Hi, I am Erik Schwartz and these are my personal blogs. Start ups and companies may come and go but this site should remain no matter where I am working. There are some pages you can only see if you log in it's mostly personal and family stuff, if I know you and you want access drop me an email.

My first introduction to what would eventually be called new media was being demoed an interactive videodisc project done by the Architecture Machine Group (the precursor to the media lab) at MIT called Aspen, this was probably around 1980 (my dad was Bob Mohl's advisor). As some of you may recall at that time a videodisc was the best way to store 55,000 unique images. Aspen was a movie map that let you virtually walk around the city of Aspen Colorado (which Google Street view now does on my cell phone). Many years later my wife was singing at the Aspen music festival, I freaked her out became despite never having been to Aspen, I knew my way around.

I then spent too many years and too much effort thinking about art history and archaeological and art conservation before realizing that going down that road (in which I was progressively becoming less interested) would require me to be in grad school and apprenticeship until I was 40. During that time I spent  time working at the Center for Materials Research in Archeology and Ethnology where I learned quite a bit about databases (in addition to electron microscopy, gas chromatography, and a whole host of other cool materials lab techniques).

In the late in the late 1980s a friend was doing her thesis involving interactive video at the Media Lab. I spent a lot of hours helping her on every aspect of the production. This is what got me back into thinking about hypermedia (as it was known at the time). I became an expert at many high level scripting languages (hypertalk, supertalk, lingo and a host of others now long forgotten).  

 In 1989 my odd background (non linear video, scripting hypermedia, databases) brought me to the attention of the founders of ICTV, one of the first companies working on inventing interactive television. In 1990 I joined ICTV as employee #7.

ICTV was like new media grad school (there were no actual new media grad schools in 1990). We were really well funded. Any idea was open for discussion. We were inventing consumer grade interactivity. We designed UI's, we designed remote contrls, we designed keyboards optimized for the living room, we designed new pointing paradigms. No one had thought about the interactive expereience from 7 picture heights while sitting on a couch.

In 1993 we started to focus on video on demand. I was working more as a product manager and less as an engineer by then. One of my major roles was walking hollywood studios through the process of having their movies digitally compressed and encoded for the first time. There were a lot of trips to LA to meet with the movie folks and a lot of trips to Atlanta to meet with the IBM division that was doing the encoding. This is where I was first exposed to the hollywood/silicon valley perspective rift. They didn't (and still largely don't) speak the same language. I acted as the Rosetta Stone for these groups.

In 1994 we signed a contract to deploy a trial VOD system on Cox's cable plant in Omaha Nebraska. This was the first deployment of a digital video on demand system where the video was playing from a server. 1995 included many trips to Omaha (lots of steak dinners), lots of plane changes at DFW, and way too much time spent in hotel rooms and cable headend buildings. While the trial was a technological success it became clear rather quickly that there was no way to make the economics work at that time.

In 1996 I played an important role in ICTVs shift from a VOD company to an internet on the TV screen. Everything we had wanted to do with ITV in 1990 was happening on the web, shopping, classifieds, games were all taking off online. We wanted to bring that to the TV set.

In late 1996 I was approached by a friend at Yahoo! about heading up the about to be formed Entertainment Group. I was one of the few people around who actually had worked with both Silicon Valley and Hollywood. After an incredibly arduous interview process I joined Y! as the head of entertainment (I was employee #206). Yahoo! was an amazing place back then. The people were the best of the best, they were empowered to build almost anything. Meetings were minimal. Powerpoint was rarely seen.