Xtranormal launches Mashface, just for fun (4)
Xtranormal, the 3d software company which was to make a tool to create easily user-generated movies, has launched earlier this week mashface, a website where users can “mashup” and remix bits of funny and weird lips, eyes, make-up and colors on celebrity pictures; or any other provided photo by the user.
It’s stupid, fun and totally gratuitous free, as they say.
Personally, I’m having trouble finding the link between their flagship product and mashface, even more so when seeing the difference between this marketing coup and their previous legendary sthealthyness. Here’s how they present it:
Mashface is supposed to be fun. We think it’s a bloody riot. And from our P.O.V. the point is to get all kinds of traffic in the over-extended UGC/social networking scene and drive that traffic to Xtranormal’s flagship site, www.xtranormal.com.
I’m not even sure he knows what he’s talking about, with all those buzzwords in just one single sentence. Or maybe I’m thinking too much, and it’s just because Xtranormal has too many financial resources to spend, and they just wanted to have fun. In both cases, make sure to have a look at their “hall of mash“.
You’re thinking too much—or perhaps we didn’t think enough.
You’re not the only one having a hard time finding the link. At one level, providing people with easy ways to make short movies online (2D or 3D) is a theme common to both sites.
Mashface was a low-cost/low-risk effort that we really, genuinely think is fun, and which has a chance to generate a fair bit of traffic.
It actually came out of an effort to solve some problems that xtranormal.com will face down the road (server-side encoding of Flash-client effects & tricks).
We re-purposed our xtranormal.com portal infrastructure at little cost, and Mashface itself is a pretty simple Flash app with a little server-side encoding. There’s not much marketing buzz going on there, I think we’re trying to tell it like it is.
Hard to have this conversation through a comment thread, so if you’d like to know more, please drop me a line.
Cheers,
Richard Gratton
Product Manager
Xtranormal, Inc.
I think you are a little harsh on these guys. I saw the Mashface demo at NewTech Montreal last week and while it wasn’t anything groundbreaking, I think there is more to their engine than we know.
To say he doesn’t know what he is talking about isn’t fair either. Mashface definitely can send traffic to their Xtranormal site and can definitely get the buzz going their their engine can do some cool stuff. Similar efforts have yeilded great results.
I’d rather see guys experimenting and trying new things than seeing companies stagnate and never release anything. Mashface may not be their flagship product but by putting out releases, they must be learning something valuable in the process. Let’s give them credit for this.
Well I don’t how much mashface cost to xtranormal… It looked to me like a website which required substantial efforts, so I was wondering why they’d distracted themselves so much
If they did it very very quickly, then great
I’m going to back up Heri on this. This sounds like a distraction. I know that if I had been CFO there, this would not have happened (if I had a say…). Anything that distracts from the core value-creating / revenue-generating mission must go…
Leave a Reply