Stay Hungry

We launched a pretty big UI update today and people seemed to generally enjoy it.  But we also launched a little gem that probably went under the radar: full screen mode (without Flash!).  If you’re running Safari 5.1 (on Mac OS X Lion) the “expand” button in our player controls will bring you into true full screen mode with our full UI.

This functionality is supported in Lion via WebKit (the rendering engine behind Safari and Chrome).  Although Chrome doesn’t yet support full screen, once it gets up to speed with Safari, you guys will get true full screen mode too.  In fact, any browser on any operating system that supports the new HTML5 full screen spec will get the same fancy treatment from Shelby.

How do we do it?  Pretty simple; here’s the actual code running in production:

$(“#app-holder”)[0].webkitRequestFullScreen();

document.webkitCancelFullScreen();

If you’re on an iPad, that’s cool too.  You have to click the full screen button on the video element and our full UI won’t be there (due to limitations in the YouTube API and mobile Safari, respectively) but you’ll get big beautiful full screen video (despite Apple trying to hold HTML5 down!).  And I almost forgot, AirPlay just works*.

*actually, YouTube HTML5 video AirPlay has been broken for a couple of weeks now.  They broke it, not me.  So once YouTube and Apple get that straightened out, AirPlay will be back.

Dear <you>,

Between canadian pharmacies and facebook, you receive so much SPAM everyday I figured another piece from your old pal Spinosa wouldn’t clog the inbox…

In 2008 I started bootstrapping HomeField, then raised an angel round in 2010.  We got into TechStars NYC inaugural class this past winter, started Shelby.tv during that program, then raised a $1.5MM seed round for Shelby earlier this summer.

I’m writing because I thought you would enjoy seeing a) the process of starting a company through the lens of Reality TV and/or b) me probably make an ass of myself on national TV as you suspected I eventually would.  The show premiers September 13th at 9pm EST on Bloomberg TV (bloomberg flavored reality tv trailer? right here!).

So that’s why I’ve been too busy to write ;-]

Cheers,

p.s. I do hope you’re doing well.  The BCC list is only ~20, if that makes you feel any better.
p.p.s. Yes, I was so proud of my lame mass email that I turned it into a blog post.  The Internet said it would be cool.

$ shelby.tv is hiring to put a dent in the universe
$ hackday.tv
$ dan spinosa // founder, cto // danspinosa.com // @spinosa

Who has time to blog?  With all the code that needs to be written, engineers that need to be hired, servers that need to be cared for and email that’s piling up, I often fall behind on my blogging.  But not today!  We just raising $1.5MM so I have all the time in the world to fuck around…

That’s absurd, obviously.  And as Reece points out, this round is but a stepping stone; not a measure of success.  As his cofounder, and independent thinker in general, I’m in complete agreement.  But as his best friend, and generally a douchebag, it’s my duty to undermine just about everything he does.

Momentum

Startups are great because your momentum is so obvious.  Everyone has a big impact on the company, and we can all see how our push on the flywheel keeps it cranking.  This round was another push, a great one.  And while Reece rests for a year or so, until he has to raise money again (i.e. do his job), the dev team will make that wheel fly.

Morale

If Reece tells you he doesn’t like being the center of attention, you can be sure he’s doing so atop a soap box, in the middle of a crowded room, yelling at the top of his lungs.  The rest of us like it too (even the cyborg from the future, @mkrecny).  And although we didn’t raise Color money, it was pretty fun to be the cool kids on the web for a few minutes yesterday.

Do you want to live forever?

I do, but probably won’t.  So I try to remember to take opportunities to celebrate the small wins.  It’s a good thing.  It doesn’t mean you sit back and relax, but it’s good to step away, high five everyone in your zip code, then get after it, hungry for the next win.

Champagne

Wizard Sticks is a drinking game where you duct tape each can of beer you finish to the previous cans you’ve finished, end-to-end, thus creating your wizard stick.  HackStar and good friend Rebecca Zhou recommended we play that game with champagne bottles.  Sounds like an engineering problem fit for a duct tape promo spot!  But stick-in-the-mud Reece said you cant haz shampane :-[

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

In many ways it was easier to run a bootstrapped company.  This cash brings pressure.  But it’s a great kind of pressure, the kind that makes this team perform better.  I had a dream last night where Long Island was sinking into the ocean, and I had to rescue my family.  That’s the kind of adrenaline-pumping ass-kicking pressure I feel.  I dominated in my dream, going so far as to take a boat to Falmouth, MA and rescue Reece from his parents basement.  Now I’ll do the same with Shelby.

Expect everything.  Earn everything.  ;-]

p.s. With $1.5MM, at 4 dollar bills/s, you could make it rain for over 4 days.  You would also need a Defibrillator™(Jager-bomb + 5 hour energy) or two.

Recommendation Fail

There’s been a lot of noise about recommendations and relevance as of late.  Recommendation-fail happens in two major ways.  Your “Filter Bubble” - pioneered and explained well by Eli Pariser (founder moveon.org) in his TED talk - is algorithmically created by the services you use, tailoring what you see and preventing you from even knowing what you’re missing.  But your Filter Bubble only let’s through what it naively deems “relevant” without promoting different, challenging or uncomfortable ideas.

The second big recommendation-fail is social recommendations.  This is the kind of failure that keeps happening again and again, as they intuitively make sense.  But there is a fundamental issue with many social recommendations: we’re not necessarily all that similar to our social network-friends.  There’s a good, deeper discussion on quora but suffice it to say, your taste graph probably doesn’t look much like your social graph.

Illustrations of each come to mind in the music sphere: Pandora and Turntable.fm.  Pandora, which just IPO’d to a chorus of scrutiny, sets out explicitly to create a Filter Bubble.  It does a great job, but sometimes it’s too good and I have to put it significant effort to change it up.  Turntable.fm, on the other hand, leans towards social recommendations.  Sure, I can hang out in a random room, but it’s more fun with my friends, and their musical taste is very much unlike mine.  The DJ’ing aspect helps a bit when people try to keep a good trend/theme going.

Better Recommendations

Mixing the two approaches (algorithmic relevance & social recommendation) can provide a huge improvement, but it’s incomplete.  How do you provide significant variety of content and serendipitous recommendations with these givens?  Add a Noise Dial.  Don’t take away social recommendations, they’re useful (I can’t think of many TV shows I currently watch that weren’t first recommended by a friend).  And don’t make the algorithms too “smart” (aka sterile).  

Give your user a Noise Dial (balancing transparency with added complexity), whereby they can expand the horizon of algorithmic recommendations, and the tools to maintain that expanded horizon (i.e. one-way follow, like Twitter).  Their expanded social graph then serves as the base for the next iteration of recommendations.  This produces an exploratory feedback loop where the user naturally acts as their own damper, accomplishing our goals without the recommendations becoming annoying and/or irrelevant.

—

p.s. We’re building a Noise Dial into the core of Shelby.tv’s collaborative filter.  And our noise dial goes to 11.