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the 12seconds.tv blog

every second counts


Passion is recession proof.Yesterday

Tonight I was standing outside the Synagogue holding my son, Marlon, who was conveniently unable to sit through Yom Kippur services.  I was reading this Techcrunch article which featured Ron Conway giving advice to his startups in these dire economic times (I’ve gotten very good at holding Marlon in one hand and my iPhone in the other).  Maybe it’s just the nature of the holiday but I began feeling very thankful for what I had in the non-iPhone hand.  I also started to think about applying some of the logic that Ron Conway described.

He gave a lot of advice about tightening up, focusing on monetization and making sure you had “enough” to last for a while.  I’ve been doing plenty of complaining about raising money lately and everyone has told me that it’s nearly impossible to do so in this market, particularly for consumer-focused internet companies that have an as-of-yet-determined business model.

Maybe we’ve all been focusing on the wrong thing?  Maybe our little burrito-funded startup is onto something?  12seconds came out of a group called “the geeks.”  It’s like a Santa Cruz social club that meets every once in a while to drink beers.  It’s the kind of group where you can talk about Twitter without having to explain it.  Beach had a cool idea and a bunch of us decided to build it.


So Much To Talk AboutYesterday

We’ve been going so fast lately that it’s all a bit of a blur. There’s a ton of stuff we’ve been working on and even more in the pipeline. We’re very focused on improving the site, the technology, and the user experience. For us, it can’t be simple enough. It can never be fun enough! 12seconds should be as easy, fast, reliable, and super as possible. Super!

Here’s a bit of a recap of what we’ve done in the past few days:

We can’t say all that’s coming up next for us, but we’re really excited about it and are looking forward to sharing it with you. Is that coy enough? :)
We can tell you that we’re focused on bugs and fixing a bunch of things that need attention. We even ordered a Logitech WebCam (QuickCam Pro 9000) to try and figure out why browsers seem to crash when Logitech hardware is being used. Don’t worry, we’ll fig

View 12seconds from your mobile phoneOctober 1

Here’s a cool feature: login to http://m.12seconds.tv.

Yep, you can now enjoy 12seconds content on the go.  Wondering what your friends are posting while you’ve been away from your machine?  Wonder no more.  Grab just about any phone with a web browser like your blackberry or your iphone and enjoy 12seconds all day long.

This is our initial version so there might be a few bugs.  You can see your latest updates, watch everyone or enjoy featured content.  This is just the beginning of our mobile strategy!  We wanted to satiate your desires for mobile updates, so here you go.

      
The London Film Festival in 12secondsSeptember 27

One of our awesome 12ers, Mike Atherton, better known as Sizemore, is a well respected writer and social media badass.  Every year he is invited to the London Film Festival and asked to review tons of films.  As he says on his blog, “I’m happiest writing about film, but can turn my hand to most topics.” A quick check of his blog will you tell you that he loves film, technology, photography and humor.  During this Film Festival season, Sizemore has to sit down and watch 3 films a day for a couple weeks!  It’s a tough job.  He eats a lot of popcorn.

We’re really excited that Sizemore is planning to do 12second reviews of those exclusive films for our benefit!

“I have no idea yet how I’ll boil down some of the best cinema in the
world to only 12 seconds, but I’m looking forward to kicking this off.”

We’re looking forward to it too. If you want to keep up with Sizemore on 12seconds, you can check out his channel and follow him here.  Thanks Mike!

      


12seconds’ Users are Awesome!September 24

Hey, this is Beach. First I don’t really like the word “users” to define people who use a web site, I mean not all of you are drug addicts. Second, I know that you probably think that Sol and I use the word “Awesome” quite a bit. We also say “dude”, “rad”, and “sweet”. I’m not sure if it’s our California upbringing or our lack of vocabulary, but when we get excited about something… these words tend to come out. 

With that said, I just wanted to take this time to say that you guys (12seconds’ users) are awesome! It is so cool to see what all of you are doing with the site. So great, in fact, that it’s getting difficult to keep up with it all! This is a good problem to have for sure, but I wanted to let you know that we care about what you guys are doing, and it means so much to us that you are finding 12seconds a fun place to be. Just last night with a quick glance, I saw part of a Sigur Ros concert in detroit, had great seats at a Giants game, and learned that Clay Aiken is gay! All of these were posted within moments of each other! It warms the cockles of my heart. 

I’m not sure if you all know this, but everyone who works on 12seconds has a day job. We do everything in our spare time, in the morn