Ross Mayfield's Weblog

The Intersect iPad App for Netflix

With all the movies available on Netflix Instant, have you ever started to figure out what movie to watch with your family like this?

You know that guy who plays the Scarecrow in Batman?

Then you have to hope someone in your family knows. Until now.

The Intersect is an iPad app that lets you explore the Netflix library through intersecting search. That is, searching and browsing by genre, director, actor and/or more. Once you've found something you can add it to your Netflix queue or watch it instantly. And if you have a new Apple TV, you could stream the instant movie from your iPad's remote to your TV.

It was created by Kirsten Jones, who used to work with me at Socialtext and now works for a movie rental company that was cool enough to let her do this on her side time.

 

Distributed Talent, Beyond Silicon Valley

Om has a great post on Silicon Valley and the Talent Crunch. With angel funding booming and companies like Facebook, Twitter, Zynga growing like bad good talent and real estate are growing scarce again in the Valley. Yes, we cycle through boom and bust -- but what I don't understand is why we don't learn from it.

If space and talent constraints are your biggest growth challenge, shouldn't you look at distributed teams as a strategy?

• Socialtext is an extreme example. Over half of our team is distributed and working from home around the world. You can find management and the marketing function in Palo Alto, and sales offices in NY & London. Here's a post from two years in, before we had and office. Of course, it helps that we make collaboration software. 
• Before eBay, Skype was incorporated in Luxembourg, had management and marketing in Stockholm but swiftly moved it to London and 80% of its team in Estonia. SlideShare and others use a similar structure.
• Seat 1A strategy. Om's post mentions Flickr as a shinning example of talent. But they were based in Vancouver before Yahoo acquired them. Stuart Butterfield flew down here for the smallest reason and hit the conference circuit hard. It took me a while to realize that frequent flyers like Stuart & Caterina (and Dick Costolo during Feedburner) weren't locals.

This post isn't to say that distributed collaboration is easy, even with the great tools available. And I do believe you are best HQd here. But through boom and bust, distributed is a core strategy for a business made of people.

Badgeville Wins at TechCrunch Disrupt

I'm an advisor to Badgeville, which launched at TechCrunch Disrupt this week -- and won the audience choice award! Badgeville is a social rewards and analytics platform that increases loyalty and engagement with your web audience. It's been great to watch former Socialtexter Kris Duggan create a well timed startup from scratch. Here's their presentation:

TechCrunch Disrupt Presentation

View more presentations from Kris Duggan.