Michael Rice doesn’t doesn’t exactly have the persona of a successful web developer. Quiet and to the point, this second year computer science student is a stark contrast to some of the personalities of The Social Network. In partnership with a friend at San Francisco State University, Rice created RemembertoWatch.com, which issues free text or email reminders for upcoming TV shows.
The Varsity sat down with Rice to learn more about how he came to create Remember to Watch at U of T.
The Varsity: How did you get the idea for Remember to Watch?
Mike Rice: I just started getting annoyed when I missed shows, and I tried to set up reminders on my computer and stuff, but I always ended up being out when the show aired.
Paul, a fourth-year radio and television major at San Francisco State University, is the one who initially came up with the idea, and I loved it, so off we went. He’s definitely the more technical of the both of us.
TV: Did you create any other apps before Remember to Watch?
MR: Yeah, nothing as big-league or as successful as this one, though. Mainly just small side projects, like little tools that would help me out.
But with all my projects — I just love to collaborate with other people. It’s great to work with people and learn stuff that way, because they always teach you little tips and tricks that help you in the long run. It’s a lot more hands-on than sitting in lecture — to make something that people end up using, and helping them out.
TV: Let’s talk about the success of Remember to Watch.
MR: We were pretty fortunate for our launch. Especially when we got picked up by Lifehacker.com — that kicked everything off. Then other blogs started mentioning us, including PC World Magazine’s blog.
Visits and use and sign-ups have been consistent but we definitely want to get more people on. We didn’t expect it to be so successful. We definitely didn’t expect a lot of people to use it. Which was crazy, because we have to pay for the hosting, and especially sending out the texts is the biggest expense.
I think [the key to the site’s success] was the texting. We wanted people to be notified immediately, and we knew that people carry their phones around religiously and react immediately when they get a text.
TV: What message would you like to send out to your fellow students at U of T?
MR: People need to keep on building stuff. Don’t say you have an idea and wait around to do it. Just build it right away, because you never know what’s gonna happen. Because that’s what happened to us. We just built it, and it turned out that people liked it.
TV: What is the biggest problem you are working on right now with the site?
MR: The big downside is that we don’t have text notifications in Canada right now. It’s just been kind of a pain, really, because it’s so cheap to send out texts in the US from a short code. But it’s really difficult to find a company that we trust over here, because obviously we have to make sure that we keep people’s privacy, because we have all their phone numbers. We’re still looking for a company we can trust.
But other than that, things have been running smoothly. We had some hiccups with our last hosting company, but we switched over to a new one, and performance has improved a lot.
TV: Why should people care about Remembertowatch.com?
MR: If you’re a student, and you don’t have a PVR, and you like TV shows, the last thing you want is to miss a new TV episode, especially if you’re studying, because we all love to procrastinate. We made it really easy so that people get reminders at the click of a button, and people can subscribe to new episodes. They will automatically get a notification.
