7 Questions for Clicker
Clicker isn’t just another directory service like Yelp or IMDB or WikiPedia clamoring for your precious attention. It's an online service that's been needed for some time that comes at a critical time - allowing users to easily post status updates about what video content they're engaged in (television, movies, web content), interact with other members and rate programming. With the convergence of the Web and traditional TV literally right around the corner, I spoke to head honcho Jim Lanzone, formerly of Ask.com, about his service and how it he's enabling people to stay connected during couchtime.
Here's 7 Questions for Clicker.
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1. What’s your title at Clicker and what role(s) do you play in the company?
CEO. Role changes daily wherever I'm needed to stir the drink, between people management, hiring, business development, investor management, product design, communications, brainstorming, writing blog posts, etc. (One thing I don't dabble in is straight-up technology. I was political science, not computer science.)
I do the stereotypical setting of strategic direction and planning, rah-rah speeches and all that, but at heart we're a product company filled with hardcore product and engineering veterans who have a clear idea of what we're doing and why. They don't want a ton of rah-rah. Just something challenging to build that they believe in.
We have more trust in this company than any I've ever worked in. Things are pretty seamless.
2. Describe how did the idea for your service came to be and explain how you brought it to life online. Just how in the world are you able to obtain such a comprehensive listing of television, web video and movie listings?
After I left Ask.com/IAC, I was an "entrepreneur-in-residence" (EIR) at Redpoint Ventures. I met each week with my buddy Dave Goldberg (now CEO of Survey Monkey, an amazing company), who was an EIR at Benchmark, to brainstorm and compare notes. The "TV Guide for Web video" idea was his, and after a few weeks of brainstorming it I fell in love with it too. It seemed clear as day to me that in the future people would navigate programming online, but to do it across millions of choices would take a highly structured navigation and discovery system with a beautiful UI. Those were things my team was good at.
Dave wasn't going to go after the project full-time, so with his blessing I took it on. Bill Gurley at Benchmark - who is perhaps the best analyst in the Valley as well as a great investor - had also been studying the market and was passionate about the project, and he agreed to fund us right away, along with Geoff Yang at Redpoint, who had been on the Ask board before we sold to IAC. Then Bill found a small company in LA who had a little head start on the project, but had mostly been doing things manually. We took them in and started building an automated system on top of their database, which we also grew exponentially. We spent a year in stealth building the system and came out of hiding in closed beta at TechCrunch50 last September.
As for how we do it, it's a classic structured data system. We determine which sites we want to index content from, then crawl their data, normalize it into our data structure, and keep it updated as the data and content change over time. By the time we're done with a particular source of video, it's highly automated. That's how we can scale over so many sources of data, most of which are changing their content every day. You just can't do it manually.
Besides having some of the industry's best search and development engineers, we have an incredible content management team that has developed true expertise in all of these premium content sources, and how to organize and monitor them. In addition, our users come in an help edit all the data. All descriptions, categories, and tags are open and editable by Clicker users.
We will get far deeper into community curation as time goes by.
3. Without giving away too much, describe your back-end (platforms, servers, databases, architecture, languages, etc.).
Let's save this for our second date. We're just getting to know each other.
4. How do you see Clicker continuing its current momentum as a social network for people that are really into TV and online video content?
If you go back to an interview I did with Greg Sterling in Sept 2009 after TC50, I was talking about how social would be the second major evolution of Clicker, after we got the core database and its supporting technologies - what I call the spine of the book - done right. Our mission is to help you find the right show, right now. To do that, you need to be able to navigate and discover what shows are available online, where they're at (usually more than one place, sometimes paid vs. free), and what's worth watching.
This last part - what's worth watching - is where most of our technology guns are focused these days, and the juiciest problem for us to solve.
We have the world's best - and I mean best - recommendation engineers at Clicker. People who can read the tea leaves of data and extract out for all users, and for you personally, what shows you will like. Social is another angle on discovery, and we just launched the first step, Clicker Social, at the Fortune conference last week. Clicker Social turns the lights on and allows Clicker users to see each other on our system, so they can share, observe, rate, comment, and even check-in to tell each other what they're watching -- all of which will help them decide either what to watch right now or what to add to their Playlist to watch later.
Social to us isn't really a network and isn't a game. It's a massive discovery system.
5. From your documentation, notifications and site, there’s an air of whimsical fun at Clicker (reflecting the television platform on which it is based). It’s an angle very welcome in a web that’s often stuffy. Explain this philosophy.
Dunno, we've always tried for that, even back at Ask. I like informality in communications with our users. Talk to them like regular people. Be irreverent, be a little funny, be even a little random sometimes. Don't annoy them and don't act too corporate, since if you ever spend time with us in the office, we're not like that. The trick is getting this voice to come through consistently as you grow the company (we're 40 people now) and more of us are given the bullhorn to speak or write on behalf of the company.
My advice is to write how you think (or talk), not like you think you're supposed to write. The worst kind of writing on the Web is the "golly-gee, folks, ho-hum punch you in the arm, friend" type of stiff, forced informality that sounds like a brochure. I see it all the time. If that's your idea of informal, stick to formal.
6. With Google TV right around the corner, more apps will move to the connected television as a platform. It would seem obvious that Clicker will look to be a driving force to this end. How do you plan on offering data based on TV programming on actual TVs and set-top boxes?
Yes and no. I am in favor of any system trying to bring the TV and Internet together. It's inevitable, so let's get moving here and figure it all out. The Rokus, Boxees, and now Google TVs of the world have been pioneers every bit as much as YouTube and Hulu. But I've always felt the gravitational pull of the open Web being an unstoppable force over time.
Your big screen is truly just a screen. Technologies are coming that will wirelessly connect your laptop, iPad and iPhone content to it in near-HD resolution, obviating the need for a box, be it Google TV or anything else. So to me, Chrome is just as likely to be your TV operating system in the near future as Android, Comcast, DirecTV or anything else.
Blake Krikorian, who founded the original connecting box, the Slingbox, is one of our board members and closest advisors, and is he using any box at home to watch TV? No, he uses a Mac Mini and a Hillcrest remote to navigate it from the couch. That's why we built Clicker.tv, so you could navigate our database from 10-feet away.
Now all that said, I also think boxes will have a place, especially in the early days, when so many people are building them...more even than the number of companies who have launched social entertainment check-in services the past few months! And yes, I think Clicker can and will be an app on those devices, just as we've been on Boxee since we first launched. But for any of that to matter, those boxes/devices need to get market penetration, which to date has been tough. We're agnostic to how that turns out, want to be present everywhere, and will help anyone who wants our help in making their own product successful.
The much, much bigger issue than devices will be content. There are so many guns pointed at each other over content access and distribution. Two things I'll add to that: 1) The middlemen are the ones at risk, not the content owners or creators, over time. The former's value is access, which allows them to control content distribution, whereas the latter may go through some business model trials and tribulations, but ultimately holds the true value for the consumer in a world where access will be (unless evil prevails) open, easy and everywhere; 2) Don't under-estimate the stream train of Web original content. The quality is rising fast. Especially in non-fiction verticals, where the discrepancy between cable and the Web is small and shrinking - and this represents 99% of the growth of cable content the past 10 years.
7. How will Clicker continue to integrate with existing social platforms, while continuing to build itself as a brand and strong service?
One interesting trick with our own check-in service is that from launch, we're partnered with over 40 sites to integrate our check-in buttons onto their sites, at the point of their videos, so users can check-in from anywhere. You'll see some more significant Facebook and Twitter integrations coming, as their personalization and annotation services start to roll out. And of course, we are going to make Clicker highly, highly social internally (and via mobile, where we just launched a Clicker companion app on Android, with iPhone coming soon).
Anything we can do to make it easy for people find the right show, right now, we'll do. Our service, audience, partnerships and technologies will be our moat in whatever the evolving landscape throws at us.
Thanks Jim! Good luck and keep people glued to the tube! :-)
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