Head2Head

In 2006 I got back into web development by talking my way into a web job at a digital agency in New York. The owner sold branded digital content to companies and had a wall of Video CDs as trophies to prove it. We had a good rapore and worked well together on a number of client sites. But his real passion was in the emerging online video space. He wanted to develop a daily video competition and realized that CMSes weren't going to cut it. So he hired me to work on it. Research the hosted video space and build products that he could sell.

Head2Head was a 16-week branded contest that was sold, old school with companies as a package. Our agency would produce and edit 20 videos and run them for 16 rounds, as they battled there way to the championships in a final four like tournament. It was meant to showcase short, watchable comedy, music videos or sport highlights and then get a Vote from the user. The whole system would feature lots of realestate for traditional banner like ads and logos.

I built 4 versions of H2H over the years from scratch. The first version in PHP was a lot more like Youtube with voting. Versions 2 through 4 were proper bracket tournaments written in Ruby on Rails and Javascript, with some flash elements as well. The 2nd version had a full comment system and social networking capabilities. With friend connections, etc. Users could earn rewards for voting multiple days in a row, etc. It was built to be embeddable and responsive to various screen widths and installable as a Facebook App

Head 2 Head always had a throw back, big stadium design. Working with the designer/owner of the company was fun and at times frustrating as the way he wanted to sell it was less SaaS and more old school handshakes and big money deals. We got several large brands, as well as film and music compeitions. The sites became mini vlogging platforms as we added more functionality over time. Some of the brands like NHL brought with them a lot of daily traffic.