Indee.TV - an alternate destination to discover content

According to IMDB, over 21,000 films (legit enough to get a listing on IMDB) were made in 2006. Of these less than 2% received any type of distribution. Ever wondered where those amazing shorts, film festival darlings and cult-favorites go away after their limited half-life?

There are several new offerings that attempt to deal with this problem and a need for an alternative market for launching, promoting and distributing indie content. Some examples are IndieGoGo (which was founded by my friends Danae Ringelmann and Slava Rubin and of which I am an early and happy customer), The Auteurs (which Edward King, a friend of mine works for), Jaman etc.

Indee.TV is a cool new entrant in this space, that is founded by my friend Sharan Reddy. I joined the board as an independent director some months ago. Since launching in February, the site has 500+ short and independently made features uploaded or embedded on the site.

The value to filmmakers is three-fold:

- Drive community around their work. Users "rave" for their films and this bubbles their film to the top, not unlike what Digg does for news.

- Finding talent and collaborators for future projects. Think IMDBPro meets Facebook, where you can network with the editor or cameraman of another film you see, and interact directly.

- Getting your film screened. The second such special screening of shorts happened at SWIG in San francisco this past weekend, in conjunction with Natalie Portman's company MakingOf, IndieGoGo and TheAuteurs.

As someone with a technology background interested in digital filmmaking, it's great to see these brave new companies make hard-to-find content accessible, curate them and deliver it (mostly for free) to consumers.

There have been interesting companies which were all Generation 1.0 services for content creators - JumpCut (since discontinued by yahoo), WithoutABox (THE definitive film festival submission tool), Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB come to mind. Should be interesting to see how these Generation 2.0 companies evolve and how this impacts consumers' overall movie-going experience!

UPDATE: Feedback from those who read this... other companies that were successful Gen 1.0 services include iFilm (acquired by MTV), CinemaNow (now part of Sonic Solutions), AtomFilms (also owned by MTV/Comedy Central), MovieLink (since acquired by Blockbuster) and the Morgan Freeman promoted ClickStar.

Rajeev Motwani - In Memoriam

It's not an overstatement to say that I get most of my news from Twitter these days! Admittedly some of those "scoops" turn out to be rumors, and not to be taken seriously. That is how I initially reacted to the update that spread like wildfire on June 5th that Stanford Professor and well known Valley investor and advisor Rajeev Motwani passed away quite suddenly - especially since just 3 days back, he had (like numerous times before) introduced me to someone who he believed I should meet.

It has been days since the incident happened, but still feels like a shock. A lot has been said about Rajeev's razor-sharp intellect, his ability to pick winners and back them (like Google, Jareva, Flarion, Kaboodle, Green Border and many others). As Sergey Brin appropriately put it:

Today, whenever you use a piece of technology, there is a good chance a little bit of Rajeev Motwani is behind it.

During the early days of starting Aeroprise, Rajeev was one of the first people I was introduced to (when folks heard that we were a bunch of students with a technology background thinking of starting a company). We were then still in stealth mode, and did not want the name to give away too much regarding what we were upto! Rajeev got the significance of lying low, and focusing on having a product before trying to build a business around it. The numerous brainstorms at University Coffee Cafe are still fresh in my mind, where he would put his finger on the most critical issues within 30 seconds, and yet have the patience and grace to let you describe your entire problem before flashing his smile. Of course, you knew at that point that something was wrong... but Rajeev was too nice to laugh at any entrepreneur's dreams, especially those of his students!

During one of these conversations, we brought up our name (then called Kwaish an Urdu word for Dream) and mentioned to Rajeev that several people thought we should change it. We asked if that should be a priority for us at all. Rajeev replied - "Just focus on succeeding. When you go public, people will learn how to say Kwaish!"

Rajeev leaves behind a generation of aspiring entrepreneurs he inspired, who will I am sure carry forward his generosity with his time and resources and his support for entrepreneurship! Silicon Valley will miss his dignity, intellect and grace, and University Coffee Cafe will never be the same again.