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Lou Douros
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An Interview with Lou Douros
Interviewed by Geetesh Bajaj, May 17th 2006
See Also: Freepath:
The Indezine Review
Lou Douros (pictured to the left) has many
years of experience in media production and presentation, business
development, and product design. He previously served as a staff
producer for Fresh
Air Media, Auburn, California, where he was assigned
the responsibility of creating a user model and ultimately
a business plan to address the demands of real-time presentation
needs. Lou was the first interaction designer for the
Prologue family of presentation products, Worship Leader and later
SundayPlus, entries into the house of worship market which moved
quickly to a top position.
As President of Grass Roots Software, Lou's primary role is in securing
partnerships to advance the use of Grass Roots Software technology
in a broad range of vertical markets and business to business
solutions.
Geetesh:
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Tell us about yourself and Grass Roots Software?
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Lou:
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We are a company of entrepreneurs. We are a small, privately-held
company. CEO and co-founder, John Schultheiss and I have tried
to build a culture that can survive business the old-fashioned
way: creating useful products, then helping people to buy
them.
We are located in Grass Valley, CA, in the Sierra Foothills.
Grass Valley is a charming, small town with lots of high tech.
We share the same grocery stores as the likes of Telestream,
Grass Valley Group, AJA Video and others. More and more talented
professionals are choosing this area as a place to settle
down to flee the heavy brown skies of the big cities and decompress
in breathable airspace. The Grass Roots team is made up of
around a dozen developers, support, sales and marketing people.
We have succeeded as a bootstrap start-up by asking, "What
are the problems we can do something about?" Then we
have tried to stay focused with the means we have to pull
it off. Freepath is a perfect example of a product that came
from a common problem: presenting multimedia to a live audience.
I call it "multimedia improv". At the podium with
a live audience, a speaker's comprehension becomes limited.
Tunnel vision at its best. So the software needs to communicate
a lot in a little amount of space. Our visual interface is
one way we've provided light in the tunnel.
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Geetesh:
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Tell us more about how Freepath evolved and how the response
to the product has been?
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Lou:
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Freepath evolved from an interaction design challenge we
feel we solved with our earlier product. "SundayPlus".
People who present in an environment that isn't conducive
to linear storytelling need a "nonlinear" presenter.
Some of our house of worship customers are now among the
most progressive multimedia creators and presenters in the
marketplace because they're free to access their ideas on-the-fly.
We started by looking at PowerPoint 95. We saw a great product
that had lost the presenter because of the mirror image on
both computer and projector. Windows 95 had dual display,
but Microsoft only just started pushing it. Most of our early
tech support was helping customers set up the dual displays.
Now Freepath even does the monitor setup for you.
I recently read an article by Bill Gates about his work flow.
He led off with his description of dual monitors. "Finally,"
I thought, "now we'll start getting tech support from
Redmond on that one!"
Today we look at our marketing universe not demographically,
but by use scenarios. Grass Roots products are the tools
communicators use for live, face to face meetings and live
web meetings. Freepath is completely compatible with GoToMeeting
and its sibling software programs. You can present one minute
from your laptop over the Web, then run down the hall and
show the same Freepath presentation in the conference room.
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Geetesh:
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Freepath takes a new approach in enhancing PowerPoint's
abilities using the playlist metaphor. What made you decide
on this route and what advantages do you see in using PowerPoint
presentations and other content this way?
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Lou:
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Well, most obviously, we try to make our cues into large
clickable targets. That is, if you drop a digital image
into the list, the actual image thumbnail is what you
single-click to send it to the audience. Since we're a
nonlinear presenter, you can click anywhere in the playlist
to show multimedia.
As for PowerPoint, we open each file in a slide "chooser"
window. Soon the presenter view you can see each slide just
as it would look to the audience. Although Microsoft does
this in dual mode, Freepath will let you open many chooser
windows at once giving you point and click from any slide
to another, even between .PPT files.
We say that Freepath makes ordinary files "presentable".
For example, PDF's, Word documents and Excel spreadsheets
aren't often thought of as being shown in the middle of PowerPoint
presentations. Likewise, the Web is considered to be more
of a research tool than presentation tool. Freepath allows
any website to be presentation content.
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Geetesh:
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Tell us more about your other product SundayPlus?
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Lou:
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Back in the day, as they say, churches used business software
to project hymns and sermon notes. Now, many churches are
highly improvisational. SundayPlus was the first software
program to give media directors a visual display on two monitors.
There are others that are modeled more after PowerPoint or
make their cues highly text descriptive.
SundayPlus falls under that "live, face to face"
use and will be based on the Freepath engine in the future.
What started as a niche design has taken us into a very broad
set of potential uses.
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Geetesh:
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What sort of support infrastructure do you have in place
for your products?
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Lou:
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Of course our goal is to make software that never needs support. For example,
Freepath manages your monitors for you. We've minimized what used to be our number one
tech call for assistance: setting up dual displays.
We offer 30 days of free support. Beyond that we sell annual
support at $75 per seat. That includes phone support and a
self-service, online help desk. We host a user group on the
site www.freepath.com
and are looking at adding extended hours for our phone support.
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Geetesh: |
Can you share some trivia - perhaps an unconventional use of Freepath
or something similar? Or just something you want to share with
Indezine readers?
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Lou:
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Freepath has been out for a week now at this writing. We expect some pretty heroic uses. As
we did with the house of worship market, we intend to see a huge improvement in story-telling
for Freepath customers. Nancy Duarte said in her interview with
you, "PowerPoint doesn't kill ideas, people who don't know how to use it or presen well
are what kill ideas." We don't want to get blamed for bad presentations either.
Today, people are launching Adobe Acrobat Reader, PowerPoint, Windows Movie Player and Word
and Alt-tabbing at presentation time. Freepath will let you access your presentable content within a couple clicks behind the scenes, rather than a tour of your desktop while your
audience watches.
Lastly, one of the greatest human fears is that of looking stupid. Simpler access to
useful multimedia creates courage. We'd love to see your readers raise the bar for great
digital storytelling.
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