Last week, we spoke with Roger Wu the CEO of Klickable.tv. Klickable is an interactive video platform that allows users to click on objects within a video. Imagine watching a music video and clicking on Jay-Z’s bling to learn where you can get some for yourself. It’s possible with Klickable’s interface.
We tried Klickable by applying it to a video we made last month with Fred Wilson. Check out the video and click around:
Roger told us the story behind Klickable’s founding and shared his plans for the company’s future development and funding. Below is the interview:
NYC 3.0: How did you come up with the idea for Klickable?
Roger: Before Klickable.tv I was actually working at an interactive agency and one of the things that I did was create videos for clients. But days that I wasn’t producing I would be in front of a computer working. I would have Word, Excel, PowerPoint and email open and all this other stuff. But then I would get an email that said “you have to check out this video. It got a million views.” So I would click on it and as I’m watching the video I was going to from this ADD state where I was doing a million things to a state where I was doing nothing. Video is a passive medium where your computer is very active.
And so what I wanted to do was to understand why there was these crazy drop off rates. I think T-Mobile did a survey where they said after 10 seconds you loose ten percent of your audience and after a minute you loose more than 50 percent of your audience. I believe it’s because there’s this discrepancy between being active and being passive on your computer. So I wanted to change that and make it so that there was a new way for people to consume video.
NYC 3.0: How did you develop the product?
Roger: Initially the premise was to outsource to India or Russia and focus on the sales and marketing. It quickly became apparent that they couldn’t create something new only something that had done before. So I bought a book “Learn Flash in 24 hours.” Mind you it took much longer than 24 hours to learn Flash but I started to just dabble with it and just talked to people and really just developed the product in house, which is great because now we know how everything works.
Also during my video creation days I had entered a Butterfinger viral video contest. And through that I had won the grand prize – a MacBook Pro. So I had this MacBookPro and this “Learn Flash in 24 Hours” book, which I got for $18 on Amazon. And then I found a place in Manhattan called Subtlety that had free Wi-Fi. So we basically parked ourselves there all day from open to close until we got this thing done.
NYC3.0: What’s your funding situation?
Roger: We raised a little bit of money from friends and family, but I think one of the best sources of funding are users and customers. So we have some paying users and customers that are keeping us afloat right now. What we really want to do right now is grow the business to the point where VCs will come to us. And our burn is almost nothing at this point so it’s a really good point to be in right now because we really have nothing to loose.
NYC3.0: What advice would you give to other entrepreneurs?
Roger: I think the biggest thing regarding entrepreneurship and I can’t take credit for this I read a book from Mark Burnett called “Jump In.” A lot of people are aspiring entrepreneurs and they’re doing the research and analyzing the market and looking at what the opportunity is yadda yadda yadda. And I think the biggest thing is to just do it. When you look at all the numbers out there the odds are against you. You’re going to look at them and say there’s a one in a million chance of succeeding. So you won’t do it because statistically you can’t. But I think if you just go out and do it.
NYC3.0: Any thoughts about the future of video on the Web?
Roger: Well, I think obviously we’re going to get tons and tons and tons of more video out there. And I think that what we’re going to see is a lot more computer vision being applied to video. Believe it or not there’s this ability for computers to have almost like this Terminator-like vision in video so it’s just a matter of scaling and extending it across all video. And that’s something we’re working on as well – the ability to really see things within video and be able to scrape videos similar to a Google Images. So I think that video will become more like the rest of the Web where it’s searchable, linkable and seeable/crawlable by the rest of the search engines. Video is going to become just like a pictures and just like text.
NYC3.0: Who are your customers? Are you focusing on one market?
Roger: Everybody uses the product a little bit differently. We’re – i like to use the analogy – like PhotoShop. Somebody might want to crop your head out and put it one my body. Or somebody might want to change a blue car into a green car. And those are completely different applications of the same software product. So we have a very diverse group of users. One of them is an E-commerce company in Boston and what they want to do is show video where you can click on the clothes in a video and that ties into their inventory so you don’t have to leave the video while you shop.
We’re working with a couple of cooking shows so you’re able to really see what the ingredients are when somebody’s cooking. You can also link to some of the pots and pans or other recipes.
We’re working with a couple real estate developers out there who really want to showcase some of the properties that they’re representing and get some user feedback. So if someone is looking at a kitchen online they can say I thought everyone would be clicking on the Viking stove but instead 80 percent of the clicks come on the Koehler sink. So that’s probably something I should emphasize on the walk through.
We’re working with a lot of entertainment people so folks who create a lot of content where they want to link to other pieces of content.
We’re also working with news organizations. One of the things is that news organizations are being commoditized by Google. So if you’re watching NY1 and you saw that the Jets lost the game to the Colts you know you could put that into Google and all of a sudden you could go anywhere. Well now with Klickable you can simply click on the video and it can take you deeper into the NY1 Web site.
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