Posted: 12 Nov 2010 09:56 AM PST

Image representing Jim Lanzone as depicted in ...

Image by Jim Lanzone on LinkedIn via CrunchBase

With nearly $20 million in funding and a ballooning database of some 1 million TV episodes, Clicker.com is fast becoming a go-to destination for TV watchers on the Web.

In an era of increasing programming options strewn haphazardly across the Internet, the year-old service does the necessary sifting and discovering for its roughly 2 million monthly users. Rather than host its videos and incur the wrath of networks and studios, Clicker points those users to the many places they can find the content, free or paid. Missed that episode of How I Met Your Mother last week? Clicker is on it. How about the True Blood finale from a few months back? Yep. What about that Between Two Ferns Funny or Die video the blogoshpere has been chirping about? Got it. (For more on the service's merits, an early review from AllThingsD.)

Clicker.com's co-founder and CEO Jim Lanzone, who formerly served as chief executive of Ask.com and was recently submitted as a 'Name You Need To Know For 2011', talks about his plans to make his start-up TV Guide for the Web generation.

So what's Clicker's pitch to users?

Lanzone: Our aim is to be the way you navigate and discover programming in the next generation of television. We're heading into an era where it no longer matters when things are on, so a programming guide can no longer be a calendar. It matters what's on and where you can find it across what will be thousands of possible destinations, some of which will be free and some of which will be paid. We're search engine guys and the only way to manage that on the back end is to have built a search engine, essentially, that goes out and collects all of that programming information in real time, minute by minute, automatically.

We spent a year plugging into thousands of websites and setting it up so that we could organize all of it in one common way so that you, the end user, could have one easy way to search for and browse all of the programming information. That also includes paid databases, like Itunes, Netflix, Amazon VOD, we recently added Comcast and we'll have Hulu Plus when it launches. So whether it's on YouTube or Charlie Rose's own website or Stanford University's site, it all looks the same to you — it all sits together in one common directory.

And since you're not actually hosting the content on your site like some rivals, the networks are willing to work with you?

Not only that, we're a great way to fight piracy. The MPAA and the Writers Guild are big fans because we don't index illegal content. Also, we're a kind of noise cancellation machine for users because we won't mix up random excerpts and clips with full episode information. So when we tell you the number of episodes that are available online, that's the number. The problem with search engines is that if you were to search for these shows or topics on a regular or video search engine you'll get thousands of results back and you won't be able to sift through them in an easy way. We will tell you the exact number available and we organize them by season and air date.

We don't compete with the destination websites for viewing either. So we've never had a source say they don't want to be indexed by Clicker; instead, we've struck relationships with a ton of these guys, major network brands, to get feeds from them so that we can be more accurate and up to date. To use the analogy, we realized you have to be either TV or TV Guide, but you can't be both.

What does being the latter entail in today's landscape?

To be the programming guide, you need to be three things. You need to be completely comprehensive, which we are. I draw an unofficial distinction there: we have 1 million episodes and 1,400 categories, but there are no clips and excerpts, no cat videos and no pirated content. You have to be unbiased, meaning we're not promoting content that we or our owners benefit from you seeing or that we have advertisements embedded in. We're showing you what, from an editorial point of view or an algorithmic point of view, is there. And the third thing you have to be is organized. On the back end, we work like search engine; but on the front end, to users, we look much more like sites like Yelp, Wikipedia or IMDB. In wonk speak, we call it structured database. Almost every other vertical has one of these and TV and Web video didn't –we're still the only ones who do what we do.

Right now Yahoo's TV site is the behemoth, and sites like Hulu and Google are luring users. How do you ensure your site becomes the destination for this kind of search?

Yahoo doesn't have a comprehensive, unbiased, organized catalog of all premium video online. They have a lot of eyeballs to their TV website; a lot of people do. TVGuide.com is another example of a site that drives a lot of eyeballs for different reasons than Clicker. It's more about offline television than online television. Google TV is a new entrant, and we are a spotlight app in Google. I fully expect that if Google decides to go hard at this category, they would have a need to do something similar to Clicker. It would be in the same way they have Google Local, which is like Yelp, and Google Maps, which is like Mapquest. Look, I used to run a search engine and if you see these queries coming through it's natural that you'll want to try to handle a lot them yourself. I would say that in every vertical category they're strong branded players and so while I'd love for Google to leave it alone it also speaks to the value of the category. It says we're on the right track. There are video search engines out there too – my team has operated one of the three major search technologies in the world and if that was the right way to do this we would have done it that way. We just don't believe a bunch of blue links on a page are the right way to handle a vertical category.

What does Clicker look like a year or two from now?

Right, you also have to understand where the vision is headed. Step one is building the database. Step two is to enable social interactivity. We not only want to be the way to search but also the way to discover content, and we think being the hub for navigation puts us in position to be the best place to discover. So we spend a lot of time building this database and we have some of the best user-behavior algorithm engineers or scientists on our team. They own many of the original patents in this area of the search industry. A huge focus for us is going to be to essentially read your mind and come up with 40, 50 or 100 factors that we extract what you like.

As in if you like show X, you'll like show Y?

Specifically not just that. That's the flaw of what you see everywhere else. Collaborative filtering has been around for ten years and it's too simplistic to say because you like Mad Men, you'll like Breaking Bad. You can go much, much deeper in understanding a person based on a lot of their behaviors, from searching to watching to sharing. We also believe we can determine your mood and what you'd want to watch right now.

How and how quickly do you foresee monetizing all of this?

Well, even now it's a very attractive monetization category –sites like IMDB make up to $100 million a year just in banner ads basically—but we think the category will evolve to where regeneration will be a very effective model. It is too early to really go after that; we need to lay the tracks first with users and build ourselves into that iconic hub. But if you do that, you have the ability to send traffic to websites or subscribers to subscription services. Amazon, iTunes, and Netflix are already willing to pay fees for sending them new subscribers. That's where we think that pot of gold is but first we've got to get there.

How far off is this?

We're just finishing up year one and people are still discovering us. Really, people are just starting to watch TV legally online. In a lot of ways, our no. 1 competitor is piracy. If you do a search on a lot of these shows on any major search engine, you will get back a ton of pirated options. So we have great momentum and the people who do find out about us seem to view us as a must-have without any clear alternative. We'll go after monetization once we're through with that first phase of our life cycle.

One year in, what's the thing that keeps you up at night?

I'm a product guy at the end of the day. Building innovative stuff is my lineage, so I'm usually kept up at night by our own ability to get things launched. It's usually about how and when you bring things to market. We have a really innovative team and the sky could be the limit for us, but my day-to-day frustration is about building better things faster. That's what the conversations in our halls here are all about. We don't have to worry about content providers because we're working arm and arm with them; and in any category there will be competition and people who put a target on your back, but if you don't want that you shouldn't be in business. What am I going to do about what they're doing? I'd rather make them react to me.

Looking ahead, what's your No. 1 priority?

My main focus right now is on helping the category grow. I think Internet TV is inevitable. The milk is guaranteed to expire on the old model; we just don't know when the experimentation date is. It could be in two years, five years, ten years; certainly won't be longer than that. The category can grow up to be healthy or, like music, it cannot. So we want to help it grow up the right way, and I think there can be a lot of winners in this category, especially for content owners and distributors. It's funny because they're the ones under the most pressure short term, but I think they're also the ones in the captain seat long term. They're the ones that ultimately have the thing that consumers want. It's all of the middle men who are at risk.

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Donkey Kong Country Returns Will Have Super Guide Option - Softpedia

Posted: 10 Nov 2010 11:28 PM PST

Nintendo's upcoming new Donkey Kong game, Donkey Kong Country Returns, will have the same special Super Guide as last year's New Super Mario Bros. Wii, in order to help players that can't finish certain levels in the game. For those not in the know, Nintendo introduced late last year, with New Super Mario Bros. Wii, a special option, called Super Guide, in order to help players that were struggling with certain levels or stages.

After players died at least eight times during a level, the Super Guide option was made available.

With that option, Luigi, one of the two brothers, appeared and traveled through the level, and players had the chance to stop him at any time and resume playing on their own.

Now, with the upcoming Donkey Kong Country Returns, Nintendo is once again implementing such a system.

This time, players will be helped by a new character called Super Kong, which is just like Donkey but with a silver fur and a blue tie.

As you can imagine, Nintendo won't actually allow the Super Guide to be used by lazy people or cheaters.

Super Kong will take the most efficient route through the level, but won't use any secret pathways or shortcuts, which must be discovered by the player by his own.

Also, any scoring items collected by Super Kong won't be added to the total of the player, and the levels completed with the help of the Super Guide will be shows as red dots on the game's map, so people can't brag to their friends about completing the whole game.

As with New Super Mario Bros. Wii, the Super Guide is only available in the single-player mode of the game, and won't appear when players are going through the game using the co-op mode.

Donkey Kong Country Returns is set to appear exclusively on the Nintendo Wii on November 21, in North America, December 3 in Europe and December 9 in Japan.

Follow the editor on Twitter @softpediagames

Guide to Big Bend National Park in Texas - Associated Content

Posted: 08 Nov 2010 10:51 AM PST

Big Bend National Park is located on the border of Mexico and situated along the Rio Grande. The park covers more than 800,000 miles of terrain and with its beautiful desert landscapes is one of my favorite parks to

visit.

Entrance Fee: Usually around $4 per person you can either pay upon entrance if the booths are open (they often are not) or you can pay later at a visitor center. While this makes it easy to avoid paying, please remember that the money is used for park upkeep and not paying may be very bad for the park. Visitor centers are frequently situated and marked on park maps.

Lodging: You have 4 choices of where to sleep when entering Big Ben. I am going to start with the cheaper, more fun options.

1. Bring a Tent. Be sure to bring plenty of tent stakes as there is often a great deal of wind. The park has special area's set aside for tents or you can choose your own pretty much anywhere that is flat and dry.

2. Sleeping bag. Faster to set up than a tent but be sure that it is not going to rain during your trip. I have had fun every time i have done this but if your trip is during the summer watch out for snakes.

3. R.V. If you want the comforts of a bed but don't feel like getting a hotel an RV is perfect, the park has plenty of setups for RVs at a minimal charge and most RVs rent cheap if you do not own one yourself.

4. Hotel. This limits where you can stay as most of Big Bends available rooms are up in the mountains and near their hiking trails. Rooms are not cheap and quite small but luxurious and comfortable. On a special note last time i stayed in one there was still ice cream in the rooms freezer *Bonus*

Food: Now I would definitely recommend that you either bring your own food or buy some from one of the small local towns. Eating at the restaurants in Big Bend can be quite expensive and the food is not always the best quality. There are stores at several of the visitor centers where you can buy food but they are overpriced so try going to one of the towns such as Terlingua. The stores are small and not often clean but they are cheap. Plus you can have fun and cook food over a camp fire.

Maps Guides

Saturday, November 13, 2010

“As TV Migrates To The Web, Clicker Aims To Be Your Guide - Forbes (blog)” plus 2 more

“As TV Migrates To The Web, Clicker Aims To Be Your Guide - Forbes (blog)” plus 2 more

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