Business Wire, February 05, 2010
During his opening address at the AdMeld Partner Forum 2010, Michael Barrett, AdMeld’s CEO, discussed rapid emergence of Real Time Bidding (RTB) as a platform for buying and selling ad inventory. Barrett cited factors such as enhanced pricing, efficiency, transparency and control of data as reasons for the technology’s growth and said it had the potential to bring billions of additional dollars to the display ad market.
Barrett also introduced the forum’s keynote speaker, Emily Riley, Research Director & Principal Analyst at Forrester, who outlined key findings of a study conducted by Forrester Consulting and commissioned by AdMeld titled “Media Buying Goes Real Time.” The study, which is available for download on AdMeld’s website at http://www.admeld.com/resources, discusses the inefficiencies of current methods of media buying and how improving them can open up new opportunities for companies on both sides of the transaction.
Business Wire, February 04, 2010
NBC Universal Interactive and KickApps, the industry’s first complete Social Software solution today announced a broad licensing agreement including the latest version of the award winning App Studio and recently released Premium Social Video platform.
Expanding on an existing relationship with NBC Local Media, the new agreement includes full access to the KickApps platform for a variety of NBC Universal sites, including a unique socially driven fan site launching from Telemundo in the coming months. Using the KickApps platform will allow NBC Universal to launch increasingly socially integrated site and video features, driving deeper user engagement and interest in their world-class content.
Business Wire, February 04, 2010
NBC Universal Interactive and KickApps, the industry’s first complete Social Software solution today announced a broad licensing agreement including the latest version of the award winning App Studio and recently released Premium Social Video platform.
Expanding on an existing relationship with NBC Local Media, the new agreement includes full access to the KickApps platform for a variety of NBC Universal sites, including a unique socially driven fan site launching from Telemundo in the coming months. Using the KickApps platform will allow NBC Universal to launch increasingly socially integrated site and video features, driving deeper user engagement and interest in their world-class content.
”We’re really excited about the KickApps App Studio- it’s by far the most advanced solution we’ve seen for publishing and managing social media, and it’s going to make a huge difference in our ability to quickly build and launch socially powered sites for our brands,” said Marc Siry, SVP of Digital Products and Services for NBC Universal. “Additionally, their support for the Open Source Media Framework was a key differentiator in our decision to work with KickApps for our premium social video needs- we truly believe it will help us innovate quickly for our brand and advertising partners.”
TechCrunch, February 04, 2010
We recently wrote about the traction that how-to video site and producer Howcast is seeing online. But there’s another information and how-to video startup that is dominating the space: 5min. The company is a syndication platform for instructional, knowledge and lifestyle videos, both professionally produced and user-generated. The service’s video library boasts 150,000 of videos across a variety of categories (e.g. food, health, home and garden ), submitted by media companies and independent producers from around the world.
December’s comScore data shows that 5min saw 30.5 million unique viewers, ranking just below Turner Networks (30.6 million unique viewers) and just above AOL (30 million unique viewers). Google saw 136 million unique viewers and Hulu saw 44.2 million unique viewers. 5min ranks as number 14 out of 100 properties in ComScore’s video metrix, according to unique viewers. In terms of videos streamed, 5min saw 75.4 million streams which pales in comparison to Hulu’s 1 billion video streams and Google’s 13.2 billion video streams for the month of December. If 5min was ranked by streams, it would most likely rank lower on the list, as AOL and other video properties had more streams than the startup (AOL saw 210 million streams).
MSN Money, February 01, 2010
Adap.tv, creators of OneSource, the open and universal platform that provides publishers, advertisers and ad networks with a one-stop, end-to-end video ad management platform, today announced the appointment of Toby Gabriner as President.
In this role, Gabriner will be responsible for managing the business development, sales, account management and marketing groups. Most recently, he was President of Tribal Fusion, the digital marketing solutions company owned by Exponential Interactive, Inc.
“Toby’s relationships, leadership and depth of experience in the rapidly evolving online advertising space will be an incredible asset for Adap.tv as we continue to innovate and make video advertising more profitable and less complicated for all parties in the eco-system,“ said Amir Ashkenazi, co-founder and CEO of Adap.tv. “In his new role, Toby will be a key figure in guiding Adap.tv’s market positioning for our core offerings and expansion into new markets.“
Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2010
A new partnership between video-syndication platform company 5minutes Ltd. and health magazine Prevention is betting that consumers will increasingly integrate health and lifestyle content into their daily Web use.
Prevention, which is published by Rodale Inc., is allowing venture-backed 5minutes, known as 5min, to distribute its collection of 700 health videos on topics including fitness, healthy living and lifestyle. 5min will syndicate that content across the Web using technology that enables publishers to automatically match videos with article topics.
The new relationship is aimed at increasing viewership and brand awareness for Prevention, while adding to the 12,000 video health library 5min can tap into to lure publishers and advertisers.
Business Wire, January 14, 2010
AdMeld, the leader in ad network optimization for premium publishers, has announced it will host an invite-only conference on Real Time Bidding (RTB) on February 4, 2010 at the Time Warner Center in New York City. The AdMeld Partner Forum will gather thought leaders and decision makers from across the online advertising space to discuss RTB’s implications for premium publishers and the industry as a whole. Emily Riley of Forrester will deliver the keynote and unveil the findings of a Forrester Consulting study on RTB commissioned by AdMeld. Each attendee will receive a copy of the study.
Other speakers and moderators include Randall Rothenberg, President & CEO of the IAB; Daphne Liska, Senior Advertising Manager, eBay; Darren Herman, Founder & President, Varick Media Management; Jeremy Steinberg, VP Digital Sales and Business Development, FOX News, and John Ebbert, Publisher & Managing Editor of AdExchanger.com. Additional speakers and details will be released in the coming weeks at: http://www.admeld.com/partnerforum.
CNN, January 11, 2010
The Boxee Box, a cubelike device that shares Internet content with your TV, won the annual “Last Gadget Standing” competition Saturday at the International Consumer Electronics Show.
The box narrowly beat out Plastic Logic’s Que e-reader and the Intel Reader, a device that scans printed text and reads it aloud, in the annual product-demonstration contest, which is decided by audience applause.
The Boxee Box plugs into your TV and allows you to search and store Web content, play it on your television and and share it with your friends on social networks via a keyboard in the device’s remote control. The device is scheduled to go on sale this spring and cost about $200.
“It’s truly a game-changer,“ said Boxee marketing vice president Andrew Kippen, who presented the device. “We’re really bringing the creativity of the Web onto your TV screen.“
CNET News, January 08, 2010
Boxee.tv has upgraded its much-discussed software to public beta, and it can be downloaded now for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The Boxee software, which requires a physical cable connection from your computer to your television, allows users to access local and streaming media using their TV and its remote control.
Boxee uses a combination of apps, RSS feeds, and an in-program browser to make most—but not all—streaming media available to its users. In addition, the program supports content that you’ve stored on your hard drive, including photos, music, and videos. Boxee works with most major file formats, including OGG and MKV. There’s a socializing aspect, so that you can comment on and share what you’re watching with your friends, and it hooks into your Facebook and Twitter feeds, too.
The New York Times, January 04, 2010
I can remember when I first thought seriously about Twitter. Last March, I was at the SXSW conference, a conclave in Austin, Tex., where technology, media and music are mashed up and re-imagined, and, not so coincidentally, where Twitter first rolled out in 2007. As someone who was oversubscribed on Facebook, overwhelmed by the computer-generated RSS feeds of news that came flying at me, and swamped by incoming e-mail messages, the last thing I wanted was one more Web-borne intrusion into my life.
In the pantheon of digital nomenclature — brands within a sector of the economy that grew so fast that all the sensible names were quickly taken — it would be hard to come up with a noun more trite than Twitter. It impugns itself, promising something slight and inconsequential, yet another way to make hours disappear and have nothing to show for it. And just in case the noun is not sufficiently indicting, the verb, “to tweet” is even more embarrassing.
TIMES Online, January 04, 2010
ON June 15, our technicians told me to add a note to our website, writes Biz Stone, a co-founder of Twitter.
The note warned users of a planned maintenance session that meant our service would be inaccessible while we carried out an overdue system upgrade.
Immediately, we began to see a reaction in the form of tweets. Then came the emails. Then came the phone calls. Even the US State Department contacted us. The message was loud and clear: Twitter cannot rest while there is unrest in Iran.
Telecom Tiger, December 24, 2009
Aricent bagged a contract to develop Optical Packet Switch and Transport network platform capable of supporting NGN for Ireland’s Intune Networks.
Aricent says that while IP and Ethernet are changing the overall nature of communications with the convergence of Ethernet and the Transport Network, a significant bottleneck is posed by the stacked network switching equipment and the associated static optical transport interconnects which continue to exist.
According to Aricent its solution helps Intune to address this issue by virtualizing physical networks through a distributed Layer 2 switch, the advantage being that the resultant network design is a highly simplified network with predictability and quality of performance guaranteed. Aircent claims that the solution also delivers up to 75% reduction in power consumption compared to existing designs.
Business Wire, December 24, 2009
AdMeld, the leader in ad network optimisation for premium publishers, today announced the introduction of Real Time Bidding (RTB) capabilities in the United Kingdom. The move allows publishers across Europe to harness the enhanced levels of efficiency, transparency and control that RTB provides. Since launching support for the technology in the US earlier this year, AdMeld has processed more than 6 billion real time bids from a variety of trusted demand partners. The company’s initial RTB partners in the UK are AdJug, AppNexus, Infectious Digital, Invite Media and MediaMath.
“Real Time Bidding is the latest in a series of innovations that are changing the way digital ad inventory is transacted,“ said Michael Barrett, CEO of AdMeld. “We are pleased to lead its introduction into the UK and surrounding region by offering premium publishers the tools they need to generate the most overall revenue while accommodating their unique needs and enforcing their business rules. RTB is one in a suite of technologies AdMeld uses to help publishers worldwide maximise the true value of every ad impression.“
Yahoo!, December 23, 2009
Real-time Web search provider OneRiot on Tuesday announced a new service that will offer developers of Twitter apps, IM clients, and iPhone apps a way to monetize their efforts.
The service, dubbed RiotWise Trending Ads, works by displaying video ad links relating to Twitter’s trending topics. Last September, OneRiot introduced the RiotWise real-time ad network, of which this new service becomes a part.
According to the company, “RiotWise is grounded on the premise that users of real-time Web apps are trying to find out what’s going on right now. Our ads directly match that intent. RiotWise Trending Ads offers another exciting option for developers to monetize their social Web applications.“
TechCrunch, December 23, 2009
We recently wrote about OneRiot’s foray into the advertising world, RiotWise, which places content in an emphasized position in their realtime feed. Because people are becoming more and more interested in realtime search and getting access to information that is going on right now, OneRiot believes in the strong potential of serving relevant ads beside results. Today, the realtime search engine is launching RiotWise Trending Ads, a stream of ads that correspond to trending topics as they emerge across the social web.
RiotWise will match trending topics with display ads that are highly relevant to the same topics within an application such as a Twitter client or iPhone app. OneRiot says the “realtime relevance” results in a higher click through rate on the ads. The system is enabled by OneRiot’s realtime search technology and PulseRank relevancy algorithm.
OneRiot says the Trending Ads offering is a perfect fit for monetizing social web applications such as Twitter apps, IM clients and iPhone apps. The third-party Twitter client option makes particular sense considering how many of these clients ads on its application.
Media Post, December 22, 2009
How-to video network 5min has added a batch of new content partners further expanding its inventory. The Style Network, cable network G4, the Wiley’s “For Dummies” series, and Meredith Corporation will contribute hundreds of videos to start to 5min’s library of more than 100,000 instructional clips.
Here’s what the deals entail more specifically:
The Style Network will offer practical makeover tips and ideas for women from the network’s popular series such as “Clean House,“ “How Do I Look” and “Whose Wedding Is It Anyway.“
Gaming and entertainment-focused network G4 will supply videos covering game reviews and previews, Web culture and live events, among other subjects.
5min will create a branded channel that showcases 120 “For Dummies” videos, as well as distributing programs throughout its network. The videos cover topics ranging from how to hook up a modem to carving a turkey to knitting a scarf.
Media Post, December 22, 2009
How-to video network 5min has added a batch of new content partners further expanding its inventory. The Style Network, cable network G4, the Wiley’s “For Dummies” series, and Meredith Corporation will contribute hundreds of videos to start to 5min’s library of more than 100,000 instructional clips.
Here’s what the deals entail more specifically:
The Style Network will offer practical makeover tips and ideas for women from the network’s popular series such as “Clean House,“ “How Do I Look” and “Whose Wedding Is It Anyway.“
Gaming and entertainment-focused network G4 will supply videos covering game reviews and previews, Web culture and live events, among other subjects.
PRNewswire, December 21, 2009
5min, a media company that operates the largest video syndication platform, was named the number one video startup of 2009 in the NY Video 2009 Top Startup Competition. Originally competing against a pool of more than 100 online video startups, 5min was joined in the final round by second-place finalist KickApps and third-place finalist Kaltura along with Zixi, Popscreen, and Adotube.
The top six finalists were selected by online vote and presented a live demo at the Columbia Business School on Dec. 17. It was then up to the decision of 300 NYVideo.org members in attendance - including industry executives and entrepreneurs within the online video community - who ultimately chose 5min as the overall winner via live SMS vote.
“New York is the online video technology and startup capital of the world,“ said Ran Harnevo, CEO of 5min. “Knowing this, 5min took great strides this year establishing itself as the largest media company for professionally produced lifestyle, instructional and knowledge video content. With our video syndication strategy, the VideoSeed platform technology and high profile partnerships, we shattered all of our 2009 goals. We are honored to be chosen by our online video community peers as the top video startup for 2009.“
The Boston Globe, December 20, 2009
Along with losing 20 pounds, learning to parlare Italiano or sprechen Deutsch is apparently high on the list of New Year’s resolutions for many people.
“Learning a language is kind of like getting a gym membership or a NordicTrack,’’ says Christopher O’Donnell, director of product management for Transparent Language Inc. “Jan. 1 is our biggest sales day of the year. But let’s just say there’s more impetus to start learning a language than to continue doing it.’’
Transparent, based in Nashua, is part of a cluster of companies around New England that aim to reinvigorate how we learn foreign languages, using iPhone applications, Twitter “word-of-the-day’’ messages, Facebook groups, virtual worlds, videos, Web-based games, and speech recognition technology. They’re taking on established giants in language instruction such as Berlitz International Inc. (founded in 1878 in Providence) and Virginia-based Rosetta Stone Inc., which went public earlier this year.
Also part of the language learning cluster are two companies, Woburn-based 8D World Inc. and EnglishCentral Inc. of Lexington, which have raised venture capital for sites that teach English to nonnative speakers in Asia.
As with many businesses mov ing from the physical world to the virtual, there’s a cloud of confusion hovering over price: How much should it cost to become fluent in French? Berlitz charges $499 a year for its eBerlitz Fusion program, introduced last April, which includes online exercises and live group review sessions run by an instructor over the Web. Rosetta Stone, best known for its CD sets sold at mall kiosks and in airports, introduced TOTALe in July. It combines independent exercises, review sessions, and an online community of fellow learners: Unlimited access is $999 per year.
Business Wire, December 16, 2009
KickApps, the industry’s first complete Social Software solution, received the “Best Social Media Platform” Award at the 2009 DPAC Awards (www.dpacawards.com) on December 8, 2009, in New York City. The DPAC Awards honors overall excellence and breakthrough achievement in Digital Publishing and Advertising. The DPAC Awards are presented by DM2, the publishers of digiday:DAILY and the hosts of the DPAC events.
“KickApps has shown us yet again that its innovation and leadership is producing a best-in-class solution for the publishers, advertisers and brands,“ said Nick Friese, CEO of DM2 Media. “When our judges reviewed the entries, KickApps stood out as the clear winner because of its innovative products, position in the market, and vision for where social media, online publishing and advertising come together. Congratulations to everyone at KickApps for this achievement and I look forward to seeing more great things from the company in 2010.“
Boston Business Journal, December 11, 2009
Todd Dagres of Spark Capital decided that to be the best investor he could be in the frothy market where entertainment and media meet technology, he would need a crash course in the entertainment side. So he became a Hollywood producer.
That was after his stint as a general partner at Waltham-based Battery Ventures, where he famously led that firm’s investment in Akamai Technologies Inc., the Cambridge-based content delivery network company that speeds up media across the Internet. When Akamai went public, Battery saw a tremendous return on its investment.
“I got involved early on with those guys and did the first round,” Dagres said. “That was several hundred million dollars return on a $12 million investment.”
The New York Times, December 10, 2009
Generally, when people look for money managers to help them invest their savings, they are limited to hiring people who do that professionally.
But there are many people who invest as a hobby, and some of them are quite good. A start-up called Covestor is making it possible for people to use them as money managers instead of the professionals.
“In the last few years, the world has really flattened, and investors have the same access and tools as pros, but I can’t invest alongside them,” said Perry Blacher, Covestor’s chief executive. “I have to invest alongside someone who gets paid fees whether or not he does a good job.” Covestor changes that by letting people choose whose investment model they want to follow, he said.
Here’s how it works. Covestor, which was founded in 2006, has always let investors post their portfolios so other people could view them and copy their trades, and 25,000 investors have done so. Now, customers can open a brokerage account with either Interactive Brokers or TD Ameritrade and link their account to Covestor. Then, any time one of the investors they choose to follow makes a trade, the same trade is automatically made in their own account.
TechCrunch, December 09, 2009
MySpace is today launching a brand new suite of APIs that will allow third-party developers to tap oodles of data that gets published on the social network, in real-time, on the fly. MySpace COO Mike Jones debuted the new set of APIs on stage at the Le Web conference this morning, showcasing some initial services from launch partners.
The most important one to debut today is the Real-Time Stream API, which allows the full MySpace activity stream to be pushed to third-party websites and apps in, yes, real time. The API includes granular filters that allows developers that leverage it to exercise full control over the amount of data that gets pushed out.
Google and realtime search company OneRiot are two launch partners that will be tapping MySpace’s fresh Stream API, enabling the search behemoth and startup to suck in data like status updates, music, videos, photos and more for inclusion in its search results.
Venture Beat, December 09, 2009
Covestor, a startup that lets people mimic other investors’ moves, is opening its doors and allowing anyone to become a portfolio manager on its investment management service. It will create many more investment options on the site for Covestor members; previously there were only 25 models that users could follow.
Becoming a manager on the site is contingent on a few conditions: you have to disclose all your real brokerage moves and share a year of performance history. Managers on Covestor can attract others to “follow” and copy their trades, while earning fees based on how many people track them or the total value of the assets they guide.
“We’re trying to bring the principles and practices of the Internet to finance and allow clients to pick what’s most appropriate for them,” said co-founder Perry Blacher. “As long as you’re willing to share your real investment activity and be transparent, then we’ll set you up with a level playing field.”
Business Wire, December 07, 2009
AdMeld, the leader in ad network optimization for premium publishers, today announced it is integrating support for mobile ad inventory into its platform. The solution applies AdMeld’s real time revenue maximization technology to the mobile space, offering premium publishers a single platform for optimizing their ad inventory across multiple channels and through dozens of demand sources. Currently undergoing beta testing, the combined product will be available to select AdMeld customers in Q1 of 2010.
“Adding mobile capabilities to our platform is a natural extension of our objective, which is to ensure publishers get the most possible value from their ad inventory,” said Michael Barrett, CEO of AdMeld. “The explosion of the iPhone and Android platforms has increased the amount of under-monetized inventory in the marketplace, and that curve that will continue to steepen over the next several years. Publishers need tools to optimize every discretionary impression, and AdMeld’s proud to offer the first such solution addressing this need across both web display and mobile channels.”
Today more than 130 of the world’s top online publishers use AdMeld’s technology to increase ad revenues and reduce operating costs, including Answers.com, AccuWeather, Discovery Communications, FOX News, Hearst Television, IAC, New York Post, and World Wrestling Entertainment®. For AdMeld’s trusted network and demand partners, the platform provides access to quality audiences totaling more than 150 million unique users in the US and 270 million unique users worldwide, according to Quantcast.
LA Times, December 07, 2009
Boxee unveiled plans at an event in New York tonight for the next generation of its Web TV software and the first steps of a strategy for invading the set-top box arena.
Details of what’s being called the Boxee Box are still trickling out of the sold-out Beta Unveiling event at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, which has taken 1,880 RSVPs. We’ll update the post as we learn more.
Boxee Chief Executive Avner Ronen gave The Times a brief rundown last week on the company’s plans for infiltrating the hardware business as well as a preview of the beta version of the Boxee software, which will be available to a limited number of testers this month and to everyone in January.
Contrary to initial speculation, there is no official Boxee Box. The new device is being developed in partnership with a third party, and Boxee expects to strike several more of those deals with other manufacturers next year. Boxee doesn’t charge hardware makers to install the software on its devices.
Ronen had his ideal specification list for the first set-top box to ship with Boxee—1080P high-def support, an HDMI TV connection and a price tag of less than $200.
Mashable, December 02, 2009
Boxee, the media center with a social twist, will be launching its public beta on December 7 — which is great news for those of us who have been using the service since the very early alpha days on our Apple TVs or Macs.
Even before Boxee enters its official beta, the service will continue to expand its content-partner offerings. In October, Anime portal Crunchyroll joined Boxee, and today another commercial partner joins the mix: an entertainment source called Crackle.
Crackle is a division of Sony Pictures Entertainment and has a great backlog of movies, TV shows and original content. The partnership between the two content sources will garner Boxee 49 different TV show miniepisodes and 37 original Web shows.
Mashable, December 02, 2009
Boxee, the media center with a social twist, will be launching its public beta on December 7 — which is great news for those of us who have been using the service since the very early alpha days on our Apple TVs or Macs.
Even before Boxee() enters its official beta, the service will continue to expand its content-partner offerings. In October, Anime portal Crunchyroll joined Boxee, and today another commercial partner joins the mix: an entertainment source called Crackle.
Crackle() is a division of Sony Pictures Entertainment and has a great backlog of movies, TV shows and original content. The partnership between the two content sources will garner Boxee 49 different TV show miniepisodes and 37 original Web shows.
PRESS RELEASE, November 18, 2009
IPWireless, a leading provider of 3GPP technology for new applications and markets, today announced that it has secured $15.5 million in Series A funding. Spark Capital of Boston, Massachusetts, led the transaction. The company plans to use the capital to accelerate sales of its unique 3GPP based mobile broadband and broadcast solutions into both the government and commercial markets.
“Securing over $15 million in financing during these turbulent financial times speaks to our solid business model, our proven team, and the tremendous growth opportunities that our unique platform and capabilities continue to create,” said Dr. Bill Jones, CEO of IPWireless. “3GPP standards are unequivocally the leading global solution for wireless carriers. However, while the large wireless vendors continue to focus on mainstream spectrum bands and traditional markets for their 3GPP solutions, IPWireless is expanding the benefits of this leading standard into untapped spectrum bands and opening the door to a new generation of mobile applications, devices, and ecosystems looking to capitalize on the explosive wireless market.”
Santo Politi, General Partner at Spark Capital commented, “I’ve been following IPWireless for several years and have always been impressed with their superior technology. They have a unique ability to deliver innovative mobile solutions that open new markets for tier one carriers and change the way government entities, like New York City, improve public safety and operate more efficiently using wireless broadband. IPWireless is a company that has already delivered on their promise and, going forward, they have the potential to break a number of exciting new markets wide open.”
Ad Ops, November 17, 2009
AdMeld, the leader in ad network optimization for premium publishers, announced it has processed more than a billion API-based real-time bids on behalf of its customers. The results provide an encouraging view into how this much-talked-about technology performs in practice, delivering increased value to publishers and buyers and greater levels of efficiency and transparency across the board.
“The data we’ve collected on the way to reaching this milestone has affirmed our best hopes for RTB,” said Michael Barrett, CEO of AdMeld. “The technology provides significant benefits to parties on both sides of the transaction, and it’s clearly on a path for accelerated adoption across the industry in 2010.”
MobileCrunch, November 10, 2009
Taptu, the mobile search engine, is announcing today that they’re using the OneRiot search API to provide realtime search results to mobile devices at their touch-friendly mobile web page. The realtime search results will eventually make their way into the Taptu iPhone app.
Realtime Search Now Comes to Mobile
Taptu and OneRiot Team Up to Offer First Realtime Search for Mobile
Cambridge, UK and Boulder, Colo. – November 10, 2009
Announcement Details:
■Taptu, the mobile search engine, and OneRiot, the realtime search engine, have launched the first ever realtime search for mobile. Available right now on Taptu.com, people can browse hot topics and discover the web’s most relevant new search results in realtime.
■Taptu makes use of OneRiot’s realtime search API, incorporating the web’s freshest, most buzzed about content into Taptu’s mobile-touch friendly interface. Mobile users can now search the realtime web or browse trending topics in a mobile-friendly format for touch screen devices, one of the most significant developments in mobile search to-date.
■This partnership fulfills a need for people to discover realtime, socially-influenced content on the go in a mobile-friendly format. The service is available on the major touch devices, including the iPhone, iPod touch, G1, Nokia N 97 and 5800, and the BlackBerry Storm 1.
■OneRiot’s realtime results will soon appear within Taptu’s iPhone app, providing even more functionality for realtime search on mobile devices.
■OneRiot’s API allows its partners to syndicate its realtime, socially-relevant results; Taptu is the first mobile search engine to leverage the company’s API.
Business Wire, November 09, 2009
AdMeld (www.admeld.com), the leader in ad network optimization for premium publishers, today announced it has processed more than a billion API-based real-time bids on behalf of its customers. The results provide an encouraging view into how this much-talked-about technology performs in practice, delivering increased value to publishers and buyers and greater levels of efficiency and transparency across the board.
“The data we’ve collected on the way to reaching this milestone has affirmed our best hopes for RTB,” said Michael Barrett, CEO of AdMeld. “The technology provides significant benefits to parties on both sides of the transaction, and it’s clearly on a path for accelerated adoption across the industry in 2010.”
Confirmed benefits of RTB include:
Higher CPMs for Publishers, Better ROI for Buyers
On average, real-time bids yield higher CPMs for publishers than optimized ad tags, primarily because buyers are willing to pay a premium for RTB’s enhanced targeting and inventory access.
Dramatically Improved Efficiency for Ad Operations Teams
RTB requires less manual work from both the sell and buy side, resulting in far fewer discrepancies between ad servers. The technology represents the latest in a series of innovations (i.e. dynamic passbacks) that have proven a high correlation between increased operational efficiencies and higher yields for publishers.
Increased Competition for Ad Tags Despite Low RTB Volumes
Though growing fast, RTB volumes are still far too low to fill the lion’s share of most large publishers’ discretionary ad inventories. Running RTB alongside optimized ad tags addresses this fact, increases free market competition and applies upward pricing pressure on buyers working through both methods. As RTB scales, this pressure will accelerate as buyers seek to maintain predictable impression volumes.
More Branded Advertisers, More Control for Publishers
AdMeld noted a higher concentration of quality branded advertisers coming through its RTB partners than other channels. In addition, says Barrett, “RTB allows for creative control down to the individual advertiser. This makes it even easier for publishers to effectively block certain advertisers to avoid conflict with their direct-sold inventory.”
Dramatically Increased Transparency
RTB enables publishers to see more detail about buying patterns and rates, unclouded by issues related to discrepancies and passbacks. It also provides buyers with increased visibility into each impression so they won’t get stuck with inventory that’s off-target or on the wrong sites. This level of transparency will become even more important as the amount of discretionary ad inventory in the marketplace continues to increase.
Business Week, November 01, 2009
Innovation among startups is alive and well, judging from the crop of entrepreneurs who made it onto this year’s list. Herewith, BusinessWeek.com’s annual rundown of the most promising tech startups and the young people, age 30 and under, who set them in motion. To arrive at the finalists, we weighed input from readers, investors, and BusinessWeek editors and writers who cover the tech sector. Each slide lists the company name, executives age 30 and under, a business description, and lessons learned amid the recession.
Silicon Alley Insider, October 28, 2009
Estimated Value: $80 million
Business: Professional online video network
Location: New York, NY
More Info: About Next New Networks
CEO: Lance Podell
Investors: Goldman Sachs, Spark Capital, Saban Media Group, Pilot Group, Bob Pittman, Fuse Capital
Analysis: Next New Networks’ syndicated Webisode model is a tough one to pull off. The company must make cheap but compelling programming, then convince advertisers of the value of selling sponsorships on that content across multiple distribution points like YouTube, Blip.tv, Yahoo, and many other portals.
Still, the company appears to be making a lot of progress toward that goal, consistently growing its audience and advertiser base with high-rate product-placement packages.
We estimate about $8 million in revenue this year (which admittedly may be on the aggressive side) and apply a 10-times multiple to come up with a $80 million valuation.
Media Post, October 28, 2009
How-to video Web site 5min on Wednesday is expected to announce a partnership with condition-specific consumer health and wellness publisher HealthCentral.
The deal combines 5min’s audience—which it says amounts to 21 million monthly unique visitors—with HealthCentral’s 11 million monthly unique visitors.
The tie-up also adds HealthCentral’s own library of hundreds of health videos to the existing 5min library, which will be distributed through 5min’s VideoSeed semantic syndication platform, which matches videos to relevant audiences across some 350 sites.
“Health seekers want information that is relevant to them, when and where they want to find it,“ said Christopher Schroeder, CEO of HealthCentral. “5min provides us with a technology that enhances our ability to get the most specific videos to the right people at the right time.“
It’s been a good month for 5min, which competes in the increasingly saturated markets of free “how to” and “do it yourself” information.
Earlier this month, Scripps Networks, which operates lifestyle cable TV channels such as HGTV and Food Network, agreed to supply videos to 5min’s home and food categories.
TechCrunch, October 28, 2009
Not wanting to be left completely behind, Yahoo will soon launch their own real time search engine too. But unlike Microsoft and Google, they won’t be partnering with Twitter and Facebook directly for the data (perhaps memories of their ill-fated blog search engine from 2005 linger). Instead, we’ve heard, they’ll work with one of the existing real time search engines. If our source is correct, that partner is OneRiot, and the product will launch very soon.
Dow Jones Venture Wire, October 28, 2009
Move follows recent tie-ups between Microsoft, Google and Twitter.
Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp.‘s Bing are rumbling into the real-time search space, saying last week that they separately have agreements with Twitter to incorporate the microblogging platform’s short messages into their search engine results.
The explosive popularity of Twitter and the limitations of its own search tool have made such moves expected, but now that the deals have been announced, what does it mean for start-ups trying to develop their own spin on real-time search?
PR Newswire, October 26, 2009
SendMe Mobile, the premier mobile media company, today announced a multi-faceted partnership with Sony Music Entertainment to offer mobile phone users access to Sony Music’s roster of acclaimed artists through SendMeMobile.com.
As part of the agreement, SendMe will offer users a comprehensive selection of Sony Music ringtones, videos and wallpaper images of artists such as Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, Franz Ferdinand, T-Pain, Wyclef Jean and more.
In addition, SendMe will deliver additional ringtones, images and video content from Sony Music’s extensive catalog never available before to mobile users.
“With Sony Music, we’re giving mobile phone users access to the most in-demand mobile entertainment, including content from some of the hottest labels such as Epic, Columbia, Jive, RCA and more,“ said Russell Klein, Co-founder and CEO of SendMe. “Along with more offerings for our subscribers, this partnership reinforces the value of SendMe’s portfolio approach for content providers.“
Subscribers can download media directly onto their mobile devices at SendMeMobile.com or through one of SendMe’s distribution channels, such as imeem, Eventful and Univision. In addition, SendMe and Sony Music will unveil special co-branded sweepstakes to promote Sony Music’s hottest artists. For example, the recently introduced “Viva Las Vegas with Mario” offers fans the chance at an exclusive weekend in Las Vegas with the Grammy-nominated artist. Mario fans entered to win on SoLow.com, SendMe’s mobile game and contest platform where the player with the lowest unique guess wins unique prizes and once-in-a-lifetime experiences.
“SendMe is connecting artists and fans in exciting and innovative ways by offering a full suite of mobile entertainment services,“ commented Michael Paull, Executive Vice President, Global Digital Business, Sony Music Entertainment. “We are pleased to make our unparalleled roster of music available to SendMe subscribers as more and more consumers continue to look to their mobile phones for engaging entertainment.“
With this partnership, SendMe now offers content from all four major U.S. music labels and claims the most robust mobile entertainment library on the market, also featuring content from dozens of emerging labels, top game publishers, movie studios and other leading content providers.
The New York Times, October 26, 2009
On the Web, people do more than just consume articles, pictures, music, video and virtual goods. They also create them. Aviary, a start-up in Long Island, wants to make it much easier for people to become creators on the Web.
Aviary has just raised $7 million from a new investor, Spark Capital, and from previous investors, including Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment company of Amazon.com’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos.
Aviary makes Web-based software that artists and would-be artists can use to create and edit images, fonts, audio files and, soon, videos. It also has a marketplace where people can sell their creations. Photographers, artists and musicians use it to edit and sell their work. Twitter users create avatars or backgrounds for their profile pages. Virtual game players build virtual goods, like swords or costumes, to use in the games.
The New York Times, October 21, 2009
Twitter gets 55 million monthly visitors, it has raised $155 million in venture capital, and it has generated intense interest from Hollywood to Iran. But it hasn’t earned much revenue and certainly no profit.
Back-to-back deals on Wednesday to make the company’s steady stream of posts available to Microsoft and Google’s search engines may point to a potential new source of cash. How large, however, is not known. The terms of the deals were not disclosed and Evan Williams, Twitter’s chief executive, said in an interview that revenue was “not the focus of the deals.”
Microsoft said it did not plan to put ads on its Twitter search service for now, and Google said ads might appear at a later date.
The deals represent the latest evidence of the intense interest in what is known as the real-time Web — the constant stream of posts and updates on Twitter, Facebook and similar services. Unlike traditional Web pages and blogs, that real-time information has not been easily integrated by search engines.
The Wall Street Journal, October 12, 2009
Boxee Inc. wants to broaden the horizons of television viewers. The company has developed software, now in the early stages of testing by consumers, that allows users to browse through all the music, photos and video stored in their computers on a TV screen, using a remote control. Music and video can then be played on the TV, and photos can be enlarged to view on the screen.
The free software also allows users to browse a selection of Web sites for photos and for video and music to play on the TV. What’s more, users can share with friends what they’re viewing or listening to and exchange recommendations.
Boxee has raised $6 million in Series B funding led by General Catalyst Partners, with participation from previous investors Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures.
MediaPost, October 05, 2009
How-to video Web site 5min has struck a deal with Scripps Networks, which operates lifestyle cable TV channels such as HGTV and Food Network, to supply videos to 5min’s home and food categories.
Under the agreement, Scripps will also directly sell advertising not only on its own inventory on 5min but all syndicated video in those two categories. The company syndicates its short, instructional videos to hundreds of sites that reach a potential audience of 250 million monthly visitors.
“We sell by category, and this is the first time we’re allowing a media partner to sell any of our categories,“ said 5min co-founder and CEO Ran Harnevo. “Where 5min can be helpful is to leverage their distribution and scale so they’re not selling only their own destination sites.“ He added that the company typically splits advertising between itself, content providers and sites in the network.
The partnership will start with Scripps providing hundreds of videos from its cable channels, which also include DIY Network, Fine Living Network and Great American Network. “The partnership with 5min gives us an innovative opportunity to vastly expand engagement with Scripps Networks brands by reaching additional targeted consumers across the Web,“ said Lisa Choi Owens, Scripps’ senior
The Deal, October 05, 2009
In another sign that the real-time Web is heating up, real-time search engine developer OneRiot Inc. has closed a $7 million Series C from existing investors Appian Ventures, Commonwealth Ventures and Spark Capital as well as angels, including Brad Feld and Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors Inc.
Some details of the round, which brings the company’s total venture capital raised to $27 million, were released earlier. On Monday, OneRiot is announcing a content advertising network akin to Google Inc.‘s (NASDAQ:GOOG) AdSense but with real-time content. (Subscribers to The Deal Pipeline may read more on OneRiot’s Monday news and the startup’s backstory.)
“If you search on David Letterman with Google, you’ll get news articles about him and the ‘Late Show’ home page,“ OneRiot CEO Kimbal Musk (and brother of Elon) tells The Deal, referring to Letterman’s Oct. 1 disclosure that he was being blackmailed over sexual affairs with CBS staffers. “But if you search on Letterman with OneRiot, you’ll get the video of his confession, some blog chatter, recent tweets, plus news related to the story. If you do the same search later in the day, you’ll get fresh content.“
The New York Times, October 02, 2009
Intune Networks, a Dublin-based supplier of telecommunications equipment, has raised $32.5 million in a new round of funding co-led by financier Dermot Desmond and Kernel Capital.
Enterprise Ireland and Invest Northern Ireland participated, as did previous investors Balderton Capital, Amadeus Capital Partners and Spark Capital.
The company said that the funding marked the largest private equity investment round in the European telecoms equipment sector and the third largest in the European IT sector this year.
Venture Beat, September 23, 2009
Altius Education, a company that partners with real junior colleges and universities to run a cost-effective, accredited online degree program, has brought in $8 million in a first round of funding.
Recognizing the need to provide access to areas of study being trimmed from budgets, especially at the community college level, Altius launched Ivy Bridge College in 2007 — with help from Tiffin University in Ohio. The web site gives enrolled students a more affordable route into a four-year university, all online and remotely accessible for greater flexibility. The company also provides students with round-the-clock tutoring and a personal academic coach to help them through their studies.
Financial Times, September 17, 2009
The idea began with Richard Tahta’s cousin, a talented amateur stock market investor. He would occasionally pass on useful trading tips, but Mr Tahta was frustrated that he seldom had time to act on them.
Believing that there were other frustrated investors like him, Mr Tahta’s solution was to join forces with fellow serial entrepreneurs Perry Blacher and Simon Veingard this summer to create Covestor Investment Management, an investment site that allows users to follow and replicate the stock market moves of traders with strong track records. It builds on Covestor.com, a social networking site for traders which they created two years ago, where investors come to show off their track record, ask for advice and share thoughts, a sort of Facebook for traders.
TechCrunch, September 05, 2009
While there have been many real-time search engine launches over the past few months (Scoopler, Topsy, Collecta, CrowdEye), most of them so far have fizzled (see Google Website Trends chart above). After an initial burst of curiosity, interest tends to dive. One exception, however, is OneRiot, which appears to be gaining some early traction in the real-time search race.
This race has just begun, of course, and other real-time search startups are chasing hard. But OneRiot is already serving up results for more than one million search queries a day (see chart below). This would be a rounding error for any major search engine, but at least it is going in the right direction. Its investors think so. They ponied up another $7 million in a new round at the end of last month
OneRiot started to be noticed when it added link search from Twitter last May. But its search volume didn’t really take off until it launched its API, allowing other sites to tap into its real-time search and add it as a feature to their own Web app or site. OneRiot has 40 API partners, including Microsoft (sometimes bundled with IE)., browser add-ons Yoono and Shareaholic, and desktop apps like Nambu and EventBox.
All of these API partnerships add up. In fact, about 80 percent of OneRiot’s searches are coming through its APIs rather than directly on its site. OneRiot is building up market share by offering real-time search to others. (Rival Collecta is preparing to do the same thing by offering its own APIs soon). Search is a volume game, where the more search queries you can process, the better your results become. So OneRiot wants to power as many real-time searches as possible.
Business Week, August 24, 2009
Creating IT hardware on your own can be real chore. All that time and money spent researching and prototyping, and there’s no guarantee it will do the job. But what if getting a custom-built device were as easy as making pizza? Start with a crust of a base module to run an operating system. Add a few toppings—a GPS unit, an accelerometer, a motion detector, or a 3G connection—and you’ve got just what your company needs.
Accenture (ACN) is now in this pizza biz. The consulting giant has teamed up with Bug Labs, a New York startup, to offer hardware and software packages unique to each customer. For Accenture the payoff is in getting these buyers to subscribe to its new software platform, AMOS, or Accenture Mobility Operated Services. As for Bug Labs, its wager is that Accenture will open doors to big companies that will put in multiple orders for its snap-together computerized gear.
The advantage for would-be customers is that the hardware can be tailored to fit an individual company. A shipping company might be able to buy a regular GPS unit at an electronics store, but what if it needs the device to have a 3G connection to send information over a cellular network? What if it also needs that device to have an accelerometer, so the company can track accidents?
Mashable, August 05, 2009
Simple blogging site TumblrTumblr will reveal its July stats later today, along with a claim that it is “taking over the world”.
The site served 255 million pageviews in July, according to directly measured stats by third party analytics firm Quantcast. In August, Tumblr expects to serve 330 million page impressions, and is purchasing 5 new servers to cope with the demand.
Other Tumblr stats are equally impressive:
- 50 million visitors in the last 30 days
- 650,000 posts per day (which equals 6 new posts per second)
- 5,000 new users every day
- 1.5 reblogged posts per second
A direct comparison to rival PosterousPosterous is not possible as the latter chooses to hide its traffic, but Compete.com has Tumblr at 2.6 million unique US visitors in June versus Posterous at 650,000.
In recent months, Tumblr has released an iPhone app, added support for audio recording, launched a popularity rank called Tumblarity and debuted new tools for community-powered blogs.
PR Newswire, July 23, 2009
Globespan Capital Partners and Spark Capital Invest in Series B Financing
5min (www.5min.com), the leading syndication platform and destination for vertically focused broadband lifestyle, instructional and knowledge videos, today announced that it has secured $7.5 million in Series B financing. Led by new investor, Globespan Capital Partners, the round also includes existing investor, Spark Capital. Globespan Managing Director Jonathan Seelig will join 5min’s Board of Directors.
5min syndicates its content through its semantic video engine, VideoSeed, and its proprietary video player to websites such as Answers, wikiHow, Wikia and Articlesbase and hundreds of vertical sites. The 5min platform collectively reaches a potential audience of over 200 million monthly unique visitors, and of this group, 14 million people watch at least one video per month. 5min has also built a multi-vertical content library of over 100,000 professionally produced videos through partnership with media companies such as Hearst Corporation’s UGO Entertainment, Elle, Car & Driver, The Doctors, Pet Side, Britannica, Ford Models, Kiplinger, Big Think, WatchMojo, Road & Track, Woman’s Day and more.
“While 5min has become the largest ‘how-to’ video destination site,“ says Ran Harnevo, CEO and co-founder of 5min, “we’ve also developed the only video platform that leverages a huge category-specific library to semantically syndicate the most relevant content to passionate audiences across the Web, wherever they exist. We provide every site publisher with professionally produced content, a video technology platform, and a full video monetization solution - all in one free offering.“
The New York Times, July 16, 2009
The star video game developer behind Age of Empires has turned his gaming talents to something new: teaching children languages.
Wiz World Online, developed by 8D World, a start-up based in Shanghai, China, and Woburn, Mass., was built by Rick Goodman, who developed the popular games Age of Empires and Empire Earth. In his latest virtual world, instead of re-enacting historical battles, Chinese children can learn English.
Alex Wang, the company’s chief executive and co-founder, said the idea grew out of his personal experience landing at the San Francisco airport on his first visit from China, 21 years ago, when he was in his 20s.
Though he had studied English for years and scored well on the written part of the GRE test, he discovered that he could not read the McDonald’s menu in the airport, nor could he converse with the server. Alhough he was hungry, “I was never in that kind of conversation before, and I ended up with a jumbo Coca-Cola with tons of ice,” he recalled.
“Hundreds of millions of people experience the same problem worldwide, particularly in Asia,” he said. “People study languages, but cannot talk, cannot communicate.”
The biggest problems, he said: children studying languages do not get to practice the language in their daily lives, they do not get much attention from teachers in large classrooms and they are often afraid to make mistakes when they do try to speak different languages.
Those are the problems that Wiz World Online aims to solve. Kids choose an avatar and pick a scene, like a castle in a fantasy land or a supermarket in the United States. They are confronted with challenges, like dodging flying monsters or buying fruit, all of which ask them to use English. If they hit a ceiling in their language capabilities, they go to the wizards’ library and read so-called magical books that teach them lessons.
The company is initially focusing on kids age 7 to 12 in China but plans to expand globally, eventually teaching many different languages to kids all over the world.
Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs are increasingly interested in Web companies that have to do with education, an area they say has not yet been transformed by the Internet.
“The fundamental education business models are coming down,” said Alex Finkelstein, a general partner at Spark Capital, which led a $7 million venture capital round for 8D World.
Business Week, July 13, 2009
Making apps for Apple’s smartphone may be sexy, but startup SendMe has built a big, profitable business from games and features for plain old cell phones
Readers of a certain age will remember TV commercials aimed at showing that Kellogg’s Frosted Mini Wheats appeal to both the adult and the kid in all of us. In the 30-second spot, grownups who crow about the cereal’s nutritious value suddenly morph into younger versions of themselves who plug the cereal’s sweet frosted side.
I’m a bit like that when it comes to mobile startups. The consumer in me welcomes the explosion of fun, useful, and innovative games, activities, and tools on smartphones. I’ll admit that I’ve livened up many a dull train commute with rounds of Flight Control on my iPod touch.
On the other hand, the business reporter in me is getting bored by endless press releases and pitches from companies whose entire business model involves running an app on the Apple (AAPL) iPhone. We get it—the iPhone is awesome. On a recent visit to China, I was stunned at how many expats from the U.S. and Europe have flocked to the country and are spending their time developing iPhone games—this in a country that doesn’t officially have the iPhone yet. Many said they were attracted not just by the large market opportunity but also the low-cost talent for designing casual games there. Fair enough.
Under the Radar
But I’m highly doubtful about the prospects of building a lasting business dependent on people like me who will pay at most $1-a-pop to play a game until we get bored and then move on to a new, probably free alternative. And even while the iPhone is very popular, it’s part of a niche that still accounts for a small slice of the larger mobile-phone market globally. Smartphones, including the iPhone and Research In Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry, made up 13.5% of all cell-phone sales in the first quarter, according to Gartner (IT).
What gets the business reporter in me far more excited is the handful of companies designing content, games, or social networks that can run on the much larger pool of plain-Jane cell phones. Some are even making money.
A very under-the-radar case in point: SendMe. The San Francisco startup sells run-of-the-mill mobile content under three brands. SendMeMobile makes ringtones and wallpaper, mBuzzy is a mobile social network, and SoLow.com runs sweepstakes via cell phones.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.