I've posted a transcript of the recent podcast in which I talked with our VP of Product Development, Alain Chesnais on Tucows Developer at:
http://developer.tucows.com/blog/_archives/2006/3/19/1828969.html ...and I've also included the full text of the transcript below. In case you missed it, the podcast can be downloaded [14.3 MB MP3 file] from here: http://developer.tucows.com/_attachments/1824872/Tucows%20Developer%20-%20Alain%20Chesnais%20on%20the%20Tucows%20Platform.mp3 Transcription services were provided by the CastingWords.com podcast transcription service (http://castingwords.com). === Podcast: Interview with Alain Chesnais, VP of Product Development [music] Joey deVilla: Hello and welcome to Tucows Developer Podcasts. I'm Joey deVilla, technical community development coordinator for Tucows, and host of this podcast series. This is the first of a regular series of podcasts coming to you from Tucows headquarters in Toronto, Canada. About every three or four weeks I'll be talking about Tucows platform and related topics with people in the know, and that could be anybody from our CEO to somebody in product management to one of our developers, maybe our QA Team. The interviews won't just be limited to people from Tucows, I also plan to talk to people outside the company working on interesting projects that are relevant to the developers who build on our platform. You never know, one of these days it might be you on the other mike. I thought I'd start the inaugural podcast with somebody pretty high up our totem pole, that's Alain Chesnais, our VP of product development. Every time I pass by Alain's office, I notice two things. One is that he's got both a Mac laptop and desktop, and giant screen too, and I'm sure his Mac laptop is faster than this single Mac laptop I have to contend with. But that's not the important thing -- the important thing that I also noticed in his office is that his whiteboard is always full of interesting diagrams, and user interface mockups of what the services on our platform could look like in the future. I thought he'd make a perfect candidate for a first podcast, and being a guy who's fascinated with gadgets, I also hope he'd be a little more patient just in case our podcast setup decided to give us some trouble on its trial run. Aside from few too many umms and ahs on my part, I'm sure that'll go away with practice, the recording session went smoothly. So, here it is, an interview with Alain Chesnais, VP product development on the Tucows platform. [music] Joey deVilla: Well Alain, you're one of the new guys, in fact every time I walk in the offices these days, I walk into a scene and I just go "who are these people", and well, you've got one of the nice offices so I thought I'd ask you first, especially since looking over your shoulder I see a picture, of an Academy Award, so I'm curious about you and where this award came from. Tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and yeah, what's with the Oscar picture. Alain Chesnais: Okay, the Oscar does prompt quite a lot of questions, it's not what you expect in a VP of product development's office. And yes, that is mine. So let me give you a little bit of background as to who I am, where I come from and what I've done previously. Before coming to Tucows I was at ATI, where I was responsible for the development of the Longhorn drivers and relationships with Microsoft, looking at the next generation chips that ATI was developing, and coordinating the drivers for that next generation chips, so these are chips that haven't yet shipped. So pretty exciting times. I was then approached to take over the position of VP of product development here at Tucows, and when I came here to meet with Elliot [Elliot Noss, Tucows CEO] and discuss the prospects of the company, I got very very excited about the company, and decided this was the place I wanted to be. So sign on the dotted line, I've been here now for just a little over six months. In terms of that Academy Award there, well, one of the companies I used to work at, actually quite a while ago, it was about five years ago, in a company called Alias Wavefront at the time, now called Alias. The company develops a software product called Maya, which is the leading product in 3D software. So basically whenever you go and see a movie that has any sorts of special effect, and that means today just about any movie you actually go and see, there are something like a 90% chance that Maya was actually used in that movie. The interesting thing about that was the Academy recognized the importance of Maya, and I might give you a little bit of background as to how these Academy Awards work, I mean you've all noticed the things about best actor and those sorts of Academy Awards. There is an Academy Award for technical achievement, and that's what this was. The technical achievement award was granted to the Maya team for the development of the Maya project, so there is only one statuette. And we all got pictures of the statuette, so all of the people who worked there, and I was director of engineering on that project. It was a very very exciting time, and it was a project where we basically decided to go and reinvent the whole notion of 3D and set the bar in terms of where the rest of the competition had to compete to be able to go and provide a top level project. So it was just an interesting thing to do. I ended up leaving Alias to go to a company called TruSpectra, which was developing imaging servers, so basically think of it as a web server with imaging capabilities built in. If you look at what you see in something like Google Maps for instance, the engine that's powering the back end of that would be something equivalent of what we were developing, we were doing much more than what say Google Maps does, but we would have the full pan and zoom capability that allows to go in and manipulate images on the fly. The key value in developing that type of product is if you look at something like Macy's, which has over a million pictures up on their website, most of these pictures are actual copies of other pictures of different sizes and resolutions depending on what page you want it to pull and provide it in, so they give you an idea, a typical product on something like Macy's site would have seven different representations depending on whether you're seeing it as a thumbnail, as something in your shopping cart, or as a representative image in one of the catalogs or a detailed image or even better, one of the zoomed up images. That requires an immense amount of work and quality assurance in the back end to be able to go and make sure the pictures are always up to date. Our premise was that by populating the website with one high resolution image and automatically deriving all the other representations from that one high resolution image was a much more cost effective way of doing things. So if you think in terms of why this makes sense, well when we looked at something like Macy's, and Macy's was a client of TruSpectra's, they estimated that they were saving close to $2,000,000 a year, in terms of effort by using this technology rather than going and doing this manually the way they had before. So it was a very very exciting time, and we had actually deployed this solution in partnership with Akamai with Spidera, with Digital Island in terms of the content, well, edge caching providers, be able to say, well, if this makes sense in a single website, it also makes sense as a distributed service. And this was the first time when I had actively participated in deploying a service in multiple pops understanding how you deploy a network service in a largely distributed manner. And that's the experience I bring to the table at Tucows in terms of understanding how to go and deploy web services in a very very complex distributed environment. Joey deVilla: What does product development mean at Tucows? Alain Chesnais: Product development at Tucows covers all the aspects of taking a product from concept all the way through actual development, software engineering, through final queue way and off to deployment where it goes into operations. So that's the way we split it out, the pieces of the organisation that report to me are product management, so this is everything that takes the project from concept, so this is initial idea which we put in, we have a database we call the Idea Tracker where we put projects through successive gates to go and validate the value of a potential project before deciding to actually go and build it, all the way through the engineering of a specification, and go through to actually estimate the amount of work that needs to be done, finally through the actual software development itself, and the testing organization also reports to me. So basically three major organizations in the company report up into me here, that's: product management, software development and quality assurance. Joey deVilla: Tucows describes the standard services it offers as a platform. Could you give us a brief 10,000 foot overview of the services and why a collection of them is called a platform? Alain Chesnais: Okay. If you look at all these services we actually have, and we have quite a few here. Let's go and list them and just give you an idea of what the various services are, and then I'll come back to that and look and see how does this compose a total platform, how does this offer a complete solution to our ISPs, and give them something that they can build upon. What we're most known for is domain name registration, that's one service we have, being a domain name host even. We also offer email, and this is most visible through our recent CP [Critical Path] acquisition. On top of the email we also offer an email defense service, so the ability to do anti-spam, anti virus filtering, both ingoing and outgoing as a service, if you wish to have your own email rather than to go through our hosting services. You can of course hold the two together. We also offer managed DNS, offer certificates, we offer website building, we offer Blogware and we offer a billing solution. So you see, all these solutions are bits and pieces that offer a total solution to our ISPs. The ISPs can pick and choose, decide which of the ones that make sense to them, and start off say perhaps with email defense, then realize that rather than having your email in-house, you'd rather have us manage that for you and then move to email plus Email Defense. Once you've got email, you think you can move on to other elements such as Blogware, and website building to help your clients go and build their web presence, not just have the messaging part, but also look at the online part. And that actually leads us to some changes that I'll go into a little bit later in terms of how we're looking at our product offering and how we're looking at putting the pieces together to make a more clear initiative, so that's obvious to our ISPs how the pieces fit together and how they can use them as vectors to cross-sell and get better "stickiness" in the first place, but also better response from their clients. Joey deVilla: All right. Well, you mentioned you were talking about the changes, why don't we talk about them now, actually. What changes do you see, where do you hope to have made to the platform over say the next year or so? Alain Chesnais: Okay, the key change we're looking at has to do with email and various messaging services that we have. So, let me get into this a little bit with a story that I like to tell and that I use when I try to get my point across and explain it to people who I'm targeting. So the person I think of the most when I'm doing this is I think of my dad. My dad is 76 years old. It took him a long time to get comfortable using email, but today he gets it. And the key thing is he gets it with his children and his guests and his grandchildren who have now adopted email as their principle vector of communications. This allows him to stay in touch with the family, be able to go and exchange messages with my sons for instance or my nephews and nieces, and understand what's going on and be a real part of the family as we've gone and moved to various parts of the world. I've got a sister in Afghanistan, I'm here in Canada, I've got a brother in Boston, another sister in San Francisco, so we're all spread out and the way to keep in touch is using email. Getting my dad involved in this was a key piece in keeping the family together, keeping us communicating. Now you look at that, you think ok first, somebody who is 76 years old who's learned how to use email, and for whom in his professional careers computers weren't a major part. Getting him to the point where he understood and has internalized this vision of folders, of messages and how you can take messages from a folder, move them to another folder, select them, do things to them such as reply them or forward them to something else, is actually a pretty complex model, and it took him a fair amount of time to get comfortable with that and internalize that. So my premise is that once my dad gets it, basically I assumed quite a few people having the internet have gotten this concept and they understand it. They've internalized that this is a model that they get. So the thinking we've had here at Tucows to look and say, well, how could we use this and spread it out and use this to affect other products? So, a simple one is to look at what we can be doing is, why don't we bring RSS feeds into your webmail interface. Why? If you look at RSS feeds, so those of us who are in the field and use RSS day in and day out understand what it is, have conceptualized it, we understand the model, we get it, we know how to subscribe, but many people out in the internet actually don't. Where if they're using it, don't realize that they are. So some recent statistics which here hysterical, where you saw people who were actually using them as part of their start pages, yet claimed that they weren't using RSS. They didn't know what it was, the technology was meaningless to them. What is meaningful is the service and the ability to get notification of articles as they get posted. So the premise is, well, what if we were to make this part of your webmail interface so it's in a part of your web presence, that you use day in and day out, because you are going to be checking your email at least on a daily basis, why not also offer out the articles that are coming in over your various RSS feeds and make that easy to use, bring that down to one element. Another element that we're looking at is blogs. Now here, think of Blogware, what do we do with Blogware. One concept that we can push is to say well blogs are basically messages to the world. When I'm posting something to my blog, instead of giving an explicit list of people that I want to send my message to, I'm basically putting my message out on a web page, knowing that people have access to it, and that they're sending out that URL to various other people. So basically I'm using it as a way to message the world, bringing that in and putting that back to a consistent interface, well my premise it so say well, if I allow you to very simply and easily with a minimal amount of configuration to send a message to your blog from your email interface, we've won. We've brought down one of those barriers to entry to the blog, it's now moved from something that's perceived as being very geekish, very technical, only somebody who actually works at Tucows would ever use, to something that your Joe Random user out there would actually use. Why, because it's simple. Use the attachment capabilities, so attach a photo to your email, and again something that people have now internalized, my dad does this on a regular basis, he understands it, he's gotten that concept, it's really a part of the way he works today. Use that as the metaphor for populating your photo albums for instance. This is something that we can do. The easier thing is that we can actually put on and put in that interface. So basically what we're proposing to do is come up with an interface -- and we're working on this, we're prototyping this as we speak -- with all the AJAX that you would expect now in an email interface, so give you that immediacy of response, use the asynchronicity of AJAX based technologies, to give you an experience that's comparable to what you get on your desktop. Put in various other elements so that the various services that we're providing support each other. So let's think in terms of putting yourselves in the shoes of an ISP, who's using this service. You just sold an email account to your client. They haven't signed up for a blog yet. Wouldn't this be a great opportunity to say, well by the way, sign up for a blog here, we'll set this up for a 30 day free period, whatever it takes to get you used to it, and we'll populate this in your email interface, so all you have to learn is how to go and send messages to your blog, and you're up and running. If that's all it took, think of how easy it would be to start off, and think of how many more people could adopt this. Same thing in terms of domain names. You're coming in, we have your first name and your last name. I know who you are because you've filled this in in terms of setting up your email account. What if in the background we were checking to see, oh, well does JoeydeVilla.com exist or is available as a domain name, and suggest to you in your email interface we just noticed that JoeydeVilla.com is available for sale, wouldn't you like to be [EMAIL PROTECTED] Think of how compelling that would be for the ISPs to give them yet another vector to incite customers to come onboard and add in extra services. So that's where we talk about this as a platform. The whole idea is to bring this into an interface where the various components support each other, and help the ISP bring their clients to a point where they can go and ask for other services in an easy and meaningful manner. That's what we're looking at. Joey deVilla: Now I have to bring this around to developers, as this is a developer podcast and I'd like to ask what opportunities does the Tucows platform offer to developers, particularly in terms of APIs, what APIs currently exist and for the future? Alain Chesnais: There are various ways that you can actually come in to the Tucows platform, and actually address the various elements that we have. There we have APIs available for all of the services that we provide, and the key thing that we would like the developers working on is helping us provide better services to our clients, see how do we do this, what we would love to see, is people adding on to the interfaces that we've actually built, and have developed, and adding extra functionality. I'd love to see mash-ups using our tools, how can we do this to enable people to come in and find, say, domain names, use them, put them together with your search and see what can you do in a way that comes up with an application that makes it easier for people to get to it. Okay, I'm not quite sure if that addresses the question in terms of what level of detail you were looking at. I was afraid you might be asking to go down into describing the APIs and podcasts just don't cut it form me, in terms of how you do that I'd need a whiteboard. So in terms of what we're looking... Joey deVilla: Just a general view. Alain Chesnais: The key thing is if you look at all of the services we provide, each one has an API that developers can get to. The key thing we can do, is you can modify the interfaces, you can go down beneath the web interface that we provide for all of our services and write your own. Everything is open to allow you to do that. We have certain services that encourage you to write plugins. If you look at the beta of the Start pages that we're working on right now and racing to developers, we do have the ability to write your own modules, there you can write your own content in there. This is what we'd like to see. There's a lot of opportunities there in terms of being able to talk to our various services. Basically, the sky's the limit. Joey deVilla: Alain, thanks very much for taking the time to do this interview, and thanks for being the first interviewee on our series of podcasts. Alain Chesnais: You're welcome, Joey. [music] Joey deVilla: That was Alain Chesnais, VP of Product Development for Tucows, talking about the Tucows platform. Once again, I'd like to thank Alain for appearing on the podcast. I'd also like to thank Ross Rader, Director of Research and Innovation, and my boss, for providing valuable technical assistance. This has been a Tucows developer podcast, which can be downloaded from the Tucows developer site at developer.tucows.com. I'm Joey deVilla, Technical Community Development Coordinator for Tucows. Thanks for listening. -- Joey deVilla - Tucows, Inc. - [EMAIL PROTECTED] TC/DC (Technical Community Development Coordinator) "Nerdy Deeds Done Dirt Cheap" http://farm.tucows.com + http://developer.tucows.com _______________________________________________ domains-gen mailing list [email protected] http://discuss.tucows.com/mailman/listinfo/domains-gen
