Are ‘Midtails’ the Future of Television?
The New York Times, June 22, 2009
So you want to watch TV on the Internet. You canceled cable in a spasm of austerity and figured you’d catch your shows online. If you had any shows left. Because really, TV, the kind that chains you to a sofa and a grid schedule, is not part of your life anymore. And you don’t miss it. Except “The Rachel Maddow Show,” “Weeds” and (guilty pleasure) “The Hills.” You found some of that on Netflix, some on YouTube or, via Hulu, on the shows’ sites. But now you’re looking for more TV. Maybe a spirit-lifting summertime diversion, like “Friends” back in the day, or “TRL.” Good times. But your remote conjures nothing from your uncabled flat screen. It’s just you and the Internet now.
Boredom, then, brings you to Next New Networks. Looks as if it’s time to try some “midtail” content: nouveau videostuffs that are kind-of produced, kind-of user-generated. Something like “Obama Girl,” which was created by an ad executive to look like a spontaneous fan video for the Web site Barely Political (which is now owned by Next New Networks). According to an article in Advertising Age, this midtail miscellany — the specialty of Next New and a few other shops — is the only online programming that scores sizable audiences, along with overlay ads, banner ads and creepy brand integrations. Midtail is bankable, then. Therefore, it’s there.
Next New Networks is a producer and distributor of Web television that was started in January 2007 by, among others, the former MTV bosses Herb Scannell and Fred Seibert. It comprises a family of sites, each of which produces videos. Next New calls itself “a new kind of media company.” But don’t be put off. There are actual shows here. Just be patient, because — I’ll give it to you straight — the shows don’t look much like TV.
Actually, at first it’s hard to find shows of any kind. Even though the serials on Next New’s eclectic and interconnected networks now collectively attract 10 million unique viewers every month, the regressive design of the company’s home page, and its use of icky Aquafresh blue, make it look like one of those default pages that appears when you misspell a url. Fortunately, a video starts playing right away as a sample of the company’s wares. Recent clips often come from a network called $99 Music Videos, an experiment that challenges hipster bands and filmmakers to make supercheap videos.
Indy Mogul, a popular network devoted to budget filmmaking, has a series called “Your FX” that I like. A recent video showed what looked like a child of 9 or 10 sitting on a bed. He demonstrated how to create a chopped-off finger out of (mostly) wax, “fake blood and more fake blood.” Indy Mogul shows a lot of material that’s made by viewers, but it’s framed by host intros and show graphics, and it has been solicited. This is what midtail video looks like.
How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live
TIME, June 05, 2009
The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your “followers,“ and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It’s not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, “If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal.“
I, too, was skeptical at first. I had met Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-creator, a couple of times in the dotcom ‘90s when he was launching Blogger.com. Back then, what people worried about was the threat that blogging posed to our attention span, with telegraphic, two-paragraph blog posts replacing long-format articles and books. With Twitter, Williams was launching a communications platform that limited you to a couple of sentences at most. What was next? Software that let you send a single punctuation mark to describe your mood? (See the top 10 ways Twitter will change American business.)
And yet as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds. The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this “ambient awareness”: by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don’t think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask.
8D World aims to teach English language through gaming
Mass High Tech, May 29, 2009
Woburn-based gaming startup 8D World Inc. had them all fooled.
With Ensemble Studios founder Rick Goodman on the management team, and a website displaying fantastical scenes and Chinese-language characters, stealthy 8D World last year looked like Age of Empires for the Asian market. Turns out, they’re teaching English as a foreign language — with a beta product launched this month.
“We’re deceptive, shall we say,” quipped founder Alex Wang, who conceived the idea while heading up sales in the Asia Pacific region for Burlington-based Emptoris Inc.
The 8D World product is a fantastical online virtual world called Wiz World, designed to let players interact in spoken English with computer-generated characters that correct their word choice and pronunciation. With Wiz World, Wang hopes to find a market in Asia for a product developed using Boston’s unique mix of expertise in gaming, artificial intelligence and education.
Wiz World’s “language robots” are backed with language recognition and pronunciation assessment technologies developed by Daben Liu, formerly a senior scientist on translation projects at BBN Technologies. The company’s creative content director, Jodie Waldesbuhl, is a former Brookline Public Schools teacher who has consulted on English language acquisition projects on both sides of the Pacific
Instant Video: Take One Text Site, Add Pinch of 5min
www.minonlin.com , April 30, 2009
The how-to video site 5min.com has amassed 2.5 million unique monthly users in two years of operation, which ordinarily would be a key talking point for a dot-com entrepreneur. “The site is just a small piece of what we do,” says CEO Ran Harnevo. “Semantic syndication is what 5min is all about.”
Doing for video what Google’s AdSense does for text, the company works with publishers around the Web such as Answers.com and wikiHow to place contextually relevant how-to clips next to the right content at their sites. Currently the site works with familiar magazine brands as well as with less recognizable digital studios to amass professionally produced clips for redistribution around the Web. ELLE.com clips on how to make fairy headbands could be placed next to fashion- and craft-related content at a site. Last-minute tax tips from Kiplinger.com might show up near tax help articles. The site works also with CarandDriver.com and WomansDay.com, among other magazine brands.
“We turn a text site into a video site in five minutes,” says Harnevo. Publishers can plant a small bit of code in their pages that lets the 5min engine read the page content and place a relevant video in the center of the page.
For publishers, 5min seems to offer a new route to hyper-distributing the online video that often remains locked on their own destination sites. “The niche magazines are dying because the consumer can get the information for free on the Web,” Harnevo argues. “There is no ROI for creating a video brand for one destination. There are no economics in it…period. You would never be able to monetize the video and be profitable.”
He shares ad revenue with the content producers who feed the library and claims double-digit CPMs and a 50% sell-through on “tens of millions of views” in his inventory.
Instant Video: Take One Text Site, Add Pinch of 5min
www.minonlin.com , April 30, 2009
The how-to video site 5min.com has amassed 2.5 million unique monthly users in two years of operation, which ordinarily would be a key talking point for a dot-com entrepreneur. “The site is just a small piece of what we do,” says CEO Ran Harnevo. “Semantic syndication is what 5min is all about.”
Doing for video what Google’s AdSense does for text, the company works with publishers around the Web such as Answers.com and wikiHow to place contextually relevant how-to clips next to the right content at their sites. Currently the site works with familiar magazine brands as well as with less recognizable digital studios to amass professionally produced clips for redistribution around the Web. ELLE.com clips on how to make fairy headbands could be placed next to fashion- and craft-related content at a site. Last-minute tax tips from Kiplinger.com might show up near tax help articles. The site works also with CarandDriver.com and WomansDay.com, among other magazine brands.
“We turn a text site into a video site in five minutes,” says Harnevo. Publishers can plant a small bit of code in their pages that lets the 5min engine read the page content and place a relevant video in the center of the page.
For publishers, 5min seems to offer a new route to hyper-distributing the online video that often remains locked on their own destination sites. “The niche magazines are dying because the consumer can get the information for free on the Web,” Harnevo argues. “There is no ROI for creating a video brand for one destination. There are no economics in it…period. You would never be able to monetize the video and be profitable.”
He shares ad revenue with the content producers who feed the library and claims double-digit CPMs and a 50% sell-through on “tens of millions of views” in his inventory.
Boxee Continues To Innovate With API And New Alpha Version For Mac, Apple TV
TechCrunch, April 07, 2009
Free entertainment hub Boxee keeps on getting better and better. A couple of hours ago, the venture-backed startup released a full API that allows developers to build applications for the open-source platform using a set of API calls in Python and writing the GUI using XML. At the same time, the company is laying the groundwork for a richer App Box, which it refers to as an open application store where they are not the gatekeeper (like Apple for its iPhone App Store) but rather a facilitator.
Heck, they’re even prepared to act as middleman for connecting freelance web developers with companies looking to leverage their API. Hard not to love that type of company.
Boxee is today also introducing a new test version of the Boxee alpha version for Mac and Apple TV (get it here for Intel Mac OS X 10.4+), adding two applications that were built using the brand new API. The new Boxee alpha comes with a lot of music goodness as it includes both Pandora, the popular music streaming service, and RadioTime, which enables their users to access over 100,000 traditional radio stations from across the globe.
This comes right off the heels of the introduction of a (basic) iPhone application.
The new version of the software for Mac and Apple TV features support for Hulu too, but in the work-around way, i.e. using a custom browser built on top of Mozilla technology (sort of like a stripped down Firefox). As you know, Hulu is doing everything it can to keep its content from being streamed on Boxee, while Boxee is doing much of the same to do the exact opposite.
Boxee says it’s now working on updated versions for Ubuntu and Windows.
As a PC user, I can hardly wait.
What Can Twitter Do for You?
Adweek, April 07, 2009
Whenever I start a conversation about Twitter with someone who doesn’t use it—or who tried it, but never got beyond the inane act of twittering some insignificant detail of his daily life—I get eye rolls, throat clearing and other signals that suggest I should change the subject.
But if I start a conversation about Twitter with someone who has taken the time to use it, I get the exact opposite response: an instant conversation about fresh ideas, emerging thought leaders, newly revealed content and trends in social media that comes at me faster than an overcrowded chat room.
I am in the latter camp. For me, Twitter is not another Facebook. It’s not about connecting with lost friends or letting your virtual posse know what you’re up to. It’s not simply a source of breaking news à la US Airways Flight 1549. And despite the fact that it blows Google away as a real-time search engine, even that barely begins to describe Twitter’s true potential.
Instead, I’ve found far greater benefits to incorporating Twitter into my life and onto my desktop. Here’s what Twitter’s given me:
1. Instant access to thought leaders in social media, digital trends, technology and marketing in the new age of community. They’re all here: the staff of Wired, the lead strategists at the next generation of agencies, the pioneers of social media itself. Not just the expected names like @crowdsourcing (Jeff Howe) or @johnbyrne (BusinessWeek’s digitally proactive editor) or @henryjenkins (MIT’s director of comparative media studies) or @jaffejuice (Crayon’s Joe) but a new generation of even younger social media enthusiasts. Most of them are remarkably generous with their knowledge, willing to answer questions, share ideas, even give away their content.
2. An opportunity to experience crowd sourcing in action. Conduct a brainstorming session in your own agency and you’re pretty much limited to the usual suspects. But on Twitter there are thousands of people willing to help out. And because no one pays attention to seniority or title, new voices are more willing to express an opinion that more often than not is both fresh and provocative. I’m constantly surprised where the quote or thought or insight or example I’m looking for comes from. But it’s always to be found.
3. A new way to connect with Millennials. We live in a society that does its very best to isolate generations. But because a Twitter relationship centers around content, information and ideas, it erases differences in age. I’m now connected with college students in New York, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta and Miami. Many of their blogs are far more telling than another research report from Simmons or Forrester. And all of them are willing to make me smarter about how marketing has to change if it’s to connect with a generation defined by community, collaboration and responsibility.
VC Firm Launches Seed Funding Program to Find Next Twitter, Tumblr
WIRED By Chris Snyder, March 26, 2009
Spark Capital, the venture capital firm behind startups like Twitter, Tumblr and Boxee, has launched a new early-stage investment program called Start@Spark as part of its larger initiative to spur tech innovation in the Northeast.
Boston and New York based entrepreneurs with companies in media, technology, and entertainment are eligible for the program and can receive up to $250,000 in jump start money.
But this is just one part of a wider initiative that involves connecting entrepreneurs with VCs through weekly meetups and pushing for non-compete agreements in Massachusetts and New York.
“Our feeling is that with the downturn in the economy, a lot of angel and seed investors that were typically very active over the last few years aren’t as active anymore,“ said Bijan Sabet, general partner with Spark. “As an important part of the ecosystem and value chain when it comes to startups, this piece needs to happen.“
Spark has been involved in many early stage investments, like funding a second round for Twitter and gaming site OMGPOP (seeded partially by Digg’s Kevin Rose) and some of their own seed funding like $300,000 in Tumblr.
Why are we doing this?
START@SPARK, March 25, 2009
When we launched Spark Capital in 2005, we were convinced that a revolution was taking place at the conflux of media, entertainment, and technology. Four years later, the pace of that revolution has exceeded even our own expectations, as the movement of people and content online has driven innovations across all segments of the value chain. A lot has happened in the past 4 years and we have been right in the middle of the action. Yes, we are in a global economic recession and yes the new media markets are being impacted. The current environment has made it difficult for entrepreneurs seeking capital to start companies. Investors, including VCs, Angels and Strategic Investors are distracted from early stage investments due to a combination of portfolio triage, concern about capital availability, and downright confusion over where to invest. The options for starting new companies have evaporated along with financial markets and market caps.
So, this must be a terrible time to fund a start-up company. Correct? Au contraire. This may be the best time in the last 8 years to start a company. While capital is scarce, the tectonic plates continue to shift creating major rifts. The walls are coming down and the barriers to entering new markets are falling along-side.
We don’t expect the economic woes to evaporate soon; however, we are long term investors. We are looking forward to what will happen in 4 years rather than in the next 4 months. We see a clear opportunity to partner with talented entrepreneurs who possessing the vision and commitment that transcend current market conditions. We have prided ourselves on being aggressive and funding disruptive, early stage companies.
Tumbler Makes Blogging Blissfully Easy
The New York Times, March 13, 2009
Have you always wanted to blog, but never found the time to set up a site? Stop reading me and click through to Tumblr, a free blogging site that makes it effortless not only to type in text, but to share photos, links, music and videos. There’s even an instant-post button to include quotes from other blogs.
Setting up a Tumblr blog takes about 35 seconds. I timed it. You hit the site, click on “Sign up,” then type in your e-mail address, a password and a name for your blog. Click once again and you’re up and running.
Besides being easy to use, Tumblr has a very eye-pleasing layout with a minimalist Web-2.0 look. You can customize it, but why bother? When you log in to add content, a row of giant buttons atop the page gives you one-click access to simple tools to insert text, a photo, a quote, a link, a chat session, an audio clip or a video clip.
Much like Facebook or Twitter, Tumblr handles all the formatting for each type of content automatically. The less you think about it, the better Tumblr works.
Sharing Consumers’ Tastes in Cellphone Web Surfing
The New York Times, February 22, 2009
On Monday, a Denver-based start-up, Buzzwire, is unveiling a new site for cellphone users that will tap their collective preferences to create a guide to the best Web content for mobile users.
Buzzwire began in 2006 as a service to help wireless carriers and video producers play videos on mobile phones. With its new site, which users can reach on their mobile browsers at m.buzzwire.com, it hopes to expand its reach.
By 2012, “people will be browsing the Web more on their phones than on PCs or laptops,” said Greg Osberg, Buzzwire’s chief executive. “This is the first site 100 percent dedicated to the best of the mobile Web, with nothing to do with the PC Web.”
The number of people who surf the Internet on phones has doubled since 2006, according to Nielsen Mobile, to 40 million. Still, only 16 percent of people with cellphones use them to go online, and those that do visit an average of six sites a month, versus 100 on their computers.
Mr. Osberg wants to change that. He joined Buzzwire in November after leaving as president and worldwide publisher of Newsweek, where he revamped the magazine’s Web site and started its mobile site.
Similar to Digg, which lists stories recommended by Digg users, Buzzwire readers will pick stories they want to appear on the site by sending a text message or e-mail message or clicking on a Buzzwire button at the bottom of a story. Unlike Digg, Buzzwire has four editors who also cull articles from around the mobile Web.
A Music Video Site For Producers on a Budget
The Wall Street Journal, February 19, 2009
Calling all crooners and carolers looking for time in front of a camera.
Indie bands and under-the-radar filmmakers are being brought together by the folks at Next New Networks, a Web company that set out to create a litter of niche video networks on a variety of topics. After launching more than a dozen sites on topics from autos to comic books, it is trying its hand at music videos.
La Strada’s video for “The Sun Song” on 99dollarmusicvideos.com
Today it’s launching a video network called $99 Music Videos which features music videos made for — you guessed it — just $99.
The site is designed to introduce music fans to unknown acts, says Fred Seibert, MTV’s first creative director and a co-founder of Next New Networks. Its founders saw a “unique space between what iTunes is providing and what YouTube is providing, in a branded sort of way,” he says.
The barebones structure is simple: the site matches bands and directors and asks them to shoot a music video in one day for $99 or less. Professionally produced music videos can cost upwards of $100,000 or more.
Next New, Verizon launch music video site
The Hollywood Reporter, February 19, 2009
Goal is to create MTV ‘all over again’ for emerging talent
Online TV firm Next New Networks and Verizon FiOS are launching an online network Thursday called $99 Music Videos to showcase the talents of emerging musicians and filmmakers.
The companies say they are looking to create an MTV for the digital and iTunes age against the backdrop of strong consumer interest in online music videos. The network pairs musicians and filmmakers to produce original music videos for no more than $99, potentially giving them exposure to new fans.
The network launch kicks off with an original video for “The Sun Song” by La Strada, directed by executive producer and Webby Award-winning filmmaker Jack Ferry.
New videos will premiere every Thursday at 99dollarmusicvideos.com. Directors also include Dan Meth, Ana Veselic, Kathleen Grace and Matthew Semel. Upcoming music talent includes Jeffrey Lewis & the Junkyard, Via Audio, Plushgun, the Depreciation Guild, Project Jenny, Project Jan, Lowry and Savoir Adore Frances.
Twitter Raises $35 Million From Venture Investors
The Wall Street Journal, February 15, 2009
Venture-capital investors have poured an additional $35 million into Twitter Inc., an Internet service that enables users to spontaneously post brief messages online.
Benchmark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners led the financing round, which comes as Twitter, of San Francisco, has yet to unveil how it plans to make money off the popular “micro-blogging” service.
A person familiar with the matter said the round valued the nearly two-year-old company at between $200 million and $250 million. A spokesperson for Twitter could not be reached for comment.
The round included existing Twitter investors Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital, along with several others. Twitter had previously raised some $20 million in funding.
The infusion comes as Twitter’s popularity is surging. In a blog post announcing the funding, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said that the service’s number of active users has increased 900% in the past year. He also said the business requires relatively little investment to maintain.
“We weren’t actively seeking more funding,“ Mr. Stone wrote, because the company still has money in the bank from its previous round of funding.
But the company faces growing pressure to prove that it is more than a novel way to share short messages online. Twitter executives have said they are exploring ways to charge for additional offerings for businesses, but have yet to announce any details. Twitter enables users to allow friends and contacts to follow their “tweets,“ or brief messages, which are used for everything from disseminating breaking news to providing snap travelogue to posting random thoughts.
How Tweet It Is
New York Magazine, February 08, 2009
Sure, the Twitter guys still have no idea how to make money off their fabulous invention. But for now they are living in a dreamworld of infinite possibilities, maybe the last one on Earth.
In case you don’t remember the precise details of what the Silicon Alley dot-com boom-and-bust in the late nineties and early aughts was like, allow me to remind you, because I was there. Everyone showed up to work, hung-over, around 11:30 a.m., just in time for our free lunch. There were about six different dogs in the office. Everyone left around 6 p.m. to go drink on the company bar tab or show up at ubiquitous “launch parties,” extravagant affairs (often on a boat that circled Manhattan) that celebrated the historic occurrence of a website going live.
Mostly, I remember the meetings. We’d have about four meetings a day, in which a group of overpaid twentysomethings would ramble on for an hour about “content integration” and “vertical scalability,” just long enough to make it look like we were doing something. The nine months I worked at a dot-com back then were epic slack, all done in the name of The Future. We were changing the world. We believed. In something, anyway. The rest of the world didn’t matter.
The company I worked for died, as did hundreds of others. But the belief didn’t. Which brings me to Twitter. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, 34, wearing the casual yet composed Accomplished Techie uniform of an unbuttoned dress shirt over requisite logo tee and jeans, sits in a well-lit conference room in San Francisco, sharing a floor with mobile-software company iSkoot. Though he’s surely aware that the rest of the planet is in full-fledged depression panic, he doesn’t act like it. Inside Twitter, there is no economic downturn. Stone talks about “groundbreaking ideas” and Twitter’s unique place of responsibility. He talks about branding, provoking growth, and, yes, “scalability.” Twitter lives in its own bubble of The Future, while the rest of us are barnacles unfortunate enough to scrape by in the present. He sounds like everyone I worked with back in the dot-com days. He has the hot product. He might be right. But back then we all thought we were right, too.
Why Does Everyone Heart Boxee?
Gigaom, February 06, 2009
The buzz has been building for Boxee lately. Mainstream news outlets like The New York Times, BusinessWeek and NPR are getting hip to the little open-source media center that could quite possibly change the way you experience TV.
I first met Boxee CEO and co-founder Avner Ronen at a NewTeeVee meetup in New York roughly a year ago. At the time, I was contemplating buying an Apple TV. He politely shook his head and said I shouldn’t bother, that his company had something better in the works.
Indeed, Boxee launched its alpha last June, it has since gone on to aggregate some big-name content, allowing users to watch Hulu, ABC, Joost and even stream Netflix video through its clean interface. Boxee now has more than 240,000 users checking out its alpha, and, oh yeah, it raised $4 million in October, helping ensure that its 12-person staff will have jobs through 2009.
With all it has going for it, it’s no wonder everyone is jumping on the Boxee bandwagon. I asked Ronen why people love his company so — he credits the diligence with which Boxee listens to its audience. Twitter plays a big part in what Boxee does; Ronen himself maintains the @Boxee account on the micro-blogging service answering questions, delivering news and taking advice from users. The company also continuously combs through its forums and changes up its product road map based on what its community is saying.
Santo Politi Named to the Forbes Midas List
Forbes.com, January 29, 2009
The Midas List
#91 Santo Politi
Spark Capital
2008 Rank: 92
Age: 43
Scored big exits with BigBand Networks’ 2007 IPO and Motorola’s 2006 acquisition of Broadbus Technologies. Briefly fled venture capital to work in new-media development at Blockbuster; returned to focus on media and tech investments. Other investments include KickApps (networking applications for media companies) and OneRiot (social networking search hybrid). Sporadically updates Twitter and Tumblr streams.
‘Obama Girl’ Team Retools for Tech Satire
The New York Times, January 25, 2009
With the presidential campaign over, the producers of the Obama Girl videos have a new target for parody: technology.
played in the Internet “Obama Girl” parodies, will make appearances in satirical jabs at technology.
The Obama Girl character, played by the actress Amber Lee Ettinger, became a bona fide Internet hit when she showed affection for then-Senator Barack Obama in mid-2007. Since then, YouTube has counted more than 13 million views for the first of the low-budget music videos, “I Got a Crush on Obama” — twice as many views as any of the campaign’s official videos. The clip, showing Ms. Ettinger dancing in a bikini in front of a photo of Mr. Obama in the ocean, helped crystallize the view of the candidate as a pop culture figure and, to some, a sex symbol.
Dozens of subsequent videos parodied the presidential debates, Mr. Obama’s competitors, and even the federal stimulus package. “The videos became part of the political conversation,” said Ben Relles, the creator of Barely Political, the producer of the segments.
Political zingers, of course, may not draw as many video views now that Mr. Obama has moved from campaigning to governing. While Barely Political will keep writing the Obama Girl character — she was in Washington last week filming an “inauguration dance party” video — it is establishing a spinoff channel called Barely Digital to give technology the same treatment.
Spark Capital Promotes Alex Finkelstein to General Partner
PEHUB , January 22, 2009
PRESS RELEASE
Spark Capital, a venture capital firm with investments focusing on the conflux of the media, entertainment and technology industries, today announced the promotion of Alex Finkelstein to General Partner. Since joining the firm at its inception as a Principal, Finkelstein has led Spark’s investments in New York-based 5min, an online how-to video company, and 8D World, a virtual world that teaches English as a Second Language with offices in Boston and China. As a General Partner, Finkelstein will take a leading role at Spark in identifying and building the next generation of breakthrough media and technology companies.
“Alex has real talent for uncovering emerging trends, recognizing new businesses with real potential, and partnering with exceptional entrepreneurs,” said Todd Dagres, Founder and General Partner of Spark Capital. “Since joining Spark at our inception, he has made a tremendous contribution to our firm and the companies within our portfolio. Alex has identified investments that are poised to be leaders in their emerging market segments. He has played an important role in their growth by offering hands-on support in recruiting top talent, making important partner and customer introductions to support business development, and working closely with CEOs on all facets of their operations.”
Boxee, Used to View Web on TV, Generates Buzz
The New York Times By Brad Stone, January 16, 2009
Piping Internet video into a television seems as if it should be simple — after all, a screen is a screen. But consumer electronics and media companies have been moving toward that combination with painstaking caution, both because of technical limitations and to protect their existing business models.
Now, with an Internet start-up’s hubris and whimsical name, an 11-employee New York company called Boxee is barging into the fray. It is treading over the carefully negotiated business arrangements of much larger companies and garnering accolades from tech-heads for doing what the big guys have failed to do.
Boxee bills its software as a simple way to access multiple Internet video and music sites, and to bring them to a large monitor or television that one might be watching from a sofa across the room.
Some of Boxee’s fans also think it is much more: a way to euthanize that costly $100-a-month cable or satellite connection.
Web Video: How to Actually (Maybe) Make Money
Business Week, January 14, 2009
Startup EQAL has a hit on its résumé, a big-name client, and a four-pronged business plan.
The two thirtyish founders of Web video production company EQAL, Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried, are too media-savvy to boast they’ve cracked the code for minting big hits from serialized short online videos. Nevertheless, this is what their business (say “equal”) is based on, and it’s why CBS (CBS) is paying them to create a Web series offshoot of the network’s upcoming mystery show Harper’s Island. (EQAL’s Web series, called Harper’s Globe, will make its debut on Mar. 18, about a month before the show hits the airwaves.)
Along with screenwriter friend Mesh Flinders, Beckett, then an urgent-care physician, and Goodfried, then a lawyer, made a loud Web debut in the summer of 2006 with Lonelygirl15. In that, a young female diarist narrating her life in a series of YouTube (GOOG) videos dragged legions of fans (myself included) down a rabbit hole, trying to answer a simple question: Was she real, or was it scripted?
Next New Networks: 300M Views in ‘08
CnnMoney.com Written by Liz Gannes, January 14, 2009
Online video studio Next New Networks says that it tripled views of its programming in 2008, breaking 300 million total video plays, up from 100 million in its first year.
Barely Political’s Obama Girl (which NNN acquired) is still the company’s biggest traffic generator, but other properties like Fast Lane Daily have built up significant audiences and communities. The company said 11 of its networks get more than 1 million views per month, and that across all its networks it has nearly 400,000 subscribers.
Boxee: WebTV That Makes Sense. Is That Good or Bad for Big Cable?
All Things Digital by Peter Kafka, January 13, 2009
No need to go on about my lack of interest in this forced marriage, which the consumer electronics business has been trying to make work for more than a decade (see the 1993 Time cover to the right). Slate’s Farhad Manjoo has done it for me. If you’re pressed for time, the title will do: “I don’t want my Web TV.”
Here’s what I do want: The ability to use my TV to watch all the great video the Web makes available–actual TV shows and movies like “The Office” on Hulu, “Lost” on ABC.com, “No Country For Old Men” on Netflix’s (NFLX) on-demand service. Which is where Boxee comes in.
The New York-based start-up makes elegant software that cobbles together offerings from all of those services, plus many more–with whatever media you have stored on your hard drive–and serves it up to you on your big screen, with a minimum of fuss. Right now it’s a niche product–it only works on PCs running Linux, or Apple’s (AAPL) Mac mini and AppleTV boxes–but that should change soon.
It’s slick stuff, and when you get a chance to watch it in action, it’s the first time that all those anecdotal stories about people dropping their cable TV subscriptions and just watching Internet video finally make sense: Why pay for cable stations you don’t want when you can watch just about everything you do want, on demand, for free?
Can EQAL make CBS’ Harper’s Island a Hit Online?
NewTeeVee, January 13, 2009
HARPER’S ISLAND is about a group of family and friends who travel to a secluded island for a destination wedding. They’ve come to laugh… to love… and, though they don’t know it… to die. As the wedding festivities begin, friendships are tested and secrets exposed as a murderer claims victims, one by one, transforming the wedding week of fun and celebration into a terrifying struggle for survival. In every episode, someone is killed and every person is a suspect, from the wedding party to the island locals. By the end of the 13 episodes, all questions will be answered, the killer will be revealed and only a few will survive.
Dunh-Dunh-DUNH!
CBS is using EQAL’s technology and video experience (lonelygirl15, KateModern) to develop the Harper’s Globe web site that will feature original online episodes that will intertwine with the TV component. The online part of the show will debut on March 18, weeks before the show debuts on TV on April 9, and the old and newteevee shows will coexist throughout the show’s weekly run, which will conclude on July 2.
Now that EQAL (and by extension, new media) has a seat at the table, it has to prove its worth. EQAL Co-founder and President Greg Goodfried was on our transmedia panel at NewTeeVee Live, where he and all the speakers refused to talk about transmedia success metrics or define what those metrics should even be. Defining your own success when it’s just a girl with a webcam is one thing, but when you’ve got a big media company footing the bill — they’re going to want tangible results.
Eqal Collaborates with CBS for New Interactive Show, Harper’s Island
Beet.TV, January 13, 2009
Digital studio Eqal, the brains behind LonelyGirl15, Kate Modern, and LG15: The Resistance, has teamed up with CBS to create a new, multi-platform show called Harper’s Island, which will premier online March 18 and on TV April 9. I discussed the role of interactivity in online video with Eqal CEO Miles Beckett in August, before the launch of LG15, and republished the interview today.
The online version of the show will have a different storyline that complements the television version, with overlapping characters and plots. Complementary web videos aren’t totally new—Heroes and Chuck both do it, although Heroes doesn’t have overlapping characters—but it seems like Eqal’s web series will relate more directly to the TV version than has previously been attempted. We’re looking forward to checking it out.
The premise for the show also sounds promising: A group of family and friends travel to a destination wedding on an island, and an unknown murderer among them kills someone off every episode. Gruesome. The whole secrets-and betrayal-on-an-island thing is a bit reminiscent of Lost, which sounds good to us.
—Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer
Mystery of CBS’ ‘Island’ will deepen online
The Hollywood Reporter, January 13, 2009
CBS will give midseason series “Harper’s Island” the multiplatform treatment with an online component created by the makers of Internet sensation “lonelygirl15.“
“Island,“ a 13-episode mystery scheduled to premiere April 9, will be complemented by HarpersGlobe.com, which will continue the series’ story lines through separate video content and other interactive tools.
EQAL, the production company behind “lonelygirl15,“ has worked with CBS and “Island’s” writers and producers from the beginning to map out the series’ multiplatform presence. Online components to primetime programming typically are an afterthought, not considered during development.
“The multiplatform, interactive elements at HarpersGlobe.com expand the whole experience of our show, which I feel is beyond necessary in the world of such rapidly changing media,“ “Island” executive producer Jon Turteltaub said. “We have to make our show an Internet event as well as a broadcast TV event.“
The CBS-EQAL collaboration is the first output of a partnership the companies struck in May with the intent of creating multiplatform programming. Executive producers at HarpersGlobe.com are EQAL co-founders Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried.
Life Is Tweet
Boston Globe, January 06, 2009
By Erica Noonan
You cofounded Twitter.com with venture-capital money back in 2006, and it still isn’t turning a profit. In November, the company declined Facebook’s offer to buy it for $500 million. Say what? We admire and respect Facebook. We are big fans, actually. They approached us, and we took it seriously. But we feel like we want to continue this path we’re on—sustaining this innovation—and the time is not right.
I guess we have a lot of things we think we can prove. We’re thinking really hard about sustainability and revenue and about developing the technology and seeing it taking off.
The 2008 presidential election was Twitter’s biggest day ever. Do you think the technology impacted the election in a positive or negative way?
We expected it to be big, and it was—activity was up by 500 percent. Both [Barack] Obama and [John] McCain twittered, and we had a special election news page set up for all the tweets. Someone called this the first “two-screen” election—people were glued to their televisions and the Internet, reacting to the debates and then the election as they happened. I feel like we helped change democracy to real time.
It’s pretty cool to invent a technology with its own set of descriptive terms. People “twitter” and “tweet” and . . . Someone came up with the word “twoops” to refer to a message you meant to text your friend, but you sent it to Twitter by accident.
Newsweek’s Ex-President to Head Buzzwire Inc.
Wall St. Journal, December 08, 2008
Greg Osberg, who in September resigned as president of Newsweek, has been hired as chief executive officer of Buzzwire Inc., a Denver mobile-video company.
The two-year-old Buzzwire helps mobile carriers and content producers publish video and Internet radio on mobile devices. It worked on Verizon Wireless’s m.vcast service, which lets users view and share videos on their cellphones, and also counts as clients AT&T Inc. and Alltel Corp., which has now been acquired by Verizon.
Buzzwire founder Andrew MacFarlane said he intends to expand the company’s slate of products and wanted a CEO with experience in the transition of content from print to the Web, which he said is now being replicated in the shift of online content to mobile devices.
Mr. Osberg, 51 years old, spent most of the past 18 years at Newsweek, where he launched a mobile version of the magazine in 2006 and re-launched Newsweek.com last year. Mr. Osberg also spent three years as president of sales and marketing for CNET.
5min Launches Web’s Largest ‘How-To’ Video Syndication Network
MarketWatch, December 02, 2008
5min VideoSeed(TM) semantic technology allows publishers to match relevant, ad-supported instructional videos to their lifestyle, knowledge and information textual sites.
5min, ( www.5min.com), a leading destination site and distributor of online how-to videos, today announced its VideoSeed semantic syndication platform for instructional and knowledge video programming now reaches more than 110 million unique users a month via its vast network of comprehensive knowledge and information syndication partner sites. 5min pairs brand advertising with tens of thousands of professionally-produced, niche-specific “how-to” titles produced and licensed from hundreds of content partners for semantic delivery via the VideoSeed platform.
5min has closed syndication deals with horizontal sites such as Answers.com, wikiHow, Wikia and Articlesbase as well as vertical sites including Tim Carter’s Ask the Builder, Recipe4Living and Pregnancy.org. Concurrently, 5Min has closed content agreements with Ford Models, Kiplinger’s, Elle, Car & Driver, Petside, Britannica, Big Think, WatchMojo, Road & Track, Woman’s Day and others.
The Real O’Neal Puts His Cyber Foot Down
New York Times, November 21, 2008
Shaquille O’Neal had a problem. An Internet impostor using his name was sending messages to unsuspecting Shaq fans. So O’Neal did what any sensible, 7-foot-1, muscle-bound mammoth would do. He started tweeting.
Shaquille O’Neal has moved into the Internet territory of his impersonator, ShaquilleONeal.
“This is the real SHAQUILLE O’NEAL,” came the message from The_Real_Shaq, via Twitter.com, early Tuesday morning.
A clarification was in order because, for the last several months, someone registered as ShaquilleONeal was sending frequent messages, or tweets, to hundreds of subscribers.
The synthetic Shaq sounded a lot like the real O’Neal. His blurbs were whimsical, boastful and creative, even adopting O’Neal’s unique grammatical flourishes.
“My tweets are Shaqalicious,” ShaquilleONeal wrote Nov. 11.
“Andrew Bynum’s knee is like Erika Dampier ... fragile,” ShaquilleONeal wrote Sept. 30, dealing a two-fisted insult to the Lakers’ Andrew Bynum and the Mavericks’ Erick Dampier.
The real Shaq — who could fill an almanac with clever quips — could hardly have said it better. Now he is. O’Neal opened his own Twitter account this week to connect with fans and to take back his identity.
Boxee Raises $4 Million For Socially-Networked Media Center
TechCrunch, November 18, 2008
Boxee, maker of a social media center software platform for HDTVs and laptops, has secured $4 million in first round funding from Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures.
The two firms each accounted for exactly 50% of the investment. Bijan Sabet from Spark and Fred Wilson from Union Square (also see Fred’s blog post on the investment where he calls boxee the ‘Firefox of media center software’) will join the boxee board.
Boxee is bringing us a step closer to a true open, social TV experience. The app gives your computer (Mac OSX or Linux, and soon also Windows) or AppleTV a TV-like interface where you can stream local files like personal videos, music, and photos as well as third-party, mainstream web content from sites like YouTube, Hulu, Comedy Central, CNN.com, ABC.com, Last.fm, Flickr, etc. Basically anything that isn’t DRM-protected (which also means there’s no chance you’ll be able to play your entire iTunes library with boxee).
Update: also check out this related post on Netflix streaming movies and TV episodes instantly to the TV via the Xbox 360, starting tomorrow.
Boxee also enables you to retrieve music and movie reviews, song lyrics, trailers, album artwork etc. from the internet, and comes with a social layer too: you can share information about what you’re watching with friends and make recommendations. You can also add services like Twitter, FriendFeed and Tumblr and post to them from the (beautiful) boxee interface, which turns it into a very powerful communication hub to boot.
I gathered from John’s initial review on Crunchgear that boxee uses XBMC, a media center system that makes everything look as elegant as it does. XBMC was created by creative developers who had modified first-gen Xbox consoles to run the software once it was sent over to the machine through FTP. It’s open-source, so that means developers are free to work with the code in order to create their own plug-ins, skins, and alternate interfaces.
Boxee says it is going to need the funding to be in a better position for negotiations with larger content providers like CBS, Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, and the BBC. Boxee is also talking to a series of hardware manufacturers who could be interested in licensing its software for set-top boxes.
Boxee is only available for closed alpha testers for the time being, and has already received 100,000 sign-ups according to the company blog post. They’re aiming for a beta release in 2009, which sounds rather vague. The software is completely free, although we assume a premium version is in the works.
The company was founded in 2007, has about 10 employees and has offices in New York City and Israel. The company previously raised an undisclosed amount of seed money from friends and family.
Bull vs. Bear smackdown
CNN Money, October 28, 2008
At Barely Political’s headquarters in New York City, cameraman Ian Jenkins fits the bull head on actor Steve Nelson before they head to Wall Street. The satirical Web site is behind videos like Obama girl (remember the YouTube hit, “I Got a Crush on Obama”?). Its parent company, Next New Networks, has raised $21 million from investors like Goldman Sachs.
[By Scott Cendrowski] For the complete article, see the following link
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Menara Networks Wins Light Reading’s Leading Lights Award for Best New Startup
Press Release, October 27, 2008
Menara Networks, an optical networking specialist, was named as the telecommunications industry’s “Best New Startup” at Light Reading’s annual Leading Lights Awards gala dinner in New York City on Monday night. The award acknowledges Menara Networks’ innovative and unique products and solutions that bring disruptive economics to the transport of 10 GE Ethernet services.
Menara’s CTO & co-founder Salam ElAhmadi, who accepted this prestigious industry award on behalf of the company, praised Menara’s team of outstanding engineers and employees, and the company’s unique silicon and system expertise for delivering the industry’s only system-in-a-module that greatly simplifies Ethernet transport networks.
Leading Lights Awards were determined by a panel of judges comprised of editors from Light Reading, the world’s largest online news service dedicated to the telecommunications industry and analysts from Heavy Reading, a market research organization with similar focus. The judges also took into consideration an extensive industry-wide on-line survey that cumulated in over 26,000 votes. The Leading Lights Awards recognize public and private telecommunications companies for their outstanding achievements in next-generation communications. The “Best New Startup Award” is bestowed upon a “recently launched private company that ...has the best chance at success because of its proven managers, solid backing, and interesting products or services addressing next-generation communications markets.“
Menara’s CEO, Siraj ElAhmadi said, “We are proud to receive this award from such a credible industry source. We are excited and humbled by the strong endorsement we have received from the industry for our game-changing products and solutions, as expressed by the large number of votes cast in our favor. We strongly believe that, in light of the difficult economical situation, our game changing products, that eliminate substantial capital and operational cost from the network, are a great asset to service providers world-wide. We look forward to continue working with our customers and partners and make positive contributions to their bottom line and time-to-market.“
About Menara Networks
Menara Networks develops innovative products and solutions that greatly simplify today’s layered optical transport networks. Leveraging the company’s proprietary high speed ICs and its extensive expertise in optical networking and system design, Menara products provide optical networks with superior performance and improved service velocity while reducing network elements and overall network cost. Menara’s MSA-compliant transceivers with integrated ITU-T G.709 OTN enable OEM customers to seamlessly and rapidly unlock the potential of their platforms by offering unique opportunities for expanded addressable markets and faster revenues. The Company is funded by Sigma Partners, Spark Capital, Concept Ventures, and Applied Materials venture capital arm. Menara is headquartered in Dallas, Texas and has an IC design center in Irvine, California.
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Twitter Goes Mainstream
Wall Street Journal, October 27, 2008
One of the hottest technologies in Silicon Valley is also one of the simplest.
The online service from Web start-up Twitter Inc. prompts users to do one thing: answer the question, “What are you doing?“ in 140 characters or less. People type these brief updates, known as “tweets,“ into Twitter’s site or send them to Twitter as text messages. Friends and colleagues can then check the site to monitor each other’s updates.
When the service first appeared a couple of years ago, its appeal seemed largely limited to narcissists who wanted to let everybody know what they were doing in real time. But, like blogs and social-networking sites, Twitter is starting to cross into the mainstream, as a wide range of people find interesting uses for the brief notes.
Doctors are using Twitter to update patients about office hours. Local groups such as the Los Angeles Fire Department are using it to share details about service calls with interested residents, occasionally with graphic descriptions of the victims’ conditions. And dozens of major companies, like computer maker Dell Inc., use Twitter to share deals and product news with people who sign up for the service.
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, a San Francisco-based entrepreneur, says the company is encouraged that businesses are starting to take to the service. “Looking at the value commercial entities are getting out of Twitter could help us build a sustainable company,“ he says, noting that Twitter might charge for premium services in the future.
All Atwitter
Twitter’s user base is still relatively small, but it’s growing very fast. The company says the number of active users rose sevenfold in the past year. Twitter wouldn’t disclose the total number of users, but for a rough idea of the service’s scope, consider this: Twitter.com had more than a million unique visitors from the U.S. in August 2008, up from just 282,000 in August 2007, according to research firm comScore Inc. Those numbers are likely to underestimate overall usage, much of which happens on mobile phones.
Part of what lures people to the service is ease of use. Users sign up for an account on Twitter.com by creating a user name. Then they can start posting updates through the Web or via text message. The updates appear on Twitter.com or other sites that users connect to their Twitter accounts, such as social-network pages. Users can keep their entries public or visible only to people whom they’ve approved to see them, such as family or friends.
To get the most out of the service, users not only can post updates but can choose to follow others’ Twitter entries as well. To do so, a user—call him Bob—can sign up to follow another user—Mary—by going to her account page and clicking a “follow” button. Then Mary’s updates will appear on Bob’s home screen when he logs into the service, along with updates from the other feeds that Bob chooses to follow. Bob can also see the updates on his cellphone, using Twitter’s mobile Web page or a third-party service.
Twitter can be useful for keeping up with friends, but businesses are also finding ways to employ it. Daniel Rothamel, a real-estate agent from Palmyra, Va., follows feeds from more than 1,000 people, including neighbors and fellow real-estate professionals. The 27-year-old searches the site for people who indicate that they are seeking real-estate help in his area; once he used the service to exchange messages with a potential customer, who later changed his plans.
Mr. Rothamel also uses the site regularly as an instant advice hotline. He recently used the service to pose a question about whether a client could qualify for a particular type of mortgage for a property where the well hadn’t received a safety test. A fellow Twitter user, a mortgage broker in Denver whose updates Mr. Rothamel had been following, quickly responded, “Yes.“ The client got the mortgage and closed on the house a week later.
Mr. Rothamel doesn’t just seek out professional advice, though. He once used the service to help identity some flowers growing in his front yard. He snapped a photo of them, uploaded the image to a Web site, posted a link to the site through Twitter and asked for help. Someone quickly responded, warning him not to pull the flowers up—they were daylilies and would bloom soon enough.
Part of the Crowd
Professionals such as Mr. Rothamel often start using Twitter during conferences, where there is a steady stream of news to share and people are eager to know what’s going on around them. Mr. Stone, the Twitter co-founder, notes that the service typically gains a bunch of new users around big and small events, everything from political debates and concerts to hurricanes. As a result, Twitter is looking at ways to allow people to indicate that they are attending a particular event, so they can more easily share updates with others who are there.
Other users are flocking to Twitter as an easy self-publishing and promotional tool. People are using it to build up their professional reputation by sharing updates about their work in a less time-intensive way than starting a blog. Andrew Flusche, an attorney in Fredericksburg, Va., recently used Twitter to promote a webinar he was holding on trademark registration. The session got 15 attendees, compared with seven for a subsequent seminar he didn’t promote on the service.
Mr. Flusche, 26, has also found the service handy for referring cases to experts in other areas, as well as keeping up with professional contacts he doesn’t see often. “You get interesting glimpses of them,“ he says. “It’s a different way to network with people and get to know them.“
Still, using Twitter can be frustrating if others aren’t playing along. Earlier this year, Oliver Bogler, an associate professor in the department of neurosurgery at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, tried to use Twitter to communicate with his lab. He felt it would be handy for sharing updates about meetings or interesting research.
But his team didn’t take to the service and never really began checking it. He suspects they didn’t spend enough time at their desks to check Twitter online, and they failed to activate the service on their mobile phones.
Dr. Bogler also found the performance of the service a bit finicky; sometimes it took a while for updates to post. “I am not sure Twitter is ready for the professional scene yet,“ he says. “The barriers to entry are enormous.“
Twitter’s Mr. Stone says the company “has made great advances in reliability and performance” in recent months and will continue to improve. “We still have work to do,“ he says.
Twitter is already spreading quickly at several companies, however. Online shoe retailer Zappos.com Inc., of Henderson, Nev., has more than 450 employees using the service to communicate with one another on topics ranging from politics to marketing plans. Zappos Chief Executive Tony Hsieh kicked off the trend by launching his own personal Twitter account, and continues to blast out updates about his activities to his more than 14,000 followers.
To help employees get the hang of the service, Zappos has begun offering classes. They range from teaching basics like how to follow a friend’s updates to “advanced” topics like using third-party services for fancier tasks, such as adding images to one’s Twitter stream.
Some companies are using the service as a way to reach out to customers. Frank Eliason, director of digital care for Comcast Corp., often resolves dozens of customer-service issues a day over Twitter. Several months ago, employees of the cable operator started mining public Twitter accounts to detect issues people were having with their service, from faulty DVRs to troubled Internet connections.
The Philadelphia-based cable giant now has a seven-person team that works to help resolve those issues over Twitter or by looking up customers’ contact information and calling them at home. “Now we can search for what people are saying [about us] and utilize it,“ says Mr. Eliason.
[By: Jessica E. Vascellaro]
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Mandalay Media Completes $22.8 Million Acquisition of AMV Holding Limited
Press Release, October 27, 2008
Mandalay Media, Inc. (MNDL.OB) (the “Company”) announced today the completion of the acquisition of AMV Holding Limited (“AMV”), a European leader in direct-to-consumer mobile Internet content and services. The Company paid $10.75 million in a combination of cash and the issuance of a promissory note, as well as delivered an aggregate of 4.5 million shares of the Company based on the value of $2.67 per share. Concurrent with the closing of the acquisition, the Company secured a $4.5 million equity financing at $2.67 per share, which includes 50% warrant coverage with each warrant having an exercise price of $2.67 per share. Further details of the transactions will be available in a Current Report on Form 8-K, to be filed by the Company with the Securities and Exchange Commission. AMV will be integrated with Mandalay Media’s mobile subsidiary, Twistbox Entertainment, Inc. (“Twistbox”). Together Twistbox and AMV will employ over 200 people, with offices in the Unites States, United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, Russia, Mexico and Brazil. AMV’s UK offices in Marlow will serve as the Company’s European mobile headquarters. Twistbox and AMV have a combined distribution and reach in excess of 1.2 billion mobile devices. On a monthly basis, the Company’s current services and destinations represent a growing base of more than three million mobile subscribers and in excess of 100 million page views. On a pro forma basis for the six months ending March 31, 2009 (i.e., the second half of the Company’s fiscal year), combined revenues are expected to be in excess of $30 million, with EBITDA (excluding stock option expense) of approximately $4 million. The forward looking pro forma estimates are based on April 1, 2008 to September 30, 2008 historical operating results for both AMV and Twistbox and do not include anticipated operating efficiencies or synergies.
“The acquisition of AMV allows us to almost triple our monthly mobile revenue while gaining the scale and profitability to be a worldwide force in the expansive mobile content arena,” said Bruce Stein, CEO of Mandalay Media. “Mobile is the first of several digital media businesses that Mandalay plans to build. The combination of Twistbox and AMV is a great example of what our team and platform is capable of creating in just eight months.”
“The combination of Twistbox’s global on-deck distribution with AMV’s direct-to-consumer expertise uniquely positions Mandalay Media to deliver compelling consumer propositions while maximizing revenues for its wireless operator and content partners,” stated Twistbox CEO Ian Aaron. “AMV’s Founders and Managing Directors Nate MacLeitch and Jack Cresswell have demonstrated over the past four years their ability to drive both growth and profitability in a rapidly developing European mobile market while positioning AMV as a leader and innovator in marketing mobile internet services.”
“This is a great opportunity to take our direct-to-consumer business to the next level,” stated Nate MacLeitch. “We are excited about the opportunity to accelerate our revenue growth by taking our proven products and mobile marketing capabilities into Twistbox territories including the United States, Europe, Latin America and Asia and enhance our offering with Twistbox ’s stable of leading consumer branded content and partnerships. We see a great opportunity in these market conditions to leverage the platform created by Mandalay Media to grow our business organically and through other strategic acquisitions.”
About AMV Holding Limited:
AMV is a leading mobile media and marketing company delivering games and lifestyle content directly to consumers in the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa and various other European countries. AMV markets its well established branded services including Bling, Phonebar and GameZone through a unique Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform that drives revenue through mobile internet, print and TV advertising. For more information, please visit www.amvholding.com.
About Twistbox Entertainment, Inc.:
Twistbox is a leading global producer and publisher of mobile entertainment. Twistbox has exclusive licenses with industry-leading brands, direct distribution with more than 120 wireless operators in over 45 countries and provides an extensive portfolio of award-winning games, WAP sites and mobile TV channels. For more information, please visit www.twistbox.com.
About Mandalay Media, Inc.:
Managed by leading media and technology industry executives, the Company’s mission is to build a unique combination of new media distribution and content companies through acquisitions with domestic and foreign businesses with strong management teams and historical financial performance. For more information, please visit www.mandalaymedia.com.
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Adap.tv Closes $13 Million in Series B Round of Funding
Mashable, September 23, 2008
Adap.tv, creators of OneSource, the first platform to help publishers fully monetize their online video content, today announced that it has secured $13M in Series B venture funding. Led by Spark Capital, the Series B round also includes existing investors Redpoint Venture and Gemini Israel Fund. As part of the investment, Spark Capital General Partner Dennis Miller will join the Adap.tv board of directors. Adap.tv will use the financing to accelerate the development of its flagship offering Adap.tv OneSource and its adoption by video publishers and online ad networks.
“Amir and his team have created a technology platform that addresses key pain points for publishers of online video as well as online ad networks,” said Miller. “By removing roadblocks that have prevented the growth of online video advertising, Adap.tv OneSource has the potential to open up vast new areas of monetization, and is rapidly delivering on that potential.”
The opportunity for online video advertising is significant. According to eMarketer, nearly 67 percent of US Internet users view online video ads at least once a month in 2008 and 129.5 million people will watch online video ads this year. By 2013, an estimated 183 million people in the US will watch online videos.
Following a $10M Series A round led by Redpoint Ventures and Gemini Israel Funds in July 2007, this investment makes Adap.tv one of the best capitalized companies in the video advertising space. Since Adap.tv launched OneSource in April, it has signed partnerships with leading video websites, including BitTorrent, Metacafe, DemandMedia, blip.tv and nearly 300 others. With Adap.tv as the latest portfolio addition, Spark Capital focuses on the conflux of the media, entertainment and technology industries with current investments including, Twitter, Veoh Networks and EQAL.
“We recognized Spark Capital as one of the most knowledgeable and influential teams in the online video world,” said Amir Ashkenazi, founder and CEO of Adap.tv. “Today’s funding round represents a tremendous vote of confidence in our value proposition and vision to accelerate adoption of online video advertising through our industry leading OneSource platform.”
Adap.tv OneSource empowers online publishers to run ads in any format and from any source on their video content, without having to perform multiple ad network integrations or adopt special video serving technology. Publishers using Adap.tv can choose from a wealth of online video advertising formats, such as pre-roll video ads or overlay ads, to maximize revenue and protect the user experience. Ad sources may include the publisher’s own sales team or any number of video, display or text ad networks.
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Todd Dagres on the Media Trends Taking Spark Capital Way Beyond Boston
xconomy.com, September 17, 2008
Boston venture firm Spark Capital launched three years ago with a relatively small $260 million fund mainly targeting early-stage investments at the “conflux of the media, entertainment, and technology industries.” Small funds typically focus on a given geographical region, in addition to their specialty areas. But on Monday, when Spark announced the hiring of former New York media executive Moshe “Mo” Koyfman as a principal, it was billed as helping the firm expand in the Big Apple. Indeed, Spark has made only a small percentage of its investments on its home turf – and it’s looking farther and wider as it establishes itself among the elite of media investors, with major plays in CNET Networks and Twitter, as well as a variety of interesting startups.
To learn more about the strategy behind the firm’s expansion, I asked Spark co-founder and general partner Todd Dagres about the trends he sees in media, technology, and entertainment – trends that are driving Spark’s investments (the company closed a new, $360 million fund earlier this year). We spoke, in particular, about how social media sites like YouTube, networking services such as Twitter, and Internet TV networks like Veoh (another Spark portfolio company) are using technology to distribute content directly to consumers – and how consumers, in turn, are using them to program their own entertainment. These changes are rocking traditional media, and everyone – old media and new media – is struggling to understand how to capitalize on the new media behaviors. The stakes are enormous. Says Dagres, “It’s hundreds of billions of dollars that are now ups for grabs in the whole distribution and consumption of content.”
Taking part in this disruption, and finding ways to monetize it, has always been a focal point for Spark – and its growing footprint in New York and beyond is only a manifestation of that.
“We had to make a decision. Do we want to invest in the best deals we can find close to home, or do we want to invest in the best deals we can find? And we decided on the latter,” Dagres says. As a result, he says, “We find ourselves less focused geographically on the New England area, and more focused on the space that we’ve targeted. Right now about a third of our companies are in New York, a third are in California [split evenly between north and south], and a third are everywhere else, including Boston. We’ve actually got more deals in New York than we do in Boston, but that’s because New York is a media capital.”
The strategy seems to be working. Judging by the scope of the firm’s deals, and its participation in major plays like CNET’s recent sale to CBS or Twitter’s financing, Spark is becoming an increasingly influential presence on the media-entertainment-technology landscape. Dagres says it took a while for the firm to make its mark. But now, three years into Spark’s existence, he says: “People know who we are. We’re productive as a team. We feel like we have a good sense of where to invest. We feel like we can compete with anybody in the areas we’ve chosen to focus on.”
So what are those areas? I asked Dagres what trends, or aspects of the ongoing media disruption, he is focused on now. He named three.
“One huge trend is monetizing all of this digital media and this social Web experience,” he says. “You’ve got lots and lots of eyeballs on the Web now looking at video, listening to music, and creating their own personal presence on the Web. The monetization has not yet caught up.” But, he says, “that’s normal. When TV first came along they didn’t know how to monetize it.” Indeed, TV shows had sponsors, rather than advertisers – and they sold tickets to the shows, he says. “And now, of course, it’s an $80 billion business.”
Dagres gave me a few examples of Spark investments aimed at “bridging that gap between the engagement online and the money that’s flowing there.” One is San Diego-based Veoh, which aims to deliver full-screen, high-quality video over the web, bypassing traditional broadcasting systems and regulatory restrictions. Another is Next New Networks, a New York startup founded by veterans of AOL and MTV, among others, to produce web-based “micro television networks” that combine traditional TV programming with community-based Web interactivity. Still another is Eqal, the Los Angeles studio behind the cult Web video series Lonelygirl15. While Veoh is a distribution platform, both of the last two companies are content creators that use the Web to get around the traditional media dominance of distribution channels. As Dagres puts it, “You don’t need a studio or network to be involved, or give up economics to them.”The second big trend is what Dagres calls “life streaming.” Here, there are few better examples than Twitter, the text messaging/social networking/microblogging service in which people convey to their friends and followers what they’re doing at the moment.
“Twitter has taught me something that I didn’t know,” he says. “There’s a growing community of people out there that basically want to stream their lives, and they want to consume—the streams of other people’s lives.” This might sound strange to many, he says. But he notes that there are hundreds of millions of people, most of them under 30, who don’t find it strange at all. “These people, they connect with their friends and they connect over the Web in a way that we only used to do in physical venues,” he says.
Besides Twitter, another Spark investment that seeks to capitalize on this trend is called i’minlikewithyou, or IILWY. Dagres describes it as a cool little New York startup that produces multi-player, social games that attract communities of like-minded players. He calls it half game playing and half life streaming. “I think you are going to see more examples of live content flying around the Web where people are almost creating a kind of virtual proximity,” he says. “I think that’s a very powerful trend that we’re going to see.”
The third trend, an “infrastructure backlash,” stems from the disruptive power of the other two. The upheaval in media and entertainment is not all about applications and content, Dagres says. At some point, the information infrastructure will have to go through what he calls a generational shift in order to handle all the new forms of interaction and consumption. “We’re going to run out of—what I call quality of service,” he says. So to counter that, and provide the connections needed to do what people want to do, he predicts, there will be a wave of investments to add capacity and features to network systems.
One investment Spark has in this space is Intune Networks, an Irish firm that is developing optical switching technology for next-generation metropolitan area networks that will be better able to deliver high-bandwidth content such as streaming HDTV. Another Spark company, Westford, MA-based Verivue, is developing advanced networking solutions for enabling next-generation IPTV (Internet Protocol TV), in which digital television content is transmitted in the form of Internet data packets.
We spoke about one last aspect of Spark’s investment strategy that relates to the current turmoil in financial markets, including the poor market for public offerings – and investor concerns about whether portfolio companies will need lots of additional financing before an exit is possible. “Right now, everybody’s worried about what’s going on with the markets, and when is there going to be an IPO,” Dagres says.
Spark’s approach is to continue being aggressive in its investments, but not to pour huge amounts of money into firms that will need lots of additional capital any time soon – allowing the firm to be patient with its investments. “We pay attention to that, but we don’t let that paralyze us,” he says of the financial climate. “And our early stage focus allows us to let companies pursue big ideas rather than try to get to cash flow break even.”
Especially in these times, that would be welcome news to any entrepreneur.
[By: Robert Buderi]
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Next New Networks Names Lance D. Podell as Chief Executive Officer
Press Release, September 16, 2008
NEW YORK, New York – September 16, 2008 – Next New Networks, the new media company creating micro-television networks on the Internet, including Barely Political, Fast Lane Daily, ThreadBanger and Indy Mogul, announced today the appointment of Lance Podell as Chief Executive Officer overseeing day to day management of the growing company.
Podell brings over 20 years of executive experience as well as marketing and advertising expertise to Next New Networks. Most recently, Podell spent five years as Chief Executive Officer of Seevast Corporation, an operator of marketing services companies offering search engine marketing, content-targeted “sponsored links” for the Web’s top properties and Vertical Ad Networks for CBS and MSNBC. While at Seevast, Podell built the company into a $100M+ business across its lines of operations. He is responsible for multiple innovations including the first sponsored links ad network to run on content pages, and in email, RSS, and video. Prior to Seevast, Lance headed the Sprinks unit of About.com, which he launched and built it into a prosperous unit of the company that was sold to Google under his leadership. Additionally, he has held numerous marketing positions including the Chief Marketing Officer role at DealTime (Shopping.com). Podell began his career in advertising and publishing at such esteemed places as Chiat Day, Time Inc and Ogilvy and Mather
“Lance Podell is a seasoned executive with web business expertise and leadership skills that will be integral to the future of Next New Networks’ corporate strategy,” said Herb Scannell, Chairman, Next New Networks. “He’s built businesses from the ground up and been in the web business since its most formative years. He’s seen and participated in the growth of emerging markets and will be an asset as we continue to establish ourselves as leaders in online television super-distribution and related advertising. We are excited to have Lance on board to lead the next phase of Next New Networks’ growth.”
“Next New Networks is the innovator and trailblazer in online television programming. As an entrepreneur I couldn’t resist the next big frontier on the internet and the opportunity to work with the talented team they’ve put together,” said Lance Podell, CEO, Next New Networks. “I’ve been fortunate to lead companies that pioneered online city guides, comparison shopping, and search and content-targeted advertising. The opportunity to marry the quality and creativity of the Next New Networks product with my content and advertising background positions us well for the future. Plus, this one’s going to be a lot of fun as television is being reinvented by companies like ours on the internet.”
Next New Networks received $23M in funding from leading investors including, Velocity Interactive Group, Spark Capital, Goldman Sachs and the Saban Media Group
“We are pleased to announce the appointment of Lance Podell as CEO of Next New Networks,” said Jonathan Miller, Partner, Velocity Interactive Group. “He’s got a great skill set and experience in taking companies to the next level on the internet. With Herb staying on as Chairman, this will be a very media-savvy company that taps traditional and new media expertise as it builds a robust business in an emerging and dynamic marketplace.”
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Moshe “Mo” Koyfman Joins Spark Capital
Press Release, September 15, 2008
BOSTON AND NEW YORK (September 15, 2008) – Today, Spark Capital announced the addition of media and technology executive Moshe “Mo” Koyfman as principal. Koyfman comes to Spark with a broad range of transactional and operational experience across the consumer Internet and digital media sectors. Based in Boston, Koyfman will split time between Boston and New York and work to deepen the firm’s ties with the New York entrepreneurial community and support Spark’s further expansion into the New York market, which already includes ten emerging companies backed by Spark.
“Technology and the Internet are fundamentally altering and improving the ways in which we all interact with media and services. And New York is continuing to churn out innovative entrepreneurs and businesses capitalizing on this evolution,” said Mo Koyfman. “Having spent the bulk of my career engaged with companies that operate in this sphere, I am thrilled to be joining a fast-growing and pioneering firm with an investment focus so uniquely suited to my interests and experience.”
Before joining Spark, Koyfman spent six years at IAC (NASDAQ: IACID) in a variety of strategic, transactional and operational roles. He most recently served as chief operating officer of Connected Ventures, parent of CollegeHumor.com, BustedTees.com and Vimeo.com. Prior to that, Koyfman helped establish IAC Programming, a new unit of the company focused on opportunities in the digital media space. In his role as vice president, Koyfman spearheaded the acquisition and integration of Connected Ventures and helped conceptualize and incubate a number of new businesses. He previously served as vice president, mergers & acquisitions
“Mo has a keen strategic understanding of the media, entertainment and technology ecosystem and a uniquely diverse background that spans buying, building and operating businesses in the space,” said Todd Dagres, founder and general partner of Spark Capital. “With Mo’s addition, we are expanding Spark’s expertise in our targeted areas of focus and adding someone who can help us mine opportunities in the emerging New York marketplace and beyond. We are thrilled to have him on the Spark team.”
Koyfman graduated from the University of Pennsylvania where he received a B.S. in Economics from The Wharton School with a concentration in Finance and a B.A. in English from The College of Arts & Sciences. Koyfman also serves on the board of directors of ArtWorks, an organization that brings performing arts programming to children suffering from chronic and life-threatening illnesses
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KickApps Announces Video Publishing Solution That Integrates Akamai’s Stream OS
Mashable, August 19, 2008
KickApps, the leading on-demand social media, video player and widget platform, today announced an offering that makes advanced online video publishing available to every web publisher. By combining the KickApps Platform with Akamai’s enterprise class rich media management platform, Stream OS®, web publishers now have access to powerful tools for turnkey creation and management of players for video publishing. Through the integration between Akamai’s Stream OS media management system and the KickApps Platform, the offering provides web publishers drag-and-drop video player customization, a comprehensive media management system, social media enhancements, High Definition (HD) video players, and new video revenue opportunities. Using the KickApps Widget & Video Player Studio, web publishers can easily create, manage and program an unlimited number of custom online video players. Together with the automated digital distribution workflow of Akamai’s Stream OS business rules, web publishers now have on-demand access to a robust online video publishing solution. In addition, KickApps’ video players can be deployed with a range of social media features (e.g. rating, tagging and one-click viral syndication) to drive deeper levels of audience engagement with video content.
“Web publishers have few viable options when it comes to affordable, enterprise-level video publishing solutions that include deep, out-of-the-box social media functionality,” said Alex Blum, CEO of KickApps. “By integrating the two solutions - social & media applications and an enterprise scale video management and distribution solution - web publishers have the means to handle even the most advanced media requirements. With on-demand deployment, we are enabling web publishers to dramatically reduce costs and time-to-market.”
Together, KickApps and Akamai offer web publishers many options for creating unique and differentiated video experiences. In addition to industry-leading video player customization, the offering also provides publishers with a solution for on-demand deployment of HD video. As consumer expectations and demand for HD quality video increase, the challenge for media companies and web publishers will be to easily access these technologies at an affordable price.
To further facilitate growth in the online video market, the companies have developed a standard approach to video player development for web publishers, large and small. As part of this, KickApps has integrated the Akamai Media Player Framework into its video players. The Akamai Media Player Framework provides best practices for creating and deploying video players that support streaming and progressive download of content created in Adobe Flash®, Flex® and AIRâ„¢. The Akamai Media Player Framework enables standards-based integration with many of the major video advertising networks, inviting web publishers to more effectively monetize editorial and user-generated video. Additionally, when coupled with Akamai Stream OS, KickApps’ video players will support automated workflows for publishing and syndication, allowing web publishers full control of their media assets.
“This is a huge step for KickApps’ customers, web publishers and the industry as a whole,” said Tim Napoleon, chief strategist for digital media at Akamai. “This solution offers a simplified way to build players and monetize content with an efficient workflow that is made available through Akamai’s Stream OS. Together, we’re hopeful to remove the final barriers to adoption by making available a highly sophisticated video publishing platform to web publishers of all sizes.”
About KickApps
KickApps provides on-demand social media, video and widget applications that enable web publishers and marketers to grow, engage and monetize online audiences. Its SaaS platform includes social networking, user-generated content, programmable video players, drag-and-drop widget building, WidgeADsâ„¢ and other applications that are tightly integrated with robust media moderation, member management and reporting. The KickApps Platform seamlessly integrates with any website using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, feeds, Widgets and APIs (REST and SOAP). Customers include: ABC Family, CW Television, Guinness World Records, Scripps Network Interactive, VIBE Magazine, HBO, Cinemax, Cox Television, the Phoenix Suns, the New York Knicks, the New York Rangers and thousands of other sites. For more information, visit www.kickapps.com and www.kickdeveloper.com.
The Akamai Difference
Akamai® provides market-leading managed services for powering rich media, dynamic transactions, and enterprise applications online. Having pioneered the content delivery market one decade ago, Akamai’s services have been adopted by the world’s most recognized brands across diverse industries. The alternative to centralized Web infrastructure, Akamai’s global network of tens of thousands of distributed servers provides the scale, reliability, insight and performance for businesses to succeed online. An S&P 500 and NASDAQ 100 company, Akamai has transformed the Internet into a more viable place to inform, entertain, interact, and collaborate. To experience The Akamai Difference, visit www.akamai.com.
StreamOS is a registered trademark of Akamai Technologies, Inc. All other trade or service marks belong to their respective owners and are used without implication of endorsement.
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Pro Sports Teams and Their Fans Connect Online with KickApps
Press Release, August 19, 2008
KickApps, the industry’s leading on-demand social media, video player and widget platform, today announced that the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers, the New York Knicks and New York Rangers, have deployed KickApps powered social media websites. MSG Interactive launched KnicksNet and RangersNet, which were designed in collaboration with award winning interactive marketing agency, Deep Focus.
The teams are using their new social media websites to increase online interactivity and engagement with fans, present video and photos in video players and widgets, and generate incremental revenue from new advertising and sponsorship opportunities. These websites further KickApps’ industry leadership in the professional sports category. KickApps also powers community, video and widgets within the NBA’s Phoenix Suns (PlanetOrange.net), the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks (Spiritof12.com), the Arena Football League and Real Madrid America, among others.
“We believe that the 49ers Faithful are the best fans in the NFL and that social networking, online photo and video sharing are perfect web based complements for diehard fans who already live and breathe football,“ said Michael Williams, director of marketing for the 49ers. “Our fans express and share their passion for the 49ers at games, at home watching games on TV or listening to radio broadcasts, by the coffee maker at the office, and over the phone. In today’s Internet world, they should also get the chance to show that loyalty and support online with other fans! We feel the enhancements we’ve made with KickApps to our 49ersfaithful.net site will enable us to achieve deeper relationships with our fans and gives us a channel to engage with them every minute of every day, 365 days a year.“
The KickApps hosted platform powers sports-oriented websites with a wide range of integrated social networking applications, where fans establish their identities by creating their own profile pages, friend other fans and send public and private video and text messages to each other. KickApps also enables rich media sharing capabilities where fans can upload videos, photos, audio clips and blogs that express their passion for the teams. Members of the online communities can leave comments, rate, share, and ‘snag’ content as widgets and place them on other social networks, such as Facebook and MySpace, as well as on their own blogs or other fan websites. These widgets create virtual gateways back to the team’s website, sending traffic from across the Internet.
“The New York Knicks and New York Rangers have some of the most passionate fans in the world and creating a destination for them to gather online is an important objective for us,“ said Scott Richman, senior vice president and general manager, MSG Interactive. “The KickApps Platform allowed us to very easily and quickly put together a website which features applications that create a highly interactive environment for our fans. This combined with the strategy and design guidance from Deep Focus resulted in a perfect branded experience that speaks directly to New York’s basketball and hockey fans.“
“Our KickApps website is a huge asset in uniting our fans and enabling them to express their Seahawks spirit with tools that are easy to use,“ said Mike Flood, vice president of community relations, Seattle Seahawks. “The KickApps team understands both broad goals and finer points of social networking. Combined, they helped us focus on creating a website that addressed the needs of fans of various Internet ability, featured easy-to-use administration on the back end, and is optimized to encourage participation.“
The KickApps Platform also features a broad set of media applications that are easily integrated into existing websites. The KickApps Widget and Video Player Studio invites even non-technical web developers to create and deploy highly customized video players and widgets. The KickApps drag-and-drop application building environment removes the need for expensive technical resources to quickly deploy new editorial media content and is supported by industry-leading RSS feed and media management tools.
“Social media has proven to grow and reinforce the fan community, strengthen team and brand affinities, and create new revenue opportunities through merchandising, sponsorships and online advertising,“ said Alex Blum, CEO of KickApps. “As leading brands in professional basketball, football and hockey, these teams are paving the way in their industries by defining new channels for fan interaction and engagement, and revenue.“
KickApps currently powers over 30,000 social media websites for large media and entertainment brands, professional sports teams, as well as fan created sports sites, such as My Jets Nation and The Lakers Nation.
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Bugs That Obey You
Forbes, August 14, 2008
In May, as the hype surrounding the soon-to-be-released iPhone 3G was beginning to crest, Peter Semmelhack (pictured above) was feeling increasingly despondent. He wrote in his blog: “I feel powerless. I feel like a subject awaiting what the good King will bestow upon us this time. The result could be pleasing, boring, useful, useless. It doesn’t matter really because it has nothing to do with me. I am a minion.“
Semmelhack has nothing against Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ), per se. The 42-year-old entrepreneur owns a few Macs, and they give him the same sense of childlike wonder as they do for other people. His problem is the one-way street down which Apple and its brethren in the gadgets business direct their customers. Consumers don’t have much power in the consumer electronics business. Electronics firms sell us what they think we want, and we’re supposed to keep our wallets open and our mouths closed. “We’ve been trained to believe that gadgets come from big companies, which is a fallacy,“ says Semmelhack.
Semmelhack founded Bug Labs two years ago to shift the balance of power toward the average Joe, or at least an average Joe with programming skills. In March, New York-based Bug Labs began selling its “Bug Modules,“ an assortment of white, 2.5-inch-square hardware modules that snap into a portable Linux computer, “the Bug Base,“ to create almost any gadget you can think up. To see our pick of other technowizards, see: “In Pictures: Eight People Inventing The Future.“
So far Bug is selling a global positioning system (GPS) module, a camera, a motion sensor and a touch screen. Coming soon are a Qwerty keyboard and a module with outputs for audio and video. Conspicuously missing from the lineup of modules is one that connects to any wireless network, be it wi-fi, Wimax or 3G cellular. Semmelhack says he’s working on a SIM card reader now. Bug Labs has 10 new modules in the research pipeline including a radio-frequency tag reader and a Wimax module.
Everything about Bug’s products is customizable and programmable. The software it runs on is entirely open-source, meaning anyone can look at the operating system’s source code, modify it and share it with the world. You can write your own application for a Bug, or download one from Bug Labs’ Web site. You can remove a module and snap in a new one on the fly to create a new gadget. One Bug customer created a device that uses a GPS module to wake him up with a loud beep whenever he sleeps past his train station. A health care provider is using Bugs to build a remote patient monitoring device to replace an expensive custom-built piece of hardware. A mobile enterprise software company is building a system that uses BUGs with GPS to track assets while in the field.
Semmelhack has heard from many critics that his plan is doomed, especially the fact that few people have the time and talent to program a custom gadget. The Bug system is rather expensive: $349 for the base computer, $119 for the touch screen, $59 for the motion sensor, $79 for a two-megapixel camera module. You can’t customize the iPhone 3G the way you can a Bug, but you can get most of the way there for $199 (plus two-year contract with AT&T (nyse: T - news - people )) and a lot of free or cheap applications. Bug has also had a few bumps in its early going. Its initial contract manufacturer walked away just as Semmelhack expected it to start shipping. The snag cost Bug six weeks of delays before it could restore supply to meet the demand.
Others have tried the modular gadget idea before with mixed results. In 1999 Handspring, a company started by the founders of Palm (nasdaq: PALM - news - people ), introduced the Visor, a personal digital assistant that came with an expansion slot into which you can plug camera, GPS or cellular phone modules. The Visor had a loyal following for a few years but was scrapped in favor of the phone-centric Treo, which became a huge hit.
Semmelhack, a tall, tousle-haired and confidently cerebral Web industry veteran (he uses words like instantiation without hesitation), says comparisons between the Bug and mass-market gadgets like the iPhone are inapt. “We’re not even in the same ballpark. We’re filling that vast middle ground between iPhone and electrical engineering,“ he says.
If Bug succeeds, it may very well be with the thousands of businesses—warehouses, couriers, manufacturers, hospitals—that need a particular problem solved but lack the money or expertise to build and program an electronics device for the task.
One example of a gadget Semmelhack thinks could find ready customers is a color-matching device for the blind. Snap a camera and spectral sensor into a Bug Base and it will be able to identify and speak aloud the color of a shirt or dress it is pointing at. Say only 5% of the 2 million blind people in the U.S. would want one. That would be demand of 100,000 units. That’s too small a market for a Samsung or Sony (nyse: SNE - news - people ), but an entrepreneur with some programming skills can buy off-the-shelf Bug modules and be in business. It’s the long tail approach to electronics. “There are thousands of these markets around the world,“ says Semmelhack.
Semmelhack started thinking about the need for a modular gadget company in the days after Sept. 11, when he wanted to provide his wife with a wireless GPS device for her purse that would upload her location at all times to a Web site. He looked into what it would take to build one and found it was impossible.
He got frustrated again a few years later when he couldn’t find a camera that could e-mail pictures of his children immediately to their grandparents. He met what he calls “frustration point No. 3” in 2005 when he went looking for a motion-sensing camera that could take pictures of the deer that were eating his rose bushes and send them to his e-mail address. Bug Labs was born shortly thereafter. Since 2006 the company has raised about $4 million from firms including Union Square Ventures and is up to 20 employees.
Semmelhack finally has his DeerTracker 3000, created by snapping together two Bug modules into the base and writing a couple dozen lines of software code. He’s no threat to Sony, but representatives from Sony did stop by the Bug Labs booth at the big consumer electronics show in January in Las Vegas. “They said, ‘you’re trying to put us out of business,‘“ says Semmelhack with a laugh.
[By: Bruce Upbin]
SoCal earthquake a powerful reminder of Twitter’s potential
, July 29, 2008
This morning a 5.4 magnitude earthquake struck Southern California near Los Angeles. Well before the information was anywhere on the major news outlets, tweets (Twitter messages) were flowing in at a rapid clip. I say again, events such as this showcase the power of the micro-messaging service Twitter.When natural disasters strike, people want news ASAP. Twitter is simply very fast at disseminating information. We saw this when a large 7.8 earthquake struck China back in May and we’re seeing it again today. Today, it was especially true when used in conjunction with the social conversation and aggregation site FriendFeed. Minutes after the quake, I had various accounts of it and maps of its epicenter.
Twitter’s new search site (formerly Summize) is also an incredible tool for getting information. It used to take a little while for information on these events to trickle down depending on who you were following on Twitter. 
Now you can simply open Twitter Search and do a query for “earthquake” and get thousands of results. Within minutes of me opening the site up, I was alerted that there were already hundreds of updates on the earthquake – the information was coming in fast.
It takes reporters time to set up and get the story, but Twitter turns thousands of regular people into citizen journalists – all of whom are on the scene. Of course one has to worry about the spread of incorrect information, especially in the time of a disaster, but the sheer volume of tweets allows for the truth to come up.
Many people only like to talk about Twitter’s monetization strategy or when it will hit “mainstream” usage. Throughout all of this the most important fact remains that Twitter is useful. As long as it stays that way and can maintain (or achieve depending on the week) reliability, the rest of that will come.
[By: MG Siegler]
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Twitter took off from simple to ‘tweet’ success
, July 21, 2008
“What are you doing?“
That question is the rocket fuel for Twitter – a hot social-network service that lets you tell people what you are up to at any given moment of the day – via cellphone, instant messenger, or the Web. Never heard of it, you say?
“What are you doing?“ is the question Twitter asks “Twitterers” to answer in a simple text message as they connect with friends, co-workers or the wider world. Twitterers “tweet” about everything from what they had for lunch to how much they enjoyed their latest Netflix DVD. If that sounds silly and incredibly narrow at first, don’t worry, you’re not alone.
“When people hear about Twitter, their immediate reaction is that it’s the simplest and stupidest idea in the world,“ says co-founder Biz Stone.
“They do not want to know that their brother is eating a hot dog right now,“ he says. “But then they discover that their friends are on it. And so are the L.A. Fire Department, NASA and JetBlue. Then they get it.“
Boy, do they.
Twitter has become so popular, so fast, that keeping up with its fast-growing user base is a real issue. So many people now use Twitter to update friends that the system often crashes.
That could be about to change. Twitter executives are working feverishly to solve the problem through a new investment ($15 million, according to several tech blogs) from Spark Capital and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and putting off expansion plans (i.e., making money) until the network issues are resolved.
“Twitter took off really quickly, and honestly, we were surprised and had to play a lot of catch-up,“ says Stone. “Now we’re focusing 100% on reliability.“
Twitter no longer exists just for friends to tell friends that they’re on their way to the gym or out to eat. It’s become a kind of hypergrapevine news resource – a way of instant messaging your circle of friends about your interests (“Did you hear what Obama said today?“) or consumer rants and raves (“The customer service at Zappos.com rocks!“).
The service is even credited with breaking news about fires and other natural disasters.
Twitterers, as they call themselves, post their updates at Twitter.com or by using text- or instant-message tools.
A cottage industry of websites – including TweetScan, FriendFeed and Summize (which Twitter recently acquired and renamed Twitter Search) – have popped up to service the Twitterers and their tweets, by making it easier to search through the chatter for specific topics or people.
Tweets of gold
Savvy businesses see gold in the information: Consumers are talking about them on Twitter, and they get to respond more quickly than ever.
“In the past, companies would hire a market research firm to understand their audience,“ says Mike Hudack, CEO of Blip.tv, a New York-based video website.
“Now we use Twitter to get the fastest, most honest research any company ever heard – the good, bad and ugly – and it doesn’t cost a cent,“ he says.
With Twitter, Hudack can monitor every mention of Blip.tv and see exactly what people are saying. He can drop notes about things the company is thinking of doing and get instant feedback about whether they’re worth pursuing.
To get started on Twitter, you begin by searching to see who else is using the service and ask permission to “follow” their postings. Twitter subscriber Joe Rogel – known as Granola Joe on Twitter – says the service is a great way to reach those who might otherwise be inaccessible.
Blip and other young companies such as shoe retailer Zappos.com are on Twitter. So are food retailer Whole Foods and cable company Comcast, whose customer service issues – especially online – are legendary.
Frank Eliason, a customer service manager for Comcast, spends his day communicating with Twitterers about the company – hoping to resolve issues. Comcast isn’t on Twitter to turn around the firm’s customer service perception issues but simply to “build better relationships with our customers,“ he says.
Whole Foods, which started using Twitter in June, just wants to hear what people are saying about the company.
“It’s amazing how many people say, ‘I’m off to Whole Foods for lunch,‘ “ says Slayton Carter, Whole Foods’ online community development coordinator.
Getting beyond the tech crowd
Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh uses Twitter to make himself available to the public. He says he receives up to 200 tweets daily.
“For people who follow us on Twitter, it gives them more depth into what we’re like, and my own personality,“ he says.
Zappos tested a new site, zeta.zappos.com, recently on Twitter, “and we were able to make some improvements based on the comments,“ says Hsieh.
When Twitter co-founders Stone, Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams began working on their new Web idea, Dorsey suggested a site that emulated the “status” feature of instant-messaging services, which lets people know whether you’re online. Twitter also adopted the short character limit of text messages and IMs.
As Twitter users know, if you can’t say it in 140 characters or less, your idea won’t get out there.
And since Twitter combines use of the Web, IMs and text messaging, measuring the site’s popularity is tough. The privately held company does not disclose numbers.
Traditional online measurement firms report only Web usage, which is only half of the equation because so much of Twitter usage is via mobile phones. Still, Web measurement firm Compete says Twitter’s audience grew to 2 million users in May from 200,000 in May 2007.
Not everyone loves Twitter. Phil Leigh, an analyst for Inside Digital Media, says he goes on the site with an open mind and just doesn’t get it.
“That some guy saw Wall-E and thought it was a great movie is wonderful, but it’s just not that interesting to me. If somebody has something important to say, they can say it in an e-mail.“
Allen Weiner, an analyst at Gartner, says that Twitter’s audience right now is limited to the “cognoscenti,“ but that it’s a testament to Twitter’s growing popularity that so many third-party applications (such as Summize and FriendFeed) have sprung up to feed on its success.
Many news and media outlets (from cable giant CNN to tech blogs such as Techcrunch) have responded to the popularity of Twitter by offering instant news updates to share with friends. This adds to Twitter’s growing stature, says Weiner.
Twitter’s problem is keeping its users happy. So many people go on it that at times – often, in fact – the system crashes, and Twitter is unusable.
Stone and Dorsey say the problem is that Twitter became more popular than they ever envisioned and that the system they created wasn’t built for masses. An influx of engineers is working to rebuild it, and they say the situation should be resolved within the year.
Bijan Sabet, a general partner at Spark Capital, says the cash infusion should help solve the problem. But Weiner doesn’t think it will go far enough. “I’d be stunned if by the end of the year, somebody doesn’t buy Twitter,“ says Weiner. “They need the kind of global infrastructure a big company could provide that would make it 100% reliable.“
A flock of chirps
Stone says the secret of Twitter’s success is realizing that folks don’t want to use the Web for private conversations but public ones. Nearly 90% of Twitter users make their updates public, so everyone can read them.
“It encourages other people to see what they’re saying,“ says Stone. “People aren’t doing one-to-one e-mail or instant messages anymore. Just look at comments on MySpace and blogs. They’re communicating with one another in an open way.“
Just like birds.
In choosing a name for the service, Stone suggested Twitter, and the co-founders jumped for it. “It’s what birds do when they converge,“ says Stone. “The sound they make is technically defined as a trivial chirp. How perfect — hear a trivial chirp on your phone, look down and it’s your friend. During events, you can move as one with your friends, just like birds, because you all know what everyone is up to.“
And if the bird analogy doesn’t persuade you to use Twitter, we’ll leave the last word to Dorsey: “Is there anyone you care about? Twitter is about keeping in touch and making the world smaller.“
So — what are you doing right now?
[By: Jefferson Graham]
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SendMe Mobile Signs Warner Music Group for Music and Games
, July 16, 2008
SendMe Mobile has signed another deal with yet another major music company, adding a great deal more content available for mobile media use by its customers. myspace-forms-music-venture-with-big-labels Apr-3-2008 
Warner Music Group is the latest to forge a partnership with SendMe Mobile, making its content available for inclusion with SendMe’s mobile media platform. That means ringtones, video ringers and wallpaper images from Warner Music Group artists can be downloaded by SendMe Mobile subscription users. This is, of course, a wealth of content that SendMe Mobile can now present to users, while also providing an interesting distribution channel for Warner Music Group.
Ringtones and other mobile customization options have become a standard for the re-purposing potential of musicians, both mainstream and otherwise, as it stretches out the length and lifetime of the content’s longtail. To increase on the uniqueness of this mobile partnership, Warner has also signed on to take part in another aspect of SendMe’s platform, which includes mobile game auction network SoLow.
According to Russell Klein, CEO of SendMe, Warner’s involvement with SoLow will produce “a series of unique, exclusive, highly experiential giveaways on SoLow.com that will feature selected artists from the Warner catalog. We specialize in crafting promotions that create a visceral level of excitement with a highly engaged demo of users by focusing on giving away experiences instead of simply merchandise.”
While ad revenue-sharing is not part of the deal made between SendMe Mobile and Warner (or Universal, for that matter), the branding and marketing potential across SendMe’s multiple mobile platforms is designed to be mutually beneficial for all parties involved. Mobile networks have been leveraged for some time by large entities in the music industry for their direct customization options, and we’re seeing this direct access to users grow through other deals such as that made between Rhapsody and Verizon. It will be interesting to see the furthered development of major music labels’ branding efforts being promoted through additional game channels within SendMe’s network as well.
[By: Kristen Nicole]
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Yahoo Is Inviting Partners to Build on Its Search Power
, July 10, 2008
Unable to beat Google in the Web search business on its own, Yahoo is trying a new approach.Yahoo wants to enlist a small army of search start-ups as allies in the hope that collectively they will be able to stop the Google juggernaut, whose share of Web searches keeps growing.
To do so, on Thursday Yahoo is opening its search technology and powerful data centers to other companies, allowing them to build new or customized search engines without having to make the huge investments needed to develop a search service from scratch.
Yahoo, in turn, will sell ads on those new search engines; if some grab even small slivers of the search market, Yahoo will share in their success.
Yahoo’s future remains uncertain. Hoping to seize on growing shareholder dissatisfaction, Carl C. Icahn, the activist investor, is trying to wrest control of the company from Yahoo’s board and management team. Microsoft might renew its bid for Yahoo if Mr. Icahn succeeds.
Yahoo executives said they had high hopes for the new strategy, which they call Boss, or build your own search service.
“Over the course of years, we want this to be much more than a blip,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of research and search strategy at Yahoo. Mr. Raghavan showed a pie chart in which a hypothetical collective market share of the new search engine had grown to be comparable to Yahoo’s own. He joked that the chart was a “pie in the sky” and would not discuss actual market share estimates or timelines.
Yahoo had 20.6 percent of all searches in the United States in May. Google’s share was 61.8 percent, three times as large.
Analysts said Yahoo’s strategy was clever but added that many elements of the plan, like the terms of the business relationships between Yahoo and its partners, had yet to be defined.
“This is being done as a public-facing move to show that Yahoo has an idea for how to get traction in online search,” said Allen Weiner, an analyst at Gartner. “The overall concept is very sound. But it is way too early to determine what kind of impact it will have.”
Mr. Weiner said it was unclear how many developers would embrace the idea of building new search services on top of Yahoo’s. As of now, two start-ups, Me.dium and Hakia, have signed up to use Yahoo’s search technology.
Me.dium offers a service in which users can see what Web sites their friends are visiting. That allows the company to collect information about what sites have “buzz” at any given time, said Kimbal Musk, the company’s chief executive. Me.dium will use that information to rearrange and supplement Yahoo’s search results, creating a service that captures the “social zeitgeist” of the Web, Mr. Musk said.
A search for “Barack Obama” on Yahoo, for instance, returns a set of news articles, followed by the candidate’s official site and an entry from Wikipedia. On Me.dium, whose search service is still in a test phase, the top results include the candidate’s official site, followed by a popular YouTube video of Senator Obama dancing on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” followed by Obama-themed images for PC desktops.
“We think that for a good percentage of searches, we’ll get people to where they want to go a lot faster than regular search engines,” Mr. Musk said. He said it would have been impossible for Me.dium to create a search service on its own.
Yahoo estimates that it would cost $300 million to build a search service from scratch.
Google has allowed Web sites to customize its search results, but not nearly to the extent that Yahoo is doing with Boss.
Yahoo executives acknowledged that the new strategy, if successful, could cannibalize Yahoo’s own search business. But they said that if a search start-up became popular, it would probably take more users away from Google than from Yahoo, as Google has a far larger share of the market.
“We did a lot of analysis,” said Bill Michels, senior director for Yahoo’s open search platform. “We are comfortable with the risks associated with it.”
[By: Miguel Helft]
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Hurry up, the customer has a complaint
, July 07, 2008
When C.C. Chapman noticed a blemish in his high-definition television’s reception during the NBA playoffs recently, he blasted a quick gripe about Comcast into the online ether, using the social network Twitter.
Minutes later, a Twitter user named ComcastCares responded, and within 24 hours, a technician was at Chapman’s house in Milford to fix the problem.
“I was so floored,“ said Chapman, who runs a digital marketing agency and advises companies to do what he experienced with Comcast - listen to what customers are saying about them online and respond. “When it actually happened to me, it blew me away,“ he said. “Now I have a case study.“
Chapman’s experience is one example of the ways customer service is changing in an age when a single disgruntled consumer with a broadband connection can ignite a crisis. It also shows the potential of the Internet to turn miffed customers into fans in a more organic way than an advertising campaign. Chapman, for example, made a podcast about his visit from Comcast.
“We’re in a world where one person, by their actions, can make a company look bad, and it can get echoed and amplified over and over again,“ said Josh Bernoff, an analyst at Forrester Research and coauthor of “Groundswell,“ a book about business and social technologies. “The power has shifted, [so] that big companies now have to be worried about one individual with a microphone called a blog.“
Comcast, like other companies, has learned the power of the individual firsthand.
Two years ago, a YouTube video of a technician who fell asleep on a customer’s couch while on hold with Comcast became a hit - the video has been viewed 1.2 million times and triggered more than 750 comments. Last summer, a 75-year-old Virginia woman frustrated with the company attracted national attention when she stormed into a Comcast office and began hammering equipment. Then there is ComcastMustDie.com, a website started last year by Advertising Age columnist Bob Garfield.
And even though those individual complaints represent a tiny portion of the cable operator’s more than 24 million cable customers nationwide, in the latest ratings by the American Customer Satisfaction Index, Comcast hit an all-time low - in an industry that consistently ranks near the bottom of satisfaction rankings.
Comcast has made efforts to improve its customer service, investing in new software that allows representatives in call centers to be better informed about what products are functioning or broken. It has added call centers, and acknowledged that recent expansions - through acquisitions of other companies - can come with bumps for customers adjusting to new products and rates.
Comcast has also set up teams of employees who are encouraged to click around social networks or online forums.
“Listening and acting upon what they are hearing and being very proactive - which is different than waiting for a customer to pick up the phone and call us. We can nip it in the bud,“ said Karen Hartzell, division vice president of customer care for Comcast’s NorthCentral division.
Other companies are moving in the same direction.
At Southwest Airlines, the social media team includes a chief Twitter officer who tracks Twitter comments and monitors a Facebook group, an online representative who fact checks and interacts with bloggers, and another who takes charge of the company’s presence on sites such as YouTube, Flickr, and LinkedIn. So if someone posts a complaint in cyberspace, the company can respond in a personal way.
For example, when Travis Johnson, known by the Twitter handle, “pastortrav,“ complained recently about Southwest’s check-in process, he received a quick, public response from an airline employee saying, “So sorry to hear it! What don’t you like about the check-in process? Did your flight get off okay?“
“We monitor those channels because we know these conversations are taking place there, and we can either watch the conversations or take part in them,“ said Southwest spokeswoman Christi Day.
Even companies that haven’t deployed employees as website ambassadors are checking on how they are represented in online chatter.
Firms like TNS Media Intelligence Cymfony in Watertown monitor how brands are perceived online, by tracking blogs and social networks to find where people are talking about a company.
“Why do people post negative stuff about brands and companies online? A lot is they want to help the company,“ said Jim Nail, chief marketing officer of Cymfony. “Yeah, they’re upset; yeah, they’re angry; yeah, they feel like they’ve been treated unfairly - but they want to give the company a chance to fix it.“
Dell Inc. has been a leader in this sort of unconventional outreach. The company was burned by “Dell Hell,“ blogger Jeff Jarvis’s 2005 account of his negative experience with the company.
In the years since, Dell said, it has aggressively worked to improve customer service, including by listening online.
The company’s 40-member “communities and conversation team” includes employees that do outreach on Twitter and communicate with bloggers.
At DellIdeaStorm.com, a social website that the company launched in 2007, people are invited to make suggestions for products and services. Of more than 9,000 suggestions, 50 have been implemented, the company said.
The Society for New Communications Research recognized the Dell Outlet, which sells refurbished products, for using Twitter to offer special deals and products. The outlet has sold $500,000 worth of products through Twitter offers.
It’s not just an early warning system, said Dell spokeswoman Caroline Dietz. “If you look at the more positive side, it’s also about innovation - the closer you are to your customers via these social media tools, you can listen to what are their needs, what are their pain-points, and act on that feedback.“
[By: Carolyn Johnson]
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Twitter Aims For ‘Always On’ With Spark, Bezos Cash
, June 30, 2008
Sometimes the best way to decide whether to invest in a company is to use its product yourself.
That was the case for Bijan Sabet, general partner at Spark Capital, who tried Twitter Inc.‘s microblogging service about a year ago and quickly became addicted. Now, Spark has led a second round of funding in the company.
“I’ve observed since using it first-hand how important it is to me personally and the people I’m interacting with online,“ said Sabet, who has taken a seat on Twitter’s board.
The funding, reported by GigaOm to be worth $15 million, was also provided by new investor Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment firm of Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos, as well as existing investors Union Square Ventures and Tokyo-based Digital Garage. The company declined to discuss the amount of funding or valuation.
Twitter, based in San Francisco, has become the digital tool of choice for technology early adopters for its 140-character maximum micro-blogging service. It has also become a sort of group chat service. The service is now used for posting breaking news, and has been integrated with third-party music, gaming and social networking services.
Twitter is a new type of communications tool, Sabet believes. Unlike instant messaging, which is one-to-one, Twitter is one-to-many. The messages can also be viewed publicly in many other third-party services, unlike instant messaging.
The funding will go primarily toward addressing the company’s biggest problem: repeated downtime of the service. Sabet acknowledged the problems, but said the service has made some steady improvements in the past month.
“The lion’s share of all activity is now going towards making this always on, so it really becomes a global communications utility,“ Sabet said.
The problem has been mainly due to the explosion of use of the service, which approximately doubled from March to April and has continued at a torrid pace, according to Chris Sacca, an angel investor in Twitter and former head of special initiatives at Google Inc. There has also been a 30 to 1 rate of hits coming from third party API calls versus Twitter Web site hits, a massive amount of traffic for the company to address, Sacca said.
“One interesting thing about Twitter was [that] they didn’t tell users how to use it,“ Sacca said. “They didn’t artificially restrict use cases and instead let users use their imagination.“
The downside of that rapid user growth has been almost full-time focus on keeping the service up. The new funding will allow some flexibility to also add long-awaited features. Generating revenue is not a priority right now, Sacca said. Twitter has tested ads on Twitter’s Japanese version.
“There isn’t a lot of pressure to roll out that stuff,“ Sacca said. “Nevertheless, we’re seeing more companies want a commercial presence. It’s an increasingly important channel for communications with a company.“
Sacca said the company could eventually release opt-in features such as instant notifications from a bar about its happy hour or special sales from a ski resort after a snowstorm.
[By: Tomio Geron]
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AT&T Offers Buzzwire, JuiceCaster To Mobile Users
Mashable, June 19, 2008
AT&T has launched today two new mobile media applications for its wireless subscribers, Buzzwire and JuiceCaster 6.0, which are being pegged as software releases that help users “experience and share the best streaming media from the Web while mobile.”
The Buzzwire and Juicecaster applications are not free to AT&T wireless subscribers. Upon download, the first of the two demands a monthly fee of $4.99, while the latter runs $2.99. And whether you choose to download one, all, or neither, is of course entirely dependent on your preferences as a consumer and social Web user.
Buzzwire, for one, which requires a 3G-enabled handset to function, is described as a mobile application that enables consumers to stream to their devices any of 5,000 video clips, whose categories range from news, sports and other premium entertainment to user-generated content. Live Internet Radiois available as well. If on-the-go, on demand downloads of clips and audio streams are what you’re after, the $4.99 levy may well be a manageable one.
JuiceCaster, meanwhile, a service which Mashable as touched on a number of times, most recently last month with a geo-tagging option, is more an investment in the social networking realm. For a flat charge of $2.99/month, JuiceCaster 6.0 allows users to share things like photos and videos taken through their devices - be they 2G- or 3G-compatible - to a myriad of services, including Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube, and Twitter. For folks not invested in smartphone level data plans which would naturally present a variety of media consumption and publication choices, a download of JuiceCaster 6.0 from AT&T’s mobile Meadia Mall is something to really consider as a $2.99 extra on one’s bill.
[By: Paul Glazowski]
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Employee Non-Compete Agreements: Protecting Innovation or Stifling It?
Press Release, May 19, 2008
A Discussion Hosted by the Berkman Center and Spark Capital; Sponsored by Gunderson Dettmer and Silicon Valley Bank
Thursday, June 19th from 4:00-7:00PM (Please note the updated time)
The use of employee non-compete agreements by Massachusetts companies is routine, with employers mandating that employees steer clear of any business of a competitive nature once they leave their present jobs, typically for a year or more. Many believe these agreements are critical to guarding a company’s hard-earned intellectual property—protecting legitimate business interests, and thus our region’s economy. Others, however, believe that non-competes are nothing more than handcuffs that prevent talented entrepreneurs from bringing new innovations to market and, in some cases, even driving entrepreneurs to leave the region to pursue their innovations elsewhere. In this session, we’ll bring together some of the area’s best known venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and executives to explore the issue of non-competes and weigh the pros and cons of their use here in the Commonwealth. Are non-competes protecting innovation and economic growth in Massachusetts? Or stifling it?
Panelists will include:
- Melanie Haratunian, general counsel, Akamai
- Paul Maeder, general partner, Highland Capital Partners
- Lee Fleming, associate professor of business administration, Harvard University
- Rich Miner, founder, Google Android
- Bijan Sabet, general partner, Spark Capital
- Moderator: John Palfrey, Clinical Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School
Join us on Thursday, June 19th from 4-7PM in the Ames Courtroom at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Mass. The panel will be followed by a cocktail reception.
RSVP requested: Please email your name, title and company to Amar Ashar at the Berkman Center: ashar@cyber.law.harvard.edu
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Lonely Girl Duo Gets VC Funds for EQAL
Business Week, April 17, 2008
Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried, the duo behind the 2006 online video phenom, Lonely Girl, have received $5 million from venture capitalists including Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, to create an independent online studio.
The pair say they turned down money from major media companies to build an independent studio that will let them do things their own way – create what they are calling a “social entertainment” company that will be equal parts TV studio and social networking site. The company is to be called EQAL, a shortening of the world “equal” to show that folks like them have just as much a chance to find a big audience as the huge media companies with their armies of programming executives.
The two aren’t the only online programming hotshots who have found some deep-pocketed venture capitalists and who have designs on going directly to mouse-clicking videophiles. Former MTV Networks chief Herb Scannell has raised money – including from Spark Capital, one of the backers behind Lonely Girl, to create several online channels.
Webby Award Nominations
But Beckett and Goodfried have a couple of true hits already. Their shows Lonely Girl 15 and Kate Modern have been viewed more than 150 million times, the two say, and were both nominated as best drama at the upcoming Webby Awards, the Emmys for online producers. Moreover, Lonely Girl, which at the outset featured what appeared to be a real 15-year old in distress, became a national obsession among online video viewers before it was revealed that Bree, the young woman, was in fact an actress.
Beckett, a onetime surgeon, and former lawyer Goodfried intend to use the two shows – and others they are contemplating – to create their own studio to tap the social networking aspects of their current site lonelygirl15.com. They expect to use some of the $5 million to find new technology that will enable them to offer services such as messaging and “friending” to expand the numbers of people who already go the site, says Beckett.
The site currently uses a comment board to keep its users involved with the plots. Viewers have occasionally offered up ideas on the comment board that have become plot twists. An upcoming guest appearance by one of the characters in Lonely Girl on Kate Modern was an idea first broached on the comment board. That kind of viewer interaction is the beginnings of a larger social network, according to the two creators. The two shows use limited product placement at the moment, says Goodfried, and will look at revenue sources that include on-site advertising and subscriptions.
So far, the two say, they have steered clear of aligning with major media companies. “We’ve talked with all of them,“ says Beckett. “We’ve talked to MySpace ( NWS) and Bebo, everyone, and we’d rather stay independent and pursue our own vision.“
The two haven’t ruled out making TV shows in conjunction with a large media company, but they would rather maintain the rights to the show – and, of course, the revenue stream. That would make them a new media version of the independent production companies that now produce movies and TV shows, but then license them for limited showings on TV networks or as features in movie theaters. Not surprisingly, they say that they are already fielding tons of pitches from other, not-as-well-financed, video producers who would rather deal with them than a large media company.
[By: Ronald Grover]
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Covestor Raises $6.5M for Social Investing
Mashable, April 07, 2008
Online portfolio-sharing service Covestor has raised an additional $6.5 million in its Series A round of funding, led by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital, along with Amadeus Capital Partners. Todd Dagres of Spark and Albert Wenger of USV will be joining Covestor’s board. Having raised some seed funding last summer, the social stock picker has since taken steps towards launching its API in an effort to provide its tools for mashups and other applications.
Covestor’s unique twist on the online, social aspect of trading sites is its monetary rewards given to users for making good decisions in the real stock market. And despite the current economy’s downward turn and speculation from analysts that such sites would see a great deal of trouble as a result, Covestor and several other social trading sites have received a good amount of funding in the past four months.
Covestor plans on using the funds to build out its asset management platform, a central feature of the Covestor service. What this platform does is enable users to invest along the “self-directed investors” in their communities, instead of through a managed fund. Covestor and other sites are pushing an interesting concept into the realm of trading, especially as an option for individual, experienced, or even first-time investors.
[By: Kristen Nicole ]
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Jana can nominate candidates for CNET board
CNET, March 13, 2008
Hedge fund Jana Partners LLC, which is leading a group of investors trying to take control of online media company CNET Networks Inc’s (CNET.O: Quote, Profile, Research) board, said on Thursday that a court upheld its right to nominate seven directors. Shares of CNET, best known for its technology news Web site, rose as much as 6 percent on the news.
CNET said in January that the efforts of the activist investor group to nominate two directors to existing board seats and expand the board by five members were “improper” under its bylaws.
Jana took the matter to the Delaware Court of Chancery through an affiliate, challenging CNET’s interpretation of its bylaws.
“This is the first step towards putting aside the legal mechanisms CNET has relied on to fight our effort to create stockholder value,“ Jana Managing Partner Barry Rosenstein said in a statement.
A CNET spokeswoman was unavailable for comment.
Jana, which holds about 10 percent of CNET’s voting stock, has said that the San Francisco-based company has “significantly lagged peers in value creation and performance” and needs to be “revitalize(d).“
Jana is partnering with investment funds Sandell Asset Management Corp and Velocity Interactive Group, venture capital firm Spark Capital and technology entrepreneur Paul Gardi of Alex Interactive Media to shake up CNET’s board.
The group hopes its nominees—drawn from the tech, media and finance industries—will bring the expertise needed to turn CNET around and boost its stock price.
It said earlier that it would nominate Gardi and Spark Capital founder Santo Politi to replace the two CNET directors scheduled to stand for reelection at the company’s next annual meeting in June.
In addition, Jana proposed expanding CNET’s board from eight members to 13 and filling the resulting vacancies with its nominees.
Last week, the nominees met with CNET representatives in an attempt to reach a settlement prior to the ruling, a person familiar with the group’s affairs said.
The group has also been talking with CNET shareholders, as it tries to drum up support for its slate of nominees, the person said.
CNET shares were up 17 cents, or 2.4 percent, at $7.37 in afternoon Nasdaq trade after reaching as high as $7.65 earlier.
[By: Anupreeta Das]
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Next New Networks draws $15 million to build video empire
News.com, March 12, 2008
Next New Networks, a network of online video programming, has raised $15 million from Goldman Sachs and Velocity Interactive Group, according to its co-founder and CEO Herb Scannell. That funding adds to an early round of $8 million from Spark Capital and Saban Media Group when the company launched last January. Spark and Saban also contributed to the Series B round.
Roughly 14 months after its debut, the New York-based company plans to rapidly expand its niche video programming. The company currently runs 12 video channels, or “micro-networks,“ such as the political satire show Barely Political. But Scannell, a former TV executive, said it plans to eventually grow to 101 channels. With the money, Next New Networks also plans to hire an advertising sales team that can sell video ads against its content.
The company is also looking to boost its distribution partners. Next New Networks syndicates its content to sites such as MySpaceTV, among about 25 other partners. In the past 10 months, Scannell said, Next New Networks has served more than 100 million video views.
“It’s still a new marketplace. This is not like CBS where you put on Grey’s Anatomy against CSI to kill the other guy. It’s more of a collaborative effort with other players in the market,“ Scannel said in an interview.
[By: Stephanie Olsen]
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Moblogic, Next New Networks, Niche Online Video
Business Week, March 12, 2008
I’m really think that after Wallstrip, Lindsay Campbell has hit another sweet spot with her new online video show Moblogic. It’s a short daily video about current news and politics. (Although I still get caught up short when I see her on commercials on TV because though her demeanor is the same.)
I was getting set to write a short post about her when I got an email that Next New Networks has raised $15 million. That’s the network of short videos launched last spring. The company launched with a lot of energy and big names from old and new media behind it. (Herb Scannell, the former MTV Networks chairman, Fred Seibert, who helped create the notion of branding cable channels through his work launching MTV, and Emil Rensing and Tim Shey, pioneers in video blogging.)
It was still hard though, to gauge whether its quirky approach would appeal broadly or be able to work across more than one show. But it appears to be. Their 12 video shows pulled in 33 million video views in February.
The innovation just keeps moving along with niche videos, which you could argue would be one of the hardest places for it to happen. I think it’s just the example of where people are feeling there’s a lot of creativity for individuals. They’re willing to take chances.
[via Businessweek.com]
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IE8 Launches with Me.dium Integration
readwriteweb, March 06, 2008
IE8 was released today and features integration with Me.dium. Read the full article at ReadWriteWeb
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Take a Tumblr
Time Out Chicago, March 04, 2008
A new site gets your blog on a roll.
Maintaining an online identity is almost par for the course. You can meet someone at a bar and, knowing only a few details, easily discover a wealth of information about him or her through MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, del.icio.us and WordPress, among many others. Capitalizing on this trend and taking it one step further, Tumblr (tumblr.com), a new bloglike platform, seamlessly combines elements from all those sites into a new, simple – dare we say, more fun – form of Internet expression.
We’re talkin’ expression that you can’t get from a basic blog, which, according to New Yorker David Karp, Tumblr’s 21-year-old founder, is “too much like old-timey print.” He asserts that, as with traditional, editorialized publishing, maintaining a blog can be daunting. “Right around the time we launched [a few months ago], Technorati, a tech news site, published a stat: While the number of new blogs was doubling year after year, the number of actively maintained blogs had actually fallen,” he says. “That made our objective clear” – to create a platform to which users wanted to keep contributing. So far, it seems to be working: Tumblr accounts receive more than 120,000 new posts each day.
Karp saw the potential for Tumblr after noticing how cutting-edge programmers interacted online; they called it tumblelogging. “They were blogging without sitting down to editorialize on their day for 20 minutes. Instead, any neat photo they came across or took, every cool link they found, anything they created just sort of went up. I loved the idea of having a blog, but I wasn’t wordy enough. I wanted an identity online.”
Tumblr’s version of the Digital You looks like a Flickr stream, a condensed Blogger roll and a collection of del.icio.us links all in one. As Tumblr’s website puts it: “If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks.” In other words, a tumblelog can contain, really, anything you want – it’s a vertical cascade of words, pictures, quotes, audio clips and video snippets.
Of course, WordPress and Blogger also support a variety of content, but what sets Tumblr apart is the ease of uploading. The minimal dashboard contains buttons simply labeled TEXT and LINK, which immediately add content to your tumblelog. The site even takes care of technical things like sizing photos, formatting paragraphs and embedding videos. By streamlining the process – the site also supports uploading from your cell phone and via instant messenger – you’re hard-pressed not to find good content to share.
Like MySpace or Facebook, Tumblr provides a sense of community: You’re able to “follow” tumblelogs you find interesting, meaning their posts appear on your dashboard screen in the order they show up online. Karp likens this to looking through the eyes of others, as opposed to stalking them like on Facebook or Twitter. Like what you see? “Reblog” friends’ content on your own site with a single click. And unlike WordPress, Tumblr doesn’t categorize users as music bloggers or humor bloggers – people are just people. Plus, Tumblr’s interface – unlike that of its social-networking predecessors – is clean, controlled and, best of all, ad-free.
Come to think of it, Tumblr doesn’t seem to make any money at all. It gives away even advanced features: The grand site launch included support for custom HTML themes and the ability to use your own domain name – all things you have to shell out additional money for on other sites. Karp says his group – which consists of himself and three others – plans to roll out yet-to-be-identified “alternative ways to publish content” for paying power-users.Given the tools Tumblr provides and its smooth handling, the site may be the best one out there to create an online you – as the site says, “Everything you find, love, hate or create.” Karp says Tumblr’s users have been pleased with the results, and they’re showing it in ways you’d expect from a generation familiar with MySpace’s Tom. “People are trying to maintain a relationship with us – like at Apple, how people are terribly curious about Steve Jobs.” Maybe they should just read Karp’s Tumblr page.
Start tumbling at tumblr.com.
By: Steve Heisler
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Veoh aims to be one-stop shop for Net TV viewers
USA Today, February 27, 2008
LOS ANGELES – Dmitry Shapiro wanted to start a website that promised to be the CBS, NBC and ABC of the Internet, a one-stop shop for TV programming on the Web.
Shapiro wasn’t the first to come up with such a lofty concept. At the time of his brainstorm, 2005, many others had similar notions. Shapiro’s Veoh competes with YouTube, (GOOG) Fancast, (CMCSA) Joost, Blip.TV and at least 250 other video websites, according to researcher the Yankee Group.
But former Disney (DIS) CEO Michael Eisner thought Shapiro was onto something. So did two former top Viacom (VIAB) executives, Jonathan Dolgen and Tom Freston. They’ve all invested in Veoh, which has quietly become the top independent U.S. video site on the Internet, attracting 2.1 million visitors a month, according to Nielsen Online.
“Companies like AOL, (TWX) Yahoo (YHOO) and Google (GOOG) have all defined a space,“ says Eisner, who now runs the Tornante investment firm. Google-owned YouTube aside, he says, “I think Veoh has the potential to define the space. They want to marry the Internet to the TV set, and that’s the real deal.“
While YouTube specializes mostly in amateur video clips, Veoh showcases both homemade clips and full-length TV shows. CBS (CBS) has many of its prime-time shows on Veoh, as do NBC (GE) and Fox, (NWS) via their Hulu joint venture. There’s also programming from PBS. Next month, Viacom’s cable networks, which include MTV and Comedy Central, will join the stable.
“Our goal is to give consumers the broadest collection of video available anywhere,“ Shapiro says.
A key selling point for Veoh, Yankee Group analyst Anton Denissov says, is a download feature that lets you save shows to watch later. The Veoh TV application aggregates full-length shows from all over the Web and lets you save them if downloading is an option.
Shapiro says that once you connect your computer to a television, Veoh TV can act as a TiVo-like guide. For now, download availability tends mostly to be made-for-the-Web productions such as Goodnight Burbank and Prom Queen. So far, CBS, Viacom, NBC and Fox aren’t offering downloads of their TV shows, but PBS and the Time Warner-owned Cartoon Network are.
Yankee says the average consumer watches about five minutes of Internet video a day. That’s projected to jump to 45 minutes a day by 2011.
Dolgen, a former top executive at the 20th Century Fox, Paramount and Columbia (SNE) movie studios, says what attracted him to Veoh was the “one-stop shop” concept. “Back in the old days, you had to turn on three TV sets to see everything from CBS, ABC and NBC,“ he says.
Quincy Smith, who runs CBS’ new media division, says the size of the audiences on Veoh are getting close to what some shows are receiving on broadcast television. While he declined to cite specifics, he said the post-apocalyptic drama Jericho has a bigger online audience than it does on traditional TV.
Veoh says its most-viewed TV show is Fox’s Family Guy, which attracted 200,000 viewers, but that pales next to Prom Queen, a made-for-the-Internet production from Eisner’s Vuguru production company. The debut last summer attracted 1.2 million viewers, Veoh says.
Family Guy isn’t even hosted on Veoh. The website picks it up from Hulu, the NBC/Fox joint venture that puts their shows on many websites. Much of the content on Veoh is found elsewhere on the Web, but viewable on Veoh TV.
Veoh showcases videos in higher resolution than competing sites such as YouTube. The service uses peer-to-peer technology, the same concept that put the original Napster (NAPS) on the map – tapping into its users’ computers to broadcast higher-quality video. Still, it’s far from high-definition. Ads surround most shows.
Pitching Eisner
Shapiro, a Russian immigrant who moved to Atlanta at age 10 and worked in the cellular industry after graduating from Georgia Tech, got the idea for Veoh while on his honeymoon. At the time, he was running a software security company he’d founded in San Diego. His first successful sales call for Veoh was with Art Bilger, who runs Los Angeles-based Shelter Capital. He agreed to invest $2.25 million and helped open the door to other investors. All told, some $40 million was raised, and Bilger owns 25% of the company.
“Dmitry had a good vision, and a great ability to actually explain it to people with far less sophistication,“ Bilger says. “To be able to communicate was very important.“
Shapiro’s title is chief innovation officer, while the CEO mantle has been handed to an experienced manager, Steve Mitgang, a former Yahoo senior vice president.
Since joining in July 2007, “We’ve gone from having no monetization to having dozens of really happy advertisers,“ Mitgang says.
Veoh is currently unprofitable, but the big backers involved expect that to change in the near future.
Eisner is one of the biggest names in Hollywood. How did a guy from Russia with a penchant for loud T-shirts and jeans with odd pockets end up getting in the door to see him?
“He called me,“ Shapiro says. “It was the most amazing thing. He saw the site and liked it.“
Eisner invited him to visit at his Bel Air mansion, where Shapiro made his pitch. Eisner was impressed. “They were taking this technology created for illegal uses of expanding copyright, and turned into a legal business, which I thought was brilliant,“ Eisner says. “I figured they’re either going all the way, or will be over in 10 minutes. And ‘all the way’ seems to be where they’re headed.“
By: Jefferson Graham
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Mandalay acquires Twistbox
Variety, February 23, 2008
Media company completes purchase of gamer
Peter Guber‘s new-media venture Mandalay Media has completed its acquisition of Twistbox Entertainment, a provider of games and other content to mobile devices.
Financial terms of the deal, first announced in January, were not disclosed.
Sherman Oaks, Calif.-based Twistbox will be the foundation of Mandalay Media’s mobile and interactive offerings, the company said.
Twistbox has deals with more than 100 operators in over 40 countries for which it provides games, WAP sites and mobile TV channels.
The current senior management team will remain in place, with Ian Aaron serving as Twistbox’s CEO.
“Twistbox is our first acquisition and an important step towards establishing Mandalay Media as a global digital media company,“ said Bruce Stein, Mandalay Media’s chief operating officer. “We are aggressively pursuing other new-media opportunities at the intersection of digital media, casual gaming and content commercialization that can leverage Twistbox’s global distribution footprint, content publishing platforms and mobile games development capabilities.“
Twistbox is venture backed by Spark Capital and ValueAct Capital and has raised at least $32 million in venture funding.
[By: Marc Graser]
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Santo Politi Named to Forbes Midas List
Forbes, January 25, 2008
Forbes released their annual Midas List today of the world’s top tech dealmakers.
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Inform Technologies Receives $15 Million Investment from Spark Capital
Press Release, January 23, 2008
Inform Technologies, a technology solution for established media brands, has received a $15 million investment from Spark Capital, a Boston-based venture fund focused on the intersection of the media, entertainment and technology industries. Inform will use the funds to help implement its strategy for accelerated growth.
Founded in 2004, Inform currently works with nearly 100 major media brands to help them ensure that their sites are content destinations and offers editorial-quality features that keep readers engaged on their sites longer – and that increase page views and revenue potential.
Inform’s key offering is a technology solution that acts as an extra editor. It starts with a page of text, and then, with editorial precision, it automatically creates and organizes links to relevant content from the media property’s site, its archives, from affiliate sites and/or anywhere else on the Web. As a result, each page on a site becomes a richer multimedia experience.
Said James Satloff, CEO of Inform, “Media companies face significant challenges online. They need to attract new unique visitors, create an experience that compels those readers to spend more time consuming more pages, and then turn those page views and time on site into revenue. We believe that the Inform solution enables them to do exactly that.”
Longstanding Inform clients include Conde Nast, Crain Communications, IDG, The New York Sun and Washington.Post.Newsweek Interactive. In recent months, 30 additional media properties have engaged Inform – many already running Inform’s technology on their sites.
Inform uses artificial intelligence and proprietary rules and algorithms to scan millions of pages of text and read the way a journalist does – identifying key “entities,” such as people, places, companies and products, and recognizing how they connect, even in subtle and context-specific ways. The software continually teaches itself – in real time – how information is related and automatically updates links and topics as the context changes.
Said Santo Politi, Founder and Partner at Spark Capital, “Established media brands need cost-effective ways to compete with each other and, importantly, with other online presences, such as search. They need depth and richness in their content so they’re true destinations and so readers spend more time on the sites and click through more pages. Inform provides a truly elegant – and so far very successful – solution for that. While allowing the publication to remain in full control of its content and editorial integrity, Inform automatically enriches a site by enabling it to leverage its own content, its archives, archives of affiliates and the web overall. In effect, it enables a publication to expand its editorial capabilities without expanding its staff. We believe the potential for Inform’s growth is substantial.”
Said Joseph Einhorn, Co-Founder and CTO of Inform, “We’re delighted that our new investor understands how effectively we partner with media companies and how our technology serves their business and editorial objectives. We will use the capital to expand our operations and implement our approach to accelerating our growth.”
[via Business Wire]
CES: Bug Labs wins fans with its Legos approach to hardware
San Francisco Gate, January 11, 2008
Bug Labs won the CNET Best of CES 2008 award for emerging technologies by appealing to the Lego-loving geek in all of us. But it’s not just about building blocks, it’s about creating new hardware configurations using your imagination to guide you.
Think about that for a second. We have web developers who have created all manner of new web services. They just write code and create something where nothing was there before.
But to do that in hardware is not nearly as easy. To make your own gadget takes a lot of work, knowhow and access to hardware components. That stifles creativity because the barriers to entry are so high.
So we come back to Bug Labs, a company based in both San Francisco and New York. They’ve come up with a platform, a small mini-computer complete with Wi-Fi and onboard memory, that can take on up to four snap-on modules. By writing software in JAVA, a creative mind can come up with any number of combinations that large electronics companies may have never thought of.
“If you have an idea, you can take these parts, write code and you have a gadget you designed,“ said Jeremy Toeman, head of marketing for Bug Labs. “Every other company designs something they think you want and get you to try and buy it.“
By putting on a LCD screen on one side and a camera on the other, you get a basic camera. But then, if you add a motion sensor to it, you could create a gadget that detects motion, takes a picture of the moving object and then sends an SMS text message to a user to alert them. Voila, you have a nice security camera. In fact, one of the Bug Labs programmers was building just such a device when I stopped by their booth.
There are four modules available now. You have a camera/video cam, touch LCD screen, motion sensor/accelerometer and GPS. In the future, Bug Labs hopes to add bunch of other parts, including a cellular data card or perhaps a keyboard.
Now admittedly, this may not be for everyone. You still need to know how to write in JAVA. But Toeman said this could encourage people to get into developing when they realize what they can do with this. And since this is open source, new users can come along and see what others have done and try to build upon that.
Bug Labs will start taking order Jan 21 and plans to fulfill the orders by March. The Bugbase will cost $349 with the modules ranging from $59 to $119. But for the first two months, customers can buy the base for $299 and the modules for $49 to $99.
[By: Ryan Kim]
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Bug Labs: Build your own dream gadget
CNET, January 09, 2008
It’s the rare product that excites CNET editors across all categories. The Bug Labs platform, which has been the subject of several conversations around the CNET booth, is one such rarity.
Described as “the Lego of gadgets” by Webware‘s Rafe Needleman, the Bug Labs platform starts with a minicomputer, the Bug Base, onto which you can snap multiple modules, such as a digital camera or an LCD screen. You can then program your own software to run your custom gadget or download software others have written from the Bug Labs site. Need a GPS-enabled digital camera that will automatically upload your images to Flickr? With the Bug Labs platform, you can build one.
Aside from being eager to tinker with the product, we’re thrilled to see such an innovative approach to consumer electronics. The Bug Platform is totally open source, highly configurable, and designed to go wherever consumers’ imaginations take them. Plus, the company has a unique “early adopter” pricing scheme, in which the price is lower during the first 60 days; this is a great way to encourage people to start developing software to share.
For more information, check out Tom Merritt’s video from the CNET Stage.
[via CNET]
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JANA Partners Proposes New Board Members for CNET Networks
Press Release, January 07, 2008
JANA Partners LLC (“JANA”) announced today that an affiliate has notified CNET Networks, Inc. (Nasdaq: CNET) that it will nominate seven people for election to CNET’s Board of Directors at the next annual shareholders meeting. JANA has collaborated with Paul Gardi of Alex Interactive Media and with venture capital firm Spark Capital to select a slate of directors it believes has the industry expertise and proven talent needed to revitalize CNET, which JANA believes has significantly lagged peers in value creation and performance. JANA and its partners currently beneficially own approximately 8% of CNET’s voting stock and JANA has an additional approximately 8% non-voting economic interest in CNET. Sandell Asset Management Corp., which has agreed to support JANA’s effort, has a separate approximately 5% non-voting economic interest.
JANA Managing Partner Barry Rosenstein said, “This effort is about taking an underperforming company and increasing shareholder value by building on its top-notch editorial talent and premier internet assets. Together with Paul Gardi and Spark Capital, we have assembled a group of nominees we believe has the technical skills and business experience to reverse CNET’s ongoing underperformance and start delivering value for shareholders.”
Tom Sandell, CEO of Sandell Asset Management said, “We are pleased to support JANA in this effort to improve the performance and ultimately the valuation of CNET to the benefit of all shareholders. The depth and experience of the team that JANA has assembled is impressive and well matched for the challenge of turning around the poor performance at CNET.”
Despite owning leading web properties including technology, food and gaming review franchises, CNET has failed in recent years to create shareholder value. In 2007, CNET shares rose less than 1% versus gains of approximately 15% for CNET’s stated benchmark, the Interactive Week Internet Index, and 10% for the Nasdaq Index. For the three years through 2007, CNET shares fell approximately 19% versus gains of approximately 32% for the Interactive Week Internet Index and 22% for the Nasdaq Index.
JANA’s board nominees intend to create a stronger, more profitable company through:
- Maximizing Core Strengths: Despite the unparalleled quality of its editorial content and staff, JANA believes CNET has not been able to leverage these assets to increase shareholder value. JANA’s nominees if elected will use their combined experience in seeking to substantially grow CNET’s core business.
- Driving Traffic and Increasing Revenues: JANA’s nominees if elected will seek to broaden the reach of CNET’s properties by implementing intent-driven media strategies that better connect consumers with relevant content, which in turn will enhance revenue realization through optimized ad serving.
- Focusing on ROI and Key Metrics: JANA’s nominees if elected will bring a disciplined, return on investment-oriented approach to CNET’s Board of Directors, which JANA believes has pursued growth through expensive non-strategic acquisitions and investments but has not delivered significant organic growth in CNET’s core business.
The following two individuals will be nominated to replace the two directors who will stand for re-election at the 2008 annual meeting of shareholders:
- Paul Gardi – Managing Member, Alex Interactive Media. Former CEO of IAC Advertising Solutions; former EVP, GM for Ask Jeeves, Inc., where he led Operations and Strategic Planning; former President and COO of Teoma Technologies, Inc. He has been instrumental in evaluating CNET’s operations and developing recommendations for improving performance and creating value should JANA’s nominees be elected.
- Santo Politi – Founder and General Partner of Spark Capital. Former Partner at Charles River Ventures; former President of New Media for Blockbuster Entertainment Inc.; co-founder of BT Venture Partners; various engineering and management positions with Matsushita Electric Industrial, Panasonic Broadcast and Television Systems Company, and Weston Instruments, a subsidiary of Schlumberger Industries.
In addition, JANA will propose to stockholders that they expand the current CNET board from eight to 13 directors and fill the resulting vacancies with the following five JANA nominees:
- Jon Miller – Founding partner, Velocity Interactive Group. Former Chairman and CEO of AOL; former CEO and President of USA Information and Services (which became IAC/InterActiveCorp and Expedia); former Managing Director of Viacom’s Nickelodeon International.
- Jaynie Studenmund – Former COO of Overture Services Inc./Yahoo! and former President and COO of Paymybills.com. Current board member of Orbitz World Wide, eHarmony, Western Asset and CountryWide Bank. Former board member of aQuantive, Inc.
- Julius Genachowski – Managing Director of Rock Creek Ventures and co-founder of LaunchBox Digital. Former Chief of Business Operations and other senior executive positions at IAC/InterActiveCorp. Current board member of Website Pros, The Motley Fool and Marc Ecko Enterprises. Former board member of Expedia, Hotels.com and Ticketmaster.
- Brian Weinstein – Senior executive, Business Development Group at Creative Artists Agency focusing on strategic acquisitions and digital strategy. Mr. Weinstein has helped oversee the incubation of multiple venture-financed Internet companies. Mr. Weinstein helps lead Creative Artists Agency’s new media advisory practice assisting corporate clients on traditional media and content strategies. Founder and Chairman, The Opportunity Network.
- Giorgio Caputo – Managing Director, JANA Partners, focusing on small cap and technology investments. Former Mergers & Acquisitions Associate with Credit Suisse First Boston and Equity Derivatives Quantitative Analyst for Lehman Brothers.
Separately, an affiliate of JANA today filed a complaint for declaratory and injunctive relief in the Delaware Court of Chancery. The complaint requests, among other things, that the court enjoin CNET from rejecting JANA’s director nominations and proposals on the basis of certain provisions of CNET’s bylaws which, according to CNET, require stockholders to have held CNET stock for one year in order to propose business or nominate directors. JANA and its Delaware counsel believe such provisions, if interpreted in this manner, would be impermissibly discriminatory and invalid under Delaware law.
Background
JANA Partners LLC is a multi-billion dollar investment management firm founded in 2001 by Barry Rosenstein.
Alex Interactive Media, LLC (“AIM”) is a private company focused on leveraging its domain expertise in digital media and related industries. AIM Managing Member Paul Gardi has committed to personally investing $1 million in CNET equity.
Spark Capital is a venture capital fund focused on building businesses that transform the distribution, management and monetization of media and content, with experience in identifying and actively building market-leading companies in sectors including infrastructure (Qtera, RiverDelta, Aether Systems, Broadbus and BigBand), networks (College Sports Television, TVONE and XCOM) and services (Akamai and the Platform). Spark Capital has over $600 million under management, and is based in Boston, Massachusetts. Spark has committed to investing $20 million in CNET equity.
Velocity Interactive Group, LLC is an investment firm that focuses on digital media and communications. Velocity Interactive Group has offices in Palo Alto, Los Angeles and New York. Velocity has an option to invest $10 million in CNET equity.
Sandell Asset Management Corp. Sandell Asset Management Corp. is a multi-billion dollar global investment management firm, founded by Thomas E. Sandell, that focuses on global corporate events and restructurings throughout North America, Continental Europe, the United Kingdom, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific theatres. Sandell frequently will take an “active involvement” in facilitating financial or organization improvements accruing to the benefit of investors.
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5min Raises $5 Million in Series A from Spark Capital
American Venture Magazine, January 04, 2008
5min, the “how-to” video website, today announced it has received $5 million in Series A financing from Spark Capital. 5min is the leading online instructional video site on the Internet, allowing people to share their expertise in various categories as well as find short video solutions for every practical question.
“5min has taken the clear lead in the instructional video market. The company’s combination of traffic, content and technology is impressive for a company of its age,“ said Alex Finkelstein, principal at Spark Capital. “We believe how-to video content will garner the highest online video CPMs, because someone watching a how-to is a super-defined niche demographic and someone viewing a how-to is typically in a purchasing mindset.“
The 5min video structure, led by its Smart Player, was created specifically for instructional content, enabling users to play videos in slow motion or frame by frame, and to add a storyboard to leverage any visual illustration of any solution. The inline player supports zoom in and zoom out options for an up-close and detailed viewing experience, as well as subtitles in different languages.
5min has 10,000s of videos, 1000s of experts and a growing passionate DIY community. The company aggregates videos from sources ranging from user generated content to professionally produced videos. Currently based in Tel-Aviv, Israel, 5Min will relocate its headquarters to New York, NY in January 2008.
“We’re excited to work with Spark and further enhance 5Min’s leading position in the online instructional video space,“ said Ran Harnevo, CEO of 5Min. “Spark has the expertise, domain knowledge and connections that will help make 5min the how-to reference destination for consumers worldwide.“
[via American Venture Magazine]
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Two New Media Studios Break 100M Views
New Tee Vee, January 03, 2008
Upstart new media studios Next New Networks and Revision3 each surpassed 100 million video plays in 2007.
On its blog, Next New Networks provided a timeline and rough breakdown of how its individual shows performed. Next New Network’s Channel Frederator had a big year, fueled in part by The Meth Minute’s breakout hit Internet People, which has pulled in 2.5 million views on YouTube alone since September. EPIC-FU (previously JETSET), Indy Mogul and Fast Lane Daily also attracted millions.
Revision3 (which produces the GigaOM Show), meanwhile, said it delivered more than 25 million shows and more than 103 million clips, according to a press release.
Keeping in mind that The Biggest Loser recently drew more than 10 million people to oldteevee on a single night, it’s not time to put a bullet in the back of your box quite yet, but these new media numbers are encouraging. Maybe the strong start from both studios can attract some writing talent currently on strike and develop shows that consists of more than just a camera, a green screen and a rundown of tech/pop culture news.
[By Chris Albrecht]
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Mobile Games Co. Twistbox Merges With Shell Co.
Press Release, January 03, 2008
Mobile games publisher Twistbox Entertainment Inc. has agreed to merge with publicly traded shell company Mandalay Media Inc.
In a statement, Mandalay said venture-funded Twistbox will become a wholly owned subsidiary of the company, with its chief executive, Ian Aaron, joining Mandalay’s board and continuing to run Twistbox.
Sherman Oaks, Calif.-based Twistbox, formerly known as Waat Media, started out as a distributor of adult movies and games to mobile devices. The company has since changed its focus to mainstream games, WAP sites and mobile TV channels.
According to VentureWire records, Twistbox raised a $12.75 million first round from Spark Capital in 2006, and a subsequent $19.5 million round from ValueAct Capital Partners announced in September 2007.
Dennis Miller, a general partner at Spark Capital who serves on the board at Twistbox, could not immediately be reached Wednesday. Ian Aaron, Twistbox chief executive, and Mandalay’s president, Jim Lefkowitz, also could not be reached for comment.
The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of this year. The value of the deal couldn’t be learned as of press time.
Los Angeles-based Mandalay has a market capitalization of $101 million, based on 21.7 million shares valued at $4.65 a share as of Wednesday’s close.
The company has been inactive since 2005, a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission said.
Originally incorporated in Delaware in 1998 under the name of eB2B Commerce Inc., it later merged with New Jersey-based DynamicWeb Enterprises Inc. The merged company, which was called eB2B Commerce, provided business-to-business transaction management services. It changed its name in 2005 to MediaVest. In 2007, it changed its name to Mandalay Media.
Twistbox has distribution agreements with more than 100 mobile operators in 40 countries, the news release said.
According to VentureWire records, Twistbox last January acquired a mobile games studio from InfoSpace Inc. in another deal with undisclosed terms.
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Building Your Own High-Tech “Bug”
New York Times, January 02, 2008
Are you ready to build your own high-tech gadget? Early next year, Bug Labs, a startup based in New York City, will begin selling the Bug, a powerful but highly malleable base unit and a series of add-on modules that allow buyers to create their own consumer electronics device.
Think of them as Legos for adults who are tired of having limited gadget choices and want to make their own hardware as easily as they now mash up Web sites and write their own software.
“The idea for the company sprang out of my own frustrations with the consumer electronics business,” said Bug Labs founder and chief executive Peter Semmelhack, who describes himself as an inveterate tinkerer who yearns to pull back the screens and experiment with the innards of today’s gadgets.
The company will announce pricing and availability of its product at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next month.
The device builder begins with the BUGbase unit, a highly modular computer with room for four attachments. Four such attachments will hit the market at first: a full color LCD touch screen, a GPS unit, a digital camera and a motion detector/ accelerometer.
The company says that over 80 BUGmodules are in development and every three months it will release four new ones, like a credit card reader, hard drive, compass, RFID scanner, TV tuner and solar panel. The company will also publish the devices’ open source specs and allow anyone else to build and sell their own module.
Bug customers are expected to do the rest. For example, Mr. Semmelhack said, someone could combine a radar detector, GPS and wireless modem modules together and put the device in their car. Every time it detects a police radar trap, the unit could post that information to an online map and share it with the world.
Users could also turn their Bugs into open-source digital video recorders, game controllers, biometric security scanners or any thousands of devices that the big electronics companies haven’t thought of or won’t address because the market for such a gadget is perceived as being too small.
Mr. Semmelhack expects the first generation of users to be hard core hackers who post their designs online. Ensuing users will then have a universe of plans to mimic, or can forge their own.
The point, he said, is to harness the do-it-yourself mentality of today’s engineers who can no longer get their hands dirty with today’s high-tech products or complex automobile engines. “I firmly believe inside every software engineer is a frustrated hardware engineer,” Mr. Semmelhack said. “When you put the power in the hands of individuals and hackers, innovations happen. We want to put decision making on features into the hands of the end user.”
Though Mr. Semmelhack will be courting the industry at CES, the company is clearly taking a slightly subversive approach, since traditional CE companies eschew such tinkering and are quick to void warranties as soon as a user peels open the device or uses it for an unintended purpose.
“Bugs in the technology world are not considered good,” he said. “We are a bug. We want to be a disruptor and we want to be seen as trying to change things.”
[By: Brad Stone]
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Veoh Audience Booms to More Than 21.5 Million Unique Monthly Viewers
Press Release, December 21, 2007
Veoh Viewers Consume 30 Million Hours of Content Per Month; Seek Out Zombies, Celebs, Prom Queens and High Doses of Meth
Veoh Networks (www.veoh.com), the leading innovator in Internet Television, today announced 2007 results that indicate increasing viewer demand for a broad variety of episodic, longer form, and on-demand online video entertainment. Since its official launch in February, Veoh has seen exponential growth and significant viewer engagement:
- During the course of 2007, Veoh’s audience grew to 21.5 million unique monthly viewers from 2.5 million. This represents an average increase of 20% per month and a total year-over-year increase of 760%.
- Veoh viewers demonstrated high levels of engagement in 2007, consuming a total of more than 30 million hours of content in November. The average viewer now consumes more than 80 minutes per month, a rate that continued to grow throughout the year even when Veoh introduced advertising in Q4.
- Downloads of the VeohTV beta application, which enables high quali