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Spreecast - San Francisco - H1B Welcome - iOS Team Lead and iOS Engineers

Spreecast is the social video platform that connects people through video conversation. Our partners include ESPN, LinkedIn, VH1, Extra, CBC, and others. Our CEO previously started and sold StubHub. Our mission is to connect people through conversation. We believe that people obtain a deeper understanding of each other and a more emotional connection when they interact face-to-face.

Our upcoming app sends and receives video and audio in real time. We use lots of custom code since the iOS SDK does not support real time video. We're looking for engineers to join the iOS team. We're also looking for an iOS Team Lead.

We're always interested in generalist engineers as well, even though we don't have a job ad out. So if you're really good, send me an email ([email protected])

More info at http://about.spreecast.com/jobs/

New York, Fulltime, Spreecast Mobile Engineer

We are bringing Spreecast, a live video platform, to mobile and are growing a team of engineers in New York City. We’re looking for generalist engineers to join our mobile team.

We work primarily in iOS and Android and we use a variety of custom video components. We really like full stack engineers and encourage people to learn new skill sets – our best engineers are comfortable with modifying code on our Wowza, FMS, Ruby on Rails, and Java servers. You can try our website at www.spreecast.com to see the experience we are bringing to mobile apps.

We’re most interested in excellent engineers, regardless of which current language/toolset you’re currently using. We believe that excellent engineers can quickly accomplish great things in a language that they don’t already know. So if you’re a longtime C++ engineer that wants to get involved with mobile development, be sure to contact us. Engineers with experience in Android and iOS should definitely apply.

Fun Stuff

Choose your own engineering setup. For instance I’m writing this on a Retina Macbook Pro with two external monitors and 16GB (!?!) of RAM.

We’re expanding our office in NYC to include a full time studio for celebrities to use to create Spreecasts.

Our headquarters are in San Francisco so you’ll get to take trips to the Bay Area.

About Us

We are well funded, have been in beta for 9 months, and have offices in NYC and San Francisco. One of our cofounders, Jeff Fluhr, previously started StubHub and sold it to eBay.

Please contact [email protected]

NYC & San Francisco - Full Time

Spreecast, http://www.spreecast.com

Remote and contract possible for iOS and Android engineers

Spreecast is a social video platform. Many celebrities use it as a way to talk with their fans. Other people talk about sports, politics, or whatever excites them. We are well funded, have a team of 20, and have offices in New York and San Francisco. One of the cofounders previously started StubHub and sold it to eBay.

We are bringing Spreecast to mobile and are growing a team of engineers in NYC (iOS and Android). We are always looking for engineers on our web and infrastructure teams in San Francisco.

We're most interested in excellent engineers, regardless of which current language/toolset they're currently using. We believe that excellent engineers can quickly accomplish great things in a language that they don't already know.

If interested, please send your resume plus links to apps/websites/projects you have built to [email protected]

NYC and San Francisco

Spreecast, http://www.spreecast.com

Spreecast is a way to bring people together online, face to face, for conversations on topics they care about. For instance, two weeks ago we had a star from the TV show Glee talking with fans from Italy, Brazil, the UK, and the US. We are well funded, have a team of 20, and have offices in New York and San Francisco. One of the cofounders previously started StubHub and sold it to eBay.

We are bringing Spreecast to mobile and are growing a team of engineers in NYC. We are always looking for engineers on our web and infrastructure teams in San Francisco.

We're most interested in excellent engineers, regardless of which current language/toolset they're currently using. We believe that excellent engineers can quickly accomplish great things in a language that they don't already know.

If interested, please send your resume plus links to apps/websites/projects you have built to [email protected]

Thanks for the feedback. In your screenshot it looks like the font didn't load and thus the layout goes crazy. Perhaps is the Google fonts server blocked? I ask since I test on FireFox on both my mac and PC and can recreate this when the fonts don't load or when NoScript blocks them.

HN,

I put my new creation up this morning and now it's on the front of ReadWriteWeb - http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2010/12/addeddomainscom---....

Thanks to the magic of Heroku I'm now running 11 dynos and serving up to 100 requests per second. Beyond the awesome scalability, Heroku is fast! It turns around requests generally in under 100ms with max 150ms.

Things I learned:

Instant search is hard to scale. A normal user can type 5 characters per second and each character is a full round trip to the server.

Sinatra is fast. This is my first time using it for a live site and I've been very happy with this.

Google has nice fonts on their servers: http://code.google.com/webfonts The font I chose seems to work with nearly all browsers and since Google is serving the font file off their servers, it loads very quickly.

I'd appreciate any feedback that you all have. The site is so in flux that I put it live at midnight last night and then rewrote half the javascript in the early morning hours.

Thank you,

Robert

Until the Advanced functionality is rolled out publicly, does anyone have suggestions for logging all requests to something like S3? I was going to write my own this afternoon since I couldn't find anything.

I see the market currently providing two options, neither of which encompass my use case.

1) Exception Logging via existing Heroku addons like Exceptional

2) Tracking via javascript, e.g. Google Analytics

The problem I'm experiencing is that I have successful ajax calls to a Sinatra app that I'd like to log. Running 'heroku logs' will give me the last couple hundred but I'm generating many thousands. The new new Heroku logging functionality will expand that tail to showing me a few thousand queries across my dynos but as I understand it, it won't write out to S3 (nor a file since Heroku is write-only).

I planned on writing a custom logger that will output to S3. If anyone has suggestions in lieu of rolling my own, please advise. Otherwise I can post the code I create on github for others in my situation.

Las Vegas dominates the fundings but the Reno area has a very large number as well. The state looks split in two!

See below for detailed Google maps version http://www.formds.com/filings/advanced_filter?filters_params...

Thanks, ssskai. That article was helpful to me as the writer did a good job of describing the study and the relative merits of the different states.

I'm learning that creating the writing to describe a visualization is often as hard as creating the visualization itself.

Thanks, Paul. I'm doing some of that as well by geocoding all the filings. For instance, here are the most recent filings from California, geocoded down to the exact address:

http://www.formds.com/filings/advanced_filter?filters_params...

HN,

I created this analysis to get another view of entrepreneurial activity in the US.

On a tech note, these graphs were created with Protovis, a JS toolkit discussed recently here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1808334 Since Protovis and IE don't yet work well together (IE9 may change that), the page degrades for IE users to show PNGs instead of the JS SVGs.

The inspiration for this visualization came from the Stanford Visualization Group's choropleth here: http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/ex/choropleth.html

I would appreciate comments and feedback! Thank you.

Can anyone that has submitted their site to Killer Startups quantify the number of solicitations they received from vendors? I ask since I almost submitted my site a couple weeks back but was turned off by these lines in the Killer Startups' Terms of Service:

"You herein consent that The Company will disclose to any third party your name, address, e-mail address or telephone number (you may opt out of this by not submitting your startup), except to the extent necessary or appropriate to comply with applicable laws or in legal proceedings where such information is relevant. The Company reserves the right to offer third party services and products to you based on the preferences that you identify in your registration and at any time thereafter; such offers may be made by the Company or by third parties."

One of the coolest R visualizers I've seen is specifically for ggplot2. Created by a PhD student at UCLA

http://www.stat.ucla.edu/~jeroen/ggplot2.html

Thank you. Your idea provides a great way of addressing joshu's feedback. I'll email at the address in your profile when I have things working.

Thanks, Joshua. I appreciate the feedback.

I'm going to build the features you suggested very soon. Another HNer suggested something like: http://www.google.com/finance/stockscreener and I will enable that type of view to filter by industry, date, and size.

Regarding historical data, digital filings only exist after March 2009. Before that the SEC used a paper form that the SEC would scan and put online. The scanned PDFs would need to be injested via OCR and humans. Thomson Reuters already does this and I'm sure it's expensive.

When I have the beta of your suggestions up, I'll try contacting you via Twitter since I don't know how to contact you otherwise. If you'd prefer to email me your contact info, I can be reached at robert@#{website_from_this_post}.com

Thanks,

Robert

That stockscreener idea is genius. I was planning a more basic version but your suggestion is even better since people are already used to that format. I'll start building this this weekend - Do you mind if I email you a beta version for feedback before I put it live next week?

Investment funds are generally subject to Form D filings since they don't do "public" offerings as defined by the SEC. So yes, billion dollar hedge funds do file for raising massive amounts of money.

One more note, "Amended Filings" will show the highest amount of money raised to date. To determine how much money was raised recently, you need to subtract the underlying "New" filing and any subsequent amended filings. The SEC's data structure makes it difficult to get amounts of all the referenced filings to do this automatically (basically to 'diff' the filings) so I leave it to readers to do. Example: http://www.formds.com/issuers/mount-vernon-securities-lendin...

Thanks for the feedback. I have another set of visualizations coming soon I think will address your suggestion regarding comparables over time. Your suggestion is spot on.

As to stealthmodewatch.com, I thought the creator (you?) did a great job of getting launch coverage in TechCrunch. A very, very good job. I got a link in TechCrunch the second day my site went up (for breaking the Dave McClure 500 startups launch) but stealthmodewatch.com got a whole article. Well played!

Edit:

I thought about your suggestion more. Does the most recent listing of filings help? http://www.formds.com/filings

Regarding drill down, is 'by industry' informative?

http://www.formds.com/filings?grouping=industry&industry...

(Fitbit funding at top of that list)

Yes, it's new. As in an hour old!

HN,

Form Ds are filed with the SEC by startups, hedge funds, and growing companies to announce the completion of fundings (equity and debt) but there's no way to search for companies near you. I built a Google maps visualizer that takes the daily SEC filings and overlays them on Google maps.

For example of a Form D, here's SeatGeek's (current top story on HN) Form D filings:

http://www.formds.com/issuers/seatgeek-inc

I'd love feedback on my Google Maps visualization.

Things I know I need to add:

Ability to zoom in on an area and see filings from the last week or month.

Ability to save the areas you're interested in (instead of the whole US loading every time)

Tech thing to change:

I'm writing out the javascript using Rails' erb instead of a javascript function pulling from a JSON object. I just saw the SeatGeek guys use a JSON object + function for their raphael visualization and realized that that's what I should be doing...

Thanks for any feedback!

Thanks, Patrick. Your suggestion is perfect.

I use Embed.ly for a side-project site I hacked together quickly (www.senioritis.com) and I love it.

The beauty of Embed.ly is that users can submit a link, my site calls out to Embed.ly, and Embed.ly returns HTML for embedding in the page. In my quick hack I don't even check whether Embed.ly can handle the link, etc. but just embed the HTML if the response isn't nil (though I understand the XSS risks and need to fix it).

Parse the JSON response of: Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse("http://api.embed.ly/v1/api/oembed?url=#{self.web_link}))

and you're set. I love how simple it is.

One thing re Embed.ly, their server sometimes takes some time to respond and so I recommend using DelayedJob. Right now my horrible hack just uses an after_create hook in rails to call the Embed.ly server in the same thread but sometimes that times out or has a noticeable delay.