I'm happy to announce that this past week I joined the JibJab team as a Product Manager. JibJab was founded in 1999 and really became widely known in 2004 for the This Land video which satirized the 2004 presidential election. While JibJab still produces these videos, the core business is high production quality eCards. The 40+ person company, which has raised $17.9m in funding to date, is profitable thanks to its very popular $12/year eCard subscription business.

What drew me to the JibJab opportunity is its unique position in the tech space. It's still very much in startup mode in spite of being around since 1999. Its various products touch hundreds of millions of people a year. It's a highly talented technical team (almost half of the 40 person team is in tech or product). It's a profitable business but still has a ton of room to grow. And finally, there are a bunch of new products that will be launched this coming year that I'll be a key part in building.

The path to get to JibJab was quite an interesting one. The past two years I spent working for Jason Calacanis at Mahalo.com. The past year, I was leading and managing product on new property within Mahalo called AskForADeal. I made the extremely tough decision back in early November of leaving my promising opportunity at AskForADeal in order to try to raise money for a side project I'd been working on called SmackTweets.

The basic idea of SmackTweets was to provide provide a better real time consumption experience of Twitter around defined verticals - starting with the NFL. The plan was to then cover all major sports followed up by politics and entertainment. The site would aggregate the "insiders" within these verticals, provide a contextualization of who these accounts were over a live tweet stream and then curate the best conversations and media within the vertical.

Needless to say, after three months of making the rounds with LA's accelerators (Launchpad, Amplify, Mucker Lab, Start Engine and Science) and local LA angel investors my cofounder Travis Fischer and I came up empty. It was quite a surprise to both of us given that we both had a solid background, had the support of our former boss Jason Calacanis, and had a solid MVP live. In the end, the business model (which was based on paid apps per vertical) and also the fact that we were based on another platform (Twitter) were the primary concerns for our business. While it was very disappointing, I learned a lot from the experience of presenting to accelerators and angels. I also still believe in the product and think that someone else (or perhaps Twitter itself) will eventually provide the features and functionality we built or were in the process of building.

Either way, things tend to work themselves out and I'm very excited to continue to build my skills and experience on the product side at JibJab. As I mentioned above, JibJab provides a great opportunity to work on some really cool projects and also be a part of a super talented team. In addition, the HQ is a 2 minute walk from my place in Venice beach which doesn't hurt either :).

I participated in my first Startup Weekend (@StartupWeekend) this past weekend. The basic idea of the weekend is simple - create a company in one weekend. The project I worked on was HealthySurprise.com - a healthy snack subscription service. I worked on a team comprised of @joewinke and @edwu. I had a great experience and will definitely be involved in Startup Weekend next time around. For those not familiar with Startup Weekend check out my summary of how it works below.

How Startup Weekend Works

1. Signup
   The cost for LA Startup Weekend was $99/person. When you sign up you either identify yourself as a technical person (engineer), designer/product person or a non-technical person (marketing etc...). LA's event was held at Santa Monica's Coloft (@coloft) and was limited to 100 people split between the above disciplines.
2. Idea Proposals
   Everyone who has an idea is given a couple minutes Friday night to propose their idea in front of everyone. Everyone participating in the weekend is given two votes for the ideas they like best. The top 10 ideas become the team leaders and ideas that are built during the weekend.
3. Create Teams
   The individuals who proposed an idea that was selected become team leaders and are in charge of creating their team. Teams can be whatever size and really depend on the skill sets needed to build the product you're working on.
4. Build
   All day Saturday and Sunday is spent at the Coloft working with your team members to build your product.
5. Present
   The weekend is capped by presentations in front of a panel of judges. This event was streamed live by TechZulu (@TechZulu).
6. Winners
   After seeing all of the team presentations the panel of judges vote on the best companies of the weekend. The results of the judging are below in my tweet:

Projects

• Look.io / @lookioapp / live mobile in-app support framework
• Skilloop / @skilloop / local marketplace for finding experts
• Omaze / @omazeworld / win experiences money can't buy
• Swaydar / @Swaydar / notifying businesses when influencers are present
• Healthy Surprise / @HealthySurprise / healthy snack subscription service
• Hand Job / @HandjobApp / job discover app using LinkedIn
• EscrowSnap / @EscrowSnap / simplifying the escrow process
• Habitful / mobile app using game mechanics to build habits
• Company.is / @Companyis / directory of simple company descriptions
• TrainerSays / text-based reminder service for physical trainers and their clients
• InsiteR / competitive site technology analysis
• Votobooth / daily photo game challenge
• DrugKick / @DrugKick / site to connect patients with proper physicians
• CatchTags / @CatchTags / browser based video game around Twitter hashtags

Below is an overview of the site that I did for Mahalo.com.

Also, check out some the YouTube playlist which includes the other videos in the how-to series.

Above is a screenshot of my current email setup. I use Google Apps on my personal domain (mikebracco.com) as my single access point for all email. I route all email accounts through this account.

As a person who seeks simplicity, I heavily customize my Google mail experience to remove the clutter while at the same time giving me all the crazy functionality that I require. Using Google mail without customizations is a ok at best experience that I can't imagine doing. Here is what I do to make my Google mail experience more enjoyable and customized to my needs: 

1. Minimalist for Gmail™  (A) - allows you to take every element of Google mail and either customize it or remove it completely. It's a Google Chrome extension that is responsible for the de-cluttering of my inbox elements, the custom Star row colorings and the removal of all the garbage that Google throws in the footer of Google mail.
2. Show Label if Unread (B) -  A newer feature of Google mail that only show labels if they are unread. In other words, they hide unless there is a new email. I do this for almost all labels with the exception of a few. It's very useful if you use many labels and don't want your sidebar to be filled with labels.
3. ActiveInbox (C) - This app is the sh**. As an "inbox zero" guy, I don't use my inbox as a task manager (that's terrible!). Instead I process it immediately either by archiving it or by creating a task in Google Tasks. ActiveInbox simplifies my quest for inbox zero very quickly by giving me a simple way to create action items from emails that I remove from my inbox. I pay $25 a year for the premium version of this product and it's totally worth it.
4. feedmyinbox (D) - While it doesn't directly relate to "simplifying gmail", feedmyinbox definitely simplifies my information consuming workflow. As a longtime Google Reader user, I often found that I missed things by not heading over to Reader often enough. As a result, I started using this service to generate emails of the RSS feeds I'm interested in. Since I live in Google mail, all RSS feed updates are simply routed there via this service and are populated in the multiple inbox below my main inbox. Feedmyinbox allows you to create individual emails per feed update or create daily digests. There are also a variety of other options - I highly recommend it.

If you have any other tips/tricks or customizations you rely on, definitely hit me up on Twitter.

This week was quite a busy news week. We ended up covering the Skype acquisition of Qik, the $50 billion dollar Facebook valuation and the launch of the Mac App Store.