Comments on: Xtranormal launches Mashface, just for fun

By: Montreal Tech Watch » [breaking] Xtranormal lays off 36; half of its staff

Montreal Tech Watch » [breaking] Xtranormal lays off 36; half of its staff — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 05:24:53 +0000

[...] (see beta review) which launced with much fanfare a little over a month ago has laid off today 36, which is half of its [...]

By: Mark MacLeod

Mark MacLeod — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 23:10:36 +0000

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…

By: Heri

Heri — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 14:00:55 +0000

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

By: Alexandre Trottier

Alexandre Trottier — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 16:14:11 +0000

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.

By: Richard Gratton

Richard Gratton — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:21:52 +0000

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.