#Election2012 Video Now Live at election2012.shelby.tv!

It’s Election Day!

This past few weeks, we’ve seen a bunch of great video about the election shared on Shelby. Today, we’ve taken all this coverage and wrapped it up into our new Elections roll at election2012.shelby.tv.

You’ll find video from the left, right, and everywhere in between. Whether you’re interested in healthy discourse or some good ol’ political satire, we think it’s worth watching. The coolest thing about it is that it’s entirely powered by community and constantly being updated throughout the day as more and more people are sharing and watching video.  

Check it out at election2012.shelby.tv and please don’t forget to exercise your right to vote today! 

—

via @chris.shelby.tv

Twitter - doing the right thing

reecepacheco:

Yesterday Twitter announced the Innovator’s Patent Agreement.

The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers. It is a commitment from Twitter to our employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes. We will not use the patents from employees’ inventions in offensive litigation without their permission. What’s more, this control flows with the patents, so if we sold them to others, they could only use them as the inventor intended.

I, and many other smart people on the internet, agree that this is a huge step forward in fixing the mess that is patent litigation. There are, of course, some people questioning the Agreement’s definition of “defensive,” and for good cause.

In my experience, any good legal team can figure out a way to spin a good argument for their client, but it’s my hope that the mission driven purpose of the IPA - the “why” of the Agreement if I may - will encourage innovation for the good of the world, not the greedy, and it will help decision makers do the right thing.

While we don’t have a burning need for the IPA yet, I hope to adopt it here at Shelby.tv. Congrats to the Twitter team for stepping up here and doing the right thing.

A favorite quote that is all too relevant: 

…But he still thought it self-evident that one had to do what was right; he had never learned how people could want to do otherwise; he had learned only that they did. It still seemed simple and incomprehensible to him: simple that things should be right, and incomprehensible that they weren’t. Atlas Shrugged

We love innovation here at Shelby.tv and we’re excited to support the Twitter IPA.

back to school @internzero

Sometime back in January, this guy Chris Kurdziel started following me on Twitter/Tumblr. I didn’t think anything of it, but he was interesting enough (via his own accounts Tw/Tu) that I followed him back.

A month later, we’d started TechStars and I wanted some support in planning for SXSW, so I posted looking for help. I talked to a bunch of candidates with shiny resumes, business school jargon, and alleged “passion for tech,” but none of them really ‘got it.’

Chris did.

He jumped in and worked remotely (from business school at Cornell), helping organize a great event for us at SXSW, taking a huge weight off my shoulders so I could focus on TechStars and endearing himself to us in the process.

So we brought him on this summer and affectionately dubbed him Intern Zero(among other nicknames), but let me be clear that Chris was anything but an “intern” in the traditional sense.

For starters, he wasn’t around to get us lunch and do menial work [ok… maybe we made him deliver cupcakes to Gary et al at USV once]. We also didn’t micro-manage. Sure, we coached and gave direction, but it was usually at Chris’ request. Hell - he even emailed us at one point with the subject line “i can haz moar badass.” Here’s an excerpt…

I’m writing this as a sort of “call to arms,” asking you all to help push me where you see opportunity for improvement.  Hold my feet to the fire, put me through hell, and demand things from me that may appear to be unreasonable (even if I have no idea how the fuck to do them).

You gotta love that! So we put a little more pressure on, let him loose and “moar badass” is just what we got. Proof?

image

[Chris with Dan and Myles]

Today we are proud to officially announce hackday.tv - a 24 hour hackathon dedicated to showcasing innovation and creativity in the world of video. From booking the venue, to finding sponsors, API partners, et al… Chris is the man making it happen.

On top of that, Chris has done some solid blogging on his experience with Shelby and thoughts on our space in general. His post on Apple’s Tv Strategyblew up on Hacker News…

  1. What I’m doing this summer and why the heck you should care 
  2. Apple’s TV Strategy 
  3. Getting Ads Right in a World Where Bandwidth Isn’t Unlimited 
  4. Keyboard Cat is Cool, but Changing Video is Cooler

All this stuff, on top of helping us every day as we closed funding, built product recruited team members. Hell… he even held an event with another stud tech intern - John Exley - bringing together all the interns in NYC to talk about how to make the most of their experiences.

It’s not surprising that Chris lead that event as he has certainly made the most of his time with us. And though he won’t be around day to day anymore, we’re excited that he’s going to keep working with us from school. Thanks for a great summer, Chris. 

A few takeaways:

Trying to break into tech?

  1. Be good online. Have an active blog/Twitter account etc.
  2. Be willing to do anything, but also be able to focus on one thing and do it well.
  3. Execute like a mofo.

Bringing on interns?

  1. Find awesome people. Their resume is probably bullshit. You want the hustler.
  2. Set a general direction on a couple projects.
  3. Get the hell out of the way and let them show you what they’re made of.

Pair Programming at a Startup: time sink or saviour?

Q: Is peer programming a time sink or a savior for an early stage startup?

Back in January, during our first week in TechStars, sharing an office with Pivotal Labs, I saw something totally new to me: a profitable company that had two programmers sitting in front of one computer, writing code, together. Crazy. This Physicist had never seen that before!

I at first thought this was crazy, lavish, and unnecessary. This was what I later found out was called peer programming.

Dan and I could definitely not afford to sit in front of one shared computer, we were building a product from scratch! There was too much to do and not enough hours in the day as it was!

Fast forward a couple of months. We birthed Shelby.tv! We grew our engineering team by 50%,  Myles is on board full time, our infrastructure is [more] stable and we are firing on all cylinders!

Over the past two months Myles and I have been working on one project in particular where we have split up tasks/areas for each of us to crank on.

Until this week.

This week we decided to sit in front of one machine, use his javascript expertise, and my knowledge of the shelby backend, to build something that will be awesome for the developer community and super duper awesome for Shelby!

At times, I thought, “is out worth both of us sitting here working on this one thing when we could be doing twice as much if we split up?”

This was totally not the case. Over a two day span we completed a tremendous amount, wrote great, (seemingly) bug free code, and avoided a lot of sunk time in hunting for errors. Pair programming allows a second set of eyes to catch typos and other silly, avoidable code syntax errors.

So the question posed here, is pair programming a time sink for an early stage startup? No.

That being said pair programming is just another tool in an arsenal that startups should use in appropriate situations.

A company like Pivotal Labs is wise to use it as best practice.

A company like Shelby.TV is wise to use pair programming as a tool to speed up development through challenging situations. 

A: Savior

[reblogged from Henry]

Keyboard Cat is Cool, But Changing Video is Cooler

I’ve met a host of people this summer as a part of my internship with Shelby.tv and while most in the early stage tech community tend to see the huge potential in what we’re doing, a few question the application of such a technology to do anything consequential other than keep friends up to date on the latest memes that are circling the internet (I’m looking at you, courage wolf).

Founder’s Fund published an article recently with few really interesting points, one of which is that “we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”  While it’s true that I’d love to see more truly transformational tech companies, I tend to agree more with Chris Dixon that the “next big thing” will look like a toy at first.  After all, Twitter seemed like a toy (and still does to a bunch of people), but it has profoundly changed the way that people communicate and interact with one another.  In its current form, Shelby is somewhat of a toy (one that I happen to love) and while she can certainly be used for spreading nyan cat love far and wide, I’d say that our vision of the future of Shelby is far more than that.

Internet video shouldn’t just be a medium that’s relegated to tomfoolery and humor.  While I love that stuff as much as the next guy (probably more), when you think about the sheer number of people in this country that sit on their asses and watch TV for hours a day, there’s a huge opportunity to put some really interesting and engaging content in front of people that might not otherwise see it.

I’ve already discovered a ton of video in Shelby that I wouldn’t have taken the time to notice otherwise. Here are a few quick examples from the past week or so:

  1. Educational Content - I’m a huge fan of TED talks, but there’s such a wide swath of content on the TED website that it’s often difficult to get through and figure out what I want to watch.  Not so when my friends are filtering that content for me - I’ve got the best of relevant TED Talks (like this one) delivered to my feed in Shelby.
  2. Climbing videos & extreme sports videos - these have inspired me to set ambitious goals for myself in terms of summiting mountains and pushing myslef to get better at the things I do.  I also find the cinematography in videos like this absolutely breathtaking and when viewed in HD on a great monitor, they’re a nice escape from the concrete jungle of NYC.
  3. Political content - I’ve been out of town for the last few days and as such I’m not spending as much time keeping up with the news as I normally do. I signed into Shelby and was quickly able to see highlights on what is going on in London with the riots and the financial markets. I also found the occasional comic relief.
  4. Creative content from Tumblr - If you follow more than a few people on Tumblr, you probably realize that the Dashboard is not the most effective way of viewing video content.  Most videos go unwatched since I quickly scan my Dashboard only once or twice a day.  Since we’ve been testing tumblr integration recently, I’ve stumbled across a few fun and educational gems: “carnivorous plants” and “vortex bubbles.”

These videos have captured my imagination and inspired me to make the most of my time outside of the office and away from the computer.  They require less than 30 minutes of my attention a day.  Shelby can be that kind of “video sherpa” for all our users.  All this content is accessible to everyone for the first time thanks to the internet (sorry, cable, you still kind of suck) and given the rate at which this stuff is growing, it’s even more important to help people find the video that moves them and the people in their lives.  

Sure, some of you may think I’m just trying to justify my love of the memefilled internet, but I really do believe that video is an incredibly engaging and interesting medium that can help change the world.  Just like music, video can transcend language barriers, connect, inspire and educate (just ask Salman Khan about that last one).

Video is a young art form - it’s been around a fraction of the time that music, literature and theatre have.  Much like Gutenberg’s printing press did for the written word in the 1400’s, the internet is enabling video to be widely and cheaply distributed in a way unlike ever before.  And if video is still so young, then the future is bright. Sounds like music to my…err… video to my eyes. 

Apple’s TV Strategy

[by chris]

A friend of mine at Intel Capital was in town a week or two ago and we sat down to have a long discussion about the future of TV and how social media and computing would integrate onto the big screen. He’s been seeing an increasing convergence of computing and entertainment, so it’s no surprise that in my brief time at Shelby.tv this summer, I’ve seen a host of new entrants in this space from enhanced social TV experiences like SocialGuide to platforms like Flingo.

In most multi-billion dollar markets, we usually see a lot of hot M&A activity and I suspect this expanded TV market (both hardware and software) will be no different. There’s one company that has a ton of cash on their balance sheet lately that hasn’t been using it for acquisitions, though: Apple.

I came across a great Quora post the other day about how Apple uses their large cash balance to achieve an advantage in their supply chain for their new products. I started thinking a lot about how Apple’s strategy with the iPhone and iPad might look should it decide to release an actual TV (as opposed to today’s AppleTV product). Chris Dixon has already written an interesting post about this (go read it if you haven’t yet), but in light of recent noise this week about how Apple’s release of a TV could increase their market cap by $50B-100B, I think it’s worth revisiting. Whether the market cap figure ends up up being relevant or not, I’d be willing to bet that when Apple does choose to enter this industry, we’ll see them deploy those cash reserves in a similar way to what they’ve done in the past. In the large flat screen market, this may be even more of an advantageous and disruptive tactic.

Over the past few years, companies like Samsung and Sony entered joint venture agreements because the fixed costs of purchasing LCD factories are so high and they needed to share some risk (among other reasons). In the case of Apple, they can use their incredible cash balance to easily get exclusive rights to next-gen display factories that will help ensure their success in disrupting the digital TV market. Even as a late entrant, Apple is well poised to help capture a big piece of the pie. As Chris Dixon says:

Perhaps Apple won’t enter the market due to its structure. But that didn’t stop them in mobile phones where the structure was similarly difficult. The mistake analysts made about the iPhone was to assume the current industry structure would be sustained after Apple’s entry. I’d be wary of making the same assumption about the TV industry.

Bingo. Apple has the cash position to do things that other TV manufacturers can’t do in their respective supply chains, and they’ll be able to tilt the industry structure in their favor as a result. So, when will Apple release the TV? My guess is probably not until 2012, but I’m no oracle. And when they do release it, I sure can’t wait to fire up Shelby on it.

Social Discovery and Implicit Graphs

[by reece]

Last week, I attended a panel/discussion about implicit social graphs, hosted at Union Square Venture’s (dope!) new offices by Ro Gupta (Disqus), Marc Leibowitz (StumbleUpon), Shaival Shah (Hunch), Mark Coatney (Tumblr) and Eric Friedman(Foursquare). 

Implicit graphs are something we think about a lot as we build Shelby.tv.  In particular, there are a few points that have stuck out in my mind lately:

1. The “Like” button as an endless currency:  If you have an infinite amount of “likes,” then what do they even mean?  Personally, I only really like a select amount of things online.  To that end… 

2. What does a “Like” even mean? Mark Suster brought this up on Twitter recently (andposted about it). Some use a “like” or “favorite” to actually like it, but some just use them to “save the item for later.”  I used to “favorite” Tweets with video links to watch them later - until Shelby.tv came along. ;)  

3. Overall UX demands simple inputs: I argued back to Mark that it doesn’t matter what the input is really meant to do, it’s open to the interpretation of the user. Product developers could offer multiple inputs - like and dislike or 1-5 stars - but that just gets noisy and creates a horrible UX. Good product design demands simple interactions and data inputs.

4. Which nodes mean the most? During our discussion, we talked about what it means to like something that is “mainstream” and probably liked by ‘everyone.’ Sure, you and I may both like a video that everyone likes, but if we both like a video that is really freaking obscure, doesn’t that say much more about us? This idea always comes back to me when traveling, too. An another American isn’t interesting to me when I’m here in NYC, but if we’re both in China, you bet I’m going to appreciate anyone who speaks my language. That’s the irony of diaspora.

5. The temporal element of likes: Should stuff I liked 5 years ago impact what I like now? In some cases yes, and in some no. Tastes change. Just because I liked a sports highlight on YouTube once doesn’t mean I should only see recommendations for more sports highlights for the rest of my experience. Just think about your music collection… you may have given that song in iTunes a 5 star rating once, but is it still a favorite now?

These are clearly deeper questions that are worth more discussion and to that end, I think I may do a series on these questions as it’s worth discussing for a lot of us.

What I loved about the event was there was some actual discourse among the crowd instead of just panelists speaking the entire time. Nice work by the hosts to get the discussion going. I’ve already been talking with Eric about ideas for the next one. Looking forward to next time and participating in the group!

Here’s some more worthwhile discussion from other attendees in blog posts by Chris Kurdziel and Eric Friedman.

Bonus! My friend David hacked this together based on the conversation.  Dishing.us maps food preferences to location history.

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