Matt Hackett

"This means our voice, and the voice of our companies, are often going to be discovered and engaged..."

Thu, 23 May 2013 12:10:28 -0400

“This means our voice, and the voice of our companies, are often going to be discovered and engaged with via the copy of our services, the content of our social media channels and the clarity of our emails.”

- BRYCE DOT VC: Writing As a Competitive Advantage

andrew: terrysdiary: Andrew, Jacob, Topher Chris, Me, Peter,...

Mon, 20 May 2013 13:47:19 -0400

andrew:

terrysdiary:

Andrew, Jacob, Topher Chris, Me, Peter, Matt, John, Marco, David, and Jared at the Tumblr office today.

Roughly 3 years, 2 months, and 2 days ago..

I want to reblog the hell out of this and every other photo of the incomparable Tumblr team, but for now just the one.

Congratulations to the truly incredible set of people who made Tumblr what it is today. I couldn’t be prouder to have spent time among your ranks.

And to those worried about the future: If there is one thing years of having worked with David and the whole team have taught me, it’s that the community is sacred. You won’t be let down.

Go, Tumblr, go!

Photo

Mon, 20 May 2013 10:59:01 -0400

Lisbon

Mon, 20 May 2013 07:21:56 -0400

Lisbon

Betaworks-Backed Telecast Brings The TGIF TV Experience To Mobile Internet Video | TechCrunch

Wed, 08 May 2013 14:11:00 -0400

Betaworks-Backed Telecast Brings The TGIF TV Experience To Mobile Internet Video | TechCrunch:

It’s been a hectic four months, and I’m so [nervously] excited that the project/company/app, Telecast, I’ve been building with the help of the fantastic team here at betaworks is finally ready for the world.

Telecast is about making Internet video watching feel as simple as turning on the TV, no matter where you are: each day, we drop fifteen minutes of carefully-chosen, personally tailored video in your lap (or iPad, as it were).

Give it a whirl.

fieldstudy: Today, we introduce Days, a visual diary for the...

Fri, 03 May 2013 10:22:29 -0400

fieldstudy:

Today, we introduce Days, a visual diary for the iPhone that lets you capture each day of your life as it really is: sunny or dark, exciting or tedious, exceptional or mundane—and always unfiltered.

Days is a product I am an incredibly proud of from a team I am lucky to work with. I could write for days (hehe) about what we’ve built. In the near future I’ll post some thoughts about the process, learnings I picked up along the way, and some of the cutting-room-floor stuff that we all like to get a peek at.

But for now, I just want to express a feeling that is hard to put into words. This app feels like something much bugger than the some of our small team’s efforts. I had my hands in every corner of this app. I know it in and out. And yet I continually find myself surprised. It is thoughtfully conceived, well engineered, and carefully designed. But what gets to me are the unexpected moments of small but meaningful connectedness. It’s been something I’ve been chasing in my product design work and I can say, with humble confidence, that we’ve begun to touch that beautiful feeling.

 Download Days

Congrats, Keenan and team!

Yes, I really just got this CAPTCHA. In related news, going to...

Fri, 03 May 2013 10:13:56 -0400

Yes, I really just got this CAPTCHA. In related news, going to the Nets game Saturday.

"The assumption driving these kinds of design speculations is that if you embed the interface–the..."

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 16:13:11 -0400

“The assumption driving these kinds of design speculations is that if you embed the interface–the control surface for a technology–into our own bodily envelope, that interface will “disappear”: the technology will cease to be a separate “thing” and simply become part of that envelope. The trouble is that unlike technology, your body isn’t something you “interface” with in the first place. You’re not a little homunculus “in” your body, “driving” it around, looking out Terminator-style “through” your eyes. Your body isn’t a tool for delivering your experience: it is your experience. Merging the body with a technological control surface doesn’t magically transform the act of manipulating that surface into bodily experience. I’m not a cyborg (yet) so I can’t be sure, but I suspect the effect is more the opposite: alienating you from the direct bodily experiences you already have by turning them into technological interfaces to be manipulated.”

- Your Body Does Not Want to Be an Interface | MIT Technology Review

"The single most overwhelming piece of technology for the television business was the remote control...."

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 11:45:00 -0400

“The single most overwhelming piece of technology for the television business was the remote control. When they didn’t have to get their ass off the couch and go change the channel, it really changed the amount of control that broadcasters had … and every single step gives [the media business] less control.”

- Peter Chernin

New Orleans weekend

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 14:14:48 -0400

New Orleans weekend

"Freeing 400 megahertz of radio spectrum to be shared using new technologies would be equivalent to..."

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 17:04:46 -0500

“Freeing 400 megahertz of radio spectrum to be shared using new technologies would be equivalent to an economic financial stimulus of 800 billion euros.”

- Presidential Panel Urges More Flexible Use of Spectrum - NYTimes.com (via nickgrossman)

manbartlett: the art world according to emoji

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 21:37:24 -0500

manbartlett:

the art world according to emoji

Love NBC’s xylophone logo from the fifties.

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 14:40:10 -0500

Love NBC’s xylophone logo from the fifties.

"Curious Rituals: Gestural Interaction in the Digital Everyday"

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 23:14:24 -0500

"Curious Rituals: Gestural Interaction in the Digital Everyday"

"Even so, Netflix can’t match the quality that can be delivered via coax — not over IP — and Time..."

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 12:41:03 -0500

“Even so, Netflix can’t match the quality that can be delivered via coax — not over IP — and Time Warner Cable and other incumbent providers have little incentive to enable it to do so. By installing Open Connect boxes free of charge and peering with Netflix, cable companies would basically be giving it the tools to also offer comparable picture quality. But why would they?”

- This article on Netflix/Time Warner’s current dispute shows a disappointing lack of understanding of how the Internet is stitched together. In a story where the heart of the matter comes down to the hard tech, I wish the author had spent a few minutes talking to an engineer before misleadingly mashing terms together.

Cable companies likely already peer with Netflix. Open Connect is not peering, it’s a caching appliance that would live inside ISPs’ networks.

“Coax” and IP are two different network layers. They are not an either/or choice and they don’t have a hell of a lot to do with the quality of content that can be delivered. (FWIW, content will be delivered via IP regardless of the physical layer, because the I stands for Internet.)

That said, Open Connect is a super interesting move by Netflix, and something I’d love to see some deeper reporting on.

betaworks

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 10:27:11 -0500

Starting 2013 off with a bang, I’m happy to announce I’ve just started a new gig: Hacker-in-Residence at betaworks. With the help of the spectacular team here and a band of fellow hackers, I’m going to spend the next few months building and launching a product from whole cloth. I haven’t done this before; it’s damn exciting.

I was so lucky to have been on the early team at Tumblr, and here at betaworks I intend to keep to the same passions that brought me there. I love building technology for creative people, particularly the ever-growing number of makers, creators, collectors, critics, and fans that have found their audience for the first time on the web.

I’m not ready to say what I’m working on just yet. But now that I’m back in New York and the game after eight (fantastic, must-repeat) months, you ought to say hello.

"Radio, in its ideal, provided both an outlet for musical discovery and a place for a geographically..."

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 07:57:15 -0500

“Radio, in its ideal, provided both an outlet for musical discovery and a place for a geographically based community to gather. Talk radio, whether about politics or sports, provides the latter, but as musical communities become more fragmented, is there a place for the more casual listener—the person who might want to hear the occasional new track sprinkled into their favorites and visit a station’s van at a show, but who doesn’t neccessarily have time to dig through websites and “related” links on YouTube—to discover music as well? Has the viral world replaced radio, and does that mean that a song needs a hook that isn’t just its chorus, like the goofy pony dance PSY performs in the “Gangnam Style” video?”

- Maura Johnston, in the first issue of her fantastic new micromagazine.

Video art is hard to watch

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 11:13:00 -0500

I love video art. Being moving images, the sensory experience we are as, or more, accustomed to as talking with other humans, video art seems to have remarkably fast access to our thoughts. Though many people feel uncomfortable commenting on a painting by an artist they don’t know, I’ve never seen anyone very reticent after watching an unkown video work.

Methods and subjects in video art vary widely, from Ryan Trecartin’s gonzo, AfterEffects-distorted, drag-doused, chaotic critique/lovefests of contemporary media culture to the haunting, detached treatment of nuclear power and society in Mika Taanila’s The Most Electrified Town in Finland. Some of the sharpest critiques of contemporary culture and the most incisive political questions exist only in video.

Perversely, though, video works are some of the most inaccessible in contemporary art. Not that they are difficult to comprehend—mostly, it’s just hard to find an actual copy of the damn things. Galleries wouldn’t dream of streaming video works online and they largely outsource draconion control of video files and their performance rights. Public access consists of lending physical media to established institutions for soometimes-significant fees.

This state of affairs is strange and disappointing for artworks that exist as digital video files, a medium the Internet has proven very capable of spreading widely, rapidly. And video art should be spread widely, rapidly!

There are artists who buck the trend, and one whose work I love is Francis Alÿs. He not only streams all his work, but releases it under a very liberal Creative Commons license. Spend a few minutes watching his REEL - UNREEL, in which a pair of kids playfully unfurl and reroll film through the streets of Kabul: I bet you, like me, didn’t know what the streets of Kabul looked like.

Maybe even share it, like good art ought to be.

I know CES mocking is just fish/barrell, but this image…

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 13:05:00 -0500

I know CES mocking is just fish/barrell, but this image…

Very excited to have my hands on the first installment of...

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 19:33:00 -0500

Very excited to have my hands on the first installment of Matthew Allard (aka lifeserial)’s story subscription series, Pops and Clicks.