AnyClip

Want to work with AnyClip and write HTML and CSS for a few weeks? As we gear up for a major release, our lead designer, Gabi, could use a temporary partner in crime.

The gig is full-time for 3 weeks, starting next week.

We’re looking for someone who fits this bill:

• Hyper standard compliant HTML
• Awesome CSS skillz (focus on layout implementation)
• Semantic markup
• Knowledge of Microformats
• Javascript a plus (JQuery best!)
• Knowledge of HTML5/CSS3 a (snobbish) preference
• NYC a plus, but not required

If you’d like to work with us, please send links to your portfolio, LinkedIn, and 3-week-full-time bid to: Gabi (at) AnyClip

If you can spare 15-20 minutes of your time on Wednesday, October 14th please come by the AnyClip offices in New York to help us test AnyClip and to give us feedback on what we can do better.

Whether you’re an AnyClip user, or you haven’t had the opportunity to play around with our website yet, we want to hear from you.

We’ll have some snacks and refreshments and you’ll get to hang out with the AnyClip Team. You’ll also get an invitation to AnyClip.com if you don’t have one, and 2 extra invites to give out to your friends.

Please fill out this form and we’ll let you know if you’re a match for our testing event!

Date: Wed, Oct 14th

Time: 6:00 - 7:15pm (you can pick your time slot)

Where: 245 W17th Street - 11th Floor (btw 7th / 8th Ave), New York, NY

Questions? Get in touch with Gabi Moore — gabi@anyclip.com

Hope to see you there!

by Aaron Cohen, CEO

Movies are the world’s most influential communication medium.   They catalyze conversation in countries all over the world.  Films teach history, tell stories, and make people laugh until their bellies and faces ache.  Moving pictures are for the young, old, rich, poor, educated, and the illiterate.

Etched in each moviegoer’s memory is a panoply of great scenes from tens of thousands of films.  How much fun is a dinner, cocktail, or keg party if nobody could quote a movie line?   The language of film is universal.

Unfortunately, to re-experience these moments can be painful.  Watching Humphrey Bogart kiss Ingrid Bergman or John Belushi scream “Food Fight” or Russell Crowe facing down tigers in the Coliseum is a challenge. These are moments that everyone wants to experience over and over again. But, does anyone really pop in a DVD and patiently scan for their favorite scenes? No. We search the Internet. Mostly, we don’ find what we’re looking for, and, when we do, it’s far from a cinematic experience.

THE PROBLEMS

So far, The Internet has  provided a piecemeal solution to digital video. There are plenty of video sharing sites filled with user-uploaded content, but their selection is haphazard at best. You might find “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” seven minutes into a longer clip or with abominable picture and sound. Diehard fans do will share shaky, unreliable videos of their televisions shot on camera phones.

So you might find what you are looking for but only if you’re willing to sort through a lot of garbage and put up with subpar film quality. But  people love movies so they put up the  problems.

Over 12 million people have watched the above clip from The Lion King.   I wonder how much money Elton John and Tim Rice have gotten for their work.  Neither the owners of these films nor the artists who make them receive any compensation from the display of their works. If it’s not illegal, it’s definitely unethical. This user-generated video industry combined with other public policy issues have unintentionally driven a wedge between Hollywood and the most dynamic and creative Internet companies. Content owners must benefit from Internet distribution and AnyClip wants to provide the most compelling and engaging platform to help them do so.

WHAT IS ANYCLIP

Six months ago, my co-founder Nate Westheimer and I joined an amazing group of Israeli developers who also happen to love movies. We wanted to build a Web service that would allow anyone to find any moment from any film ever made instantly. Our co-founder and lead investor Erel Margalit suggested we name the company AnyClip.

Everybody wants to relive scenes and AnyClip set out to make that possible. Creating the data and search technology to make that work presents formidable challenges. When searching for a scene from a movie, people describe moments in so many different ways: from dialogue and plot description to hazy memories of shark attacks and flying cars. This creates really engrossing and thorny computing problems. If someone searches for “dead shark,” do they want to see Roy Scheider blowing up Jaws (i.e. action on screen) or Woody Allen lamenting the “death” of his relationship with Annie Hall (i.e. dialogue)? The AnyClip platform incorporates tools to handles these issues and more.

Early tests show our service can be a great discovery engine for films. A search for “I love you” produces countless clips from hundreds of movies. A brief visit to AnyClip can yield an iTunes download or an addition to a Netflix queue. At AnyClip, clips are dynamic and up to four minutes long. You can adjust a clip to relive exactly the joyous, daring, or inspirational moment you crave.  This sample may encourage a purchase, rental, or download of the entire film.  At minimum, it reunites the movie lover with the art and the artists who brought them such joy.  This reaffirm  loyalty and interest in the future work these artists produce.  That’s called “promotion.”  AnyClip evokes memories and channels them to enhance the values of the world’s great film libraries.

Today, we also launch a public API for our data and eventually for legally licensed content. This would allow companies like IMDB, Slide, RockYou, Netflix, Zynga, OMGPOP, Twitter, Facebook, Mahalo and - most importantly - the insanely creative and brilliant independent developers around the world to build great user experiences with movie clips on top of our movie data. AnyClip is a platform to power a renaissance of the greatest movies the world has ever known.

DISRUPTIVE BY DESIGN

If you look closely at the movie ecosystem, the only institutions that suffer from a legally available AnyClip are those that benefit from leaving the current system intact.   First and foremost are existing Internet media providers that hide behind the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. While nobody knows precise numbers, YouTube has served billions of movie scenes to audiences around the world.  Overseas video sharing and PTP sites — Tudou, Megavideo, PirateBay and BiTTorrent —operate outside the reach of US laws. Naturally content owners have been wary of digital distribution in light of these abuses and violations of the DMCA.

History shows Hollywood struggles with new formats and other technological innovation. They are instinctively protective of their core businesses. Thirty years ago, Universal sued Sony for creating the Betamax. Luckily, they failed and today we have a US $25 billion DVD industry. The good news is AnyClip enhances every distribution window.  Every one. We don’t compete. We complement.

And that’s important, because DVD revenue is dropping for the first time since the format’s introduction. Piracy and Internet video-on-demand from the likes of Amazon, Netflix and iTunes are changing consumption patterns. Economic realities have forced audiences to reassess their entertainment spending.

One way to stanch the bleeding in the Home Video Market is to reinvigorate the value locked in our memories. Short of innovation, the motion picture industry will continue to see declining revenue and audiences will get fewer new magical moments.  Why? Because Quentin Tarantino and Ridley Scott will be given smaller budgets. Does anybody really want to deprive Peter Jackson of the budgets required to make another Lord of the Rings?

Many powerful Hollywood people have told us that AnyClip is amazing but impossible. Some very smart industry executives are rooting for us to succeed but worry about the legal landscape. At its best, the digital rights marketplace is byzantine.  These executives are right to be concerned. For the sake of the movie industry’s wonderful and talented people, and the billions of fans around the world, we certainly hope we can find a way to work within the law to create great opportunities for all.

And this includes AnyClip.  While we will be a smaller participant in any transactions that occur between content owner and consumer, we believe this business will scale just fine. It’s the greatest content that has ever been made etched in the memories of everybody on Earth. We think “reliving movie moments” is a huge market. We are the catalyst for what will be a high-growth legal clip economy.

Our fourth co-founder is the former CEO of Sony America Mickey Schulhof. Mickey knows the pitfalls as well as the upsides of media innovation having introduced the CD and Playstation to North America. He always tells me that if it weren’t for naysayers, we wouldn’t have revolutionary companies.

“Sometimes you just have to do things, Aaron,” Mickey told me when I first described AnyClip.  It’s time for the curtains to open.

Today, we’re very excited to unveil the new AnyClip logo and branding.

This logo came out of a long but enjoyable process, which started back in May when we picked AnyClip as our name.

Soon thereafter, we held a logo contest on Worth1000 because we hadn’t yet hired a designer on staff; we needed an identity for presentations and thought a contest would be fun. While we hoped a design we’d absolutely love would come out of the process, we also knew it was unlikely. In the end, we settled on this logo (on the right) as our first version, mostly because it was the only one AnyClip management could agree on. We liked the typeface — sure — though we weren’t totally sure about the film strip at the top or the colors.

Then, towards the end of June, we hired Gabi Moore to be our Senior Designer. She got to work on the new identity right away.

In our first brainstorming meeting, Gabi collected data and listened to Aaron (our CEO), Ohad (COO), and me (VP Product) talk about our brand and what we wanted to convey. Out of that, words like “comprehensive,” “definitive,” “fast,” and “sophisticated” emerged as values we wanted to exude. Another thing we realized was that we didn’t necessarily want to be too “filmy” in our logo. While our main focus will be film for the foreseeable future, we of course realized that we could also move into other areas some day. Also, after watching how people reacted to the Worth1000 logos, I knew that explicitly “filmy” logos elicited very, very strong reactions — positive and negative — from our team. I wanted something more neutral, so we thought keeping any film references highly nuanced would be important. See below for a summary Gabi put together from that meeting.

Now that we had direction, Gabi got to work.

At first Gabi just played around with typefaces and graphical concepts. Here’s one from that first batch I kinda liked:

In round 2, Gabi started playing with colors and expanding the “clip” concept as part of the logo. See the next example:

At this point, however, Aaron added a new requirement into the mix (and a good one, in my opinion): that the logo be super legible.

On that note, we also remembered how much we liked the font from the Worth1000 logo we picked. The typeface, Myriad, would now enter as the dominant fonts in iterations that followed. Here’s one from round three that Gabi and I liked a lot:

Unfortunately, as fun as that logo was, when we put it into HTML wireframes and shared it with trusted peers, it was clear that it was too busy and would detract from the rest of the app. We still liked some of the colors, though, so this next logo — which also continued to play around with some abstract ideas about the emergence of clips from our database — was one that we liked, but definitely knew at the time wasn’t “the one:”

Then, a real breakthrough occurred. As Gabi and I were brainstorming, I started thinking about icons and which ones represented what AnyClip is all about. I should also note that we started off very icon averse. We generally agreed that icons are over-used and not abstract enough. The classic examples of this in video companies, we thought, were the play button and the TV.

“But what if you combined some icons?” I thought. Right about this time Dima (AnyClip’s resident mathematician) was putting the finishing touches on the first version of our search algorithm, and every day we were realizing how important our search will be for people to get to “any clip” out of our library of movies. So, here I did a 180 on the iconography issue and proposed the combination of a magnifying glass — the universal symbol of search — and a play button. “Search and play, any clip.” From that, Gabi created this idea:

At this point Gabi and I both feel in love with the magnifying glass and play button. But we weren’t sure about the legibility of the icon as a circle and Gabi was getting rather convincing that my love of bright blues, whites, and grays was boring and over played.

Over the next few days, Gabi continued coming out with iterations, including a square version of the now official “AnyClip icon” as seen below, using a unique color palate which began growing on all of us:

However, while we liked the symmetry of the square, we felt the magnifying glass got lost a bit and it looked too much just like a play button… not the unique combination we liked so much. So, we began solely focusing in on a wider icon arrangement.

Finally, yesterday, Gabi and I made our pick and presented our recommendation to Aaron for final approval. With Aaron on board, the AnyClip logo was official, our landing page was updated with a new design, and Gabi has moved on, already implementing the identity into other collateral. We now know the identity of AnyClip.

By the way, Gabi also managed to get a very nuanced film reference into the logo. We’ll keep it a secret for now, but if you can figure it out, let us know.

We’re becoming dangeously close to unveiling our new logo. Stay tuned.