Our knowledge acquisition strategy for ACS Cloudphone is starting to pay off. After only 3 days of MusyMix on the market, we already gathered good information about ACS: No one has installed the ACS CloudPhone after installing MusyMix. Most probably, the relationship between the advanced transcoding feature and the ACS CloudPhone has not been correctly identified. The result, users get invalid format errors and MusyMix is less useful to them.

A solution would be to display a dialog box upon MusyMix start to ask the user to install CloudPhone. But then, they would have to create an ACS account before using MusyMix, which is a lot of overhead before being able to fully use the app.

In addition to this, ACS isn’t stable enough yet. While it’s working relatively well, we haven’t made any scalability tests and the full-duplex communication channel between the phone and the cloud is very tributary of the quality of the network connection. We have improved, but that’s still more complex than perform a simple HTTP request when the user need something. Continuing on this path, we slow down all dependent applications, which isn’t a good move.

To add to this, ACS is a very horizontal product, a platform. With our lean strategy, we aims to deliver frequent releases, but for a platform, that’s very challenging. We did well up to now, but we think that by focusing on putting specialized cloud products, based on the platform, on the market, we will generate more revenues and gather more meaningful feedback.

After having announced the transcoding feature, we got a lot of positive feedback from the Android community. So focusing on building a strong and autonomous transcoding offer on ACS would serve MusyMix and would help ACS get traction on the market. So our next ACS move is to create the ACS Media API, a cloud transcoding offer usable from your Android phone (or other media). This service will be part of the ACS platform, but will be marketed separately (specific landing page, adword campaign, etc.) We will develop this service separately but use the same account and payment data than the ACS platform. Instead of providing a different application to access ACS, we will add a few activities through our client library to configure the ACS Media API. This is a marketing repackaging of the same implementation we did in ACS. This will be quickly assembled and integrated to MusyMix and than, the product itself (in BETA) will be launched early next week. This week should be very active for MusyMix. We’ll continue to gather feedback, hopefully reach 500 users and learn more usage patterns. We need to get this transcoding feature solved quickly to keep our user base happy.

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