2013, the year of #socialtv

In 2013, the television is not dead. Higher definition, bigger screens, slicker design, hundreds of channels, we watch TV more than 3 hours a day in average.
But for some time now, the first screen gets some competition: notebooks, tablets, smartphones, all these cool devices have invaded the living room.
Let's have a closer look of what is called Social TV.

Majority of our daily media interactions are screen based

Our time online is spread between 4 primary media devices

TV is still the screen the majority of us are using the most during our leisure time. The big surprise is the way we watch TV in 2013.

77% use another device while they watch TV

Obviously viewers' attention is decreasing from the big screen.
What do the viewers do on their other devices while they watch TV?

This is where Social TV comes. Social TV refers to technologies surrounding television that promote communication and social interaction related to program content. It's hard to tell how many of these 77% described above are interacting with what they're watching but it's on this dimension that brands and broadcasters start to actively work on. 2013 will be a huge year for Social TV.

Social TV ecosystem

I've identified 4 main groups of actors in the Social TV space.

The first group is composed of companies like Twitter whose services have been diverted from their initial usage but, because they are simple and easy, reliable and mainstream, work pretty well to share emotions when watching TV.

Then we have dedicated startups like Viggle, GetGlue or Zeebox that want to impose their supremacy to users by developing their own brand, proposing a richer second screen experience on top of the TV layer (discussions, interactions, etc.)

Afterwards, there are the brands, torn between selling their soul to these startups or creating their own second screen solutions.

Finally, there are the broadcasters, trying to protect their business by managing the entire viewer experience from A to Z, and attempting to stop the bleeding of advertising revenue that switches slowly towards the online side. (Online advertising is projected to overtake TV advertising by 2016.)

What can Social TV bring to users, brands and broadcasters

Depending on which side you are, you are not expecting the same from Social TV. If you are a viewer, you may want a richer experience like additional informations pushed to you in real-time when you watch a drama, a predictive game or trivia to play with friends along the actions of a football game, an opportunity to buy the products you see, or a way to express your opinion during a political debate.

If you are a brand, it's a fantastic opportunity to interact directly with your customers and get more informations on their behavior. It's a new way to advertise without being interruptive. It's a perfect solution to measure instantly the results of an operation and get accurate KPIs.

If you are a broadcaster, you can get a slice of the online advertisement pie and improve your service to users by proposing experiences that you are the only one able to propose (remember, you are the guy that controls the stream on the first screen...).

Conclusion

We've been studying the social TV business and opportunities for more than 2 years now with my buddy Carlos Diaz & the Kwarter team and we think it makes sense to develop a comprehensive Social TV platform that simplifies the development of second screen experiences. At the end of the day, everybody, from the brands and their agencies to the broadcasters and the end users will be satisfied. We've raised $4M in venture capital last month to achieve this goal.



Update: Last NFL football game, halftime show, commercials and power outage combined to make it the most social event on television to date. The Super Bowl tallied up 30.6M social media comments (Twitter, public Facebook data and GetGlue checkins), 2.5 times last year’s social activity of 12.2 million.

What's Next For Sports Fans?

I believe that fans deserve more than just the game itself. I talk with fans on a daily basis and they tell me they want to broadcast LIVE their comments and report what's happening during the game. In this context, mobile becomes key! Fans now need a way to communicate their passion instantly and they cannot use their laptop to do so.

This is about connecting sports and fans together. Today a lot of Professional Teams are thinking about how they can improve the relationship with their fans, not only locally but globally. For example, let’s look at the San Francisco Giants and FC Barcelona in Europe. Together, these two teams have well over 10 million fans and most of them never get to the stadium! Thanks to technology these teams can now engage directly with the fans and create a personal relationship with each of them.

Check-in based apps allow teams to create an intimate link with their fans.

Imagine that you check into a game and based on your location and your personal context you get something that is truly interactive with the people around you.

This is where Kwarter comes!



Originally posted on Kwarter blog (http://blog.kwarter.com)

Don't confuse enthusiasm with priority

Coming up with a great idea gives you a rush. You start imagining the possibilities and the benefits. And of course, you want all that right away. So you drop everything else you're working on and begin pursuing your latest, greatest idea.

Bad move. The enthusiasm you have for a new idea is not an accurate indicator of its true worth. What seems like a sure-fire hit right now often gets downgraded to just a "nice to have" by morning. And "nice to have" isn't worth putting everything else on hold.

We have ideas for new features all the time. On top of that, we get dozens of interesting ideas from customers every day too. Sure, it'd be fun to immediately chase all these ideas to see where they lead. But if we did that, we'd just wind up running on a treadmill and never get anywhere.

So let your latest grand ideas cool off for a while first. By all means, have as many great ideas as you can. Get excited about them. Just don't act in the heat of the moment. Write them down and park them for a few days. Then, evaluate their actual priority with a calm mind.

[reWork], Jason Friend and David Heinemeir Hansson

Get Real!

"The business world is littered with dead documents that do nothing but waste people’s time. Reports no one reads, diagrams no one looks at, and specs that never resemble the finished product. These things take forever to make but only seconds to forget.

If you need to explain something, try getting real with it. Instead of describing what something looks like, draw it. Instead of explaining what something sounds like, hum it. Do everything you can to remove layers of abstraction. The problem with abstractions (like reports and documents) is that they create illusions of agreement. A hundred people can read the same words, but in their heads, they’re imagining a hundred different things.

That’s why you have to make something real right away."

[reWork], Jason Friend and David Heinemeir Hansson

Find Your Train Ticket

Albert Einstein was on a train.

He couldn't find his ticket after searching through all his pockets and bags. The conductor approached him and said something to the effect of, "Dr. Einstein, everyone knows who you are. We know that Princeton can afford to buy you another train ticket."

To which Einstein replied with something along the lines of, "I'm not worried about the money. I need to find the ticket to figure out where I'm going."

Like Einstein, you should worry not about the money, but about where you are going. If you figure out where you're going, the money will come.


The Art of Start - Guy Kawasaki

My minute on the Apple Game Center

We don't present the App Store anymore. Everyone has understood its power. Be featured on it means a lot of new users and an amazing traction.
I think people underestimate the power of the Apple Game Center. Let me introduce it.

The Game Center App is a built in app made to promote social gaming. Players can create and edit their account (on top of their iTunes account), create and manage friend relationships, view friend details, view game details, purchase games and launch games with or without invites.

The GameKit Framework provided to iOS developers enhances the game development by easily authenticating a user, by submitting scores and displaying leaderboards, by submitting and displaying achievements, by establishing multiplayer games and by providing in-game voice chat.

Apple provide a unique customizable UI with very powerful features. Lets talk about some of my favorites.

Auto-Matching (Multiplayer)
If your game is multiplayer, the basic assumption is that a lot of people want to play your game together with their friends but not only. Apple gets this information and do some great logic to figure out who is the best group to match. The cool thing is that if your game has several choices (let's say race tracks for instance), the system can inform the poor guy that is alone and automatically adjust him over to a more popular race track. Cooler than that, the system can auto-match with different player attributes. For example, if a music game requires to create a band with a drummer, a guitarist and whatever else, the system does it.

In Game Voice Chat
iOS are, by definition, devices with voice capabilities. Apple provides the controls to set the participation between the players: Team A talking amongst themselves and Team B talking amongst themselves, or everybody talking to everybody, etc. I didn't see a lot of games using this feature.

Leaderboards

The Game Center provide a very complete leaderboards solution allowing to filter by friends or all players, by time (today, this week, all time), by location, to retrive ranges, etc. 

It also handles different versions of a game, categories, multiple and overall leaderboards.

Achievements

In term of gamification, achievements are totally mandatory. Once again, the framework provides a standard UI and deep features. For instance, you can have a description before the person has accomplished that achievement and then a separate description for after the person has accomplished that achievement. You also have progress, hidden achievements (very useful if you want that the person purchases an in app purchase to unlock special ones).

To sum up, the Game Center is a very powerful tool to enhance the user experience, to avoid a lot of hours of developments and to promote your social game.

Choosing the Best Architecture

I have a terrible challenge to resolve. Make the good architecture choice to build the next big thing.

First, let's introduce the problematics of my project in few words. It's an iOS app (but also an Android app as soon as possible) with chat rooms + real-time feeds access + massive social features + massive game mechanics (with rewards). Furthermore, we need to store all the actions, the messages and the interactions to generate reports and data analysis.

Of course, we hope (and we will work 200% for that) our app will become mainstream, so I need a scalable architecture. Browsing the web (and specially Quora), I ended with this type:

What do you think?

---

Nick Kallen (@nk), twitter engineer:

• "All engineering solutions are transient
• Nothing's perfect but some solutions are good enough for a while
• Scalability solutions aren't magic. They involve partitioning, indexing, and replication
• All data for real-time queries MUST be in memory. Disk is for writes only.
• Some problems can be solved with pre-computation, but a lot can't
• Exploit locality where possible"

---

Sources: 
Big Data in Real-Time at Twitter: http://www.slideshare.net/nkallen/q-con-3770885
Instagram architecture: http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Burbn-Instagram-choose-Postgres-over-MySQL?q=instagram+database
Foursquare: http://www.quora.com/What-stack-does-Foursquare-run-on-EC2?q=foursquare+technology
Facebook: http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/06/18/the-software-behind-facebook/ and
http://www.quora.com/What-database-technology-is-Facebook-built-on?q=facebook+database
Groupon architecture: http://www.quora.com/Groupon/What-technology-platform-is-Groupon-built-on?q=groupon+technology
Zynga: http://www.quora.com/How-does-server-technology-work-for-Zyngas-games?q=zynga+technology
LinkedIn: http://www.quora.com/What-is-LinkedIn-s-database-architecture-like?q=linkedin+database
Quora: http://www.philwhln.com/quoras-technology-examined
Yelp: http://www.quora.com/What-is-Yelps-technology-stack?q=yelp+technology


[update 03/04/2011]


As Johann (CTO @seesmic) suggested us in late january + developers during the BeMyApp event in San Francisco, I will have a closer look at node.js + mongoDB, it looks pretty cool:

The Art of Recruiting

"It is essential to employ, trust, and reward those whose perspective, ability, and judgment are radically different from yours. It is also rare, for it requeries uncommon humility, tolerance, and wisdom."
- Dee W. Hock

Great Ideas for Starting Things

MAKE MEANING
The best reason to start an organization is to make meaning to create a product or service that makes the world a better place. So your first task is to decide how you can make meaning.

MAKE MANTRA
Forget mission statements; they're long, boring, and irrelevant. No one can ever remember them, much less implement them. Instead, take your meaning and make a mantra out of it. This will set your entire team on the right course.

Don't confuse mantras and tag lines. A mantra is for your employees; it's a guideline for what they do in their jobs. A tag line is for your customers; it's a guideline for how to use your product or service. For example, Nike's mantra is "Authentic athletic performance." Its tag line is "Just do it".

GET GOING
Start creating and delivering your product or service. Think soldering irons, compilers, hammers, saws, and AutoCAD - whatever tools you use to build products and services. Don't focus on pitching, writing, and planning.

DEFINE YOUR BUSINESS MODEL
No matter what kind of organization you're starting, you have to figure out a way to make money. The greatest idea, technology, product, or service is short-lived without a sustainable business model.

WEAVE A MAT (Milestones, Assumptions, and Tasks)
The final step is to compile three lists:

(a) major milestones you need to meet;

- Prove your concept

- Complete design specifications

- Finish a prototype

- Raise capital

- Ship a testable version to customers

- Ship the final version to customers

- Achieve breakeven

(b) assumptions that are built into your business model; and

(c) tasks you need to accomplish to create an organization. This will enforce discipline and keep your organization on track when all hell breaks loose (and all hell will break loose).

[The Art of the Start], Guy Kawasaki

Underdo your competition

"Conventional wisdom says that to beat your competitors, you need to one-up them. If they have four features, you need five (or fifteen, or twenty-five). If they’re spending $20,000, you need to spend $30,000. If they have fifty employees, you need a hundred.

This sort of one-upping, Cold War mentality is a dead end. When you get suckered into an arms race, you wind up in a never-ending battle that costs you massive amounts of money, time, and drive. And it forces you to constantly be on the defensive, too. Defensive companies can’t think ahead; they can only think behind. They don’t lead; they follow.

So what do you do instead? Do less than your competitors to beat them. Solve the simple problems and leave the hairy, difficult, nasty problems to the competition. Instead of one-upping, try one-downing. Instead of outdoing, try underdoing."

[reWork], Jason Friend and David Heinemeir Hansson