Point your camera phone toward your face and post your reaction–This week, Autodesk announced the acquisition of video shooting/editing/sharing app Socialcam for an approximate $60 million. Socialcam is the year-old video app that has taken over social video sharing and thrives as an integral part of your Facebook feed. It’s a move that makes the layer-making AutoCAD user shake his head as he posts a video of his experience climbing the stairs of a Mayan Temple, but at the same time, moves Autodesk into an area they’re quite comfortable with.
Autodesk Video: Take 1
Socialcam. At the same time it’s extremely addicting and… annoying. If you’re a user of Instagram, you’ll have an vague sensation of how Socialcam can be a conduit by which your followers can experience your life, eats and travels. If it stopped at sharing videos with cool filters applied, that would be great, but Socialcam has built its following with questionable business-building practices. As TNW reported, Socialcam rose in popularity by “pulling in YouTube videos” and “that to view a Socialcam video in your Facebook Newsfeed, you have to sign up for the app” which automatically shares the videos you view and comments you make, even when you have it turned off.
ON a side note: This news came out just before an announcement from Vyclone that they have launched their “Social Video Collaboration App for iPhone & iPod Touch” making this space look much cooler. Vyclone is an app that gives you More angles than a Steve McQueen stunt by allowing you and your friends to create collaborative videos from all the viewing angles. You can then, of course, share it over Facebook and Twitter.
Autodesk Video: Take 2
I give the readers of this site a lot of credit. You all know that Autodesk is a much more than simply architecture, design and manufacturing software. Autodesk is firmly embedded in the arts and entertainment industry as well, with a professional line-up of film and video tech that touches every major motion picture you’ve seen in the last 15 years. They also have more mobile apps than most other app generating companies–apps that spread across and compliment their desktop products. Socialcam adds to the creative mix, socializing their focus on the creative aspects of the application and creates a platform for them to explore wider consumer options of their media software.
As Carl Bass explained on Bloomberg TV with Emily Chang, “Many people known Autodesk for what we do in engineering and architecture… but we also have this consumer business, and we’ve been growing this big consumer business, of giving creative applications to people who draw, sketch and people who make images and edit images and we really see the next communication medium is video.”
Of course the next communications medium has been video for the past decade… if you don’t count television and film. However, we all know Carl is referring to web and, more specifically, mobile communication. Sure Socialcam (and most other video apps) currently make it possible to share crappy videos you take with your mobile phone, but what about the next generation of mobile tech with 13MP mobile cameras and richer video/film apps. Need we forget iMovie? Which in it’s own right is fairly decent for capturing, editing and sharing. I present Exhibit A, my debut of Ants crawling about, edited with iMovie, uploaded to Socialcam. An app from Autodesk simply makes that whole process more seamless and likely adds a few features from software such as Flame, Flare or Smoke. I’d buy it.
Autodesk Video: Take 3
One of our favorite stories that came out of all of this was on on Wired Design called Who Will Autodesk Buy Next? by our FAB friend Joseph Flaherty. “Instead of mocking the pairing, we found ourselves asking ‘Who will Autodesk buy next?'” The guesses were GrabCAD, Makerbot and Minecraft. Sounds pretty solid to me, considering they are watching rate of adoption, mobile potential and social impact. Who would you add?
Overall, this move by Autodesk definitely shows that while other cad software companies are focused on making enterprise software social and mobile, Autodesk is spreading its influence and user base by reaching its enterprise into social software and mobile apps. A different approach and one that has definitely worked for them so far.
