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Here at AnyClip, we have an international team working a million miles an hour. To support this environment, we’ve been relying on and testing out a variety of hosted apps which help our team collaborate more efficiently and let us focus on maintaining only the technology we’re building.
Stuff we use daily:
Google Apps: Gmail (for all company email and built-in video chat)
Google Apps: Docs (for simple, collaborative modeling of traffic, stats, etc)
Google Apps: Sites (for API documentation and feature specs)
Basecamp (for task management and communication around implementation)
ooVoo (Google’s video chat is great for 1-to-1 communication, but I love having multiple people on video chat, but not huddled around the same webcam. ooVoo let’s us stay at our desks and all take part in a larger conversation).
Procaster by Livestream (We’ve started using Livestream for usability testing. With their Procaster tool, you can stream both a webcam and screencast of what the user is doing. This allows you to watch the user and their movements around you application. It’s not what Livestream intended, but we love it.)
So that’s the stack of online tools we use. Right now it runs us under $100 a month for everthing listed, which is pretty amazing when you think about everything we don’t have to worry about.
Over time, everything finds its place; and on the Web, this law is no different. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
I made this argument a few years ago regarding organization of offline activity and webservices in a post called “Scatter Mob.” This idea actually came out of a comment I wrote on Jeremy Wagstaff’s blog where I started to think about a phenomenon I’ve been calling “Ambiance Scatter.”
Ambiance Scatter
Here’s what I wrote about Ambiance Scatter in 2007 on Wagstaff’s blog:
What I’m seeing with Twitter, IM, email, blogging, etc, etc is something I’m calling “Ambiance Scatter” — kinda taking Leisa Reichelt’s concept of “Ambient Intimacy” and wondering how its different levels intimacy find the most appropriate medium for broadcast.
What I noticed is that with the advent of Twitter, a B-list tech blogger friend of mine — a great writer — stopped blogging about personal, uninteresting to the wider-audience stuff on his blog, and instead left the “I love salad at Joe’s cafe” stuff for Twitter posts.
While this was written during the very early days of Twitter, I wouldn’t change much about this initial observation: with each type of communication, there seems to be an appropriate medium through which to communicate.
Late for a meeting? SMS or DM (direct message). Planning a party? Send an invite through a social network. Announcing something to your company? Email it. Tell someone you miss them? Call them. Need to disperse a rumor? Blog about it. Tell your friends you’re at the bar? Foursquare it.
100 years ago all this would have happened via the postal service. Then we got telephones. Fax was the next step, and then we had email. 10 years ago, most everything on my list above would have gone via email. But Moore’s Law must be at play here too.
As we find new ways to communicate, more and more appropriate media pop up; conversely, as we create new media, people find more and more ways to communicate (for many, Foursquare has replaced the flashmob communication I identified as popular on Twitter in Scatter Mob).
Again, for every type of communication there is a most appropriate medium.
This so this the Web of communication: a constantly and increasingly fragmenting and coalescing stream of messages, each finding their most appropriate avenue and bringing other like messages along for the ride.
Web Scatter
What brought me back to the idea of Ambiance Scatter after all these years? For one, it’s a framework through which I’m writing a more substantial post on Twitter (hopefully to be out next week).
But another reason is because of an important slide I saw in presentation given by Drop.io’s Sam Lessin a few weeks ago:
In this slide, Sam articulates a similar “scatter” model I use for communication — the idea that “over time, everything finds its place” — but for the entire Web ecosystem of applications and workflows.
In Sam’s model, however, applications are different than communication: instead of there being a “constantly and increasingly fragmenting and coalescing stream” of options, there’s a natural order, with all applications moving towards their natural, fixed category of distribution, identity, or content/IO.
Now, Sam, of course, is invested in this call, and this slide (which I’ve posted with his permision) probably articulates more about his company’s strategy than one can immediate tell by looking at their homepage, but I’m posting it is because of its value as a framework through which to see the rest of the web.
For instance, if you were to ask me what’s going on with Twitter these days, I’d channel Lessin and tell you that Twitter is increasingly finding itself in its natural place as a distribution mechanism. That’s it. On Twitter, identity is dead, and content is whatever’s on the other end of that link you included, unless you could fit your message in the signal’s 140 character limit (which many succeed at, confusing the matrix).
Now take Facebook… is it a content platform? A distribution platform? An identity platform? Like Twitter, there are a lot of smoke and mirrors to be distracted by here, but at the end of the day Facebook at its purest will be an identity platform. Each of these claims may deserve their own blog posts, so I’ll just point out the influx of Facebook Connect around the Web and how quickly most content and distribution companies have given up the idea of owning identity and ceeded control of this aspect of the ecosystem to anyone and everyone — especially Facebook.
This brings me to AnyClip and the content ecosystem.
As we’re building out The AnyClip Stack, we must keep in mind what role we serve in the larger Web ecosystem, and embrace — like Drop.io embraces — its position squarely in the content ecosystem.
We are not an identity company… and so while we’ll let you have an AnyClip account, we’ll promote the ability to login using Facebook Connect and, eventually, any OpenID provider.
We’re not a distribution company… and so aside from our own flagship applications on the Web, Mobile, and you Livingroom, we’ll let 3rd party developers build the majority of applications which distribute our content.
In the end, we’re a content company. We’re taking valuable video content and giving people access to the very pieces which matter to them, while we also give compensation to the people who made the content. For the movie business, this is important work, and doing anything but acting as the “IO” for movie clips is a distraction.
Web Scatter is an important way I’ve started to look at the future of the Web. I hope it’s useful for you too.
At midnight tonight, Facebook users around the will have an opportunity to choose a “screenname” — just like folks do on MySpace, Twitter, and most every other social network.
This leaves me up with an interesting decision (albeit not very important, in the bigger picture): Do I go ahead and (rather easily) register “innonate” — which is my current moniker throughout the web, or do I — like my friend Factory Joy / Chris Messina — start embracing my real name as my online identity and try to register Nate, Nathan or (more easily) NateWestheimer?
So, nothing life changing here, I know. But I wonder what your thoughts are. So far, when I’ve asked on Twitter and Facebook folks seem to think staying with ‘innonate’ is just fine — that there’s still somethere there for me. Perhaps they’re right.
Interested in meeting entrepreneurs and learning about some of NYC’s most exciting and innovative startups? Come to New York Tech Meetup’s first ever Showcase, a free event being held today, June 2nd, 3:30 to 6:30. at FIT’s Great Hall (West 28th St., btw 7th and 8th Avenues, south side of the street.)
NYTM’s monthly meetup will take place immediately following the Showcase at 7:00 pm in FIT’s Haft Auditorium.
Come tomorrow to meet founders and learn about the following companies:
Today, Gillian Reagan had a very nice write-up in the NY Observer about the AnyClip story and how Aaron and I came to work together.
Yesterday, Aaron wrote a great post detailing some of the challenges we have before us.
This week, our team in Israel made critical progress in our development plan, including developing a new plan for our API to support the AnyClip website — which we decided would be built using Ruby on Rails — along with a multitude of other applications which will use our platform.
Overall, this has been a very good week.
Next week is the annual meeting for JVP, when we look forward to sharing our new vision with the global investor community.
After over a month of radio silence, I’m proud to announce that I’ve joined NY and Jerusalem-based AnyClip.com as the VP of Product. This happened last month, after I completed my 9 month term as the EIR at Rose Tech Ventures, and after exploring several exciting opportunities at other NY-based tech startups I think I’ve landed at a very good and very exciting home.
Today, I’m also proud to announce a new Facebook App that we’ve built over the last month, called Casting Couch. Casting Couch is a way to tag your friends in famous movie clips, as if they were the characters in those very clips. Go check it out!
So, what is AnyClip and what does Casting Couch have to do with it?
At AnyClip, we’re building the world’s most comprehensive, high-quality, and legal database of scenes from the world’s favorite movies. Launching later this year, AnyClip.com will show off this database and allow you to browse through the top scenes of your favorite movies. AnyClip will allow us to relive the moments from films that help us make sense of our lives, the scenes which make us laugh, and the scenes which help us communicate with our friends.
Casting Couch is a great demonstration of what you can do when you have a great database of scenes. With this new app on Facebook, you can find scenes which mimic your life or are just plain funny; when you find the clip you want, you can then tag your friends as the characters in those scenes. Remember the sophomoric conversations you had with friends in high school? Tag your friends in American Pie clips and those moments come to life. Had a fight with your therapist? Tag yourselves in Analyze This!
What’s exciting about AnyClip is that we’re not going to be the only ones developing off our database of clips. Already, we’re collaborating with some exciting companies in both the gaming and publishing space, allowing them to embed our player using our API and have richer, more interactive products.
The fact of the matter is that there are thousands of ideas like Casting Couch out there, and we want to power them. So, if you have an app idea and you’ve ever said “If only I had a well structured database of movie scenes,” feel free to reach out to me. We’re still very early in serving the developer community, but the stuff we have cooking already has us very excited and it would be great to hear from you.
(Also, if you’re a killer designer who uses HTML, CSS, and Javascript 100X more than Photoshop, contact me, as I’m hiring.)
Lastly, I’d like to address why I’ve joined AnyClip, as for many of you it may come as a surprise.
First of all, I must attribute much of the decision to my good friend Aaron Cohen, who is now the CEO of AnyClip (Aaron announced his move at the end of March on his blog).
Aaron — who is one of the more storied and sought-after CEOs in the business — and I met last year through our mutual friend Andy Weissman of Betaworks. After meeting, we stayed in touch and would meet frequently to brainstorm on ideas and opportunities.
In February, Aaron and I had a breakfast where he laid out 4 awesome CEO opportunities which were before him. Of all of them, I told him I liked the AnyClip concept the most. Anyway, I’ll get to why I liked it in a moment, but the end of the story is that within a week of that breakfast Aaron decided to take the plunge with AnyClip and within a week after that he convinced me to take the plunge with him.
So, a major reason I joined was the opportunity to work for and with Aaron on a challenging project, but what also really excited me was the challenge itself.
You see, we’re doing something very difficult in this media environment: find new revenue streams for content rights holders.
Fundamentally, everyone has to ask themselves an important question about the future of media, especially then they work in this (Internet) industry: Do you believe the people who invest money and genius into media should be compensated when that media is consumed?
I think the answer is ‘yes,’ and for that reason I’m excited to take up the challenge of how to better compensate rights holders (while consumers get what they want, where they want, and how they want). As far as business challenges go theses days, it’s a big one.
But it’s not all challenges. One of the most beautiful things about this company is the opportunity to work with movies. Movies have a special place in society: they are fully meshed into our lives as both pop culture and high art. In my view, they stand with books as an epic, lasting medium. Getting to work with these pieces of art — yes, even American Pie — will be a real treat.
Lastly, let me mention the people. While I joined specifically because of Aaron, over the last month I’ve gotten to know some fabulous new people in both New York and Jerusalem (where I am now). Right now we have a winning team, and I look forward to building great things them.
While we put together a bunch of interviews at SXSW, this episode marks the real launch of a full show.
In it: a quick segment dedicated to the headlines, a VC interview, a mobile trends segment, and “Vital Signs” - a segment about the business of making a web show!
0:59 - I Want To Spend My Money
Chris Sacca (@sacca) discusses investing in companies that build things on the back of Twitter, NYC band PR startup Fanbridge, and how to start up, build, and exit a company in this economy.
3:30 - Mobile Behavior Alli and Laura of NextGreatThing talk about personalities and mobile devices. Phone is the new car.
7:04 - Vital Signs
Quirk and Nate talk about their first week making The Interwebs, divulge viewership and financial stats, and talk about past and future sponsorships.
He says nearly everything I’d say. I’ll only add that:
1. My “Twitter + payments” thesis would flourish at Google, and help Google Checkout compete against Paypal.
2. Google’s biggest asset is searching all of the history of the web; their achillies heel in search (if they have one) is most likely the “real time” element that Twitter provides and is land-grabbing right now.
3. I don’t think Twitter would sell for only $1 billion. After a first quarter of 2009 as good as theirs, they are going to over value themselves, and if $1 billion makes sense to Henry — even though they’ve more than tripled in size after receiving an offer half the size — then their strike point in this deal is likely much closer to $2 billion.
You see, there’s a very simple formula for determining the value of SXSW: Did you personally get value out of it? Yes? Go BIG! No? Go home!
On one end of the spectrum, the value may be a week-long “pointless party.” Hey! Some folks deserve vacation every once and a while. (I still don’t understand the Cyprus vacation was scandal, even as I was toiling in Ohio getting votes for President Obama.)
However, for most, the value lies somewhere in between the content found in the conference’s sessions (did Owen’s scouts attend any?) to moving “business contacts” — formerly mere names CCed in emails or LinkedIn folders — into the “real-life, drinking buddy” category on Facebook.
As anyone involved in business will tell you, getting to know the right people in the right business can be make or break for your and their companies’ success; and — even in the Age of Twitter — getting to know people means stepping out of the board room, and into the beer garden.
And this is why SXSW is wonderful for those who seek it: everyone comes. SXSW is the most effective and efficient networking buffet around.
Unfortunately for Owen and his gang, I didn’t have any business I needed to do with the Gawker subdomain crowd this year. Perhaps no one else did either.
However, the time I spent with others was well worth every dollar and hour spent there. While I was glad to get back to New York after a week in Austin, the rate at which I met people and created social and business equity far surpassed anything I could have done from my desk overlooking the Shake Shack.
You've found Nate Westheimer's blog. Nate wears many hats. He's the VP Product at AnyClip, the Organizer of the NY Tech Meetup, and co-producer/host of The Interwebs.
More about Nate can be read on his About Page and you can follow his thoughts on Twitter
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You've found Nate Westheimer's blog. Nate wears many hats. He's the VP Product at 
