#streamweb

Five years ago I left my job at Apple. Before you get too worked up, like most people at Apple, I was not working on apps nor was I BFFs with Steve Jobs. I worked at the Fifth Avenue store in NYC, teaching people how to use their computers and, eventually, iPhones. I was there 2006-2009, a pretty insane time to be working at Apple. I got my first grey hair the week the iPhone came out. If you want your 10,000 hours of Malcolm Gladwell time in UX research, I highly recommend working at an Apple Store.

Me hard at work at the Apple Store:

Now I’m the CEO of a startup called MAZ, and today we released a new web browser called Stream Web. I designed it myself and have been working with our team for well over a year building it, and conceptualizing it for way longer. It’s a real, actual browser that you can use instead of Safari or Chrome, but it’s different and better in my absolutely biased opinion.

Just the thought of entering the “browser wars” as a small startup is so preposterous, I can’t even really think about it like that, even though I guess that’s what we’re doing.

I left in February of 2009 not to create a tech startup, but actually to pursue a career in music. My band hit some neat milestones -- 1 million views on YouTube, a song on MTV -- and on the side I was doing consulting and design work, including designing iPhone apps. At the time, there weren’t that many people doing apps in New York. (or in general)

In my music days holding a Moon Man that I did not win: 

  At some point in 2010, the app biz started to take off more than the music, and MAZ was born. We created a publishing platform which now powers over 700 apps across iOS, Android, and Kindle Fire, including ones from publishers like Forbes, USA Today, Condé Nast, The Economist, Inc. Magazine, OK!, and Star.

In our original "2 desks for 3 people" cubicle in a co-working space launching our publishing platform (now you know where the name MAZ came from):

Life has a weird way of steering you in directions that you almost definitely did not and could not anticipate. Like how within a week of leaving Apple, I met an amazing girl that would eventually become my wife. We got married in the middle of the final weeks of closing a $1 million seed round in the fall of 2012. (One day I’ll write a book about why not to do those two things at the same time.)

The coolest wife in the world:

I remember pitching my co-founders Simon and Shikha on the idea of building a web browser a couple of years ago. Like most of my ideas, they thought it was insane; to be fair, it is. My basic argument was that mobile and tablet browsers just looked like shrunken desktop browsers and didn’t take advantage of a touch interface. But what did that have to do with our app publishing business? At the time, nothing.

Back on the app publishing platform side, we were hit with an interesting dilemma: people were used to sharing digital content on the web, but in native apps there are no URLs. So how do you share stuff? We set out to create a solution, which at the time we called Clippings, and it eventually became what we now call Stream. Stream is a pretty simple concept: you tap with two fingers to cut out anything on your screen, like a partial screenshot, and then easily share it across email, social media, SMS, Evernote, and so on. (You can also just save it.) But unlike a normal screenshot, the image serves as a link back to the content. It creates a visual link instead of a dumb metadata-less screenshot. And then the second part of Stream is that you can look back at your Stream (duh) of all the clips you’ve shared or saved, revisiting or resharing if you want. In some of our apps, you can even see a public stream of what everyone from that one app is sharing, creating these sorts of localized social networks.

Forbes Is The First Magazine To Launch Its Own Social Network With "Stream"

Stream has been super successful in our MAZ-powered publishing apps, driving up engagement, referring new downloads, and generally just getting used a ton by the people reading all the publications that we help publish.

Setting up the MAZ office:

So I started to think, what if we did end up building that browser, but instead of just being a better cooler browser, it also had Stream built in? Yes, there are text URLs on the web, but why are we still using them to share? Why are we still doing it the same way we were in the ’90s? Wouldn’t it be better if we could just use our fingers to cut out what we want to share?

And that was the beginning of my obsession: to kill the text URL. It’s ugly, it’s archaic, and we just don’t need it. Why not have an actual preview of real content that serves the same purpose?

But of course, if we were going to build a new browser that was Stream-able, we would have to make the underlying browser itself great enough that someone would really consider switching from their default. (Most likely Safari.)

Over the period of time we’ve worked on this app, we had a lot of soul-searching convos about what a browser really is, the nature of the web on mobile, and other heady topics. (Did I mention I was a philosophy major?) That’s why you won’t find normal browsery stuff in Stream Web. No bookmarks, no history, no back/forward buttons, no address bar at the top, no chrome distracting you while you’re browsing. It’s super minimal. But we also added some awesome new stuff, like gesture-based everything, a new type of tab that we call an overlay that you can activate on top of the tab you’re already on (allowing you to browse two sites at once), and of course Stream.

Stream Web:

Stream Web - A Mobile World from MAZ on Vimeo.

  Will we win the browser wars? I can tell you with pretty much 100% certainty that we will not. But will we turn some heads and hopefully get people thinking about the web in a different way? I hope so. Will people like sharing this way instead of with stupid, boring text? I believe so.

But again, it is insane -- even to me -- that we just released a browser into the market. It just goes to show that life and careers definitely don’t work the way you think they will. At least mine hasn’t. But if you’re open to it, you can end up in some pretty awesome places. And more than anything, if you find the right people to team up with, then your crazy ideas might actually end up turning into real things. That’s truly a feeling I can’t accurately describe, but one I hope everyone gets to experience at some point.

Download Stream Web for free

Me announcing Stream Web on Bloomberg TV this morning [watch]:

Here at MAZ, we have helped some amazing media brands across the globe to launch hundreds of apps using our publishing platform. And today, for the very first time, we are putting ourselves in their shoes -- by launching an app of our own.

We are proud to announce the release of Stream Web, a social, gesture-based web browser for iOS.

How is it that a publishing platform company came to make a web browser? Well, for starters, we see ourselves as much more than a publishing platform. MAZ’s mission has always been to connect people with content. What we learned pretty fast is that on digital devices, people don’t only want to receive content; they also want to participate in it.

That’s why we created Stream, a social layer that lives on top of every MAZ-powered app, allowing the user to “cut out” anything they see on their screen and share or save it instantly. Stream also provides a running visual archive of everything they’ve ever shared or saved.

It works like this:

Compare that to how we traditionally share on the web: boring text URLs, copied and pasted. In fact, that’s the same way we’ve been sharing content for the entire 25-year history of the web. Copy and paste into an email, copy and paste onto Twitter, and so on.

With Stream Web, we are bringing the power and beauty of Stream to -- you guessed it -- the entire web. Instead of sharing URLs, you can now share clips of actual content. And each clip, whether it be an image, text, or both, serves as a link back to the original source. So you are still sharing a link, but it’s a visual one instead of the same old ugly text. Then you can visit your Stream at any time to see a real-time feed of everything you’ve ever shared or saved.

Switching your web browser to Stream Web on your iPhone and iPad will make you feel like you are using the real mobile web for the first time, not just a scaled down version of a desktop browser.

Check out some of the neat features we’ve cooked up below, and of course, go download Stream Web for free right now to see it for yourself!

MAZ has spent the last three years helping other companies create apps.

For the first time, we have created an app to call our very own– a mobile web browser called Stream Web.

Within the hundreds of apps created with MAZ, we saw that many people use Stream to share and save content from the web. Which got us thinking... what if you could use Stream to share and save from any website?