BloGiza

The List - May 28

Every week we run across a number of articles that catch our eye. As a regular feature, we round them up for a little something we call The List:

• 5 Pitfalls Tech Start-Ups Must Avoid - American Venture Magazine
• Facebook's plan to hook up the world - Fortune
• Ballmer: Innovation Takes Time - Business Week
• Silicon Valley move over? NYC bullish on next Internet wave - ZDNet
• Social Networking Sites Drive Traffic To Each Other, Figures Show - Information Week
• 5 Million Channels and Nothing’s On: Discovery and Recommendation in an Internet Video World - KillerApp
• Silicon Valley Could Use A Downturn Right About Now - Tech Crunch
• What's hot today? - Google Blog
• CEO Schmidt Ponders Google's More 'Personal Future' - Information Week
• Digg unveils data visualization finalists, Apollo in the house - Webware
• Broadcast Your Life Online, 24-7 - Technology Review
• The Never-Ending Battle for a la Carte TV - Tech News World

The Online Advertising Chowdown

With all the recent focus on new media and the future of television, it seems that the real story as far as Internet exits (at least for the first half of  2007) is online advertising. Over the last month or so, we've seen a real feeding frenzy in the sector. Almost all the big Internet players --Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL -- have rushed to snap up online advertising agencies.

Thus, just when you think Goog's $3.1B acquisition of Doubleclick was a biggie, along comes the $6B Microsoft/aQuantive deal (at an 80% premium, no less). Not to mention a raft of smaller but still very substantial exits (WPP/24/7Real Media, Yahoo/Right Media) in both online and mobile advertising.

From the Internet-oriented VC perspective this brings up two thoughts:

1. Just a year or two ago, DoubleClick and its ilk were seen as boring Web 1.0 companies (albeit lucrative ones). And yet, despite the hoo-ha over Web 2.0 and online video, these subsectors haven't shown anywhere near the potential for mega-exits that we are now seeing with online advertising. Perhaps I should say "the potential for mega-exits yet," since I am a hopeful fellow. Still, it goes to show that while hype has its place in our biz, there is still no substitute for the old-school basics like revenues and a logical business model.
2. This does, however, bring up the obvious caveat: are these companies actually worth the money Goog & co. are willing to pour into them, or are we talking about another Internet bubble? IMHO these companies are worth the price tag, even though the aQuantive deal seems excessive. We are, after all, talking about the companies which drive most of the revenues on the Internet. Until the Web comes up with better business models, online advertising will continue to be a most lucrative field. And will likely get more lucrative as the big Internet players start using the mountains of information they have about us and our browsing and shopping habits to start targeting better and better ads at us.

Google Eats Feedburner

It's funny to think now, but just a few short months ago we labored under the conventional wisdom that "Google doesn't do major purchases." Which was correct up to a point. If you look at Goob's M&A activity over the last five years you see a string of (by VC standards) nickel and dime acquisitions: lots of startups doing nice features (maps, spreadsheets, etc) plus a few deals where Google wanted to buy a company for the R&D team.

In fact, even the YouTube deal seemed like an outlier. But no more.

Google just announced that it was buying Feedburner for about $100M. This of course comes on the heels of the Doubleclick acquisition that was announced last month. So now Google's acquisition activity is becoming a bit clearer.

What seems obvious is that Goobe has gone from making small tactical purchases (in order to boost products that it wanted to develop) to making much larger strategic purchases in its drive to become the undisputed Master of Your Online Life. The Feedburner acquisition means that Google will now have access to millions of RSS feeds, the new life blood of the Web. It's all in service of finding out more about you the user and serving up better and more targeted advertising.

I has seen the future and it is looking increasingly multi-colored.

The List - May 21

Every week we run across a number of articles that catch our eye. As a regular feature, we round them up for a little something we call The List:

• Guy Kawasaki Talks Truemors.com - Red Herring
• A Laundry List of Free Internet TV - PC World
• P2P, Streaming and CDNs: What Will Really Work? - New TeeVee
• How Will Telcos Avoid Me-Too TV? - Light Reading
• YouTube founders' next moves - SiliconValley.com
• Sun's Diffie: Second Life To Become Prime Source Of Intelligence - Information Week
• The Great Internet TV Race, Part 1 - e-Commerce Times
• The Great Internet TV Race, Part 2 - e-Commerce Times
• Google Evangelizes Its Ecosystem - Information Week
• Stay tuned: Prime-time geeks coming to TV - Computerworld

The List - May 14

Every week we run across a number of articles that catch our eye. As a regular feature, we round them up for a little something we call The List:

• The Secret of Apple Design - Technology Review
• Top 17 Search Innovations Outside Of Google - Read/Write Web
• War of the People Search - TechCrunch
• 27 Features That Make Google Analytics Best of Breed - Mashable
• Netscape Compared To Digg, A Marketer's Perspective - Search Engine Land
• The "New" Apple - Technology Review
• Help Me Redesign the Web - Technology Review
• Some Unrest Is Bubbling Beneath the Top Tier - New York Times
• Intel Invests In Chinese Social Network, Five Other Companies - Information Week
• See Who’s Reading Your LinkedIn Profile - TechCrunch
• Jajah's Phone-On-A-PC Chip Technology Gets A $20 Million Boost - Information Week
• Bill Gates: Reading to go 'completely online' - Seattle PI
• Charles River Ventures’ Angel Experiment: First Nine Investments - TechCrunch

Joost!

Holy crap! Joost has just announced that it has raised a whopping $45M in its first institutional round. Investors include Sequoia and Index, as well as CBS, Viacom, and a Chinese billionaire.

Also, they are going into open beta very soon.

My thoughts:

1. If I hadn't mentioned it before, holy crap!
2. This answers my question of how CBS plans to compete with the NBC-News Corp Internet venture.
3. It will be really interesting to see how these projects deal with scaling effectively once millions of users tune in. P2P works more or less fine when it comes to transmitting audio (i.e. Skype); let's see how the architecture handles video.
4. I'm so jealous that Sequoia always gets in on these projects

Behold the future of television, folks. You can tell your kids you were there in the early days.

A Digg for startups

I recently discovered an interesting Web site called Killer Startups. Their basic idea is to function as a social community for the startup space. Or, in other words, they are like Digg but totally focused on startups.

Entrepreneurs can submit their startups to the site. You submit a link to your site and your elevator pitch. The Killer Startups guys posit some questions and analyze why the startup might be a killer. And the users of the sites give votes to the startups.

Interestingly, there are four Israeli-based companies in the list of Top 10 Killers: SuTree, 5Min, MatchMyPet.com, and G.ho.st.

This could possibly be a good source of deal flow.

The revolution will be televised

Gil over at De Gardener has posted videos of a talk that Jeff Pulver gave about two weeks ago at the last Garage Geeks event.  Pulver talked about his vision for the future of television. And that future resides on the Internet.

Much of Jeff's speech revolves around the idea of using RSS as a delivery platform. Which isn't too surprising, since he is currently very involved with Network2, a new Internet venture that seeks to aggregate all the independently produced episodic content on the Web and create a kind of uber-television network for it.

In the last couple of months I've been immersed in the New Media world. It seems that after years and years of hype about TV and the Internet coming together, it's starting to happen. Joost is the highest-profile example, but there are literally dozens of companies working on becoming the NBC (or Fox, or Comedy Central, or whatever) of the Internet.

As I see it now, no one group will emerge as the 800-lb gorilla of the space. There is too much content out there and -- at least in the realm of top-tier content -- a lot of gorillas already competing with each other. What I think we will see are a number of different classes of television broadcast online:

• The Big Kahunas -- These guys will be serving up professionally produced, premium content to the widest available audience. This includes not only episodes of Lost and Desperate Housewives, but also the latest Shakira videos, as well as re-runs of Happy Days. As mentioned, Joost looks like it will be a major player in this category as doubtlessly will the still-unnamed NBC-NewsCorp project
• The Middle-of-the-Tail Guys -- Here you will find episodes of independently produced shows like Ask a Ninja, Chad Vader and Jeff's favorite, Feed Me Bubbe. Not to mention thousands of other examples of people doing their own series. The content will likely be shorter-form and not quite as slickly produced, but my feeling is it will manage to find an enthusiastic audience. Network2 is looking to dominate this category.
• One-offs and amateurs -- The traditional realm of YouTube, Metacafe, and their ilk. You want videos of cats playing the piano? This is the place for you.

Of course, these categories are far from fixed and rigid. I expect we will see a lot of overlap between the players, not to mention various other broadcast models such as live vlogging. However it plays out, it's going to start playing out soon. And as soon as it does, the ad dollars are going to start rolling in that direction.

The List - May 7

Every week we run across a number of articles that catch our eye. As a regular feature, we round them up for a little something we call The List:

• Is The VC World Dead or Just More Selective? - Mapping the Web
• Will Blogs Replace News Agencies? - Mapping the Web
• Social Networking for Dogs - Technology Review
• Microsoft's Bach pitches 'user-driven marketing' - CNet
• Joost goes one beta better - CNet
• Ray Ozzie's quiet revolution at Microsoft - ZD Net
• Q&A With Vinod Khosla - alarm:clock
• When Best Practice is just not good enough - IT-Director
• Web 2.0 is Froth - Ethical Software
• The Cost Of User-Generated Content - Information Week
• Online Influencers: How The New Opinion Leaders Drive Buzz On The Web - Information Week
• Challenging VC market big test for Irish firms - Silicon Republic
• Watch this space: a new era of TV viewing is dawning - Times Online
• Unrest in Cyberspace - Technology Review

Flickr ascendant

Yahoo! has announced that it will close Yahoo! Photos in favor of Flickr. On the one hand, the move looks a bit funny considering that Y!P has consistently been a much more trafficked site than Flickr. On the other hand, Yahoo! Photos' traffic has been flat while Flickr's has been growing steadily. Plus, in the wake of Yahoo!'s persistent struggles it makes sense to consolidate properties and not run two competing photo-sharing sites.

All of which makes the news not entirely unexpected.

Still, this raises (at least in my eyes) a couple of issues that I hope Yahoo! has thought through:

1. The interface thing - I love Flickr, but I think it has one of the most problematic interfaces out there. After more than two years of using the service (and having paid up as a member twice now) I still find myself hesitating and being forced to read the help material when trying to do relatively simple tasks. Yahoo! Photos made things a lot more simple. Which leads me to wonder how my non-computer savvy mother-in-law who might have been able to handle Y!P's interface will get along with Flickr's.
   
   Granted Flickr has been improving things over time, but IMHO it's still not quite ready for prime time and I wonder what effect this will have on old-time Y!P users.
    
2. Flickr's snob factor - Flickr managed to acquire the mind share that it has in part because it is positioned as a quality photo site. As some people have pointed out, Flikr's message (think of the "Interestingness" feature) creates a kind of subtle pressure only to upload your best photos. Compare and contrast with the message you get from sites like Photobucket. Yahoo! Photos leans more in the direction of the latter than the former, so again it will be interesting to see how Y!P users adapt and how longtime Flickr users will react to the waves of hillbillies who are now moving into their neighborhood, as it were.
    
3. New services - If Yahoo! wants the new Flickr to really take off it will need to enhance a couple of features, especially photo printing. Yahoo! Photos was pretty good with this, Flickr not so much. Also, IMHO they need to improve features for regulating access to photo albums.