“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

Sure, knowing a lot of things can certainly get you far in your career. But true genius take that fount of knowledge, and imagines a new way, a different way. Imagination without knowledge is fantasy; knowledge without imagination is uninspired.

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.” and “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

One challenge more established companies have in the valley is to continue innovating once they have an established product and business. It is very easy and tempting to simply add new features to a product, thereby “improving it.” However, it takes a truly innovative hand to improve a product by making it simpler, not more complex. Products like Microsoft Word suffered from this, and Google Web Search often threatens to fall off this precipice. Improve doesn’t equal new features; improve means driving more user value.

“The only real valuable thing is intuition.”

Many technological leaps coming from the valley are those where a person has been working on a problem space for some time, and suddenly has the insight into what could be the next great innovation. Einstein suggest we should trust that, because so much of what comes out of Silicon Valley is too “me too.” Have an intuition to truly make a leap forward? Follow it.

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

One challenge any founder has is to take their idea and explain it simply to others, specifically to potential investors. Often this comes, not from understanding their product well enough, but not understanding the user value they are driving. Yes, Facebook is a social network that provides photo sharing, comments, keeping up with friends and family, etc. But Mark Zuckerberg had it right: Facebook is about connecting people. Simple, and well understood.

“A person starts to live when he can live outside himself.”

All too often, product managers, executives, and co-founders decide what to build by examining their own pain points. Better and more successful products can be built when they think instead about what others needs, and better yet, by asking and assessing what others need. See the world to solve problems, don’t just see your world.

“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”

Mantras like “fail fast” and “plan to throw one away” are tropes heard over and over in the valley, yet this lesson is hard to see put into practice. Try something new, fail quickly and learn to do it better the second time. Instead of being afraid of failing, look forward to it, knowing what valuable things you will learn from it.

“For an idea that does not at first seem insane, there is no hope.”

Quotes like “Everything that can be invented has been invented” by the commissioner of the US Patent Office in 1899 and “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home” by then-president and founder of DEC Ken Olson in 1977 remind us that the true innovations that catapults technology forward are those that initially sound ludicrous and impossible. But it is only in these ideas that we can really truly make leaps.

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

As much as I hate this tired business buzzword phrase, it is true that solving problems often mean that we have to “think outside the box.” Often by abandoning the kind of thinking that perhaps created the problem, we can start to see what might solve that problem. Doing the same thing and expecting different results isn’t the definition of insanity; no, there are other words for that, like stubborn, unrealistic, misled, bureaucratic, etc.

“Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.”

I’ve heard it said: mediocre, even good people, often end up hiring those that are similarly mediocre or worse, as they are threatened by those that might be smarter and more talented as them. The truly great hiring other great people, knowing that everyone brings something different to the table, and by putting together many intelligent people, you can rise about old patterns of thought to take things in a new and innovative way.

“You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.”

The work that we do here in Silicon Valley affects people far and wide. Let us all take that responsibility seriously as we continue innovating. Do we need another service that helps wealthy serial entrepreneurs to connect with wealthy investors? Or a service that makes the process of finding your own personal chef marginally easier? Or should we understand that the “head of the cat” is meowing to people all over the world, often living far below our own standard of living, and the “tail pulling” we do here in the valley matters greatly.

In your opinion, how should TV networks be using the second screen to drive revenue?

TV viewers have evolved into multitaskers who like to continuously shift their focus. With the exception of the ultra-gripping drama that keeps you on the edge of your seat, most shows allow for some distraction. As a result, shows have to battle for attention within the timeframe of the show, not to mention episode-to-episode. Unfortunately, in that war for attention, traditional TV content is unidirectional and lacks the interactivity that has made the internet such a disruptive force. The second screen is the opportunity to engage the viewer with interactive content that complements and reinforces the traditional televised content, providing a level of personalization and targeted content that could never be achieved on a single televised screen. In that same context, that increased personalization and targeting allows advertisers to create new approaches to identifying and marketing to customers. Second screen consumers can signal interests through this interactive behavior, thus affecting what ads they see and when they see it—something unimaginable by television alone and part of why advertisers have steadily shifted many of their ad dollars towards digital marketing. Second screens let TV networks be more serious players in the digital advertising space and give them access to the associated growing budgets.

Which second screen apps are best-positioned to disrupt the TV industry?

The nature of the content will determine which apps will best disrupt the industry. At Turner, we provide content for news, sports, entertainment, and children/young adults. Each style of content and associated demographic has a different tolerance for both multiple screens as well as interactivity. Older viewers who grew up on television even before there were remote controls may not be so easily influenced by second screens, where as so-called who have grown up with the internet and YouTube will take to it naturally. Turner has been successful with their Team Coco app for the late night talk show “Conan”, showcasing a significant level of innovation through “synching” content between the second screen and the televised content. The drawback of this is that it’s hard to keep the viewer in the app for the whole episode, especially during commercials. Therein lies both the challenge and the opportunity. How do we, as television networks, help companies make their advertising more compelling?

It’s worth noting that the most successful second screen app is one that is rarely categorized as a “second screen” app: Twitter. It’s where you can hear general chatter, but then tune into a specific conversation through a hash tag. Twitter is where conversations evolve, particularly around televised content. On any given night, you’ll likely find a TV show driving multiple trending topics. Twitter’s retention is higher because you can always jump off the hashtag and resume your normal digital behavior without ever leaving the app. Can any of the upcoming second screen apps drive a value proposition that exceeds the ubiquity of Twitter? That remains to be seen.

How do you see the second screen industry evolving over the next five years?

There are already interesting companies that are building platforms for development that will standardize a core set of features and allow most shows to build innovative experiences. But more importantly, I believe the production of televised content will be done with the second screen in mind. Just as radio programming had to evolve to television and the opportunity for visual cues and grandiose special effects, so too should televised content evolve into interactive “lean forward” experiences. And as the content producers are willing to change their approach, so too will companies innovate to support new and exciting experiences on second screens. The traction of these devices is too great to ignore, and the opportunity both from a business (i.e. revenue) and creative perspective will drive significant innovation and a new style of programming—or new ways of looking at old content.

Best Way To Learn New Technologies

There’s something about reading the latest review on new technologies that seems a bit myopic. Top marketers and PR folks spin to the tech blogs and general press, who in turn share the excitement and enthusiasm and latest great feature. It’s the way they’ve been doing things for years and will continue to do so. The only way to truly separate the truth from the embellishments is to take it for a test spin. You wouldn’t buy a car without taking a test drive. Well, I don’t like to recommend adopting a new technology until I’ve taken it for a test spin. In the last year alone, I’ve found a bunch of products that seemed perfect for what we were doing–until I actually built one-off projects to test their implementation. And in other cases, I was pleasantly surprised by the flexibility of the technology to be converted into a use case that is perfect for Turner, even if the creator of the product didn’t anticipate it. That extra inside info can really make a difference.

Don’t Get Scammed

I’ve always hated going to the mechanic when I have car problems. My utter lack of car knowledge would make me an easy mark for someone who wanted to take advantage of me. They’d say, “Uh sir, you have a problem with your conflabulator–you need to pay $500.” And I’d respond, “Duh, sure!” It’s frustrating, but I accept it. I refuse to accept it in software. Years ago, I was working with another group on a project and the scope expanded by request of one of the key executives. The GM from the other team said his team of three developers would need two weeks to implement the change. I insisted that was a lazy estimate just to sandbag. Our manager defended the GM and reminded me not to ask for the impossible. That night, I went home and stewed in my anger. Then I realized there was only one way to win the argument. I pulled out my laptop and spent two hours writing the thing myself. The following Monday morning at the staff meeting, we took up the issue again. This time, I pulled out my laptop and said, “THIS is all I want.” I made it clear that they still needed to write their own version to make it compliant with security requirements, but it was clear that something that was mostly completed in two hours by a manager didn’t need six man-weeks of developer time. Sometimes, you’ve just got to show them what you want and call people on their BS.

Friction-Free Innovation

Let’s face it, we’ve all heard the person who says “I’ve got a great idea for a business. All I need is a coder.” Now, there’s nothing wrong with that per se. After all, most people in the world will never write a line of code. That doesn’t prevent them from coming up with the next great idea. But it does say something that most the best tech entrepreneurs did start as developers. When they saw the vision, they were also able to see the implementation along with the associated complexities and determine, “Hey, that’s doable!” Or they had the ability to hop on a laptop and just crank it out. I never want to lose that, especially since I need to be prepared in case the entrepreneurial bug comes back.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

When people know you can write code, it changes the tenor of the conversations you have. The expectations are higher in both directions, the depth isn’t constrained, and the possibilities are endless. I know a lot of careers at Microsoft that hit a wall when talented employees couldn’t prove their technical chops—partly because they couldn’t be a part of these geek-outs. It’s part of what encouraged me to recapture my technical depth after business school and one of those lessons that I’ve never lost.

Can’t Quit You

I love writing code. There, I said it. It can be frustrating, tiring, and oftentimes, you throw away a lot of that hard work for a better solution. But when I write a few lines and bring a computer/device/whatever to life, it’s likely the same feeling Dr. Frankenstein got. At the heart of everything great about Silicon Valley lies millions of lines of Python, PHP, Java, Javascript, Objective-C, and more. When I worked on open source initiatives at Microsoft, I used to quote the phrase about having an “itch to scratch” as a motivation to create software projects. I still have plenty of itches to scratch.

There may come a day when I stop writing code. At the very least, it’d give me a lot of extra free time that I’d love to have back. But it’ll be hard to ever cross that point as long as the above points are valid. There’ll always be new technologies, new opportunities, and new people that need my depth. And I’ll be glad to oblige…

The start date is the week that the first sessions will begin for each program. The Demo Day is a target date that may move based on venue availability, but should definitely be during the week targeted.

So, get your startup application in NOW to be considered for either program!

Would you like to spend the summer in San Francisco helping define the way the world will watch television years from now? Do you want a big company internship with a startup feel? We’re part of the Emerging Technologies group for Turner Broadcasting, the folks who bring you CNN, TNT, TBS, Adult Swim, Turner Sports, and so much more.

Our small team of veterans from Apple, Microsoft, and Google (all with additional entrepreneurial and/or investment experience) was built to transform the television experience. We’ve been creating experiences on everything from Smart TVs to iPhones and Android phones to iPads and XBoxes and more. We partner on cutting-edge products with everyone from Twitter and Google to tiny startups. In fact, we can’t even tell you about some of our top-secret projects until you join. We also launched Media Camp, a startup accelerator program for media technologies to help innovative new startups get into Turner properties.

We’re looking for students with great attitude and enthusiasm to work with us on these exciting initiatives. Associates will have the rare opportunity to participate in intimate educational sessions reserved for the best technology startups in the media space, and mingle with media executives, investors, entrepreneurs and technologists from the Silicon Valley and beyond. Whether you aspire to be a hustler, a hacker, or a designer for the next great startup, we want you to work and learn with us. We promise you’ll learn a ton, meet some great people who will help your career, and never be bored.

Job Requirements:

•  Current / recent undergraduate and graduate students
•  Minimum GPA of 3.0
•  Ability to commit 40 hours per week for 3 months with occasional evenings for dinners & social events
•  Excellent written, oral and interpersonal communication skills
•  Interest in and ability to work in both a team environment and alone with minimal direction
•  Knowledge of Mac and PC computers, including use Microsoft Office and Google Docs
•  Demonstrated use and comfort navigating websites and tools, including blogs, social networks, video and photo sharing, etc.
•  Interest in supporting entrepreneurs and technology innovation

Preferred:

• Coursework in business, communications, engineering or relevant field
• Knowledge of online advertising, SEM, SEO, WordPress, Adobe Suite (business applicants)
• Knowledge of web languages such as PHP, Python, Ruby, and Java as well as experience developing apps for devices platforms such as Android, iPhone, or Windows Phone (engineering applicants)

Compensation: Weekly stipend + event-related perks like free food

Apply now by emailing us your resume and/or portfolio.

We’re extremely excited to announce the expansion of Media Camp by the inclusion of a new Academy taking place this spring at Warner Bros. in Los Angeles.

Applications are now open, both for the new class as well as the second class to be hosted again in San Francisco and led by Turner. The team is really excited and will be working on both Academies to give our startups the best of both companies insights and connections.

We’d also like to welcome Ethan Applen and Daniel Ornstein from Warner Bros. to the core team. You’ll be seeing and hearing more from them I’m sure in future posts and events.

Here is the press release.

In case you didn’t catch Demo Day in September, here’s a short video of a few of our entrepreneur founders relaying their experiences about the program.

Follow the latest news on our first class of startups on Twitter.

Chute @getchute
Matcha @matchatv
Showbucks @showbuckstv
Socialize @socialize
SocialSamba @socialsamba
Switchcam @switchcam

Scaling and Measurement

A year ago, online video meant that the users were viewing them on site or on YouTube. Mobile device video views were but a small blip on most publishers’ radar. Today, we are seeing that number change dramatically. Based on the numbers of a cable TV network I’m familiar with, they are seeing upwards of a third of video views now coming from mobile. The biggest growth is coming from mobile apps for shows (as opposed to network apps or TV Everywhere apps). This is a combination of clips and full episodes, and is sure to climb as mobile devices proliferate.

One underlying question here is how the new mobile viewership is measured, and whether or not this measured activity is leading to tune-in on that living room big screen. If this causation can be proven, then the amount of investment put into this can be dramatically increased.

Advertisers and Revenue

Even if causation can’t be shown, monetizing mobile video is becoming a big business of its own. According to research and analysis by Pyramid Research, mobile video revenue is predicted to top $16 billion by 2014. As video viewing moves from desktop to mobile, how this content and viewing gets monetized will likely shift as well. Today, the vast majority of monetization of videos occurs in the form of a video ad before, during, or after the video content. Pre-rolls still dominate this group, accounting for two-thirds of video ad views, with the mid-roll counting the remaining third, and post-roll barely registering. But will users tolerate their precious mobile bandwidth (which is often paid for separately by customers or limited on a monthly basis) to video ad viewing?

There are other forms of monetization that are being tried by many. Examples include paying for individual pieces of content or paying for a subscription. Services like iTunes allow for per-show or per-content pricing while your monthly cable bill provides you with the subscription fee to watch TV Everywhere services. Consumers have gotten used to paying their monthly bill to get TV content, and likely that will be the driver for pay-for-content models. Having said that, consumers today are somewhat mystified, if not grumpy, about the cost of their monthly cable bill, and will likely be due for a rejiggering to keep up with consumer expectation.

Platforms

So where will this social, mobile, monetized viewing experience occur? As far as hardware platforms are concerned, there are two primary ones: Apple’s iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod) and Google’s Android (Samsung, HTC, Nexus, Kindle Fire, etc.). With more devices coming out all the time in all shapes and sizes suggest that we haven’t quite nailed down the ideal viewing hardware. Some prefer, and are used to, the larger tablet size (9″ – 11″). However, this can be unwieldy and so competitors have introduced a smaller tablet size (7″ – 8″), which trades off size for greater portability and versatility. Then there are the smartphones (4″ – 5″), where one gets ultimate portability and flexibility, but the viewing experience can be an eye-squinting one.

As for where conversation, interaction, and engagement occurs around television, there are a number of different options available today, and much like the hardware landscape, it’s clearly a situation where we haven’t quite figure out the magic formula. Viewing can happen on a TV publisher’s site, or on YouTube. More and more, content producers are creating video viewing apps for the mobile clients, and even here, there are a number of options: single show apps, network apps, third-party aggregation apps, just to name a few. With so many options, it’s no wonder viewers are confused, and also understandable that when it comes to discussion and engaging with others around TV content, they turn to the largest social networks: Twitter and Facebook. More activity happens around these two places than perhaps all the custom mobile apps combined. Any TV publisher that takes advantage of Twitter and Facebook will likely see dividends from their effort.

Check in apps

A specific kind of service unique to TV content are the various check-in apps that are now available in the iTunes App Store and the Google Play Store. Checking in to a TV show is much like checking in to a location in the real world: you announce to the world that you are at a certain place, or in this case, watching a certain show. It’s unclear to me what the value of this would be to the end-user. The business model is also not totally proven. Getting large numbers of users to check-in seems like a monumental task, and without those users, it’s not clear how a business like this will monetize at scale.

Challenges and predictions for 2013

As we move into 2013, the world continues to change, and so do the habits of TV viewers. More people are signing up for and using services like Twitter and Facebook, all kinds of mobile devices continue to proliferate, and the way online video get propagated and monetized continues to evolve. There are challenges for sure, for both the TV publisher as well as the viewer, and there may well be some successes next year, maybe even paradigm-shifting ones.

Challenges

Birthing a new business always brings with it a set of challenges, and social TV is no different:

Fracturing and segmentation: the number of options will continue plague the industry, which makes it more challenging for viewers and content creators. Many distribution channels and mechanisms means that consumers will have a dizzying array of choices when it comes to watching their favorite TV shows, but the same means TV publishers will have to spread their efforts to meet consumers at as many of those channels and mechanisms as they can afford.

Low monetization: so far, calls to “show me the money” in mobile and social have resulted in meager results, especially when compared to the linear revenue TV networks see today. Online video monetization is certainly on the rise, but it will have to get much bigger to be material to most TV networks. With the lower revenue, businesses will be challenged to find the funds to help along this industry, and growth could be stalled in 2013.

Non-professional content creators: YouTube has shown that anyone can be a producer of video content. The number of days of video content uploaded every minute continues to increase at a furious pace, and just by the law of large numbers, some percentage of that content will be successfully distributed and monetized. This could pose a real challenge of premium content producers, as their cost of production far exceeds this new post-amateur content creator’s costs.

Predictions

However, all is not lost. With these challenges will be those that overcome, and their efforts will result in positive change for the industry:

Experimenting leads to innovation: yes, fracturing can lead to headaches for all involved, but with so many companies trying so many things, we are bound to see some truly needle-moving technologies emerge. Amongst the many seeds planted, we are bound to see some tall-growing beautiful flowers in this field. And this includes software, hardware, user experience, and wireless network infrastructure.

Growing monetization: similarly, the many experiments in monetizing online video will lead to some great lessons learned about what works, what doesn’t, and what remains to be tried. Progress will surely be made as many clamor to unlock the potential revenue in the millions of hours of video content consumed.

TV networks and shows learn to be more “social”: as viewers get more immersed in social technology, it will translate to more conversation and interaction online for TV content. At the same time, those content creators who aim to keep up will find better ways to connect with their viewers, and lower the barrier for what separates the content creator with the content consumer. In the end, the best content relationships are two-way, and a better product gets created for a more satisfied consumer.

2013 will certainly be a year to watch in the ongoing evolution of social TV!

The tech world suffers the same issue. We have an infinite number of people that are anxious to label the new products that come out as successes and failures. How many articles were published about the new Microsoft Surface? When someone in our office sent a link to an article calling the Surface a disaster for Microsoft, I responded with two articles that described it as “sexy” and a “must-have” device. While I’m sure most of the people on the thread assumed I was just defending my former employer (I spent six years at Microsoft), I was actually trying to point out how all-over-the-map these so-called experts were. This same person in our office also tried to use my Surface for 90 seconds and then declared it unusable. 90 seconds and he could pass a judgment that it was going to fail. Not that it was a bad product, but that it would fail. Now I’m a believer in the Malcolm Gladwell Blink concept that experts in certain fields have the ability to make snap judgments, but it really is amazing who considers themselves experts. I find ignorance off-putting and there’s no shortage of it, whether it’s baseball, elections, or high-tech products.

Take, for instance, John Dvorak, the longtime PC Magazine editor (yeah, I didn’t know it still existed either). Dvorak needs to be taken with a grain of salt because he is famous for writing things that are almost intentionally absurd to draw attention to himself (journalism at its finest). Still, he wrote an article deriding the Surface not for its style, its usability, or its form factor, but rather the folly of releasing a stripped down version of the OS on the initial batch of Surfaces. Clearly, all the consumers who weren’t tech-savvy wouldn’t understand it’s not the full OS and would return the device, angry that they couldn’t run all of their apps. It looks too much like Windows, he insists. Now anything is possible, but it does seem a little comical given Microsoft’s past history of doing just this (Windows NT, Windows CE, Windows XP Embedded) with decent success. Of course, this is the same man who told Apple to ditch the Mac and license the iPhone design out to Samsung (oh, the irony). But he states it and people take that opinion with them, often declaring the Surface a failure.  Consequently, I had 2-3 friends post Dvorak’s comments on Facebook, lending it credence and perpetuating the idea that it was doomed before it had been out for a week.  And if/when he is wrong, he’ll quietly sweep it under the rug just as his predictions with the Mac & iPhone.  The lack of accountability is stunning.

Will the Surface succeed? I don’t know. I don’t even know what success means to Microsoft or anybody else in this case. What I do know is that the only thing we can assess is whether it is a good product or not (and even that is a matter of opinion, as the disparate Surface reviews indicate).  And frankly, product quality doesn’t really predict the whole story about future adoption.  For example, I thought the Palm Pre OS was much better than Android, but we all know how that turned out. How the market reacts is, well, up to the market. Speculation is absurd and only serves to skew perception instead of providing any real value and often leaves people with egg on their face. Ask Dick Morris. Ask those retired baseball scouts.  Ask John Dvorak.

Oh, and this 800 word blog post was written with pleasure on a so-called unusable Surface keyboard…

It’s not as easy as it seems in the above picture. If you are an entrepreneur thinking of a startup idea for 2013 or exploring pivoting your existing startup, what markets should you approach and what product should you build?

This topic has come up again and again in my conversations with venture capitalists and corporate executives. Based on those conversations with various experts in the industry, here are my predictions.

1. 2013 is going to be the year for social media marketing. Organizations are finally going to figure out how to measure, monetize and translate social media to create business value. Even though 70% of corporations have already adapted some form of platform for social media, the annual capital spend on social media is less than $10,000 on average. This will change in 2013; social media will be tightly integrated into the marketing plans. Most social projects that are experiments inside marketing departments will soon become mainstream across entire organizations.
2. Enhanced mobile advertising models. This is the Holy Grail that has not been cracked yet. Brands are getting fed up with traditional display banners and demanding mobile rich media ads. Mobile advertising is the fastest growing segment currently accounting for less than 5% of all advertising budgets, totaling $3B annually. This number will significantly increase next year spearheaded by advertising on tablets. With a true convergence happening across linear, social and offline purchases, vendors and advertisers will figure out efficient ways to capture users’ attention along with increased engagement.
3. Enterprise gamification. Almost every platform will have some form of gamification angle to it. We are currently seeing this trend across marketing platforms, enterprise employee training platforms and second-screen applications. 2013 will be the year where enterprise gamification will eclipse consumer gamification.
4. “So-Mofying”. Lately there has been a surge of VC investments in startups that provide technology to make the enterprise more social or mobile. This will peak in 2013. Enterprises/brands will need to think about mobile optimization strategies and how increase downloads for their applications.
5. Mobile Retail. This is another area where companies are coming out of the woodwork. I am not referring to mobile payment companies, but companies providing in-store and out-of-store shopping experiences, in-store navigation experiences, and social and mobile sharing of products.
6. Set-top boxes in 2013 will go through significant changes. Content owners and distributors are looking to increase engagement and provide a better experience in and across the linear channels. Consumers will begin to see enhanced visual guides, seamless integration with second screens, and seamless switching between VOD and linear broadcast.

That’s it for now. I am shutting down the crystal ball and getting back to work.