Ben Reyes

Hacker / Entrepreneur / Failed Student

Salman Khan is a hero to education, here he speaks at TED about how he’s really changing up the traditional model of learning. 16:30 Bill Gates walks on stage and Salman looks absolutely shell shocked as to why everyone is standing up and cheering.

Into Eternity A truly beautiful documentary film about a spent radioactive material storage facility deep within the earth. The mood of the film can be made similar to ‘Moon’ or ‘2001’  (Thanks DanW)

Digital installation projecting living room texture designs

A look into video sites

Video on the web is everywhere. But if you are listing a bunch of videos on your website, just using text doesn’t do it. This is personal research that I’ve turned into a blog post.

If you are building a website with video you might find this useful.

What are we working with?

Videos often contain:

  • Title
  • Description
  • Audio
  • Moving Images (video)
  • Thumbnail

How do we select what videos we watch?

Personally I look at the following things. In ranking order:

  1. Look at the thumbnail, see if its interesting - Able to judge video quality and type of video from the thumbnail.
  2. Read title > Usually sold by the title
  3. Read description If the title didn’t include enough information or still unsure, then read short description if available.

Let’s look at some examples

TED Talks

TED Full Screenshot

Ted is an interesting example:

  • Thumbnails with overlaying Title with opacity
  • Varying sizes of thumbnails according to recentness or ranking in a category e.g “funny”, “inspiring”.
  • Javascript overlay with more information
    TED

Next Example: YouTube

It’s probably the worst experience of displaying lists of video. 

1275426147

  • Spotlight video in separate section highlighting a sigular video
  • Thumbnails (bordered)(animated scrubbing)
  • Video length/time overlaid over thumbnail (TED Talks don’t have to do this because all of their video has a similar length time)
  • Amount of views
  • User who posted video

YT

    Plans for company culture

    A working document and early plans on what I would base my own company’s culture around. Culture is very important to get right and to build it when you start to expand past founders.

    Where I go to be inspired..

    Startup Information:


    Magazines:


    Video:

    Research Papers

    Tech News:

    Internet/Ethernet Controlled Lights @theshh
    I’m currently working on an internet connected ambient lighting system as a personal project using the Arduino. Here is how my progress is going..