.
Flowzit takes everything we learned in the past and now is a finely-honed Gatling-gun of bits dispersion. But that isn’t actually the point of this little essay.
The real point is, the very first client we moved on to the very first version saved money. LOTS of money. That client was an automotive manufacturer who spent very, very close to a million dollars every year on overnight shipping. You see, every version of every TV advertisement (spot) was recorded to tape then shipped overnight across the country so someone could review and approve it. Believe it or not, that’s how the entire advertising industry operated for decades! With one little two month project, we cut a cool million out of one client’s costs. Every. Single. Year. Further, the whole editing process actually improved. Instead of taking the time to record to tape from the digital copy in the Avid suite, the producer just did a quick transcode to Quicktime or MPEG2 and sent the spot via Flowzit’s grandfather to the client for immediate feed back. Instead of a 24 hour turn around, we had an hour or two turn around!
That was just one client and just one example workflow. Across the board, cost savings abounded.
Now, with all that in mind, and given the current state of the economy we are *all* trying to sweat out, you might imagine that Flowzit is a very good way to cut costs. And you might be right.
About the author
Mike Wille - I'm the head techie here with a passion and hunger for all things digital. I got into programming because I love to create and couldn't cut a straight line in wood shop.