Emily Chang - eHub Interviews

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Posted May 8, 2006

eHub Interviews eVokeTV

Thanks to Tony Buser and the team at eVokeTV for this email interview.

eHub: What is your web application/service about?

eVokeTV: eVokeTV is basically a television program guide.  What sets it apart is it’s ease of use and community building features.  Each show that is on right now, has a real-time chat room connecting people together that are watching the same thing at the same time.  There’s also a script tag you can add to your website/blog which displays what show you are watching and chatting about at that moment.  You can also share your personal lineup for the day, recently rated shows, and top rated shows on your website/blog via javascript tags and RSS feeds.

The real-time chat is something we are planning on focusing more on to make it easier to find other people to chat with.  It brings people together in the same way a family might sit around in the living-room watching and talking about the show or a Mystery Science Theater 3000 effect where people can joke and comment on what’s on the screen.

eHub: Why did you start this project?

eVokeTV: Salman Farmanfarmaian approached us at Unconundrum, Inc. and development began around September 2005 out of the desire to build a better, faster, easier to use tv listings system.  I found that a lot of other tv listing websites were slow, bogged down with ads, and confusing.  We also thought there were many new and interesting things we could do to allow people to communicate and share their interests in tv shows compared to most other primarily forum-based, tv community websites.

eHub: How much time do you devote to its growth?  Do you have a day job?

eVokeTV: There are other projects I am working on at Unconundrum, but eVokeTV is my current focus.  This is my day job… and night job… and the job I think about in my sleep!  :)

eHub: How large is your team and what are your backgrounds?

eVokeTV: We’re a very small team.  I (Tony Buser) am the CTO of Unconundrum, with over 10 years of IT and web application development.  I’ve been responsible for the majority of the design and development.

Dan Smorey is a programmer with Unconundrum and has been in application development for almost ten years, specializing in databases and middleware.

Warren Prince is the CEO of Unconundrum, a web application development group based in Bechtelsville PA, and the founder of Prince Law Offices, a distributed / virtual law firm. Warren has been designing software systems since 1984.

Salman Farmanfarmaian is currently a principal at SCP Partners, a family of venture funds based in Wayne, PA. He has been a student of media convergence over the past several years.

Bobby Yablunsky is an advisor to eVokeTV, and a venture partner at SCP Partners. Bobby has offered strategic and tactical planning, fund-raising, and business development advice to many successful ventures through out the country.

eHub: What is your design philosophy?

eVokeTV: I try to follow the KISS principle.

eHub: What technologies are you currently using?

eVokeTV: The site was created using Ruby on Rails, mySQL, and a lot of javascript and ajax.  Although this isn’t the first application I’ve created using Ruby on Rails, it is certainly the largest.  I doubt I could have created such a large and easily maintainable system in such a short period of time with anything else.

eHub: If your project is live, what are the most requested features from your users/community?

eVokeTV: We just went live at the DEMO 2006 conference (see: presentation video) and we’re technically still in beta.  In that short period of time we’ve gotten a ton of feedback from users.  One of the most commonly requested features include requests for over the air broadcast listings, something we initially didn’t consider to be a priority.  Most requests were minor tweaks which we’ve either already addressed or will very soon.

eHub: Does your user base reside in a primary geographic location or is it distributed?

eVokeTV: We haven’t really looked at the data to see where most users are from yet.  Since we provide listings for all the major US cable and satellite companies, they’re pretty spread out across the nation.

eHub: Where do you see the project heading in the next 6 months?  The next 2 years?

eVokeTV: Our primary goal is to serve TV viewers with similar interests and help them connect to each other online. More and more people have always-on broadband internet connections at home and they are online while they are watching TV. The focus of our web site is to serve those connected users by leveraging the traditionally static ‘TV Listings’ functionality to create dynamic communities around the television watching experience.

That goal won’t change over the next 6 months or two years - we’ll just be adding more ways to make it easier for people to connect.

eHub: What is the greatest challenge to your success?

eVokeTV: Critical mass.  We are hoping to help connect people around their television programming preferences. I think a great sign of our success would be if we start connecting people at the very end of the long tail… when a few people with interests in some obscure topic that has a tv show related to it, find each other on eVokeTV and make their solitary tv watching experience into an interactive exchange around that program.  That would be a great success. The challenge in getting there is that statistically, you need a lot of users to create that kind of connection between them.

eHub: What is the one thing you need to get to the next phase of the project?

eVokeTV: Our web site will be changing all the time as we add new functions… so there is no one big ‘phase’ - it is more of a continuum of improvements.  And we have to say that our community of users has already been incredibly helpful in getting us to define how to improve our site.

eHub: Do you have a business model?  If so, what is it?

eVokeTV: Our business model is primarily advertising and e-commerce driven. We’re also considering ways of using our show ratings and real-time chat ratings, which could potentially be valuable.

eHub: If you’re able to disclose this information, how much traffic or usage do you see on an average day?

eVokeTV: (Answer from March 2006) Since we’ve only been live for 3 weeks, the numbers wouldn’t be very impressive.  However, it is growing quickly.  Last week after we made the front page of digg.com and lifehacker, we’ve gotten a huge increase.  The day we hit digg, we had over 20,000 visitors.  The past few days we’ve had thousands a day.  The important thing is we’re starting to see quite a lot of return users after that spike.

eHub: What is the one thing you’re most proud of about the project?

eVokeTV: Probably the thing I’ve been most proud of has been the community feedback.  We encourage people to participate in the development of eVokeTV and enjoy chatting with users in the chat rooms.  Everyone has been amazingly positive and supportive.

eHub: How would you describe the shift that’s occurring with the web right now to future generations?

eVokeTV: What most people might consider a shift right now, isn’t really anything new to me.  The Internet has always been and always will be a place for people to connect to each other and communicate more easily and effectively.  I’m sure future generations might look back and chuckle at the term “Web 2.0” in much the same way we might laugh today at the term “Information Superhighway”.  I certainly don’t want to get caught up in a Bubble 2.0.

eHub: What site(s) do you visit everyday other than your own?

eVokeTV: Lately, the only one I visit everyday has been Google Reader.  :) A sampling of some of the RSS feeds I subscribe to include: Slashdot, Digg, 43 Folders, Ajaxian, Mac OS X Hints, the Ruby on Rails Blog, RedHanded, Terra Nova, Broken Toys, RocketBoom.

eHub: How many hours of sleep do you get a night?

eVokeTV: I’ll sleep when I’m dead.

Thanks to Tony Buser and the team at eVokeTV for this email interview. Posted May 8, 2006.

Visit EvokeTV
Originally added to eHub on Feb 23, 06

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eHub Interviews is a series with the creators of Web 2.0 applications and services by Emily Chang, author of eHub, designer, and co-founder and principal of Ideacodes, a strategic web consultancy in San Francisco that she co-founded with Max Kiesler.

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