Continuations

This past weekend was the first annual Ecommerce Hack Day in New York organized by Dwolla and Etsy with support from many other companies. I was delighted to be a judge as there were a lot of talented folks working hard on building interesting ecommerce hacks. Here are some of my takeaways from the weekend. First, there are tons of exciting APIs that people can use to build new ecommerce experiences. Marketplaces such as Etsy and eBay have APISs. So do ecommerce sites such as Amazon and Zappo...

Susan, Oliver and the team at Ziggeo are organizing the second annual Video Hackday. You will learn the latest about video APIs from companies including Twilio, JW Player and of course Ziggeo. The first video hackday was a blast. I gave a talk on No Stack Startups and even managed to write a small hack myself. This year I will again be one of the judges for the hackathon. So if you are at all interested in video (and who isn’t?) you should definitely sign up and attend.

Saturday was the second Video Hackday, once again organized by Susan and Oliver from Ziggeo. What I like a lot about the format is that it is a single day without an overnight. While that may seem like very little time it does make it much less daunting and Video Hackday attracted a very diverse group of participants (including many first timers) as a result. All the engineers there from sponsors including Clarifai, Twilio, Embed.ly and JW Player were super friendly and helpful. I gave a brie...

The age of video is upon us. As humans we have a finely evolved system for extracting lots of information from even very short sequences of moving images. And now we have the bandwidth, storage and devices to make video ubiquitous. The result is an explosion not just of video usage across all platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Snapchat) but also in format, content and delivery innovations: livestreams (eg Meerkat, Periscope, YouNow), over the top (eg HBO, VHX), remixing (eg Dubsmash, Coub...