TBT: I applied for a patent for social discovery on a short form mobile streaming platform

When I was a cofounder of a mobile streaming platform called Second Screen - later we called it “10 Block” to represent the blocks of 10 minute video it could stream to social viewers on our platform - our final chapter was an M&A journey. To document our novel idea, we applied to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office in 2019.

As the chief operating officer of our early stage startup, I led the initiative to create our patent application with a patenting law firm. The project had unusual demands, as entrepreneurs so often face, and faced budget restrictions as well.

“I found a Vietnamese-speaking entrepreneur who could interview the tech team in Vietnam and produce a technical sketch of our system.”

— With her example I sketched the rest of the drawings to complete our application.

My work on this initiative included producing technical sketches of the system. This particular challenge involved locating a technically-minded entrepreneur familiar with patenting who could speak Vietnamese to interface with the development team in Vietnam who built the platform long before I joined the company. The sketches never existed, and the team had never produced a sketch.

Thanks to Gigi Wang at UC Berkeley’s School of Engineering Sutardja Center, I was able to connect with a local founder of a technical company who just graduated Berkeley with a PhD. She’s a brilliant woman who is currently CEO of her own startup addressing cognitive impairments with light and sound. Mai Nguyen had the skills and experience to be able to capture an accurate first sketch after just a half an hour call with the development team.

I’m not a technical person but I’m creative who can learn from a model and replicate it so once I had the first technical drawing I was able to produce all the rest of the drawings needed to make our patent application.

Our provisional application was filed in January 2020 with fellow 10 Block inventors Marc Lopez and Jade Gabriel.

Conceiving of an Expat Harem inspired streaming series

Stealth project, defunct. Revolved a return to the cultural thread, in international streaming, if the time is right. (It wasn’t, 2022 and 2023 earthquakes and bombings changed the landscape, in a heated election year.)

Pitchbook for streaming series concept, 2022-2023

Expat Harem-related projects won't quit. The book is still for sale, and people are finding it like an actress in London who discovered it in a bookshop in London and sent it to a TV producer in Istanbul.

In 2022, at the request of that TV producer in Istanbul, I co-developed a streaming series concept inspired by the book "Tales from the Expat Harem" and its associated blog.

Collaborating with another writer, Katherine Belliel, whose Haze appeared in the book, and who coedited the sequel book Expat Sofra, we crafted a unique series that reflected the themes and stories from the original literary work.

This involved extensive research into the rights landscape, and entertainment legal agreements. We then pitched the concept to an international streaming service, leveraging our creative vision and strategic communication skills to present a compelling case for the globally accessible series.

The project demonstrated our ability to adapt literary content for a new digital medium while managing complex logistical and legal aspects.

Amazon buys MGM, now itching for actual updates to the content vault

So many of us have envisioned this day, or at least where things are now surely headed for MGM's legendary library!

Once worked in Studio Business Affairs at MGM in the 90s, you may recall.

Then prepandemic had the pleasure of pitching 10 Block, my social and mobile streaming platform solution to MGM, Madhu and the studio's distribution leadership, and together envisioning the impact of connecting today's global audiences -- where and when and how they are watching -- with MGM's vaulted riches.

Still itching to see actual forward-looking viewing conventions applied to older content. Personally, want annotations, episodes, interactivity.

Can you imagine, for instance, viewing MGM’s library of Old Hollywood classics and Bond blockbusters broken down into short modern length episodes you can chat with your friends about, and discovering what to watch through reviews and what your network is liking? That looks like this?

A woman can dream!

Our advisor Craig Kornblau advises Google Ventures on the future of film in a streaming world

It's been wonderful for the past year and a half having Craig Kornblau advise our entertainment tech startup 10 BLOCK  — and Google Ventures’ GV — on the intersection of the entertainment industry and the tech world. "The reason I decided to work with early-stage and growth companies is, having lived in big corporate America and big entertainment companies, it's really hard to find massive innovation in large companies. I think real innovation is going to come from small companies," he says in this interview about the future of film in a streaming world.

In the news & behind the scenes: it’s the flywheel

Scott Galloway takes on the streaming wars in this week’s No Mercy/No Malice newsletter.

He writes

“My colleague Sonia Marciano teaches that to achieve success, the best strategy is to find the dimension with the greatest variance — the biggest delta between best and worst. In the streaming wars, both flywheel and distribution offer the greatest variance, and monopolies dominate those categories. 

“A flywheel is a disk that stores kinetic energy and then spins it out to a nearby engine. In the context of business, as the flywheel rotates it increases output or revenue without increasing input or cost. The ultimate flywheel is Amazon. Amazon Prime attracts shoppers who want a wide assortment of products with rapid fulfillment. These subscribers also enjoy the benefits of services like Amazon Prime Video, which increase the stickiness of Prime and time spent on the platform.” 

From “Land of the Undead” | No Mercy / No Malice from Scott ‘Prof’ Galloway

Here’s Galloway on how these flywheels, or feedback loops, can work in the world of video on demand, the world of 10 Block…the mobile streaming platform I’ve been running as chief operating officer for the past two years.

“In the context of the streaming wars, SVOD adds momentum to the flywheel. Movies and entertainment evoke powerful emotions. The connective tissue of the flywheel is increasingly emotion. The NPS score (consumers’ emotional connection to a company) is negative to zero for ecommerce and internet companies, but it’s strong for SVOD companies. Loving Fleabag means you’ll buy your next toaster from Amazon, not Target or Williams-Sonoma.” 

It was interesting to read Scott Galloway today talking about the winner-take-all effect of flywheels in the context of the streaming war macrocosm. As the cofounder of a mobile streaming platform, talking about the microcosm of the flywheel we built into the product fills my days. Those emotions that drive the flywheel in our patent-pending social discovery system drive viewers to share what they’re watching, what they think of it, and invite friends to view with them.

I took a peek back at some of my own shorthand sources and insights on flywheels and growth loops captured on a Trello card. (Trello is my favorite productivity tool at the moment, and for quite a while, BTW. <More on that later.)

Second Screen featured in Europe's leading magazine for media & entertainment industry

In January I took a cofounder & COO role in Second Screen, a mobile startup in LA's Silicon Beach that aims to become the Netflix of bite-size series. Europe's magazine for the media & entertainment industry interviewed us for their May issue when they took a look at the adoption of second screen technology and other rapidly growing areas of mobile content.

Today they made the Second Screen app their cover star. Thanks to TVB editor Jenny Priestley for the interview of Second Screen's founder & CEO Estella Gabriel.

"Wouldn't the clever idea be to create an app where viewers can watch content but also comment about it?" asks TVB Europe's editor in her note prefacing the magazine.

Estella talks about social discovery: "Instead of an algorithm like Netflix has, we use a referral system. You can see what your friends are watching."

You can read the whole issue here.