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Today, a moment of self promotion in FlexStuff.co.uk. After all, what is the point of working like crazy 7 days a week and being able to only write a short post every couple of weeks if all this hard work remains unknown? (at least on this side of the pond, those ads being designed for the US market).
As already stated here and there in this blog, I’m currently employed by a London based company named Tailgate Technologies as their lead Flash Platform programmer. And believe me, it’s no easy task to work for a start-up when the global economy has decided at the same time to go deep down the sink. And the recent news about our main competitor surely do not help either (hey, we also had our own TechCrunch article!).
Anyway, we try at Tailgate to create a new type of online ads that actually try to be (at least a little bit) helpful and informative and not just some random stroke inducing stroboscopic animations as most of online ads have turned to be nowadays. It seems sometimes that “creatives” just took Flash only for its sole name and thought that flashing was somehow its one and only function.
The result of this? Nobody seems to give a bloody crap anymore (to quote the locals 
) about ads. And I’m just talking here about the most open minded, the others have already long activated some ad blocker, just to avoid what has become an annoyance.
And that’s when we arrive (drums and trumpets here, please) to save you all from boredom!
More seriously, what we attempt to do here is to create micro applications and not plain stupid ads (we first called them MiniApp, but it sounded a little bit too mini-me so MicroApp it is). It’s literally creating little RIAs, with a proper user experience, real information, actual interactivity and so on. To a certain point (pretty soon actually) people will be able to buy the product straight into the unit itself (the functionality should be ready in a couple of weeks for Direct2Drive).
But better than an explanation, here are two examples. The first one is for Dada US, and is aiming at Ring-tones and MP3 lovers. The MicroApp embeds a search engine, you can browse their top-seller albums with a coverflow-like component, play a 30 seconds preview of any song, etc. Under the hood, it’s entirely developed using Flex 3.3, and a mix of renowned tools and frameworks (Degrafa, Mate, Spring Actionscript, Efflex, Papervision3D, FlexLib, Red5, etc) and some internal tools and what begins to be a proper Tailgate framework (I’ll probably release separately some non-business critical parts in the future).
But here it what it looks like (click on the image to launch the MicroApp):
Dada Ringtones MicroApp (click to Launch)
The second one (and most recent to date) is for the online video game reseller Direct2Drive. Even if it looks a lot like Dada’s, the core engine has significantly evolved, improving and fixing many things Dada’s project revealed. No search engine here, but 3 separate coverflows (tricky to put together if you don’t want to see the CPU rocketing…) and embedded video players (a slightly customized version of FxVideo player), screenshots, etc.
At the moment, the Buy button simply links to Direct2Drive website but, as said above, the entire transaction will be embedded in the application soon.
Direct2Drive MicroApp (click to Launch)
Next?
Well, first: many others like those, some simpler, some probably richer. I (we) believe the idea is good, so why stopping there?.
Second: these microapps are already designed to be modular, and to be customized quickly and easily. So easily actually that it’ll eventually be done by our customers themselves with the authoring tool I’ve already been working on for the past months (in parallel with the microapps). It’s already about 50% done and when it’s finished the tool should be able to automatically generate and compile the bunch of MXML and AS files required for any MicroApp. The user will just have to visually create their apps using various components (no code required, even if a full interactivity will be possible, just like the current miniapps). The platform should also eventually benefit of its own API.
And finally, little pre-weekend gift: a little screenshot of the current prototype.
The future Tailgate Platform Authoring Tool
Hopefully you’ll understand and forgive me now for not being as active on FlexStuff.co.uk as I should…
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Amazing work Gilles, this will really point the web advertising industry back in the right direction over the next couple of years, if I remember correctly I’m already seeing D2D MicroApps here in the UK (or perhaps the MicroApps just mimic the site incredibly well and thus seem familiar). Goodluck.
Well, thanks Jonathan, but as it turned out I’m not working for Tailgate anymore, and the latest news were that there’s not much left of Tailgate actually… I still believe the idea is good, but the economic situation, well, you already know about it.