A few months ago, we “announced” Giphy - a search engine for animated GIFs.  I’m using quotes because, to be honest, we weren’t really ready to announce it.  The product started taking off and we felt it was best to give the couple hundred thousand folks and countless publishers that started using it a place to direct their feedback, bugs, and feature requests.  Needless to say, there was a lot of duct tape holding the search engine together — until today.  The Giphy team, started by hackers in residence Jace Cooke & Alex Chung, have been hard at work building a robust search engine, responsive site, realtime crawler, and most importantly (for us) a way to handle attribution.

While a lot of what we’re launching with this “version 1.0” is behind the scenes, some of the new features you’ll notice are a sexy homepage, a browse mode, much faster searching, and about a dozen featured GIF artists with their own pages to host original content.  This is the first step we’re taking to help organize a historically fragmented community, and give GIF artists around the world a legitimate platform to start the next big Internet meme.

- paul

The promise of video entertainment on mobile devices is a theme that quickly emerged in our hacker in residence group.  Matt Hackett was particularly frustrated that despite the simplicity of an iPhone and iPad, it’s incredibly time consuming to find video entertainment worth watching.  Traditional mobile video apps did one of two things - they either pulled uninteresting video from social streams, or they relied on extensive keyword searching only to find a semi-entertaining 30 second clip.

At the same time, traditional television, for all it’s flaws, still does one thing well - when you turn on a TV and switch to a channel you like, you’ll get professionally programmed video designed to (hopefully) entertain you.  Why can’t we do the same thing on an iPad or iPhone?  

Matt and a small team of builders, including Jason Morrow (product design), Juan Alvarez (iOS), Mike Byhoff (editorial), Grant Custer (front-end extraordinaire) spent the next 3 months working to fix this problem: Enter Telecast.

We believe in what makes TV special, professionally sourced and programmed shows.  At the same time, we feel the most interesting video content now exists on the Internet.  Telecast brings you three 5-minute bursts of seriously good, personally tailored video every day.

One thing’s for sure - you’ll love the shows.  Download Telecast now and give it a shot.

- paul

Telecast is currently only available in North America, additional markets coming soon!

We recently launched Dots to an amazing response.  In just one week, Dots has been downloaded 1 million times, has become the #1 app in 8 countries, and is a top 5 app in 15 other countries.  Our Twitter and Facebook streams were quickly filled with friends, colleagues, celebrities, and complete strangers talking about the game and challenging others to beat their Dots score. Needless to say, we’re thrilled with the response.

There’s a lot to do, and we’re working hard to release an update shortly with a few bug fixes, new features, and iPad support.  Check out the blog on Dots to see what we have planned (plus a few tips and tricks).

- patrick & paul