Day 6 of a going-away tribute to advanced.aviary.com‘s Peacock
Outfolding by Sloan Nota, made in Peacock
Time is running short for Peacock — it’s slated for extinction on September 15, two days from now. A funny time to start talking about visionaries. But here goes.
It was an ambitious plan — supply online Flash-based software to photographers, animators, writers, musicians, digital painters, artists who use vectors, 3d, video and more. Eden. And Eden began slowly to unfold.
In a prescient move Avi recruited the Flash-programming whizz Mario Klingeman to write a new kind of app. Mario rethought (unthought?) the venerated Photoshop paradigm — very brash move. Peacock’s no copy-cat app. Mario has visions the rest of us can ride.
A community grew around the software. It included artists from North and South America, Europe, Asia, Australia plus India and the Middle East.. All connected, using the same software, talking on the forums, helping each other learn.
Phase 2. Aviary felt it needed to grow and it attracted investors. Some of them are visionaries too. Jeff Bezos, the founding genius of Amazon.com had a vision, made it real. Bezos Expeditions, his investment entity, and Spark Capital both funded the Aviary project.
Before I lose any readers, hear me out. Look in your pockets, on your desk, look around your kitchen — very little of what we take as entitlements could exist without capitalization behind it. Build your own smart phone? DIY car? Sure some gifted oddballs can bring it off, but you? Uncle Fred? And Chris who builds her own phone and roadster — when does she make the refrigerator, TV, lightbulbs?
Industrialized means capitalized. (Or Communist, which didn’t work out so well.) So if you want the life, you rely on investors investing in your toys. Bezos and Spark invested.
To be continued….
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look deeper:
* Avi Muchnick, Iz Derdik and Michael Galpert are co-founders of Aviary.com. Avi’s the one I think of as first imagining the Aviary suite, he’s the public face of it, but how much Iz and Michael are also co-imagineers is unclear.
- About Aviary
- CEO Avi Muchnick on Why Aviary Distanced Itself from Flash and Pivoted Towards Mobile | Betabeat
- Aviary – Tools
- Aviary.com
Mario Klingeman
- Quasimondo – Mario Klingemann’s Flash Blog
- Quasimondo : Incubator – Experiments, Sketches and Computational Craft by Mario Klingemann
- ScribblerToo ScribblerToo :: Mario Klingemann update :: zefrank.com This is a fun online drawing app.
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