Moving on from Yahoo!

Big change to smaller things...

The time has come to move on from Yahoo! and in some sense to close a chapter of large corporate evangelism and marketing work and get back to my entrepreneurial roots. Sure I may have mastered career development for others, coaching, piggybacking onto sales efforts in order to drive future agendas and influencing the product development roadmap, but I have been doing that in the context of the big huge we - and it really hasn't netted me much beyond a few points on share options and a hell of a lot of air miles.

So - at the end of the day we have a bitpakkit with solid corporate chops and a track record of playing at least a small role in some wildly successful platforms and ideas getting shipped, inspected, used and adopted - Microsoft.NET, Web Services, SOA, Flex, Yahoo! AMP! to name a few.

Over this time a few key trends on the internet have kept me very amused, engaged and leaning forward and one of the key ones is online video - video advertising, video sites, video editors, products, codecs, etc... - and I am going to jump headfirst into that space with a bit of a different spin. Why compete? Why fight the trend? Why focus on destinations? None of these ideas make any sense anymore. People go where they go, do what they do and use what they want.

Instead, I am going to focus on the meta aspects of video and its myriad uses and users - ultimately finding a home at the intersection of the content and the viewer and the relevance of that specific interaction of watching and finding relevance in what we watch. I know I have seen a million things in videos, but there is no real record of that.

Well, maybe we can change all that...maybe we can give users tools to say something, find something, point out something and even refer something to someone else and build a metacloud of user value on top of the streaming pixels that flow by in the billions per second.

Ben Watson
VP, Marketing
Overlay.TV