When the pandemic hit last year, Punchbowl, an online party planning service was left in the lurch with gatherings all but shut down, but instead of lamenting the situation, founder and CEO Matt Douglas went to work to rethink the company’s approach. He started by expanding the company’s online greeting card business, which until that point had been a small part of the revenue mix. Then he began talking to investors about a cash influx with an eye toward adding video to the platform.

That all culminated in a slew of announcements today. For starters, the company pulled in $5 million from SG Credit Partners. Douglas then turned around and bought online video production service VidHug and rebranded it for his platform as Memento. Finally, he invested in a couple of apps designed to draw new parents to the service early in their children’s lives. More on those shortly.

When the government made the no-gatherings rule official, Punchbowl needed a plan. “So we took our team and we put our energy towards a product that was less than 10% of our business prior to the pandemic and that is greeting cards,” Douglas said.

He made the greeting cards more personalized by adding a video component. His team got that going pretty fast, putting it together by Mother’s Day 2020 to include a visual message at a time when people couldn’t get together in person. But he wanted something more than that, and he dove into researching the video montage market. That ultimately led to him connecting with the founders of VidHug and making an offer to buy the Canadian startup.

Memento helps you make and collect video clips, pull them together into a video and choose music and backgrounds in a friendly interface, putting basic video production within reach of of just about any user.

Douglas sees adding video as more than a consumer play though. He believes with Memento, he can also attract business customers to use video — for example, as a way to welcome new employees, especially in distributed organizations, or to make a good-bye video for a long-time employee leaving the company, and in this way begin to expand the platform to include not only consumer customers, but businesses too.

While he was at it, he invested in some apps directed at new parents, particularly moms, including Qeepsake and pumpspotting. Qeepsake is an app that prompts parents with a text to collect different memories of their children’s lives and then print them in a keep-sake book. It’s aimed at parents who never got around to making that baby book. Pumpspotting helps support breastfeeding moms, whether they are at home or work, and it also provides resources for their employers to support nursing moms as well.

He believes that by attracting parents at the earliest time in their childrens’ lives, he can get them to use other Punchbowl services to plan birthday parties and other events, add video memories, and build long-term brand loyalty along the way.

Douglas has been at this since 2007 when he conceived and launched Punchbowl, and while he says he has had offers over the years to be acquired, he never wanted to sell. Although 2020 might have been the toughest year ever for his party planning business, he used the crisis to rethink it, and in the process may have built something that can survive and thrive longer term with a wider variety of services and revenue streams.

1971 is the name of the year and an Apple TV+ documentary series billed as The Year That Music Changed Everything. It’s also the number of hours the former President kept up his blog From the Desk Of. No, that’s not true. But it is satisfactual. The thesis of the movie 1971 is that music suddenly came into its own a year and a half past the Beatles’ sell date. In fact, the filmmakers make a very good case for this, with lots of studio footage of Elton John, Isaac Hayes, Andy Warhol and the Loud family, and the Osmond Family. I know this sounds like I’m being sarcastic. I would have been more onboard if there had been a little less of Keith Richards zombied out in the south of France and a tad more of the incredible Tapestry sessions that made the earth move under our feet and the sky come tumbling down, but by the end of the year the music apparently survived, I bought the bit,

2021 could use a little of this treatment. On Gray’s Anatomy, which has been time delayed 8 or so months back to the height of the Pandemic, the season finale sped up the clock to sync up mostly with the present. This Is Us started in the present, then flashed forward 4 years to a point midway between now and a previous flash forward so far in the future that apparently household appliances and haircut styles seemed to have stalled out in innovations and new features. The hidden message: forget binge viewing and working from home; it’s all watercooler conversations and cliffhangers just to be clear. Welcome back, Kotter.

We’re just weeks into the Vaccination Age and already we’re defaulting back to old norms far faster than the experts predict. Twitter is rolling out a $3 per month professional version for French and Canadian journalists that lets you save bookmarks and edit mistakes. Twitter Spaces has found a new tab in the mobile client to aid discovery of new live shows, and Facebook has invented Bulletin as a jump starter for neutered apolitical, private public radio oriented newsletters with embedded Clubhouse rules — evading the Apple 30% app store in-app tax by creating a %-to-be-named-later out-of-app subscription experience. No wonder the future is barely distinguishable from this Thursday. But don’t mistake my lack of outrage for anything but total support for the three major plans on the table so far. I actually think we’ll see the beginnings of some real shape-shifting out there in the creator economy, as we saw in an earlier time with Tom Wolf and Ken Kesey’s Electric Acid Kool Aid Test, and everything Kurt Vonnegut ever wrote.

Fifty years ago we saw what happens when the talent takes over the institution. ’72 the institution strikes back, ’73 the tapes are played back, ’74 even the president of the united states must stand naked. The underlying truth of the matter is that every year is the time when music takes over. The revolution continues to not be televised, this time shared with added interactivity. Joni Mitchell forever sits gunning the engine in her car waiting at the top of the hill:

He makes friends easy
He’s not like me
I watch for judgement anxiously
Now where in the city can that boy be

Car on a Hill © November 28, 1973; Crazy Crow Music

from the Gillmor Gang Newsletter

__________________

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, May 28, 2021.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

Subscribe to the new Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook … and here’s our sister show G3 on Facebook.

For the past several months or so, I’ve been writing an accompanying post to editions of the Gillmor Gang. Due to production issues, I’m usually at least a week behind the recording session for the target show. This originally seemed like an impediment to the process of enhancing the impact of the show, but over time and various attempts to solve the out-of-sync timing problem, I began to see the delay actually produced some interesting context to the original recording. First and foremost, what seemed important weeks earlier became more nuanced as things developed — or often didn’t. Politics seemed loud and unprecedented in the moment; 10 days later, the ups and downs of the graph smoothed out the drama and accentuated the relative stability of intuitive analysis.

This in turn isolated some of the conflicts and pressure the media perceived as central to its ability to fund journalism, or more accurately nonfictional novelistic engagement and eyeball maintenance. And produced a wave of antagonism toward this repetitive ginned-up sawtooth of anger and despair. As the vaccines began to take root, we slowly but surely confirmed that we really didn’t have to live that way. Streaming and notifications are now in the process of moving into the mainstream, with media companies climbing into bed with tech giants and hybrid venture catalysts.

Cracks in this new infrastructure threaten to slow down the requisite belief that these changes will stick. Clubhouse seems to be going through a bloating effect on its gateway page; what once was a short list of 5 or 6 rooms now balloons to 20 or more entries. Topics, never my favorite mechanism for discovery, nail many of these conversations to the wall and move away from the underlying name intersections that suggest emergent themes rather than sandblasting them into the stage. Release notes of updates suggest the analytics are being mined for improvements to the differentiation with vanilla podcasts, but how they are surfaced is time sensitive to the momentum of the platform. The good news is that healthy injections from the founder and venture team will keep things afloat while we see the impact of the Android client. Competitive pressure, particularly from Kara Swisher on Twitter Spaces, will also help integrate mainstream and newsletter media with streaming audio innovation.

At a broader level, acquisitions and merger/alliances are recasting media companies as hybrid gorillas. Although AT&T is positioned by many as backing out of their foray into content, a more interesting dynamic is the combination of WarnerMedia scripted assets with Discovery’s sports and reality programming in an ad-supported streaming bundle. It’s reminiscent of the formation of MGM in the early days of Hollywood, blending a small beleaguered studio, Metro Pictures, with Sam Goldwyn’s independent near-bankrupt studio, firing Goldwyn but keeping the name, and installing a third studio’s Louis B. Mayer and his production head Irving Thalberg as executives of the bundled company. Not so coincidentally, it was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer who was acquired by Amazon a few days later, bringing its library of the James Bond franchise, more than 4,000 classic films, and 17, 000 television properties to Prime’s 175 million active subscribers.

At various times, MGM and its United Artists acquisition have been bought and resold as power switched first from theaters to television and then to cable. Ted Turner famously bought the library and played it off on its Turner Classic Movies channel. Now the pandemic’s call to action has propelled digital transformation to the fore, and tossed yet another mix of the puzzle pieces into play. But MGM’s collapse in the 60’s and 70’s and the auctioning off of its backlot to real estate developers suggests something similar might be happening today with broadcast television networks losing out one by one when the music stops playing in this corporate game of musical chairs. Cable news may be blocked out if antitrust regulators refuse attempts to merge the new Warners Discovery with Comcast, the former now home for CNN and the latter MSNBC. Regulators will likely frown on two of the remaining 3 broadcast networks merging with a Viacom/CBS and Comcast /NBC/Universal deal.

Instead, the tech networks and their burgeoning social audio/newsletter platforms will virtualize the big studio model. Cable news will move from podcasts through Clubhouse and Spaces to newsletter brands, building tentpole events around technology news, innovations coverage, and startup deal flow. The scale of big incumbents like Netflix, Disney, and Amazon will produce 5,000+ executive interviews, with independent analysis from break-away blogs and newsletters looking a lot like a merger of MSNBC and CNBC. Apple and Spotify will emulate the ad-supported free tiers of their streaming networks to unbundle the music companies from their captive back catalogues and create a hybrid live performance promotional Top Forty for the play-from-anywhere crowd. The Marvel, DC, Star Wars cinematic universes will use the digital tier to promote theatrical experiences as the pandemic moves overseas and hopefully is suppressed globally over 2022. Politics, a trailing indicator, will be the arbiter of how quickly we can rearchitect in infrastructure, health care, and an equitable working majority rule of law. By then, maybe I can take a 3D VR trip through the MGM backlot and dream that this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.

from the Gillmor Gang Newsletter

__________________

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, May 21, 2021.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

Subscribe to the new Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook … and here’s our sister show G3 on Facebook.

Somehow it’s Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday this week. Some of you may not think that’s a big deal, but I do. The fact of his talent pretty much drowns out most other ideas of what to write about, but here’s to the birthday boy. Keep up the good work.

Back then, we wondered why Dylan kept changing, refusing to be pinned down, going electric, photographed at the Wailing Wall, you name it. We sure were hungry for direction, it seemed. Growing up in the Sixties, everything was possible. After Trump, we’re rethinking that. Crypto is a grift, better than gold, down 50%, up a third. If I wanted to throw money away, just stand on the corner and hand out NFT’s.

As much as this stuff makes my head hurt, it does make it easier to second guess the Discovery/WarnerMedia and Amazon MGM deals. In a nutshell, streaming has shaken the media world into a massive upheaval. The linear TV big three — NBC, CBS, and ABC — have lost control of our TV sets. Netflix has replaced the idea of advertising supported product (Gray’s Anatomy, This Is Us) with binge drop shows about chess. No advertising, a monthly subscription fee, and oh, by the way, free shipping. That last one is Amazon Prime, which throws in a version of Netflix with everything we get delivered during the pandemic, which is everything. When we get to the vaccinated New Normal, it will still mean everything.

Many acronyms later, the cable networks look like this: you can go through NBCUniversal now known as Comcast for all your TV plus broadband for all your Internet, or dump all that TV and just use broadband to get to the new TV, now known as streaming. Amazon bundled delivery with streaming (Prime) and studio (MGM). Google bundled streaming (YouTube TV) with advertising (search). Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile bundled broadband with cash, and the first two tried to buy up the studios and talent. 5G is the carrier Waterloo, drowning broadband in debt as it overtakes the previous cable/content cartel.

This is an oversimplified and inaccurate picture of where we are about to be. But central to the shakeout is what we do with this puzzle. The speed with which vaccinations are being distributed suggests a timetable for success in restoring the economy and bridging the gap to 5G and a hybrid bundle of delivery and digital restructuring. Here’s a trick question: if California has already vaccinated 81% of its population, will Gavin Newsom be recalled as Governor? Here’s another: who will be the winners of the streaming media reboot? Spoiler alert: the answers to both are related.

As we ease our way into the new vaccinated protocols, we start with our families and build out to our colleagues and friends. In effect, we are building a new cohort that speaks to the dynamics of the digital acceleration. A year ago, delivery was a wartime necessity, not an economic choice. Today, the choice of a restaurant or an event will be made based on the intuitive messages sent by the services. If one venue deals with masking and distancing as a transitional choice for its customers, the underlying message is of an evolving strategy based on changing information. Each day we experience more confidence in science and less fear of the unknown is validation of the new cohort we’re forming.

Do we miss the movie theater experience? Sure, but not enough to forego the play-from-home cohort we’ve gotten used to the past year. As our confidence grows, even Zoom calls become more productive and a way of planning for the days when we can reconnect in person. In this cohort process, we build muscle for a new normal that draws strength from both virtual and physical worlds.

Now the dynamic of vaccine success kicks in. Every day, week, month that the virus recedes is marked by the accumulation of a new normal: the more things don’t change, the better things are. Public officials take credit for backing the right horse. Kids go back to school; companies find the right combination of home office, collaboration room Thursdays, and business travel right-sizing. The new normal cohort develops discounts and incentives for its trailblazers and influencers. Special bundles emerge in subscription streaming, blending advertising-supported discounts in return for bigger production budgets. News subscription services provide cohort access to notification streams, replacing repetitive fear-based programming with science-based alerts and business strategy updates.

Answers: No. California is a blue state. And, we will be the winners of the streaming consolidation — as creators remind Hollywood of their power to validate the direction of how we live in the near present. On this episode of the Gang, I mention a new streaming network, Buki, that has emerged to challenge the old alphabet TV networks with a heady brew of ad-supported binge goodness. Brent Leary interrupts to complain that he doesn’t have Buki. That’s because I made it up. Buki, keep up the good work.

from the Gillmor Gang Newsletter

__________________

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, May 14, 2021.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

Subscribe to the new Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook … and here’s our sister show G3 on Facebook.

We don’t hear as much these days about “Zoom fatigue” as we did in the first months after the Covid-19 pandemic kicked off last year, but what’s less clear is whether people became more tolerant to the medium, or if they’d found ways of coping with it better, or if they were hopeful that tools for coping would soon be around the corner.

Today, a startup that has come up with a solution to handling all that video is today announcing some funding to grow, on the understanding that whatever people are doing with video today, there will be a lot more video to handle in the future, and they will need more than just a good internet connection, microphone and video camera to deal with it.

Rewatch, which has built a set of tools for organizations to create a “system of record” for their internal video archives — not just a place to “rewatch” all of their older live video calls, but to search and organise information arising from those calls — has closed a $20 million round of funding.

Along with this, Rewatch from today is opening up its platform from invite-only to general availability.

This latest round is a Series A and is being led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Semil Shah at Haystack and Kent Goldman at Upside Partners, as well as a number of individuals, also participating. It comes on the heels of Rewatch announcing a $2 million seed round only in January of this year. But it’s had some buzz in the intervening months: customers that have started using Rewatch include GitHub (where co-founders Connor Sears and Scott Goldman previously worked together), Brex, Envoy, and The Athletic.

The issue that Rewatch is tackling is the fact that a lot more of our work communications are happening over video. But while video calling has been hailed as a great boost to productivity — you can work wherever you are now, as long as you have a video connection — in fact, it’s not.

Yes, we are talking to each other a lot, but we are also losing information from those calls because they’re not being tracked as well as they could be. And, by spending all of our time talking, many of us are working on other things less, or are confined into more rigid times when we can.

Rewatch has built a system that plugs into Zoom and Google Meet, two of the most-used video tools in the workplace, and automatically imports all of your office’s or team’s video chats into a system. This lets you browse libraries of video-based conversations or meetings to watch them on-demand, on your time. It also provides transcripts and search tools for finding information in those calls.

You can turn off the automatic imports, or further customize how meetings are filed or accessibility. Sears said that Rewatch can be used for any video created on any platform, for now those require manually importing the videos into the Rewatch system.

Sears also said that over time it will also be adding in ways to automatically turn items from meetings into, say, work tickets to follow them up.

While there are a number of transcription services available on tap these days, as well as any number of cloud-based storage providers where you can keep video archives, what is notable about Rewatch’s is that it’s identified the pain point of managing and indexing those archives and keeping them in a single place for many to use.

In this way, Rewatch is highlighting and addressing what I think of as the crux of the productivity paradox.

Essentially, it is this: the tech industry has given us a lot of tools to help us work better, but actually, the work required to use those tools can outweigh the utility of the tools themselves.

(And I have to admit, this is one of the reasons why I’ve grown to dislike Slack. Yes, we all get to communicate on it, and it’s great to have something to connect all of us, but it just takes up so much damn time to read through everything and figure out what’s useful and what is just watercooler chat.)

“We go to where companies already are, and we automate, pull in video so that you don’t have to think about it,” Sears said. “The effort around a lot of this takes a lot of diligence to make sure people are recording and transcribing and distributing and removing. We are making this seamless and effortless.”

It sometimes feels like we are on the cusp, technologically, of leaning on tools by way of AI and other innovations that might finally cross that chasm and give us actual productivity out of our productivity apps. Dooly, which raised funding last week, is looking to do the same in the world of sales software (automatically populating various sales software with data from your phone, video and text chats, and other sources), is another example of how this is playing out.

Similarly, we’re starting to see an interesting wave of companies emerge that are looking for better ways to manage and tap into all that video content that we now have swimming around us. AnyClip, which announced funding yesterday, is also applying better analytics and search to internal company video libraries, but also has its sights on a wider opportunity: organizing any video trove. That points, too, to the bigger opportunity for Rewatch.

For now, though, enterprises and businesses are an opportunity enough.

“As investors we get excited about founders first and foremost, and Connor and Scott immediately impressed us with their experience, clear articulation of the problem, and their vision for how Rewatch could be the end-all solution for video and knowledge management in an organization,” noted David Ulevitch, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, in a blog post. “They both worked at GitHub in senior roles from the early days, as a Senior Director of Product Design and a Principal Engineer, respectively, and have first-hand experience scaling a product. Since founding Rewatch in early 2020, they have very quickly built a great product, sold it to large-scale customers, and hired top-tier talent, demonstrating rapid founder and company velocity that is key to building an enduring company.”

TikTok today is introducing a feature that will allow creators to deal with online abuse in an easier way. The company is launching new tools that will allow creators to bulk delete comments and block users, instead of having to moderate comments one-by-one. The update may be somewhat controversial, as it allows creators to curate a persona where the content they’ve posted is seemingly well-received, when in reality, it had a lot of pushback or correction from the broader TikTok community.

Twitter had faced this same issue in the past, and ultimately split the difference between giving the original poster control over the conversation or ceding that control to the Twitter user base at large. With Twitter’s “Hidden Replies” feature, it allow users to tuck all the unhelpful and rude comments behind an extra click — that way, the replies themselves were not removed entirely, but they weren’t allowed to derail a conversation.

TikTok, on the other hand, is putting full control in the hands of the creator. That’s a more Facebook-like approach, where users can delete anything they want from appearing on their own user profile — including comments on their posts that they don’t like.

Image Credits: TikTok; image shows the bulk delete tool (why is the user deleting nice comments, though?)

This may be the right choice for TikTok, since its social network is mainly designed to have conversations through videos. Video formats like duets and stitches allow TikTok users to react and reply to other content on the site, while also creating new content that raises a creator’s own profile. Some creators use this to their advantage. They single out others who’ve posted something they disagree with — often content that toes the line between being a “bad opinion” and one that violates rules around misinformation. They then duet or stitch (or green screen duet) that content to share their own thoughts on the subject.

However, this process can send a brigade of angry fans over to the other video, where they proceed to troll and harass the original poster. (To what extent that’s a warranted reaction may depend on your own stance on the post and the politics in question.)

TikTok says such abuse can be “discouraging.” It certainly has been for some of TikTok’s early stars, like Charli D’Amelio, a teenage girl who somehow rocketed to TikTok stardom, where she now has nearly 116 million followers. D’Amelio has begun to speak more publicly about the downsides of her online fame, saying she now finds it difficult to find enjoyment on TikTok due the mounting criticism she receives there. This includes the abusive remarks she received, the body shaming, and dealing with the competitive, dishonest nature of the influencer set, among other things.

The new bulk delete feature doesn’t solve these problems, but it may allow creators to clean up their comment section and block trolls quickly enough that they can re-establish some semblance of control over their profile.

To use the new feature, users can long-press on a comment or tap the pencil icon in the upper-left corner to open a window of options. From here, they can select up to 100 comments or accounts instead of going one-by-one, making it easier to delete or report multiple comments or block users in bulk.

TikTok says the new feature is rolling out first to Great Britain, South Korea, Spain, United Arab Emirates, Vietnam and Thailand, and will continue to expand to other markets globally in the weeks to come, including the U.S.

In the early days of social media, all things seemed possible. Twitter was this weird reboot of blogs, with a social layer atop an RSS feed that gave authority to last in/first out musings by providing data not just about read or unread but shared by who. You could take that authority data and rank posts by who shared them and who followed those people and what they in turn recommended. Although this was mostly ignored at the time by vendors and writers looking for a viral eyeball payoff, for those looking to support new talent there was something more valuable than reach.

Something like that could happen with Clubhouse and newsletters. On this week’s edition of the Gillmor Gang, recorded just over a week ago, we talk about Clubhouse, the Facebook advisory board and its siderstep of the Trump deplatforming, and early stuff I can never quite remember because the show always takes a bit too long to fully get up to speed. I’d apologize for this, but the apology would take too long to reach sincerity sufficient to not make things worse. This by the way is why newsletters exist — to save time scouring the Web and cable news for a sufficient return on investment, as in “well there’s another [duration] I’ll never get back.”

Temporal time displacement suffered a serious blow at the hands of HBO Max and its strategy of releasing theater-less blockbusters on the streaming network in 2021 but only intermittently moving forward. As the CDC noted in a confusing but welcome announcement this past Thursday, vaccines are making possible a safe return to theaters in the near future. Soon it will be possible to be confused about the movie Tenet on the big screen. It is not a spoiler to say that Tenet is all about moving through time in the normal forward but also the incomprehensible backward. Time travel stories are invariably brought to a complete standstill when how this works is explained. The only thing harder to do is find a way to end a Saturday Night Live sketch. The only rationale appears to be that the sketch is over, like a bad pun not even worthy of a groan.

Speaking as I was of Clubhouse, we tried it out last Wednesday with Keith Teare and a brief drive-by from Brent Leary. Somehow we were in Hallway mode, which actually captured the feel of the thing nicely. Being in experimental mood, I added anyone who showed up as a speaker whether they wanted to or not. The result felt like a remnant of my childhood in Woodstock, NY, where we were part of a party line with nearby neighbors. You’d be talking with someone and suddenly realize someone else was on the line, interrupting to basically say they needed to make a more important call. Awkward but oddly exhilarating, as you realized the potential of not only lurking but lurked. I’m not sure how this is useful or not, but remember that @mentions and retweets were invented not by Twitter but by users. And using Twitter like a party line turned out to be the true superpower of the social network. On Clubhouse, if no one had anything to say, they were quiet. It was very peaceful.

Another pleasant surprise was a listener/speaker from Manchester, England who professed to being a longtime listener to the Gang. He and Keith, also from Manchester, started talking about Manchester United, an important football team I know nothing about. An old friend from the conference circuit popped in and our producer/director Tina Chase Gillmor somehow started up a conversation about my alleged style as a writer. Talking about me is easily my least favorite thing to do, but having others do the job is high on my most list. It’s also acutely reminiscent of the tech conference hallway conversation stubbed out by the pandemic. I now started to understand why Hallway mode was so-called. It’s the grease of the wheel business rides on. Follow the Gillmor Gang club on Clubhouse and you’ll be notified about our next experiment.

from the Gillmor Gang Newsletter

__________________

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, May 7, 2021.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

Subscribe to the new Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook … and here’s our sister show G3 on Facebook.

Usually we wait a few days until a show has settled. While we stall, our producer and director Tina Chase Gillmor scours the recording for short clips that give a sense of the flavor and tenor of the conversation. This show, recorded a little more than 2 weeks ago, went deep on politics, government, anything but Trump, and eventually a pivot to the tech world and how it was grappling with the possible return to the office. I asked Brent Leary what he thought about the likelihood of working from anywhere, and discovered he was multitasking to the director’s cut of a famous Prince video.

Brian Solis had sent him this re-edit of George Harrison’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist, featuring a wonderful version of his classic White Album track While My Guitar Gently Weeps. An all-star cast of friends of the late Beatle included Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne, and a surprise guitar solo by Prince that ended with him tossing his guitar to the heavens in triumph. While the new video doesn’t reveal what happened to the instrument, it does extend our views of Prince and particularly his interactions with the other players. Re-released 17 years later, it does the impossible, preserving the magic of the event while somehow extending the mechanics of how Prince captivated not just his audience but his peers.

It also reminds me of what magic we’ve come to expect from the technology industry and its band of stars. The success of the vaccines came not just from the miracle of new science and desperate nature of humanity’s need for rescue from the pandemic, but also from the growing hope that government and even politics can work. The jury has been and will continue to be out on how quickly we can recover, but there’s a question of recovering what. Is it a binary choice of office or mobile or something in between? Already some tech companies have moved toward the hybrid approach, where the office would reopen and workers would return for some but not all of the week.

As a parent of two girls, I’ve watched with fascination as they grew up with technology as a given not the revolution that it is. Our youngest has for many years structured her communication with us and her peers as a text-based, emotional video channel, and occasional authorization for face-to-face interaction. The pandemic made this mandatory, but as we get closer to a safer environment, the skills we’ve been mandated to learn are only going to solidify. Texting can be replied to in a while or treated as just information to be absorbed. Voice calls are optional, Facetime usually accepted as an opportunity to catch up but certainly not a daily proposition. Sneaking a peek at her Instagram feed is good for calming nerves but abstract in terms of any real details. That’s as it should be; I actually need more emotional buttressing than she does.

Prince was like that when he appeared early in his career, conversant in the history of his craft and matter-of-fact in his approach to the technology innovations unleashed by George Martin and the Beatles with Revolver and transformationally Sgt.Pepper. Prince took that studio process, the multitracking inventions of Stevie Wonder, the extra-worldly funk explorations of Hendrix, the cool mastery of Miles — and did it all. The record business pushed him, he pushed back, changed his name to a symbol, and eventually won control of his recordings. Nothing compares 2 U, he wrote.

The music business, like the movie and TV business, has changed everything about how we consume their products. Musicians have been homebound for more than a year with no way of touring to replace what used to be the major part of their income. Some are turning to the crazy world of packaging their work as crypto objects, the so-called non fungible tokens. Joke projects like Dogecoin have become intertwined with Saturday Night Live as Elon Musk plays a character in Weekend Update avoiding persistent questions about just what is going on here. As one Tweeter noted, they made a good choice watching Dogecoin dropping like a stone as funnier than the comedy broadcast.

Sooner or later the dust will settle and we can choose some Sneak Peeks to nudge the way forward. As much as we buy the idea that we need to return to some kind of normal, the sneaking suspicion is that we deserve some relief from the rigged deck that is our politics, our culture, devoid of empathy and based on power as the ultimate rationale for who can run the show. Like the filters in Zoom that let us change our backgrounds to where we choose to be coming from, it’s a reasonable choice to define our new office as a blend of the best of our new worlds.

from the Gillmor Gang Newsletter

__________________

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, April 30, 2021.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

Subscribe to the new Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook … and here’s our sister show G3 on Facebook.

Snack, a video-first mobile dating app designed with a younger generation in mind, is opening itself up to Gen Z investors. The startup today announced the launch of its own Gen Z Syndicate on AngelList, which will allow Gen Z community members, influencers, creators and others to participate in the company’s upcoming $2 million SAFE, alongside other funds and angel investors.

The company in February announced $3.5 million in seed funding for its modern, TikTok-style dating app where users post videos to a feed which others then like in order to be matched. Snack believes videos allow users to better showcase their interests and lifestyle, as well as show off their personalities in ways static photos cannot. When two people like each other’s videos, they’re invited to direct message one another.

The experience is very much like engaging with a TikTok that’s built for dating. In fact, Snack is one of the first apps that will be adopting TikTok’s new Login SDK for third-party apps, which gives Snack’s users the ability to reshare their TikTok videos to their dating profiles.

Image Credits: Snack

Snack’s founder, Kim Kaplan, has a history in the dating app market. She previously led product, marketing and revenue at Plenty of Fish, which later sold to Match Group for $575 million in 2015.

“If you think about Plenty of Fish, we really launched off of Google SEO,” Kaplan explains. “Then you had Zoosk and Badoo, which launched off of Facebook — when it was a really early platform and it was easy to get traffic from it. Then you had Tinder and Bumble, which launched off of mobile-first. They were the first apps to come out and design and build with mobile in mind versus the rest of us which were desktop, trying to cram everything into a mobile phone,” she says.

“And I fundamentally believe now that the right opportunity is the distribution on TikTok, as well as influencers. I think that combination of TikTok being the new distribution channel is going to be a massive opportunity — and that’s what we’re trying to leverage,” Kaplan says.

Longer-term, Snack is likely to grow beyond the young, Gen Z demographic. Already, the app is attracting users in their 20’s and early 30’s, thanks to its TikTok ties. But as TikTok naturally ages up, so will Snack.

Snack began fundraising in September of last year, then hired the team, built the app and launched in late February.

Image Credits: Snack

“We’re only about eight weeks into this right now, but we’re seeing a lot of excitement, a lot of user growth,” Kaplan says. “Because of that excitement that’s kind of building, people — a lot of really interesting people — came to the table and said they wanted to invest. But I didn’t have any room left in the previous rounds, so I decided to open up a SAFE.”

As part of that SAFE, Snack is carving out a certain amount to create its own syndicate. That way, Kaplan notes, “we don’t have any carry fees with another person, and [we’re] opening it up to Gen Z investors that want to participate in the round.”

Originally, the carve-out began at $100,000 but there is already enough interest that Kaplan says she expects it to go higher — perhaps a couple hundred thousand or larger, based on demand.

Among the Gen Z investors are VCs who have heard about Snack, but whose fund primarily invests at a later stage. Others are just people the company has been working with and getting advice from while building out the the app.

For example, Kaplan had reach out to the Gen Z Mafia, a group of technologists working to make venture capital and startups more inclusive, to help consult on Snack. The group’s leaders, Emma Salinas and Nicholas Huebecker, are credited with helping Kaplan come up with Snack’s pretzel logo and its brand name.

“Video first dating allows a unique sense of expression that you can’t portray with a few well-crafted words and filtered pictures,” said Huebekcer, of his interest in Snack. “For a mobile-first generation, this new form of authenticity will grow to be necessary. Snack allows users to express their real selves just like they do on TikTok, Snapchat, and other platforms we love,” he added.

Technology investor and Founder at The Innovation Armory, Samuel Natbony, is also joining the SAFE, alongside Monique Woodard (Cake Ventures), Backbone Angels, Shakti Ventures, Christian Winklund (previously CEO of dating app Skout which sold to Meet Group), Andrew Wilkinson and others.

“I want Gen Z to have a seat at the table and help shape what Snack becomes,” says Kaplan. “I want them to have that voice and participate, and be a champion for Snack,” she adds.

YouTube today gave advertisers a sneak peek at its plans to make its video platform more shoppable. The company will soon be introducing a new interactive feature aimed at advertisers called brand extensions, which will allow YouTube viewers to learn more about a product they see on the screen with a click of a button.

The new ad format will allow the advertiser to highlight their website link or another call-to-action in their connected TV video ad. The viewer can then click the option “send to phone,” which then sends that promotion or URL directly to their mobile device, without interrupting their viewing experience.

From the mobile device, the consumer could then shop the website as they would normally — browsing products, adding items to the cart, and completing the transaction. But they can do it when they’re ready to engage with that product information, instead of having to stop their video to do so.

The advertisers will also be able to smartly target the ads to the correct audience, based on the video content. For example, a fitness video may feature a brand extension ad that shows a new pair of running shoes.

Advertisers will be able to measure the conversions generated by these brand extensions directly in Google Ads, YouTube says.

In a related e-commerce ad effort, brands can now also add browsable product images to their direct response video ads, in order to encourage interested shoppers to click to visit their website or app.

These are only a few of the efforts YouTube has been working on with the goal of expand further into e-commerce.

Consumers, and particularly younger Gen Z users, today like to watch videos and engage while they shop, leading to the emergence of numerous video shopping services — like Popshop Live, NTWRK, ShopShops, TalkShopLive, Bambuser, and others. Facebook has also invested in live shopping and video-based shopping across both Facebook and Instagram.

Meanwhile, TikTok has become a home to video-based e-commerce, with Walmart (which also tried to acquire a stake in the app when Trump was trying to force a sale) hosting multiple shopping livestreams in recent months. TikTok also found success with e-commerce as it has rolled out more tools to direct video viewers to websites through integrated links and integrations with Shopify, for example.

But YouTube still has a sizable potential audience for video shopping, as it represents 40% of watch time of all ad-supported streaming services, per Comscore data. And of the top five streaming services in the U.S. that account for 80% of the connected TV market, only two are ad-supported, YouTube noted.

Ads are only one way YouTube will drive e-commerce traffic. Creators will also play a role.

A report from Bloomberg this past fall said YouTube was asking creators to tag and track the products they were featuring in their clips. YouTube later revealed more about this effort in February, saying it was beta testing a shopping experience that lets viewers shop from their favorite creators, and that this would roll out more broadly in 2021.

Brand extensions are separate from that effort, however, as they’re focused on giving the advertiser their own means to drive a shopping experience from a video.

YouTube says the new brand extensions ads are only the first of more interactive features the company has in store. The feature will roll out globally later this year.

What if you could Zoom with your favorite creator and ask them questions? That’s the promise of Bright, the new live video platform launching today from co-founders Guy Oseary and early YouTube product manager Michael Powers. The service, built on top of Zoom, allows fans to engage in live, face-to-face video sessions with creators, ask questions and even join creators on a virtual stage for a more personal and direct learning experience.

Though the startup has some similarities to voice chat apps like Clubhouse, as it also democratizes access to big-name talent at times, the co-founders explain that Bright’s focus will be very different. Besides being a video-on experience, Bright is solely focused on educational content — that is, learning from people who are sharing their expertise with the community. In addition, the sessions hosted on Bright are ticketed events, where the creator decides how many tickets they want to sell and how much they’re charging.

Image Credits: Bright

“Twenty percent of the content on YouTube was learning. It was the second-biggest area next to music. And that was true the first year of YouTube and it’s true now at scale,” explains Bright CEO Michael Powers, as to why Bright has chosen to focus on learning. Powers knows the creator industry firsthand, having launched the YouTube Channels feature while at YouTube, and later managed YouTube’s first revenue-generating opportunities for creators. More recently, he served as SVP and GM at CBS Interactive.

Powers says he saw how powerful educational and learning content could be, but also how difficult it was for creators earning a rev share off an ad network, like YouTube’s, to become self-sustainable.

“I watched that over the past five years, especially, as the different platforms have scaled up,” Powers says, and became inspired to launch a better way for creators to monetize their expertise. “We’ve got to empower [creators] so they can go beyond just being a personal brand or social brand, and be an actual business,” he adds.

Oseary, meanwhile, was tooling around with a similar concept, having also had direct experience with creators in the music industry and through his investments. The founder of Maverick music management company, Oseary continues to manage Madonna and U2, but these days has his hands in numerous startups as the co-founder of Sound Ventures and A-Grade Investments with actor Ashton Kutcher.

Though Oseary and Powers have yet to meet in person, they connected over the web — much like Bright’s creators will now do — to get the new startup off the ground during a pandemic.

With today’s launch, Bright is promising a lineup of more than 200 prominent creators, many from the arts, including Madonna, Ashton Kutcher, Naomi Campbell, Shawn Mendes, Amy Schumer, D-Nice, the D’Amelio Sisters, Laura Dern, Judd Apatow, Deepak Chopra, Diplo, Kenny Smith, Kane Brown, Drew and Jonathan Scott (Property Brothers), Lindsey Vonn, Rachel Zoe, Diego Boneta, Tal Fishman, Ryan Prunty, Demi Skipper, Charlotte McKinney, Jason Bolden, Yris Palmer, Cat & Nat, Ronnie2K, Chef Ludo Lefebvre and Jonathan Mannion, among others.

And it has another 1,500 creators on a waitlist, ready to begin hosting their own sessions when Bright opens up further.

Image Credits: Bright session example

Although Bright’s lineup implies it’s aiming at a high-profile creator crowd, Oseary insists Bright will be for anyone with an audience of their own — not just famous names.

“This is not elitist…If you’ve got an audience and you have something to offer your audience, we would like you on the platform,” he says.

Today, creators can go to other social networks, like Facebook Live or Instagram Live, if they want to just chat with fans more casually. But people will come to Bright to be educated, Oseary notes. And short of getting a creator to FaceTime you directly, he believes this will be the next best way to reach them — and one people are familiar with using, thanks to the Zoom adoption that grew out of the pandemic’s impact to business culture and remote work.

“The best way to connect is to use a platform that we’ve all learned how to use this last year,” Oseary says, referring to Bright’s Zoom connection. “We all already have the app. We already know how to navigate through it. We’ve added a bunch of features to make it more interesting,” he adds.

Image Credits: Bright

At launch, fans will be able to visit Bright’s website, view the array of upcoming events and purchase tickets. Some of the first sessions include Laura Dern leading a “Tell Your Story” session about personal growth; Kenny Smith will interview favorite athletes and discuss their mindsets at turning points in their careers; Property Brothers Jonathan & Drew Scott will host “Room by Room,” focused on home improvement; recording artist Kane Brown will host “Record This: Nashville Edition” about the country music industry; and Ronnie2K will host a series about building a career in gaming.

Bright’s model will see it taking a 20% commission on creator revenue, which is lower than the traditional marketplace split of 30/70 (platform/creator), but higher than the commission-free payments on Clubhouse (at least for the time being!). Further down the road, Bright envisions building out more tools to help creators with other aspects of their business — like the sale of physical or digital goods, for example.

Though there are numerous creator platforms to choose from these days, Bright aims to give creators direct access to their own analytics about their biggest fans, their content and fans’ contact information, like names and emails. This allows them to continue their relationship with their community beyond Bright into other areas of their business — whether that’s email newsletters or Shopify stores.

To make all this work, LA-based Bright has recruited a team with deep expertise in both the creator economy and tech.

This includes Bright’s VP of Talent & Partnership, Kaitlyn Powell, former head of Talent at Caffeine; Bright’s lead Creator & Product Strategy, Sadia Harper, formerly a UX Strategist at Instagram; Bright’s director of Creative Programming, Jeben Berg, previously of YouTube & Maker Studios; Design lead Heather Grates, previously of Pinterest; and Bright’s finance lead Jarad Backlund, previously in roles at Apple and Facebook.

The startup has raised an undisclosed amount funding from Oseary’s own Sound Ventures, as well as RIT Capital, Norwest, Globo and other investors.

Instagram is making its video Stories and Reels more accessible with the launch of a new “captions sticker” that will allow users to watch without having the sound on. The addition will not only make it easier for users who are hard of hearing or deaf to engage with video content, it also offers a way for users to watch videos when they’re somewhere they don’t want to have their sound on — and either don’t want to wear or don’t have access headphones or earbuds.

To use the feature, creators will first record a new video using the Stories or Reels Camera in the Instagram app, or select a video to upload from their phone’s gallery. Then, you’ll open the sticker tray and look for the new “Captions” sticker, which will convert your speech to text. You can also edit the style, position of the caption, and the text and color so it matches your content. When you post, the captions will appear alongside your video for everyone to see.

At launch, the feature is only available in English and in English-speaking countries, but Instagram plans to roll it out to other countries and languages soon, it says. It’s also rolling out the captions sticker first to Stories and will then begin testing it in Reels, with a broader launch to follow.

The captions sticker had been spotted while in development before today’s launch, alongside other potential new additions, like a Collab sticker, Link sticker, Reshare sticker, and others. Instagram parent Facebook also appears to have a captions sticker of its own in development.

The addition comes only weeks after TikTok announced its own captions feature, which it calls auto captions. The two products are somewhat different, however. Auto captions automatically translate the speech from a TikTok video in either American English and Japanese, to start, but the text itself isn’t customizable and can be turned on or off by the viewer from the app’s share panel. It also hasn’t yet been broadly adopted and many TikTok creators tend to still use captions they create themselves or via third-party apps.

Instagram notes it had previously launched support for captions across Threads and IGTV, but its expansion to Stories and Reels will make more of an impact, given that instagram Stories alone is used by over 500 million people every day.