Production Push, to Vista with Love

We just pushed to production and I'd like to highlight two notable changes (of many) that folks will see.

Vista users will have a bit friendlier experience when using our downloader. Previously files were automatically downloaded to the "Desktop", but due to Vista's different foldering-system, the "Desktop" was not easily navigable for many users. Windows XP and Windows 7 users don't have this problem. We're out to make all of our user's experience easy, so have changed the system for Vista users. When a file is downloaded, it is now saved to the "Documents" folder, and the file Explorer is automatically opened to the save-to location.

The second change is subtle, but should make every transaction smoother. We're now sending dual-formatted HTML/plaintext email receipts to users. They no longer have the scary-long URL links that we exposed in previous emails. They also provide a way to side-load content into all supported systems. So go ahead, save directly to iTunes, iBooks, or whatever supported destination there is.

Our goal is to produce the most open and reliable delivery system on the market. These new improvements create a smoother user experience when they come into play.

Discovery Patterns: Timing is everything

At Bitmenu, we've noticed some consistent ways that people discover and access digital media.

Time of Day
The right product at the right price is only part of the equation.  People check their email, Facebook and twitter accounts at various times during the day.  Knowing how a given community accesses these feeds makes them excellent vehicles for sharing offers.

When offers are announced regularly, at a given time of day, those publishers enjoy waves of purchases immediately after sharing a link as their promotion propagates across their community.

Regardless if done by email broadcast, Facebook post, or by Tweet, the first spike of downloads can occur within minutes after an announcement. As a campaign's day progresses, buying picks up towards the late afternoon and evening as people get off school or work and take care of personal business.

Global wake-up
For a US-based publisher, the sharing progresses across the globe as the evening arrives.  Pacific countries like New Zealand and Australia have healthy media appetites. Then Asia, Africa and finally Europe wake up and discover what opportunities have arrived in their feeds.

Weekends see no less action.  Not all users check their messages daily, and others put off acting on some items until they have time to consider their choices carefully.  Some publishers find the weekend provides an excellent time to make new offers available.

These traffic patterns are consistent with what is described in this formal study from Buddy Media.

Customer Love

At Bitmenu, our most direct communications with end users happen through our customer services.  We engage each customer purchase issue as an opportunity to learn and grow while supporting our publishers.  After all, publishers have enough to worry about producing content and sharing their Bitmenu links through posts and emails.

Users remind us to recognize that sharing links and files is still very new.  Different machines and browsers behave differently.  Most users have not knowingly downloaded large files.  And, many network connections are not reliable.

We have seen users downloading from race courses over mobile phone networks, from highly secure military and corporate networks, and from iPads while in the stables with their horses.  Immediate gratification means the purchase and delivery happens when the impulse strikes.

Some browsers encounter a network hiccup and report the download is complete (we call this a "false positive").  A quick look at the file's properties verifies the case.  Users can always retry a failed download until they succeed.  After paying, the links don't expire until the content is fulfilled, even months later.  

We are aggressive with refunds.  If a user has any post-download issue (I lost my file, my machine blew up, I bought it at work but want it on my home machine, it was really for my son in college, etc) we don't ask questions.  When we see the file was downloaded and no longer available, we refund and invite them to try their purchase again through the link we share with them in our email response. 

We want satisfaction and we love hearing from customers. The thanks we get, and the repeated additional purchases from users who interact with us, make us realize the value of customer services. Reducing customer support issues through technology is part of the job at Bitmenu.

Direct to iPad Delivery for e-Books

We are proud to announce direct delivery to iPad or iPhone for purchased PDF or ePUB products - with no app required.

Now a customer can buy and take delivery to their Apple device and start reading immediately on that device.  They can still download to their computer and then synch using iTunes, of course, but the new direct download capability enables buyers to respond to the momentary urge to buy and read e-books and presentations while they are on the go.

Bitmenu direct delivery to PCs, Macs, Android and iOS devices opens up non-bookstore distribution for a myriad of publications, such as travel guides on the road, speaker slides at conferences, workbooks in class, and novels at the beach.

Publishers producing standard ePUB and PDF products shorten production timelines, slash publication costs and remove the approval bottlenecks associated with custom apps for content.

Best of all, authors and publishers are in control of the entire process: they can create special offers for events and appearances, watch purchases as they happen and see their account balance growing in real time.

Selling with Simple Links

The shopping-cart buying process is a poor fit for smart phones.

Consider coming to this blog from your phone or tablet. Maybe you heard about a presentation given by Jason at a recent Plug and Play Tech Center event and you wanted to get the slides for $.99.

Or you might have received a tweet about the latest issue of Sidelines magazine (left).

The publishers of these items use Bitmenu to create links to their files.  By including these simple links in this blog post, this page becomes a point of sale.  Nothing was embedded, nor was a code snippet needed.   The publisher gets paid and the buyer gets the product.

You can use your mobile device to pay for and get these items as well.  Upon clicking the link, you go to the payment provider, and, upon successful purchase, download directly to your PC/Mac, Android or even to an iPhone or iPad, to be saved in iBooks.

Creating links with Bitmenu enables sales and delivery for immediate consumption and lasting impact.

Apache ZooKeeper in the Cloud

At Bitmenu, I find myself working with lots of systems tools that were developed with a few implicit design criteria: 1) Data centers with 2) physical machines that have their own 3) local permanent storage.

But Bitmenu is entirely Cloud-based, and thus we need to rethink how we use our tools (or if we should use them at all) in a world where 1) we don't control the IPs of 2) machines which evaporate unexpectedly losing all 3) local impermanent storage.

One such tool is we've been experimenting with is ZooKeeper. It seems that it was designed to best work in a static IP environment, very common in a data center topology. At startup, the configuration file identifies all the members of its quorum, i.e. the other ZooKeeper services. Since Bitmenu's platform runs exclusively in Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud, we don't have the luxury of getting the same IP address from EC2 instance to EC2 instance. From the outset, a resilient ZooKeeper topography looked almost impossible; because if a member of the quorum changes--a ZooKeeper instance dies or becomes unresponsive, all very real events in the Cloud and usually require just replacing the failing instance--then all the other members must necessarily restart in order to get the address of the new member.

Fortunately, I figured out a little trick to keep all alive instances of ZooKeeper running and get new information about the change of a quorum member without resorting to a restart.

On Linux, there's a file called /etc/hosts, which is a list of static IP addresses and the names of hosts that they resolve to. They can be FQDN, but they don't have to be. So for example I can have a static entry that looks like:

192.168.1.12 printer1

And in normal Linux configurations, any host lookup will go to this file to resolve its name before using DNS, NIS, or other resolving protocols (the lookup order is controlled by /etc/nsswitch.conf, where usually "files" comes first).

In the zoo.cfg file, the configuration file for ZooKeeper that is parsed on startup, instead of putting in static IPs, I put in host names, like so:

...
server.1=zoov1:2888:3888
server.2=zoov2:2888:3888
server.3=zoov3:2888:3888
...

Then I created a script that checks to see if the IP address for any of the three machines of the quorum has changed by polling an S3 file. If true, then it modifies the IP address /etc/hosts entry. I put his script into cron and run it every minute.

When a machine drops out of the quorum, its replacement will update its IP address in S3, which can then be read by the script above, and update the /etc/hosts file accordingly. ZooKeeper therefore doesn't require restart, and keeps polling until it can communicate with all members of its quorum.

What is Social Commerce?

Yesterday, Matthew Mengerink of eBay announced they were working on a social commerce platform targeting developers like Bitmenu. The news came at Plug and Play Tech Center's International Expo, held in Sunnyvale, CA. This immediately drew our attention because of our experience providing a turnkey storefront for digital content publishers on Facebook. Having an allergic reaction to marketing terms like "social commerce", we had to step back and ask what it means.

What exactly is "social commerce"? Wikipedia would like to define social commerce as getting advise from trusted individuals prior to a transaction. It seems that there's a tremendous opportunity to expand that definition though, as so many companies are testing new ways to engage their audience.

We see the foundation of social commerce as "identity." If you don't know who a individual is, how can you call them trusted? There must be a way to identify who parties are before forming a trusted relationship.

Taken another way, if you see an individual's comments from a trusted network, even if you don't know (trust) the individual, you may place enough trust on the network to place more weight on their comments. In the early days, the internet placed a lot of weight on anonymity, but now with services like LinkedIn, and Facebook, we seem to be moving away from that. These services encourage real relationships and implicitly reject anonymous interactions.

We're taking action on this idea with some of our publishers. The book "Racing Yesterday" is being sold by it's author, Andy Baxter on his website.

Initially the book was available only as a link from the site, with a call to action to make the purchase on Amazon. When we added Facebook's social comment plugin to the the website, the uptick and analytics from sales were quite a surprise. Additionally, the uptick in physical sales of his book are on an upward path. As an author, why wouldn't you do this? We think that having real people comment, from the trusted Facebook network, helped make the difference.