Pixetell

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

~ the obituary ~

Pixetell was a screen recorder that treated the recording as a document. You captured whatever was on your monitor and talked over it, then attached files or a webcam window and sent the result as an email. The person on the other end clicked and watched. Nobody had to be online at the same time, which was the entire argument for it. Ontier Inc. of Portland, Oregon built it and unveiled it at DEMO 09 in Palm Desert, where the company was named one of the conference's DEMOgods.

The pitch landed because the comparison was so unflattering to the alternative. In 2009 explaining a software problem to a colleague in another city meant either a long email with numbered steps and screenshots, or a scheduled web meeting that cost an hour of two people's day. Fortune Small Business ran a piece in May 2010 headlined around the idea that a ten dollar app saved hours of commuting, which was the right number for an American small business and an abstraction to the rest of us; I was finishing up at university in Turkey that year and nobody I knew was paying a monthly fee per seat for anything. The production software only ran on Windows; the recordings came out as Flash, so anyone on a Mac or a Linux box could still watch them.

Ontier was acquired in the spring of 2011 and the buyer was never publicly named, which is unusual enough to be worth saying out loud. What customers got instead was an email: due to a recent acquisition of Pixetell, the online service would be discontinued on 31 May 2011. Brainshark, a Massachusetts company selling something adjacent, picked up support and told the press it would offer Pixetell-like features of its own. A standalone build went out so that people with a library of recordings could still open them after the servers stopped.

~ the case file ~

~ what the buyer wanted ~

An undisclosed acquisition with a thirty day shutdown notice attached is usually a purchase of the team or the code rather than the customers. The pattern is familiar in hindsight: a small Portland company carrying angel money and good press, bought by a larger firm in the same category that would rather own the approach than argue with it. The product name survived about four weeks past the deal.

~ the thing it was early about ~

Asynchronous video messaging for work is now an entire product category with funded companies in it, and the argument those companies make is almost word for word the argument Ontier made at DEMO: a short recording beats a meeting, and you can watch it when you are free. Pixetell made that case in 2009 to an audience that mostly did not have a webcam at the office and definitely did not have anywhere to put a video file.

~ the last capture ~

pixetell.com answers today with a 114 byte page whose only content is a script that bounces you to a parking lander. The last capture of the real site is 30 April 2011, a full Joomla install still advertising the 21 day trial, with Google Analytics and a comment component loading underneath it. Thirteen months later the domain was a wall of sponsored search links. There is nothing in between, because the Internet Archive stops crawling a site that has stopped being one.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »