Almost three years ago, Lee and Sachi LeFever created their first video to explain RSS.
They called the video RSS in Plain English. They used paper cut outs to explain the XML format. It became an instant hit. Tens of thousands of people watched it. Today their company, Common Craft, make all sorts of custom videos. They’ve built a business around explaining concepts.
Their latest video explains cloud computing.
“Cloud Computing in Plain English,” tells the story of a florist whose business grows. She learns about cloud computing and realizes that perhaps maybe she should not have to worry about fixing broken servers.
Cloud computing is one of those topics that confuses and confounds people. Larry Ellison loves to poke at it. It’s the hot topic so it is refreshing to see Lee once again explain the topic in simple terms that pretty much anyone can understand. It makes everyone’s job a bit simpler.
Which takes us to the last point of the day. We get so many pitches from companies. The services are explained in terms that often need deciphering. What if more companies in the enterprise space spent more time explaining what they do? What if companies did something like what Common Craft did for Twitter or with Google to help explain Google Docs?
We covered indicee yesterday. Why? We think their product looks pretty valuable. But you know what set them apart? They made a great video. It was compelling to watch. It made us laugh. We started to think about what they do. Pretty soon we were writing about them!
Here’s a challenge. Make a video about what your enterprise software does. Show us a page with all sorts of ways we can learn what you are all about. If it really does explain what you do then that will deserve some mention here. Just leave a comment pointing to where we can see what you’ve done and we’ll get back to you. Promise.
Update: We will wait a few more days for videos to come in. Thanks to all who have commented about the videos they have made. We will post next week. 🙂
