I recently found a competition online which GettyImages was running to remix their collection of pictures, videos, and audio into short stories, music videos, and or video art. I thought this would be a great opportunity to gain some credibility for the startup I’ve been working on for the past few months. I’ve been working on ‘vivid beat’ technology to automate and optimize the video editing process for music videos. This technology will not only help decide the most optimal video editing for music videos, but it will cut down the time it takes, from dozens of hours to just seconds or minutes. It’s all based on my video editing style which specializes in making very quick cuts in synchronization and understanding of the music. Read the rest of this entry »

In the fall of 2009, my school, Babson College, joined forces with Olin College (Engineering) and Wellesley College (Liberal Arts) in a Tri-College Partnership. One outcome of the partnership has been fast paced winter-session programs, lasting only about two weeks, where students self-organize and work on a specific challenge.

Last winter’s program centered on Charter Cities, essentially designing a city from scratch. This year’s winter program focused on redesigning education & pedagogy.

As a mostly self-taught entrepreneur, I have strong passion about the education process and was excited to participate in this winter’s program. Although I had prepared a variety of ideas and notes beforehand, the limitations of the two weeks still challenged myself and others.

Most of the time was spent getting to know the other eleven students across the different schools. This was very valuable in determining what worked best in education for people in general, as well as what would work best in terms of implementing ideas in the local Tri-College environment.

Overall, we concluded we all had one common goal: Adaptive Expertise

Read the rest of this entry »

There are many types of entrepreneurship. You simply don’t have to start a business to be an entrepreneur. One of the simplest ways to view entrepreneurship is taking initiative.

After I shutdown ShuffleChat, I felt I needed to find my next big thing and FAST. However, in the cloud of dust from spinning my wheels, desperately seeking the one idea that will give me enough traction to take off, I saw an opportunity out of no where.

One day I visited GoDaddy.com to check if a domain name was available and I noticed a small banner at the bottom of their website talking about a video contest. Apparently, GoDaddy crowdsourced TV commercials in the spring by running a contest with huge cash prizes.

Now GoDaddy was running another contest with 3x as much cash ($600K total) and a small twist. You had to make a 25 second TV commercial that would compel a viewer to visit their website to watch another minute or so of the video. It’s a great marketing strategy that has been deployed by other major companies.

GoDaddy announced the contest at the end of July and set the deadline as September 30th. Unfortunately, I was a little late to the game and only found out about it mid-August, and got serious about it near the end of August.

Two months to brainstorm, arrange, shoot, edit, and perfect, is barely enough time- and I had to do it in less than one. Read the rest of this entry »

Intro

I didn’t write a post summarizing everything that happened to my last startup, LinkLarry, but after reading YouCastr’s post-mortem I thought it made a lot of sense to review my experience with ShuffleChat. After all, I did start this blog to share my experiences and lessons learned through entrepreneurship. This Fall I intend on sticking to a routine and posting useful content weekly. But who knows, maybe my next venture will render me completely captivated.

Anyways, to make up for my lack of posting lately, here comes a long one… be warned.

Summary Of What Happened

I started ShuffleChat with my college roommate six months ago. It was our first night of spring semester when he showed me a new website he discovered over the winter break. He was ecstatic about things people were doing on the site; people were being very creative. It was called Chatroulette.com, and after spending a couple hours on the website we both realized we were in a position to make something better.

I’m an Internet & tech guy and my roommate is a marketing & sales guy; we had a lot of complementary skills. We foresaw the site and the social medium it created taking off. As we predicted, a couple months later the trend we spotted reached its tipping point and received major press such as NYTimes, CNN, WashingtonPost, just to name a few. This was the peak of the random video chat meme. Read the rest of this entry »