The Mojo Channel is Super Nice

April 6th, 2008

If you live in the U.S. and have high-definition cable service, there’s a good chance you have a channel way up in the nosebleed section of your dial called “Mojo”. If you haven’t checked it out already, you should. It’s full of all high-definition programming and includes three great weekly shows I have now set Tivo Season’s Passes for:

Startup Junkies — A documentary about a fledgling startup called “EarthClassMail” and the ups and downs of its everyday operations. Having just gone through the entire startup experience with Newsvine, this show hits home for me in many ways. Number one, it’s set in Seattle. Number two, it nicely covers the highs and lows of startup life, from the stress of procuring your financing, to the thrill of launching your service, to the interpersonal issues that often crop up around the office. Someone asked me a few days ago if I would have ever let cameras into Newsvine for this sort of thing, and my response was “hellllllllll no”. I wouldn’t recommend most startups do it either, but watching someone else expose themselves like that sure is fun!

Wall Street Warriors — A documentary about several people with various jobs on or around Wall Street. The cast here is extremely diverse. There’s the 28 year old superstar manager of a hundred million dollar investment fund who probably has five times the energy of any normal human being. The guy is nails. Awe-inspiring to watch at times, although not someone I’d trade places with due to his non-stop, high-stress lifestyle. There is a recent NYU graduate just getting into currency trading. There are two commodities traders who do the yelling in the pits that you always see in stock market stock footage. And finally, there are two schmucks who work at a downtown investment brokerage who take pride in getting rich people to hand over their money to them. These two jerks then pay back their clients by putting all of their eggs in one basket (in this case SanDisk) and losing most of their money. Good times. Makes for healthy skepticism towards all investment brokers. Update: Entire series available online at Hulu… nice!

Bobby G: Adventure Capitalist — Bobby Genovese is a venture capitalist/entrepreneur who lives the high life and invests in such interesting businesses as the Neptune Society; a service which cremates your remains, mixes them with cement, forms the mix into statues, and then sinks the statues to the ocean floor so divers can swim around the underwater memorial. Bobby is also in the process of reviving the Clearly Canadian brand of sparkling water which has fallen out of favor in the last several years. I hope he succeeds. I loved that stuff. Update: Entire series *also* available online at Hulu… nice again!

Like this entry? You probably shouldn't follow me on Twitter here. I recommend the RSS feed instead.

17 Responses:

Josh P says:

Welllll, here in Denver it doesn’t look like it’s available yet. Too bad they don’t full seasons of their shows available online, either.

#1 - April 6th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
Myles says:

You forgot (?) Three Sheets, which is one of my consistently favorite shows on tv.

#2 - April 6th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
Shane says:

I LOVED Clearly Canadian. The peach and pear kinds were the best.

#3 - April 6th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
Doug says:

I agree, some of my favorite shows are on mojo.

They do have some of the episodes from mojo on Hulu. Three Sheets for example – http://www.hulu.com/three-sheets

#4 - April 6th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Justin Blanton says:

I’m right there with you Mike and am constantly telling my friends about these three shows. Good stuff.

#5 - April 6th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Mark says:

MOJO really is a hidden gem. Those three shows are great, and then you toss in Timeless (http://www.mojohd.com/mojoseries/timeless/) and the occasional NBA game? Quality.

#6 - April 6th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
Greg says:

Three Sheets is the only reason to watch Mojo. The rest is icing on the cake.

#7 - April 6th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
Ward says:

There’s also a MoJo channel on Joost. http://www.joost.com/2350001

#8 - April 6th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
Sam McDonald says:

Man Mike, you are making me wish I had cable. Startup Junkies is right down my alley.

#9 - April 6th, 2008 at 6:11 pm
Charles Adler says:

Finally! Someone else talking about MOJO that’s not me. I keep making reference to the channel (I believe it’s actually Canadian owned) and few have heard of it. Definitely some good show. My favorites are: Start Up Junkies, Wall Street Warriors, After Hours (a foodie show, not porn) and lastly, Three Sheets.

Bobby G, not quite as interested honestly. I watch from time to time, but I feel like it’s go so little to do with business and more to do with what her spends his money on personally. Though, it is fun at times.

#10 - April 6th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
Jeff says:

Most people I’ve mentioned Mojo to, have never heard of it. Startup Junkies is an excellent show. I also like the MTVHD channel that is right next to it. They have some great concerts on there.

#11 - April 7th, 2008 at 6:20 am
Doug says:

@Jeff – I really didn’t think I would like Startup Junkies based on the product they were developing. However, being something that I didn’t see a need for made the show more interesting.

#12 - April 7th, 2008 at 6:24 am
John Schroedl says:

We have Mojo here on Raleigh, NC cable.

Love all of these shows as well as London Live (concerts) for a taste of music I would have missed otherwise.

#13 - April 7th, 2008 at 7:50 am
Neill Harmer says:

Three Sheets is very much so worth watching. That dude has the BEST JOB IN THE WORLD!

#14 - April 7th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
Jared says:

I agree with everyone that mentioned Three Sheets. Definitely an entertaining show and Zane has without a doubt the best job on the planet.

#15 - April 10th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Erik says:

Three sheets and Startup Junkies R O C K! I’m not sure that Zane’s wife knows exactaly what his job is.

#16 - May 20th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Doug says:

So much for Mojo, looks like they are no more. The channel disappeared recently from my lineup so I sent out a tweet and got this back.

http://twitter.com/comcastcares/status/1056124246

#17 - December 14th, 2008 at 5:45 am

Shared

Hundreds of headlines wash over us every day. And part of why many of us engage in this flow is because we have faith that over time, this torrent of episodic knowledge is going to cohere into something more significant: a framework for genuinely understanding an issue. And we live with it ’cause it sort of works. Eventually you hear enough buzzwords like “single-payer” and “public option” and you start to feel like you can play along.

But mounting evidence indicates that this approach to information is actually totally debilitating. Faced with a flood of headlines on an ever-increasing variety of topics, we shut off. We turn to news that doesn’t require much understanding – crime, traffic, weather – or we turn off the news altogether.

- Matt Thompson on why the way we report and consume news is precisely wrong. Matt is, of course, precisely right. If you’re at SXSW next week, I don’t know how you could justify missing this talk.

Cameron’s Colosseo letterpress poster is now available: The only question is, black or white? The black is oh so tempting!

Jon Stewart Skewers Media’s Obsession with Chat Roulette: Funniest Wii Craps reference ever, as well. It’s really interesting to me that Chat Roulette is getting this much “attention” when TinyChat has been around so much longer, essentially does the same thing and more, and is much more useful to the average person. Just goes to show how viral public sex acts can be.

"Add features and customers forever and rake in the dough.":

The 2005 email that spawned Picnik, Google’s latest buy. If you’re thinking about launching a startup, you should study this e-mail carefully. It’s a perfect example of exactly how a crazy little thought becomes a big idea, and even on its own, it’s better than most “official company business plans” people present to VCs. I gave a talk at Webstock in New Zealand a couple of weeks ago about creating a startup and I wish I had this to dissect at the time. Really good stuff.

50 Useful Coding Techniques (CSS Layouts, Visual Effects and Forms):

(via doug)

Tumblr Finally Rolls Out Comments. Sort Of. Trolls Not Welcome. :

I actually really like how clubby it is. Unfortunately it means I won’t be commenting on any Tumblrs since I don’t officially “follow” anyone besides via RSS, but that’s probably ok. Maybe the answer to the world’s wide-open commenting problem is something like this.

Episode 2 of Dan Benjamin's "The Conversation" is Live:

I was a guest on Dan Benjamin’s new weekly radio show last week, along with Merlin Mann, Christina Warren, Adam Keys, and Dave Nanian. Subjects discussed include Newsvine, keeping your own identity after becoming part of a big company, and the RADICAL concept of only publishing stuff to your readers and followers that is actually true.

LESS - Leaner CSS:

Given that pre-compiling CSS is an official “best practice” these days, why not use that compile step to extend CSS in powerful ways? LESS lets you use variables, nested rules, and other niceties at author-time to clean up your rules and keep everything tidy. I believe The Wolf made something like this a few years ago, but I haven’t heard about it since.

How 3D works, and why it's back:

Great article on the ins and outs of three dimensional imagery. Still doesn’t change my opinion that well-shot conventional cinematography is more impressive than the novelty that is Avatar.

The Importance of Removing Features:

This is one of the most useful articles I’ve read in a long time. As we work on focusing, strengthening, and simplifying Newsvine, the concepts discussed by Lukas ring true. “Saying no” has never been a strong suit of mine. It’s very helpful to remember how important of a quality it is. (via fullstopinteractive)

Newly released video of the space shuttle Challenger disaster: It was 24 years ago, I was in 5th grade, but I remember it like it was yesterday. School was stopped immediately and they wheeled out televisions in every classroom for us to watch the news footage. It’s great that this video has been released, but holy crap, how do you tuck something that away for two decades???

A nicely done british parody of 60 Minutes style video journalism. It’s easy to miss how formulaic our news is sometimes. (via B-Tizzle, originally via E-Chizzle)

Colosseo: This is why Cameron is a king and we are all just pawns in his world. I can’t wait to get my hands on this poster. I will point out, however, that the outro credits on the video need some kerning. Someone is going to lose their right hand for that.

Spezify:

New ways of searching are almost never as useful as old ways of searching. Spezify is pretty awesome though. It’s a visually interesting, never-ending, horizontally and vertically scrollable, topic explorer. I don’t think I’d use it for digging deep on anything, but to get a quick visually rich sampling of a topic, it’s quite fun (via tiff, a long time ago actually, over email).

Realism in UI Design:

Reminds me of my favorite logo design advice: “Never waste a stroke”. (via gruber)

Overshared

At the first Doughty show of the night at the Triple Door. If you're in Seattle you should come down for the 2nd at 10. Excellent!