Monthly Archives: October 2007
After Hulu and Microsoft One-Ups Google, Google Clown Co.’s Themselves
If the rumor about what the Google executives previously dubbed NBC and News Corp.’s idea for Hulu is true, I see them as being completely hypocritical. Around March 2007, rumors were afloat that News Corp. and NBC were parterning to develop a YouTube competitor and Google executives were supposedly not worried about it because they were reportedly nicknaming the company that didn’t exist at the time as ClownCo. Today that company is named Hulu and they have impressed the hell out of several media bloggers including Pulse 2.0, TechCrunch, and GigaOM. Mashable seemed to have a more undecided opinion about how Hulu will perform in the market.
The reason why Google would give such a nickname to the company is because of the number of players involved. Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo!, MySpace, FOX, NBC, and News Corp. were all involved somehow as partners of the company in some shape or form. But the reason why I am calling Google hypocritical is that they seem to be pulling the same trick: partnering with a large number of companies to try and one-up a company that they cannot stand to see score a good deal for themselves. Microsoft’s investment in Facebook is what I’m referring to specifically.
I am making a bold statement by calling Google execs a hypocrite, but I have to admit that I was partially influenced by the article title on today’s New York Times: Google and Friends to Gang Up on Facebook. And when hearing Google and Friends Ganging Up on Facebook, I think of a $220 billion search monopoly picking on a 23 year old with a good idea. Shame on you: Schmidt, Brin, and Page. You guys should just take some money out of the bank and take a bath in it or buy more Boeings.
Who is Google allying with? Other social networks of course. These social networks include:
1.) LinkedIn
2.) hi5
3.) Friendster
4.) Plaxo
5.) Ning
Other companies involved in Google OpenSocial include Oracle and Salesforce.com. Just for the record, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch also mentioned that the only image associated with OpenSocial is a horny Elmer’s glue thing. As funny as that comment was, I agree that there is something highly wrong with this image.
All opinions aside, do I expect OpenSocial to really take off? I think developers will explore the prospects of OpenSocial, but won’t be as receptive to developing applications for Google’s partners. This is because Facebook’s core users are college students and young, urban professionals that are still receptive to adding applications that make networking more “fun.” And the social networks that Google has partnered with are losing their edge. As a recently graduated college student myself, I have personally left Friendster years ago and never looked back.
I think Google is an amazing service and will not sway from using their search engine unless something amazing comes along, but I think OpenSocial seems too much like a product created out of a grudge. And that doesn’t go along with their “Don’t be Evil” philosophy. When Facebook Applications were released, they were promoted as a way for developers to explore the creative senses while leveraging Facebook’s user base.
Categories Facebook, Friendster, Google, Hi5, Hulu, LinkedIn, Microsoft Corporation, Ning, Plaxo
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PicksPal Raises $3 Million Series C; Total Funding @ $9 Million
PicksPal is a website where users predict the winners of sporting events and win free prizes by doing so. Essentially it is a fantasy football, baseball, basketball, and other sports website. Except in this case, users have an incentive to participate here rather than other websites.
The company is based in Mountain View, Calif. PicksPal was founded by Tom Jessiman, a former CBS SportsLine.com, Sports.com, and Ziff-Davis senior executive. Since the company started in September 2005, they have raised $9 million. The first round of investment at $2 million was provided by Canaan Partners. The second round was $4 million and was provided by Canaan Partners and Bay Partners. And the most recent funding at $3 million was provided by Canaan Partners and Bay Partners once again.
As this is the generation where the post World War II baby boomers are passing habits on to Generation X and Generation Y, more people are tuning into sports and want to compete with their peers. There is a lot of room to grow in this market and with this new round of funding, PicksPal should redesign their web site as a first step to cater to the Web 2.0 enthusiasts.
Categories Bay Partners, Canaan Partners, PicksPal
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Real Estate/Life In The City Blog Network, Curbed Raises $1.5 Million
Curbed is a New York, NY-based real estate network blog that focuses on local events and architecture. The blog network raised $1.5 million recently from a plethora of investors including Nick Denton (founder of Gawker Media), Zach Nelson (CEO of NetSuite), Joanne Wilson (wife of Fred Wilson, author of A VC blog), and Brad Inman (founder/publisher of Inman News).Â
Curbed was founded by Lockart Steele and he is a former managing editor of Gawker Media. Steele founded Curbed before working for Gawker, but went back to working for Curbed after leaving Gawker.
“We’re not just about real estate,” stated Steele. ”People come to the site to talk about their neighborhoods and about life in the city.” Some of Curbed’s advertisers include American Express and Volkswagen.
The New York Times’ Dan Mitchell broke the news of the funding.
Categories Curbed, Gawker Media
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Mydeo Now Powering Best Buy’s Video Sharing Service
“With the growing popularity of video, fueled in part by social networking sites, we’ve actually seen an increase in customer demand for alternative video sharing solutions. Many customers, particularly families with children, don’t want their personal memories available for anyone to see in the public domain nor do they want to share them in a cluttered environment that includes advertising,”
-Kevin Winneroski, VP of Best Buy
Richfield, Minn.-based specialty retailer company, Best Buy Co., Inc. (NYSE:BBY) has made a minor equity investment in Mydeo recently. Mydeo plans on using the funding for its video-sharing services. The Best Buy-Mydeo partnership web site is already online at: mydeo.com. Users are encouraged to upload personal videos for storage and then share them on blogs and web sites.Â
This investment complements Best Buy’s market-share dominance in selling digital camera and video camera within the U.S. The more that customers buy digital cameras from Best Buy, the more likely they are to use Mydeo to share video. Mydeo is based in the U.K.
The base plans for 100 minutes of video hosting with lengths up to 30 minutes each starts at $6.97 per month. Additional storage can also be purchased. A premium user plan includes uploading videos that are 90 minutes in length and can store up to 250 minutes of video for $10.47 per month. Videos can be made private and can be shared with family and friends.
Mydeo was started in 2005 by Cary Marsh and Iain Miller. Mydeo partnered with Microsoft to become the software company’s first European Movie Maker Hosting Partner.
Information Source:
[1] Mydeo press release: Best Buy Launches Online Video Sharing Service
Categories Best Buy, Mydeo
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Champion Sound Opens In Limited Beta
“Amplify your world. For Free.”
-Champion Sound motto
I just got an email saying that Champion Sound is launching in Limited Beta Launch and that the Public Launch is coming soon. Champion Sound is a tool for music artists to keep manage their gigs easier. For example, one feature is called Activity Overview: this is where artists can monitor their gigs and the documentation involved around them. Below is a screen shot:
Another feature of Champion Sound is to maintain e-mail subscribers more seamlessly. E-mail addresses can be either manually added or imported from a .CSV file:
And one of the last features of Champion Sound is the ability to generate a new campaign. This can be done so by creating a Flyer, Announcement, or Newsletter. Then the template can be added into e-mails:
Champion Sound was created by Digital Telepathy, a San Diego, Calif.-based Web 2.0 consulting company that created works on Hard Rock Hotel, MojoPages, Tierra Natal, and Razoo. Digital Telepathy also built a Facebook sponsored page to promote Mozilla Firefox 2.0.Â
The San Diego fires was a minor bottleneck for Digital Telepathy. The company had to evacuate their office for a ocuple days. Digital Telepathy’s blog is available at: http://blog.dtelepathy.com/
Categories Champion Sound, Digital Telepathy
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Tough Searches? Quintura Delivers Where Google Doesn’t
“Google reaps about 60 percent of its outsize revenues and more than 80 percent of its profits from ads on that page, according to analysts’ estimates. That means the company’s success continues to hinge on the dominance of its simple search. There are no guarantees that its dominance will last.”
-David H. Freeman, Newsweek
Tui Stark, a photography stylist recently attempted to search for “snorkeling beaches blue water,” but searching for those keywords on Google turned out to be futile. Results that Google found included web sites about real-estate companies, rafting apparel, and listings for scuba diving, slightly irrelevant from the searches keywords. [Source: NewsWeek].Â
In my opinion, is Google overvalued? For the amount that their stock is trading today and how much their company is appealing competition to enter the market, they’re not too far away from becoming the next Yahoo! by becoming overshadowed by the next big thing. And one of the most valiant efforts made by a company to take on Google today is Quintura.Â
Quintura has stayed consistent in pushing their tag searching technology and have never strayed from it. Quintura has a kid-friendly search engine that filters out inappropriate content and most recently added a Halloween themed search homepage:
I challenge Pulse 2.0 readers to test out Quintura and leave any feedback for the company. I believe that users will find that the only problem that they have is that Quintura is not like Google. Keep an open-mind because I’m sure Quintura is here to stay. The company is backed by Mangrove Capital Partners.
Categories Mangrove Capital Partners, Quintura
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Hulu Enters Private Beta & Has An Amazing Platform
“Consumers are clearly interested in easily accessing a broad spectrum of programming,”
-Peter Chernin, President and COO of News Corp.
NBC Universal and News Corporation, parent company of FOX, have proved the nay-sayers wrong with their new venture, Hulu. Bloggers, news publications, and YouTube fans all had a lot of doubt about whether an NBC/News Corp. partnership would be able to take on video user-generated content web sites. Since NBC and FOX wasn’t happy with sponsored groups on YouTube, it comes to no surprise that full episodes of NBC- and FOX- owned shows are placed on Hulu. I think it was also a smart move that FOX shows were not placed on MySpace, News Corp.’s own social network.
Even though Hulu is still in Beta testing, some of their clips are available on MSN and on AOL. The videos that are available by Hulu on AOL and MSN are of high quality so that should be a reason for future Hulu users to be optimistic about the future of video content. How will NBC and News Corp. make money from Hulu? Advertising most likely.
What are the pros and cons of Hulu? The pros are that more time will be spent on Hulu because the quality of the content is much higher than YouTube. The cons is that YouTube was made for people that wanted that quick snapshot of entertainment. Let’s say that I wanted to show a buddy of mine a 15 second clip of Family Guy, Hulu would not be the ideal place to do so. There are a lot of funny one-liners on FOX and NBC shows. But Hulu does not offer that convenience. And that will be Hulu’s one weakness.
Categories Hulu, NBC Universal, News Corp
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Yahoo!’s MyBlogLog Adds E-Mail Signature Generator
Yahoo! acquired MyBlogLog around January 2007 for about $10 million. MyBlogLog is a web tool that is used by bloggers and another publishers to showcase what web sites they are visiting or who is visiting their blog. The official announcement was made by Robyn Tippins, Community Manager at Yahoo!’s MyBlogLog.
The e-mail signature can be set-up when clicking on “Edit Profile” and then “Email Signature”:
If you look at the above screen shot, you will notice that there is a MyBlogLogo icon logo under myname. Other icons a user can add is icon links to their YouTube profile, Pownce profile, MySpace profile, Blogger account, LinkedIn profile, Digg profile, Twitter page, del.icio.us profile, Facebook profile, etc. After the signature is fully customized, MyBlogLog generates the code.
Then users simply take their code and embed it into Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird.
I could see this as being a very useful tool for Web 2.0 addicts like myself, but I don’t foresee a lot of people to use the signature generator. Great tool though.
Categories MyBlogLog, Yahoo!
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Flixster Acquisition May Not Be Too Far Away
“They [Joe Greenstein and Saran Chari, founders of Flixster] have built an amazing user generated content site around movies, including ratings, reviews, actor pages, trivia quizes, movie compatability tests and tons of other stuff.”
-Jeremy Liew, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners
San Francisco, Calif.-based movie and social network database, Flixster.com, has seen exponential growth since its January 2006 start. Flixster currently has 30 million-plus user homepages, has 870 million+ movie ratings, and 1.5 million+ quiz questions in user-generated content. The database currently also hosts over 30,000 movie profiles, 60,000 actor profiles, 1.1 million pictures, and 310,000 videos. Flixster’s Facebook Application is part of the reason why Flixster has seen enormouse growth as well.
Today TechCrunch reported that we may see a Flixster acquisition happen soon. TechCrunch sources have cited that a letter of intent was sent to Flixster from InterActivCorp (NASDAQ:IACI), parent company of Ask.com, LendingTree, Ticketmaster, HSN, and Match.com. The rumored valuation is worth $150 million.
Flixster is monitored by several administrators and the company has about 8 employees. Besides the Facebook Application, another reason for Flixster’s accelerated growth is because users are asked to provide GMail or Yahoo! Mail passwords and then the user is asked to invite friends and family from their contact lists.
Flixster is powered with $2 million in funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners. Keep checking Pulse 2.0 to see whether the acquisition takes place.
Why It Is A Good Thing That Facebook Monitors Whose Profile You Look At
I read a rather fussy article by Nick Douglas on ValleyWag today entitled, Facebook employees know what profiles you look at. The story received 1500+ Diggs and I have to agree with the with the response made by the first commenter of the article, walkngonawire: “In other shocking news, librarians can see which books you’ve checked out at the library, and bank tellers can see where you’ve spent money recently!”
When you sign up for a social network, send emails from your place of employment, or even sign up for a free e-mail account with Hotmail, Yahoo!, or Windows Live Mail, then you should expect that you’re being monitored in some form. Let’s say that some terrorists had a GMail account and a Facebook account and used both web communication forms to conspire with other terrorist friends, I could only hope that Google and Facebook reacts somehow. If not, I would say that it would be negligence on their part if they just sat there.
Scenario: let’s say that Johnny Appleplum was a stalker of a Jenny Orangebanana. Johnny and Jenny have never never met before and Johnny is known to be not right in the head because he sends threatening messages to a Jenny saying how much he needs Jenny. If I was Jenny, I would only hope that Facebook was tracking any further suspicious activity from Johnny because you never know what Internet creeps are capable of.Â
However, one of the comments that Douglas made in his blog post to clarify what Facebook employees are capable of is:
The only ones who have full access to profile information is security staff and higher ups. Seems like a fair check-and-balance.
Categories Facebook, ValleyWag
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