Fly Labs

» see editonthefly.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Tim Novikoff acted as a child, studied math and acting at NYU, taught math in public schools, took a PhD at Cornell and picked up iOS development while he was there. He started Fly Labs in New York in 2012 with LaiYee Ho. What came out of it was not a platform or a network, just four small video apps for the iPhone that each did one job properly at a time when editing video on a phone mostly meant waiting for a progress bar.

Fly was the first, in 2014, and it was the one that got noticed. You threw clips at it and it arranged and merged them without making you learn a timeline. Apple listed it among the best apps of the year. Tempo handled speed, slowing or accelerating footage while you watched. Crop on the Fly did the thing every phone video needed and no phone could do, which was reframe a clip after it was shot. Clips, arriving a year and a half before Apple shipped an unrelated app under that name, stitched things together for posting.

By late 2015 the company had its numbers in a row: three million downloads over eighteen months in more than 150 countries, and over twenty million videos made with the apps. It had won The Next Web's pitch competition and Business Insider had put it on a list of the hottest startups in New York. None of that is a business, and a company selling small paid utilities one at a time was always going to end up inside somebody larger.

~ the case file ~

~ three months on the shelf ~

Google announced the acquisition on 6 November 2015. The whole team went to Mountain View to work on Google Photos, whose product lead called them the best video editing apps in the world on his way to switching them off. The terms given to users were generous and specific: the apps would stay on the App Store for another three months, now free, with no further updates.

The three months ran out almost to the day. The Google-built page that replaced editonthefly.com carries a Last-Modified of 07:45 UTC on 5 February 2016, served off Google's own static frontend, and it reads in full: Fly Labs has been acquired by Google, Inc. For media inquiries, please contact [email protected]. One sentence and an address, where a video editor used to be.

~ where the work went ~

I never used any of the four. They were iPhone only, and their reputation was built in American app-of-the-year lists that did not travel. The strange part of this grave is the other end of it. Google Photos got in-app video editing in the years that followed, and Google Photos is preinstalled on nearly every Android phone sold in Turkey, which means the work of a four year old company from New York is sitting on far more devices here than its own apps ever reached.

That is the deal an acqui-hire makes on your behalf. The people are kept and the product is thrown away, and the idea turns up later with nobody's name on it.

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