The homepage — dubbed “peek-a-boo” by our newest designer, Nicole — is about pure movie moment discovery and exploration.

At the top, we show you three things we think are awesome and relevant for the day. Your work is done for you.

Below that, we highlight moments others have already discovered, but via our powerful SceneSearch™ technology. Want to change the results? Just type in an different City, or Object or Action and see how deep the “rabbit hole” really goes (type in “Mexico” in the places and you’ll see what I mean).

Anyway, I would love it if you would check it out and let me/us know what you think. More amazing updates coming the the coming “sprints,” but this is a big step, and again, the team should be very, very proud of their work.

I’ll blog about these new tools soon, I hope, but first I want to announce a major new initiative of ours, called “Spliced.”

What’s Spliced?

Spliced is a new, awesome, amazing, insightful, funny, and smart film blog

What makes Spliced different?

I blogged more about it here, but in short, we’re going to blog about films and the film industry uniquely the way AnyClip would: through the lens of film moments.

Who should read Spliced?

You! We’re writing Spliced with all film-lovers in mind. We won’t bombard you with a thousand posts a day, instead we’ll publish interesting and thoughtful posts that movie die-hards and and n00bs (like me) will enjoy. We’re also going to blog our fair share about the movie industry, especially the digital film industry.

Okay! That’s it for now. Go read Spliced!

Here’s Part 1 of that interview:

I don’t reblog every interview I do, but I wanted to post about this one because Sean really gets me to open up about the founding of AnyClip, running a startup in NYC, and my ideas around startups in general.

Of everything I talked about in the interview, there’s one lesson I hope people take away: people should pay less attention to “the startup story” and focus more on their own or those relevant to their situation.

“The startup story” I’m talking about is the one you’ve heard a million times before: two guys, a garage, dried ramen noodles, IPO. While this is a great recipe for success (or seemed to be for Apple, Amazon, and hopefully my friends at MakerBot one day), it’s not the end-all-be-all of startups, and it’s certainly not a relevant for every startup.

In fact, there are many unorthodox startup stories and they’re equally important to listen to and learn from. Zappos is a great example of a non-orthodox startup story. Tony Heish didn’t found Zappos. He was an early investor and advisor, and while he did’t put the first dollar on the way, he did lead the company from $1.6 million in sales to over $1 billion.

Twitter’s story is another great startup story which breaks the mold; as you know, it was incubated out of another startup called, Odeo. MySpace was also incubated out of a previous company.

Why am I pointing all of this out?

Perhaps it’s because I feel like I get an odd look when I explain AnyClip’s beginnings. “What?! You ate fresh ramen not dried ramen!?” “You started out of a pre-existing company and already had investors!?”

That’s right. We didn’t start AnyClip out of a garage — but we did start it. And, while every line of code for AnyClip and every data-point in our database has been written since we founded AnyClip last year, many of the talented software and data engineers in our company were working on our previous incarnation. Now, these great people bring something incredibly priceless to our company: relevant experience.

So I think the goal of this post is to cheer on every other startup without the storybook beginnings. While I also love “the startup story” (and took a stab at it), I’d certainly love to hear more unorthodox startup stories and case studies.

What’s yours?

My View of Jerusalem

This week marks the 6th month anniversary of AnyClip for me.

It was the last week of March that I partnered with Aaron Cohen and spent my first official day with the company en route to Jerusalem to meet a company called PopTok and the team behind it.

March 29th, 2009 was Day 1 of this turn-around story.

What’s transpired over the 6 months following has been thrilling, exhausting, intellectually challenging, and — most importantly — personally rewarding. I’ve worked late nights and red-eyed mornings with some of the most amazing people on this planet; Together, we’ve built a new company, with a vision which inspires young, old, computer and otherwise illiterate, poor and rich, friends and family; and, we’ve built the technology to back it up.

Today, we’re AnyClip. We’re building a World Class company.

I’m a lucky guy to have had these 6 months. I’m looking forward to the next 6, and those that come after.

Credit: TechCrunch50

To read “why” we founded AnyClip, check out this post on our blog, or read an abridged version on Alley Insider.

Last week, we launched AnyClip at TechCrunch50.

The results were tremendous. We took home the Audience Choice award and were also the runners up for the grand prize, making us the first TC50 company to win two prizes. Heck, AnyClip even won Robert Scoble’s unofficial whisky award for being the first company to “wow” him.

The event and the response was an absolute thrill.

Launching at TechCrunch50, however, is about much more than winning.

In fact, the experience leading up to TechCrunch50 is arguably more valuable than the 10 minutes you have on stage, or the attention you receive afterwards. Here’s why I recommend launching at TechCrunch50:

1. External dates focus a Company. From the time we decided to apply to TC50 to the day we launched, TC50 provided at least a half-dozen dates which served as valuable internal deadlines to prioritize and rally (or, in Agile terms, ‘sprint’). Having deadlines is very useful in a startup environment, where you can alway try to add “just one more thing” and everyone is launching “oh, sometime in the next few months.” Whether it was demoing to get in, practicing our pitch, or the day itself, launching at TechCrunch50 made us put our heads down, suffer a little, but come out with nothing short of an awesome result.
2. Jason’s pitch-coaching. I know good pitch-coaching: my friend and former boss, David S. Rose, is one of the best pitch coaches in the business. Well, it turns out that the West-Coast has its own pitch-coaching master in Jason Calacanis. When Aaron and I (cumulatively very experienced in the art of the pitch) flew out to Sand Hill Road two weeks before the event, Jason gave our pitch a 4.5 out of 10, and then proceeded to tell us how to make it better. After Jason gave his feedback, Aaron flatly replied, “There isn’t a single thing you just told us I disagree with.” The feedback was so fantastic, and worth the 24 hour, cross-country trip, that when we came back a week later with a new pitch, we scored an 8 in TC50′s internal ratings system. On the day we launched, with one last bit of advice from Jason, we scored a perfect 10.
3. Meet 49 awesome companies. TechCrunch50 is cool because of the 49 other companies you launch with. Every single one of them is cool and run by cool people. I love this business because everyday I get to hang out with some of the most innovative people in the world. Some of these people become my friends. Being at TechCrunch50 means hanging out for two days with other innovative people going through a very similar life-experience. It was one of the most delightful aspects of the event.
4. No “pay to play.” I’m a big fan of “open” conferences. When you force people to pay to be featured at a startup conference you have to wonder, “Is this person on stage for their cool tech, or because they dropped a load of cash?” Knowing that, I feel it would be tough to be a startup who’s launching where everyone knows you paid to be on stage. It’s like showing up to your high school reunion with a hooker as your date! For this very same reason I introduced the NY Tech Meetup Showcase, where I let 60 companies demo their stuff for free. Yes it’s disruptive to the existing conference market, but its a good thing, and it’s honest to both the companies and the attendees. TechCrunch50 has the right model here and I hope it lasts.

While not every launch and release cycle can center around a great event, I’ll surely keep my eye on TC50 in the future, as AnyClip releases big new products or if I (eventually) start another company. The event was incredibly well executed on and very much worth our time as a presenting company.

(While this may seem like a selfish or self-centered observation, if you’re not learning at your job — no matter what level you occupy — your eyes should be at the door.)

While I’ve been on a constant, upward slope over the past several years in terms of my ability to provide technical, strategic, and product direction in an organization, prior to doing AnyClip I had very little experience managing a large team of people and building culture. In fact, one of the reasons I chose AnyClip was to get this experience and to learn under an experienced manager like Aaron Cohen.

Aaron has a great post on his blog today about management and organization values, inspired by a great deck from Netflix CEO Reed Hasting which I’ve embeded below:

Last night I finally caught up on Season 2 of True Blood. I had watched Season 1 via good old fashioned Netflix DVDs, but since the most recent season’s episodes aren’t on Netflix, iTunes, or available on HBO’s website, I had relied on visits to my girlfriend’s house to get caught up on this season, via her cable TV’s “on demand.”

But here I was at my home this weekend: No HBO on demand (not even cable, actually) and a need to watch the remaining four episodes. All I had was an Internet connection and a deep desire to watch this “premium” content.

In the end, I watched all the episodes I needed to, and very happily paid $10 to do so. However, the episodes I watched weren’t legally licensed, and the $10 I paid will never make its way back to HBO, the producers of True Blood, its actors, writers, make-up artists or anyone else who worked tirelessly on creating some wonderful and gripping TV.

No, last night I paid $10 to MegaVideo.com, a YouTube-like site where anyone can upload content, not restricted by length, and share it with the world.

MegaVideo, for its efforts, charges its users $10 a month for unlimited streaming of content on its site (first 75 minutes a day are free, which is fine if you’re not watching multiple shows like I was).

And how does MegaVideo get away with this? In short: legal adherence to DMCA laws mixed with a community of uploaders and hyperlinkers colluding to help everyone (including the viewer) get away with it.

Here’s how it works: When an episode of True Blood is uploaded to MegaVideo it usually comes with very little metadata which is searchable on the site itself, so it’s tough to catch content pirates at upload; but, TV link bloggers, like WatchTrueBlood.com, “somehow” come across links to the now uploaded content and curate pages of links to the episode. Often they have to post dozens of links, as episodes are frequently taken down precisely due to DMCA claims.

So there you are. As often foretold, where there is a will, there is a way. And there is a will to see premium content on the web — a will which brought someone to upload the four episodes I was looking for, a will for someone to then link to them, and a will for me to pay $10 to view them all.

Where there was no will — or not enough of it — was on the part of the original rights holders of the content, who had the opportunity to make the content available to me legally, and for money, but either chose not to or (less likely) couldn’t muster the business force to pull it off.

Whether with TV shows or movie clips, legal, revenue-generating markets for content needs to thrive. Hulu is thriving with a lot of broadcast TV’s premium content; Blip.tv is thriving with most of the world’s independent content creators’ shows; and Netflix is thriving making a market for an increasing, yet still limited amount of Hollywood’s movies.

One of our goals at AnyClip is to bring this same level of justice to the movie clip market, where it’s already demonstrated there’s a will among consumers to upload and view movie clips as an astounding rate. Now we’re trying to create a way to make that a better experience, while helping the rights holders get paid.

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.

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.