Introducing: Video Growler

By Dan

In half a year we have watched you - the HomeField Coaches and Athletes - write thousands of comments about the video that you have uploaded.  With time-coded comments, these discussions interactively played back the video at the exact moment you wanted to discuss.  Hitting the play button didn't make it obvious that additional insights and discussions were taking place though.  So we fixed that last week with the launch of the Video Growler...

When you play back your video, and hit a point where a teammate or coach has added a comment, the comment will growl in the upper right corner of your browser.  Click the comment to go directly to that part of discussion, or click the time-code to repeat that part of the video.

I love the growler.  I built it.   But I'd love to hear from you, so please tell us what you think!

HomeField Email Issue

By Dan

Starting on 18 January 2010 (and ending at 8am this morning) the HomeField mail server decided to get quiet.  This is not a good trait for a mail server, as HomeField sends out lots of emails for our users.

No emails were lost.  But if you signed up, invited somebody to your team, made a trade or commented in a discussion you may not have received the email you expected when you expected it.  All emails that were supposed to be sent during this unfortunate quiet period were sent this morning.

I sincerely apologize for this delay of game.  If you have any problems, questions, comments or concerns please let me know.

But now... Game On!

Stale Accounts Removed

By Dan

We introduced HomeField 2.0 (the HomeField you all know and love today) after the end of our inaugural season last spring.  This major upgrade included many improvements, but a small amount of cruft from the old version remained, including a few hundred unused accounts.  I removed these stale accounts about an hour ago.

Although I'm confident that no active user accounts were deleted, I wanted to share this update with our community, in case anybody was affected.  So, if you can no longer log in to your HomeField account, and resetting your password does not work, please drop me a line.

p.s. First post (of the new year)!

HomeField Improves its 40-yard Dash Time with "Dynamic Pagination"

By Dan

The Holidays are a great time to step back, relax with friends and family, and recharge for the new year. They're also a great time to write code and push out awesome features. So I added a bunch of smaller (but much needed) features to HomeField, as well as refined some details to really smooth out and improve our user experience. Dynamic Pagination is the most visible of my stocking-stuffers...

Pagination (via the "Previous" and "Next" links with page numbers between them) is common on the web: it allows you to browse many results, one page at a time - instead of a single, overly long and very slow page. As HomeField usage has been going through the roof this year, we've seen users with many videos on a page, so it was time for pagination. As you'll see in your account (and in the picture to the right), whenever you have a lot of videos (or documents) in a category, they will be split up and those orange links will appear. This improves page load time drastically for users with many videos, while still showing you your most relevant videos on the first page.

Please check it out, and tell me what you think. By the way, I've called it Dynamic Pagination because you don't have to wait for an entire new page to load. When you click Next, your list of videos - and nothing else - gets updated dynamically.  This makes the entire process smooth as eggnog.  Enjoy!

(psst:  If you aren't seeing pagination in your chalkboard, upload some more video!)

On Over Engineering

By Dan

During our meeting with Fred Wilson last week he mentioned something fairly obvious about our company: we have too few engineers (i.e. just me). He was making the point that one particular path for our company could see it thrive (netting a few million a year in profits) with a small 10-12 person staff (7 engineers or so). But it started me thinking about it from the other angle: what if we had too many engineers?

I firmly believe one of the reasons startups create some of the most beautiful and expertly crafted products is that they have limited resources with which to produce them. Startups therefore, by necessity, build only to create value and build the smallest solution possible. This viewpoint is bolstered by 37signals’ Getting Real, Paul Graham in many of his excellent essays, and the principle of least effort (or path of least resistance, if you will). It’s why Rob Pacheco (a chef) says, “to find the most efficient way to accomplish a task, give it to the laziest guy in the kitchen.”

Conversely, when a startup grows (or starts) too big, it produces decreasingly beautiful products. Engineers, by definition, like to engineer. An average engineer - which most of them are, by definition of the word average - will not achieve perfection. Since these engineers have to do something with their time, the company they work for ends up with an over-engineered product (by definition!). It is the rare exception (i.e. Apple) that can produce many beautiful products by the labor of many engineers.

-A Lazy Engineer

Originally posted here.

Thoughts about "the winner takes it all"

By Reece

Love this post below from @bijan. He’s absolutely right here.

In our experience building HomeField, we’ve learned of a number of competitors who offer feature X or feature Y or Z. Some of them are great features (and some aren’t). But we’ve purposely tried to avoid the ‘feature creep’ that so often spreads software too thin. Applications can so easily lose focus and don’t know what they’re trying to be. They don’t know what their core purpose is.

Instead, we’ve taken a customer focused approach - starting out very simply and letting our users tell us where to go. This helps us avoid wasted time on features that aren’t necessary, and it keeps the application focused on its core value proposition.

Originally posted at reecepacheco.com

bijan:

It’s only Thursday but I’ve already heard the expression “the winner takes it all” at least five times this week.

The concept is where the winner of a market dominates the entire market. Think ebay for auctions, amazon for online shopping, google for search, facebook for social networks etc.

Often advocates of the “winner takes it all” theory also tend to believe that the best way to compete with the incumbant is too build a better/bigger mousetrap or create the “blah blah on steroids”

I don’t think about markets like that.

Often times the winner doesn’t take it all. And the best way to compete with the winner (or current market leader) is by either doing less (not more) and focusing on one thing and doing it very well. It’s actually the opposite of the “blah blah on steroids” approach.

Few examples come to mind:

1. Jobs.

The market leader for some time was Monster. This is a huge market but it’s certainly not a winner takes all market. Instead we now have powerful companies building tremendous value by focusing on different opportunities in the job market with different business models and different experiences (ie Craigslist, LinkedIn, The Ladders and Indeed).

2. Smartphone

Apple built the amazing iPhone, iTunes & App Store. Those things work together in a smooth & beautiful way. They are killing it right now. The alternative: Not an iPhone on steroids. Instead, Andy Rubin and Rich Miner created Android. A free, open source alternative. Absolutely brilliant. Google understood that vision and bought the company very quickly. I’m extremely bullish on Android’s opportunity with mobile devices.

3. Social networking

Facebook is the market leader for sure. But its not winner takes all because its just too big of a category for innovation & creativity. Right now my social network for music isn’t on facebook (instead it’s on hypemachine and tumblr). My photo social net is on tumblr and flickr. My social net for television is Boxee. My information social net is Twitter. FourSquare and Twitter are my social net for places & events. The list goes on.

There are many more examples (gaming, ecommerce, payments, browsers, etc) but this post is already getting too long for it’s own good. So let me try and bring this puppy home with one last thought.

At the end of the day, I believe that entrepreneurs are just too creative, too ambitious and too optimistic to allow for a winner takes all world.

HomeField is Disruptive Tech

By Reece

This quote recently came through my inbox via a fellow entrepreneur.

“Disruptive technologies do not immediately replace existing technologies because they are better. In fact, in the beginning, they are worse. They’re just simpler, cheaper, and more convenient. They appeal to the low end of the market (in this case, netbooks), which doesn’t need all the bells and whistles that the high-end needs. They initially gain share in the low end, and the incumbent doesn’t care about losing it because it’s low-margin share. But then… the disruptive products get better and more fully featured and they begin to migrate up to the mid-market. And the incumbent is forced to retreat to the high-margin high-end. And then, eventually, the disruptive product becomes mass market and the incumbent becomes a rickety old colossus that crashes in on itself.” -From TechTicker by Henry Blodget

In the past few days, @JoeYevoli and I have really been brainstorming around our product, HomeField. We have a lot of great users who love our service already, but there are still a lot of coaches sitting on the sidelines, afraid and/or unaware of HomeField can positively impact their life as coaches, and the lives of their players. If Joe has his way, he’ll go to every national coaches’ convention and just say, “This is HomeField. This is what it does. Give me one reason why you wouldn’t use it?”

But this quote has a lot to do with it. We believe we’ve tapped into a market that is rife with over-engineered junk, rooted in hardware that coaches shouldn’t have to deal with. We believe the future is in the cloud and sports media needs to get moving. The players are thirsty for video, coaches need to cut costs but keep up with player demand, administrators need to keep track of all this media, fans want to see it on their phones…

Yeah, HomeField is simple. Like, stupid simple. No unnecessary editing tools, no file format restrictions - we stripped it down to the bare bones, but it does what it needs to do, and it’s awesome at it. Is it a different behavior than usual - putting video online? Yes. But is it more efficient, and more powerful? Yes.

So, really give me one reason why you wouldn’t use HomeField?

Update: @JoeYevoli claims the quote above is a direct bite from Seth Godin. Re-reading it, I certainly agree. It's got Purple Cow written all over it. We're trying to figure it out, but we want to make sure we give credit where credit's due - especially because Godin is the man.

HomeField Upgrade: Organized, Supercharged

By Dan

We just went live with the latest in a series of updates to HomeField, so I wanted to take a few minutes away from writing code in Eclipse to tell you about the recent changes you can see, and those you can feel. I'll start with the stuff you can see...

Video Organization and Link Share
We have greatly improved video organization for players and coaches alike. You can fluidly browse your films based on the teams you want to watch, the year of the film, and any tags the coaches have added. This makes it so easy to jump directly to recent films of your next opponent, and then watch the ones that impact you as a player. As an added bonus, you can bookmark, email, or otherwise share the current URL while you browse, and later go directly to that selection of films with one click.

Original File Downloads
This one is strictly for the coaches. We have added the ability to download the original file for any of your films. So, if you've uploaded an entire game and something happens to the original (a crashed harddrive or lost laptop, for example), rest assured you'll be able to get it back from HomeField. Additionally, if you receive a whole game film in a trade, you'll be able to download and then edit the film in your favorite video editor. These downloads are very secure, so only you can download the films. If we detect unauthorized access, the link stops working almost immediately, keeping your media in your hands only.

And now the stuff you'll feel...

Under the Hood
First, retrieving your films - even if you have thousands - is much quicker. You'll notice the extra pep in our step every time you click on the Chalkboard, or begin browsing your films. Second, Google recently released version 1.5 of their Google Web Toolkit, and we're taking advantage of it. This toolkit helps us provide you with a fluid desktop-like application over the web, without waiting for page loads after every click. HomeField is a web application, smooth and intuitive, as it ought to be. And now it's faster than ever. Enjoy.

Stealth Upgrades
Finally, we want to remind you that you will always be using the latest and greatest version of HomeField. You never have to deal with an install or upgrade, it just works. The only thing you may notice from time to time, is your browser taking a little longer than usual to bring up HomeField. This happens after we upgrade, as your browser automatically pulls down the new version of HomeField. We think this is a lot better than asking you to manually download and perform an upgrade of a traditional application, and we hope you do too. This allows HomeField to stay on the cutting edge, and allows you to stay focused on your opponent.

Why We're Still in Private Beta

By Reece

I'm glad we haven't made any promises on release dates and launches and whatnot. The few we have, we've met (cut it close, but we did it). It's just the nature of application development to take longer than expected. The problem is the 'expectations.' The point of Beta testing is the 'unexpected.'

As we developed HomeField, we thought through a specific process for our users, based on our time as players, and research we did with coaches. We tried to build the system so that the work-flow of HomeField fell right in line with any coach who used it. So we handed it over to Brown Lacrosse and within thirty minutes we discovered a nasty glitch and an opportunity for a great new feature - not what we expected.

Sure, our proud delivery sort of failed, but it was actually a huge success. We had the bug fixed by the end of the day, and future users (you) will never have to worry about it again. We then took the time to weigh the options of adding a new feature, designed and developed it and now players and coaches can print text-only versions of their scouting reports to paper or pdf.

There were actually a few ideas born out of our testing period so far, and we appreciate them all, but we ultimately chose to implement our printing functionality because it is a major step in the process of scouting another team. In our playing days, we always received a paper scouting report. In the spirit of being green, however, some teams have left this behind and leave printing up to the individual players. So, we felt it was necessary to accommodate those players and we think all users will benefit from this added feature.

Thank you to everyone who has shared ideas with us! We'll keep picking the ones that make the most sense and continue building HomeField into the best resource for you and your team.

Development Status: Pre-season

By Reece

In lacrosse, it's way too cold. For football, it's way too hot. Some players are in shape, sharp and ready to go, others are still nursing injuries and egos from last season. Either way, pre-season is a tough stretch of the year when you fight adverse conditions, do double sessions and generally put yourself to the test in anticipation of that first, epic battle... Game 1.

While we still have the Major League Lacrosse season to look forward to in April, our pre-season focus currently involves more mouse-clicks than wind-sprints. Officially, we're in the midst of our internal testing phase, but we hope to have our private beta going soon after with great D-I programs - Brown, Princeton, Maryland, Dartmouth and Bucknell.

Dan, our Chief Technical Officer, is pumping out line after line of code (I'm pretty sure he spent Valentine's Day with his computers. I spent mine watching game film.) and everyday we get closer and closer to launch (Game 1!), so the excitement is tangible here in NYC.

We've gotten a few emails asking how to get started, and "why can't I use HomeField right now?" so, I'd like to apologize for any confusion on our status and trust me when I say, you will know when HomeField is ready for you.

For now, shine those whistles and get those vocal chords ready to motivate, the spring season has begun!