Added: Jan 31, 2012
Author: NewInSiliconValley
Duration: 28:51
Please LIKE and COMMENT this videoAn Interview made by Arnaud Saint-Paul, http://whatsnewinsiliconvalley.comAn interview with Luke Strangel, founder and CMO, http://tackable.com[Excerpts of Transcript] go to http://bit.ly/yI091z for full articleArnaud Saint-Paul: Hey Luke! Good afternoon. You're working at Tackable (http://Tackable.com), you're one of the founders and I saw you at a meet up last weekend so I thought it would be interesting to show to our audience what you had been up to. First and foremost since you are a founder of the company I think the most important thing is, what is your passion? Why did you create that company? Why did you go through all these hurdles that a creator and entrepreneur has to go through to make your dream come true.Luke Stangel: Yea, well you know, I started as a newspaper reporter and I worked as a newspaper reporter all through college. I studied journalism and I ended up spending 7 years at newspapers and radio stations here in Silicon Valley. For me, I was so consumed by the idea behind Tackable that it kept me up at night, I thought about it. I didn't originally plan on starting a company and being an entrepreneur. I assumed that somebody else was going to create the idea and the product. I would go out and pitch the product to someone else and I would say "Hey! You should build this thing that I think about all the time, that i'm driven and inspired by". But no one ever built it. So I decided to start the company with a couple of friends and build it myself.Arnaud: So what do you believe in that supports the company? Meaning, how can it exist? What is it? Let's start with that.Luke: Tackable is a photo and video assignment platform. So you ask for photos and videos of specific things and then your followers send you back responses that they record on their smartphones. So for example journalists use the platform to ask for photos of news events. Recently we had some large scale protests here in Silicon valley around the occupy movement. We had journalists from KKTV, which is a big public news TV and radio station, create assignments asking for photos and videos from people who were at the protest. They ended up getting back several hundred photos which was really great. But you know, people ask for photos of all sorts of things. If you open up Tackable today people want photos of shoes, the lunch that you're eating, the best pizza in your neighborhood. These assignments can be anything! So we're pretty excited about the ways that people are using the platform to talk to one another.Arnaud: So does it create something new or is it more like it was a need that was being fulfilled in another way and now you are doing it better?Luke: Great question. Yeah, for hundreds of years journalists have asked for things from their readers. On twitter if you search for the phrase "send us photos", you will see lots of people who are asking for photos of the big fire that's happening or the big parade that's happening. So this behavior is not new. What we were finding though was that so many people asked for photos and so few photos actually get sent back. When they do get sent back, you have to go through this really manual process. A lot of news organizations have an email address that you can send photos too or they'll say "send these photos to us through twitter and here's the hashtag to assign them to". But eventually they have to go through all of that stuff manually and there's not really a good central place for people to see all those photos and talk about those photos. So what we're doing is taking an existing behavior and making it cleaner and faster and easier for both the users and for the journalists, brands and celebrities who are using the platform.To see a deeper analysis and further transcript, go to http://bit.ly/yI091z
Channel: Tech
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