Let me handle your screencasting so you can focus on doing what you love: working on your code. I'm an experienced marketer and product manager who wants to help put your product on display and reduce your support volume. Let's reach your target market and better support your users.
I think the change in mentality will take a series of successful Pittsburgh companies. There's no lack of resources for a student (or anyone) who wants to start a company in Pittsburgh. If you've got a skilled team and an intriguing market and problem you're addressing, you can absolutely get the resources you need here.
Local companies like The Resumator, ShoeFitr, ShowClix and others are making national headlines. As these companies bring in or continue to bring in revenue and investment dollars to town, and become a cool or interesting place to work, it'll be easier for students to stick around and put down roots. Some of them might even think about starting their own project after awhile.
Any advice or thoughts about what we (Pittsburgh startups) can do to get students excited about our respective companies and convince them to take a role with us over another job?
Just come and talk to us. The first step is just letting us know you exist, and then why we should be excited about you.
It will be a lot easier for you to convince Sophomores and Juniors to come on as interns than getting a graduating Senior at first. On the student's part it is much less of a risk, and besides, staying around for a summer in Pittsburgh isn't too bad. Once you get some people to intern for you then you can get some name recognition on campus and start recruiting more seriously.
I'd say skip the job fairs: In four years, I never considered attending one because they are mostly perceived as boring among your likely target demographic.
Some companies come and give talks about their infrastructure or technology -- these were always what got me excited and interested. I also really enjoyed a few of the competitions and challenges (like Facebook's and Yahoo's).
Just being on campus and doing events which give students a taste of the excitement of creating something would probably generate much more interest than you're seeing now.
I already knew I wanted to work at a startup a year ago, so I had to actively ignore the constant recruiting from the big names while putting effort into chasing down leads with startups. Had I not already known what I wanted (from past internships), it would have been much easier to just sit back and take the pitches which came my way.
Bottom line: come woo us with talks about the cool stuff you do. Send your engineers along too to talk shop with us. Run hack sessions and showcase the winning apps. Show us how much more fun we'd have doing things your way, as opposed to Microsoft's, and you'll have the students you want lining up to apply.
The videos I've saved work for me when I browse Instafilm on my iPad. It may depend on your specific video - if I remember correctly, some YouTube videos are unable to support HTML5.
Not talking about an iPad; I used Firefox 4. I confirmed that the particular video supported WebM on YouTube. However, I just tried again with some other videos, and it worked this time. Perhaps YouTube just randomly decided that that video shouldn't work for a while. shrug
I was just about to make something like this for myself. Thanks for making it! Looking forward to an iPad app.
One quick bit of feedback: I notice when I'm logged in and try to refresh my saved videos (say to refresh to see whether the video I just hit "Watch Later" would appear), the app logs me out. Everything else appears to work great - including leaving the page and coming back to it. Just when I hit refresh. When I log back in, the video appears in my queue like I'd expect it to.
It's probably on your radar, but being able to save TED Talk videos and Mixergy interviews would be great.
Thanks! Glad you like it. The iPad app is coming soon, but in the meantime the site should work on your iPad without a problem. Mixergy and TED will definitely be coming soon to the list of supported sites.
As for the error, you might've caught us while we were frantically rebooting. :) But I'll check it out.
I assume you already know about http://embed.ly but are concerned about security, like embedding unknown/untrusted html on your site?
I find your idea great and I have built something similar my self. I focused mostly on the interface and the fact that many times when watching a video you want to be able to switch between videos and make them fullscreen without interrupting their download. For example, when you have a long video on youtube that is split into many parts.
Playlists and ratings for videos is also quite useful in my opinion.
If you want some ideas check it out: http://lideo.me - you don't have to register/signup to start using it. You can do that later.
I've seen Luis von Ahn (founder of Duolingo/ReCaptcha) speak twice about his new project (once at a CMU Project Olympus update and once at TEDxCMU a few weeks ago).
A few things that may be of interest to the HN crowd:
* This project is currently academic in nature, funded by grants he has received. However, he does see an opportunity to monetize the product if they choose to by offering translation services to companies or organizations in the future.
* The product is currently in testing. According to their metrics, the crowd-sourced translation is as accurate a professional translator. At TEDxCMU, he showed a professional translation side-by-side to a Duolingo created translation - the two were nearly identical. Likewise, according to their metrics, the education received is as good or better than the leading language education solutions (ie, Rosetta Stone).
* He showed some amazing projections on how quickly they can translate a set of text from one language to another. I forget the exact projections so don't hold me to this, but with 1,000 users it would take, say, 3 months to translate English Wikipedia into Spanish. With 1M users, it would take less than a week.
I disagree. Everyday is a part-time collaboration by 4 people that hasn't taken on funding, let alone $41M worth. And Everyday has a business model that doesn't mine data about you: it's $1.99 on the app store.
So, I guess it's like Color in that it uses pictures, except that it's different in just about every other way.
