First off must say I have a ton of respect for the Veoh team, Dmitry, and the product itself. It was always incredible seeing the pure amount of technology come out from the Veoh team.

Also, being a co-founder of a video site myself, I can’t imagine how painful it must have been getting stuck in court instead of working on the product and going bankrupt because of that. Not sure I would have handled it as gracefully as Dmitry did.

Allow me to take a step into memory lane…

It is 3 years ago and the race of the video destination. Veoh, Revver, vMix, vSocial and the 800 pound gurilla… All of us competing with features, community and spending a ton of money to do so.

What I want to share is how Viddler has lucked out into building built a sustainable business where others have failed:

1. 1/50th Raised in Funding – in total Viddler has raised less then $2M in funds. Not on purpose either.. We really just couldn’t raise more funds then this. Whether it be bad location, crowded space, or me being first time entrepreneur, this is tiny round compared to the sites we were competing with. What it forced us to do is stay small, control our budget, and get profitable based on lower overhead. Today, Viddler is 16 people. Everyone on board are rockstars at what they do and we are hiring at a slow and steady pace keeping the quality high.
2. Market Maturity – video marketing adoption, personal branding, viewers watching video.. all of this has increased to where we are at a point where our product makes sense, and even worth paying for.
3. Bandwidth Costs Affordable - three years ago, the price per GB of bandwidth we were paying was 50x what we are paying for now. If we were paying what we did 3 years ago we wouldn’t have a sustainable business today.
4. Video Advertising with No Ad Sales Team - three years ago you needed to sell directly to advertisers to have a chance at selling preroll/overlay inventory. Now with the many different ad networks and standardization with VAST compliant networks it’s all about optimization. The $250k/year + commission VP of Ad Sales is no longer needed.
5. English Focus – We haven’t had an international “non-english” presence at all. If it’s questionable, we can’t interpret it,  and overseas it’s not allowed on Viddler. This keeps costs down. Veoh was hosting alot of Anime. That content is expensive to delivery.
6. Bethlehem, PA – An hour from Philadelphia and two hours from NYC, we might as well be based in the middle of nowhere. This has helped us focus on the product (instead of the local scene), stay under the radar with competition, and hire extremely talented people (no competition in Bethlehem) at significantly more affordable rates then California, Boston, or NYC.

Again, all the respect to Dmitry. Wish him the best in his next venture, and hope this conveys how we are still around, and going to be around for the long haul.

• Thankful for being able to build Viddler these last 4 years and focus on passion of online video.
• Thankful for family, that keeps on loving me, no matter how far I am, or focused with work I have become.
• Thankful for having worked the amazing Donna DeMarco, co-founder in Viddler, who has helped build a balanced Viddler and and an amazing family of her own at the same time.
• Thankful for Poland engineering and fact that they don’t celebrate Thanksgiving so they will be able to watch over our servers.
• Thankful for an incredible designer.
• Thankful for every Viddler investor, employee, uploader, and viewer.
• Thankful for a great girlfriend, Dana Fish, that understands why this Viddler obsession might be first thing I give thanks for at this point in my life.

Thankful for the few of you, reading this blog, taking the time to follow this adventure.

A few Viddlers have asked me why this can’t be free for everyone, as Youtube does.

This is a good question, giving away everything for free is a very expensive business decision to pursue. We are focused on profitability and are certainly turning a little 37signal’ish.

To give you a little sniffy sniff.. check out what analytics looks like for me:

via MIT takes the wrappers off autonomous, robotic helicopter with intelligent navigation.

Viddler has the man, the myth, the legend – The Todd.

I just gotta burst out and say that intelligent Sys Admins are invaluable in a small startup looking to stay efficient.

Exclusive/secret underground footage of Todd working on his computer, matrix style:

Update – forgot to mention the JAMES.. rockstar lefty that comes in as a closer for Todd.

It’s funny how fundraising is such a widely written about activity when it really has little to do with product or business itself.

This is a little video spoof on just that.

We have had our share of bad relationships that I can look back on and all center around the lack of how “tight nit” that organization is.

The goal of this post isn’t to point out bad instances though, but rather highlight amazing relationships.

Stealing a bit of Gary Vaynerchuks thunder, would say these companies are “crushing it”, with regards to how tight nit they are

Tubemogul

These guys have built an amazing analytics company and someone we work with extensively to power our analytics toolsets. They started out of Cal Berkley and have many incredibly smart people working for them. At around 20+ employees they have been able to rapidly build out the best analytics platform in the online video business.

When working with them, if we have a problem an API here or there, they will work overnight to get us the answer or fix by morning. One evening in particular, we had a problem with our flash player and analytic tracker, with everyone out for the day, and not his responsibility, Jason Lopatecki, Chief Strategy Officer, pulled out flash editor, and put together a fix for us. Who has C level officers that know how to code flash?

Incredibly smart and passionate people that are not afraid to wear multiple hats.

Edgecast

The Content Delivery Network (CDN) business is very competitive right now, and get dozens of vendor emails weekly about new CDN price breaks. Having worked with these guys for over a year now, they listen and deliver. This is extremely important as many larger CDN businesses think they have it figured out, and aren’t invested in innovating and listening to there customer.

We have many business service customers we work with. Each of these customers needs to be tracked individually for bandwidth usage. Edgecast listened to this need and not only delivered reporting functions for us with a UI layer but delivered an API with 20+ functions a few weeks after.

And when someone on the Viddler team may call in because we are having a problem with some reporting tool, or inquiring about new services, the level1 support engineer could be the core architect for all we know because of how well versed he is with the status of features and problems within the company. Transparent organization or talented hire? I would assume all organizations have high level of transparency, just that they find passionate and intelligent people.

To get started over there the man to talk to over there is Duane Sulo.

Google

Due to size of Google don’t want to post anything too confidential here. What I will say is that there account reps and support staff are all on point. When working with individual units of Google, they feel like small startups themselves, proving that you can still be tight nit in one of the largest companies in the world.

Woopra

Just started using this product on this blog. But the fact the CEO, John Pozadzides,  is talking transparently about business model with his users, just rocks and leads by example on how passionate his company is about his users.

In summary it appears that there are a few key factors in running a tight nit organization:

1. Smart/Passionate People
2. Ability to Listen and Deliver
3. Employees not afraid to wear multiple hats.

Please think of these when building a company or working with other companies as it’ll help foster more tight nit companies.

Also, just a small disclaimer, there are a more companies I want to list, but in order for Viddler to attempt to be a tight company, am going to have to cut this off here.

If you know of a tight nit company, let me know what tight nit company you work with, would love to hear your story via comments, blog post, tweet, viddler, or email rob at viddler.

I never really thought this concept applied to “physical businesses”. Ones that make things physical for people to buy (Google t-shirts do not count).

Well, while obsessing over my favorite new upcoming car, Chevy Volt, ran into a livechat with GM retiring executive Larry Burns.

Toyota recently announced they will not go down GM route as it’s doesn’t make business sense for typical margins. Larry responded very “google-like” to one of my questions with regard to cost of the new lithium-ion batteries.

It’s great to see GM act as Google would.  One more reason to get the Volt!

Viddler is located in Bethlehem, PA and a few of us share our favorite sandwiches that are all less then $5!

Scrappy.

As a product guy, it’s been very apparent Myspace has been on it’s way out for many years, mainly due to it’s inability to innovate, and putting advertising efforts clearly ahead of it’s users.

When Jay Leno, a mainstream comedian, uses Myspace as center of a joke, it really questions the mainstream perspective on them.

Myspace is far from over though, and still has a chance to come back.

If I were over at myspace I would do two things to combat this before it’s too late:
What: Make it clear Myspace is going to change attitude on advertising, putting users first. Scrap all ad units and start over with more engaging campaigns. Reinvent itself.
How: Become socially transparent in this effort. Get feedback from users. Turn it into a conversation as apposed to a one way battle.

Update: NBC has pulled the commercial from it’s site. It used to be here and when you still google “Jay Leno new material” you will find it once existed on the site.  NBC and Myspace have a relationship on many levels, wouldn’t be suprised if someone asked for it to come down due to it hurting the relationship.

With it you can advertise with some of the AMAZING partners that I personally am privileged to work with including HotHardware, Engadget, Joystiq, Tweektown,  iJustine, Phillyd.tv, any many other FANTASTIC partners.

This is just the start. What I hope is that we can spur up small businesses with $500-1000 budgets to find value in this.

Would love your feedback on the guide.

Also to kickstart the program put together my first advertisement I have ever created.

Mapping USB Thinkpad Keyboard Middle Scroll Key to OSX

Originally uploaded by sandieman

I am in love with my IBM Thinkpad keyboard and how much it saves your fingers. When your on your computer 10+ hours a day, efficiency is everything with the mac red nipple, saving moving hands on mac from keyboard to mouse 1000+ times a day.

There is one thing that is missing though when using it with OSX which is very annoying. What I am trying to get to work is the middle scroll key that you press and when pressing it it allows you to scroll up and down a website page or document. This is very important function for keyboard to work for me.

Alternatively a shortcut for scrolling (Ctrl-J) would be acceptable as well.

Apple OSX’s default keyboard mapping function is pretty simple and isn’t apparent howto get this to work.

If you have any ideas on howto get this to work, please let me know in comments below or @sandieman me on Twitter!

Thanks!

UPDATE: Smart Scroll fixed this problem for me. It’s a payed shareware application but worth it.

Recent Mac commercials (which I always love) share Windows guy freezing 2150 many years into the future. It’s making fun of the Jerry Seinfeld/Bill Gates commercial where Bill hints at next version of Windows. That being said, all this poking and competition has got me thinking on where it will be in 2040 (2150 being too far away).

What are pretty much guarantees:
Dropping prices in hardware
Culture changes at Apple and Windows
Opensource movement to continue to grow
Steve Jobs will die. (sorry folks, everyone does)

Rating past, present, future
Without using any formal metric (market share, revenue generated, etc), I would like to post my prediction of how the market will evolve based on a Wine Spectator point scale. Have made a few notes on why each of the trends.

What do you think?

The pressure is on!

At this moment in time, scrappy is making me and people around us think like a company, one that is going to be around for a very long time.

Jim Louderback, CEO of Revision3 has launched his blog, louderback.com. Jim is an old-school internet dude, if Jim started this blog only halfway through his internet career he could have registered jim.com.

Seriously though, Jim is great to Viddler and community. If you haven’t done so already make sure and checkout Revision3Beta. If you are looking for another Gary-Vaynerchuk-like “personality” in the video space, make sure to subscribe to his feed!

Now all I gotta do is convince him to get a Viddler.com account and branded player

Geoff DiMassi (godfather of Philly) did a great job helping put together the Ignite Philly event and shot some great video. I really need to get his camera as not only did he shoot amazing videos (in vidget below) but great photo’s.

Make sure to watch the Josh Kopelman’s amazing intro in the IgnitePhilly Vidget:

It’s super awesome and already 20+ people leaving videos.

One technical request that will be bigtime for all future stuff we do like this is upon recording, automatically setting the permalink to the 15s.viddler.com/sandieman/3e8653be URL so it links back to the 15s site as apposed to Viddler.com/explore/..

Which would you prefer?

My first 15 seconds:

First, I love you mom.

Second, this is an amazing technique. My mom doesn’t know I am listening to music and I can hear her very clearly.

When the technical team learns how to set Mac OSX’s time correctly, Apple’s world takeover will be complete. As I tweeted while in an argument with Microsoft Zune guy at New Media Expo, Apple is overtaking Microsoft and all Microsoft is doing is trying to PR this puppy, and should be manning all resources on building a better next version.

And for those of you on Brightkite, I didn’t check into Philly and posted this in Las Vegas instead of Philly. Anyway to got back and fix this?

If you have noticed my videos, I have taken out the Viddler brand and customized the player to really emphasize our positioning on Viddler. If you haven’t seen branding, check out this page with a few of the branded players.

With our “Brand Yourself” launch we have been switching the way we have been messaging ourselves to be a “Powered By Service” rather then a “Brand Claiming Service”. This is certainly a decentralizing our strategy but we really believe that supporting video podcasters is about taking away friction in this video space.

To point this out, Gary gave us mad props on this at his keynote (video still pending upload) but as Donna Papacosta points out, he was pretty adamant about it:

Our marketing on T-Shirt Distribution has the exact same messaging, check out some nice photo’s I found on Flickr of the shirts we printed out:

I love people using Viddler and cannot wait for all the rollouts we are going to push over the next month that are solving problems in this marketplace.

First of all, if you were even thinking about New Media Expo, you should be going.

If you haven’t introduced yourself yet and are going to New Media Expo, do it via Video. All you have to do is tag your video “newmediaexpo” or “newmediaexpo2008″ and it will go in general category of NewMediaExpo Videos. If you want to do an introduction, tag it as “newmediaexpointroduction” for it to go in introduction section.

New Media Expo is going to be a big event for Viddler. We are happy to setup our “virtual booth” up at the video section of New Media Expo, to help promote our next launch of “Brand Yourself” at Viddler. More information will come soon but watch the video for a sneak peak! forced teens vids: anime rape videos. public nudity movies nudity in public. teen lesbians toying in the shower christian sex toys.

This morning, this magazine arrived, and was happy to find an interview with Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary makes an excellent point in Affiliate Summit Magazine, Feed Front. It’s about being Genuine. He calls it being a RAT (real, authentic, and transparent). Now, I wouldn’t be big on this if I wasn’t caught up with all the spamming/real internet marketing occuring on Viddler. Check out Viddler Tag: Marketing, to see how big this has become on Viddler. It’s ugly. Cash gifting, lead generation, real estate marketing all seem to fit into this. Some of this has been brought on from TubeMogul, an amazing tool for podcasters to distribute high quality shows everywhere, but also a lead generators tricks of the trade.

At Viddler, we are a little conflicted with exactly what rules to put in place to prevent this and keep Viddler itself a “RAT”. Real Authentic Transparent.

Here is my metoday rant on this topic:

Would love to hear your thoughts on this topic!

And now for a genuine video from @clintus:

This was a result of my first time ever dropping the phone.

I have had the iPhone 3G for less than a month. It was a two foot fall (slipped out of my hand) directly on it’s screen on cement.

I went to the Apple store in Whitehall, PA and they denied my request for a replacement, saying that a 2 foot drop is my fault and they apply the same rules to handhelds as they do computers.

My options: consist of $500 to get a new one or the $300 to refurbish. There is also the factory warranty voiding perfoming (not worth anything anyways) $5 plastic replacement.

I have heard stories of different Apple stores having different policies on replacing these. And the good thing is that I travel alot for Viddler. Over the next few weeks I am going to be in NYC, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, and I am going to try to find the cool Apple Genius that will replace this free of charge. I feel this is my only other option, asside from just dealing with it and joining a class action lawsuit.

If you can help out, and know a cool Apple Store Genius/employee, please email me: rsandie@viddler.com

I recently revisited the application to see how well it was growing. First of all the application is 100x more functional then it was a few months ago. Major kudos to the Geni development team! Second, my family picked up on it. My mother added everyone in family tree. My mothers uncle Frank was adding people. As of now it’s 55 immediate and many more extended family members in the tree.

Check out family tree (via flash embed):

Using the site  I really think all Geni needs is a few minor extensibility product improvements and it could be a top 100 internet property within a year. These are the same feelings I had when I was one of the first users of thefacebook.com in college .

Product Suggestions for Geni:

1. Flickr Integration – I already upload my photo’s to Flickr and treat that as my management toolset for photo’s (yes I upload to facebook but who wants that). Machine Tags preffered. Importing would work as well.
2. Email Photo’s – 100,000% needed if you want me to keep on updating geni as often as I update flickr via my iPhone
3. Viddler Integration – last thing I want to do is upload more 150 Meg videos. Somehow I need the ability to store family videos on Geni. Machine tagging Viddler videos would be awesome use for this.
4. Family Privacy – after going over my girlfriends there was a few divorces and family history that she didn’t  want to get shared. Certain family members weren’t able to be put under a “unclassified person” so father-daughter relationships weren’t able to be fulfilled
5. Girlfriends – my girlfriend is not a partner, she is a girlfriend. I want the ability to be able to classify her as that on Geni.
6. Facebook Geni App – Hijacked – someone else sitting and profitting on Geni’s name on Facebook. I invited family to use the app without seeing the full functionality and painfully regret it. Geni should contact facebook and needs to develop a full on Facebook Application (none of this Gigya confusion).
7. BONUS: iPhone app similar to Facebook’s telling me of my families happening.

Creating a new mission for this blog I will be blogging about myself with this topic in mind. I don’t want to lose the personal flavor. Part of this has to do with a new initiative I have put on myself around personal branding (made redonculously famous by Gary Vaynerchuk). What does that mean in terms of technology? A good blog post on that shall come soon.

Also, I will be changing my bio on right to refer back to that original blog post.

What do you think, good change?

Like Colin’s it added some flavor to the photo and am not all that mad.