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Online ad spending still surging, but biggest players getting lion's share

by John Shinal, October 5, 2007 | Comments (3)

The latest report on Internet ad spending showed that the rate of annual growth, while still healthy, has slipped from earlier this year, and that the biggest online properties are still dominating the business. The Interactive Advertising Bureau said online spending rose 25% in the second quarter to $5.1 billion. That's slightly less than the 27% year-over-year increase for the entire first half but still five times faster than the overall industry rate, which includes print and broadcast ads. ...

Pixsy signs partnership with Veoh Networks as video-search market heats up

by John Shinal, October 4, 2007 | Comments (2)

Pixsy Corp., the upstart video and image search company that's taking on larger rivals such as Blinkx and Truveo, said today that online video-sharing channel Veoh Networks will start using its technology in return for an undisclosed sum. With the deal, which is exclusive on the image-search side but not on the video-search side, Pixsy adds Veoh to its list of paying customers, which also includes Travelocity, Pixsy CEO Chase Norlin told Vator.tv in a phone interview. The video search market got a high-profile ...

Takei asteroid riff: why science fiction writers are the true tech visionaries

by John Shinal, October 4, 2007 | Comments (1)

Yes, I know Silicon Valley gets credit for being the cradle of high tech innovation, thanks to Dave Packard's garage, the Fairchild Eight, Jobs and Woz and all that. But if you're talking about the long-term visionary thing for consumer tech products, you've got to give some propers to Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. I write this after hearing that an asteroid between Mars and Jupiter has been renamed for George Takei, in honor of his role as Lt. Sulu, the helmsman of the Starship Enterprise during ...

Flixster has to be loving the Facebook rumor mill

by John Shinal, October 2, 2007 | Comments

With all of these multiple-billion dollar valuations being thrown around for Facebook and MySpace, my guess is that Flixster co-founder Joe Greenstein and the rest of the crew over there are feeling pretty good about their situation. The last time Vator.tv caught up with Greenstein, in June, he told us that they were at nine million unique visitors per month. About 3.5 million of those came via Facebook, thanks to the popular widget that Flixster had just built for that ...

eBay gets a discount on Skype as management shuffle continues

by John Shinal, October 1, 2007 | Comments (1)

Yes, eBay is paying less in earn-outs to Skype investors than it might have had the startup hit all of its performance benchmarks. That clearly isn’t great news for eBay CEO Meg Whitman. But whether eBay paid $3.1 billion or $4.1 billion for Internet telephony software isn’t the most important question right now. Unless Whitman can find someone who can figure out how Skype fits into eBay, either amount is way too much. The Skype executive shuffle suggests that ...

A VC on saying "no" and the "courtesy-proof" firm

by John Shinal, September 30, 2007 | Comments (1)

Ouch! That's what entrepreneurs say every time they're told no by a VC. Now comes word that it's no fun on the other side of the table either. Saying no to aspiring entrepreneurs sometimes makes you feel like crap, according to venture capitalist and Sevin Rosen Fund partner Nick Sturiale. (Wait, should I feel sympathy for a guy who made an early-stage investment in XenSource, which was bought in August by Citrix Systems for half a billion dollars?) Read on and decide. ...

Apple whacks the iPhone hacks - a lesson in mobile-market power

by John Shinal, September 28, 2007 | Comments

Apple’s decision to make good on its threat to disable hacked iPhone units with a software upgrade should leave little doubt as to who has the power in the company’s partnership with AT&T. (Hint: it's not based in Cupertino.) The move is telling given that the iPhone is a smash hit, with one million sold in less than three months. Its popular features, which rivals are fast duplicating, mean that a big percentage of those who bought it likely would have ...

The Europeans are coming! (with checkbooks)

by John Shinal, September 27, 2007 | Comments

The falling value of the U.S. dollar is crimping the European vacation plans of American tourists, something anyone who's tried to buy fish & chips in London or a beer at Oktoberfest this month can tell you. And let's not mention all those formerly-reserved Canadians streaming south across the 49th parallel to celebrate the fact that their precious loonie has now achieved parity with the greenback. But there may be an upside to the dollar's slide for startup entrepreneurs, according to one investment banker I spoke to recently. The ...

Facebook worth between $10-$15 billion? Microsoft may think so

by John Shinal, September 24, 2007 | Comments (4)

The value of a premiere social networking site became clearer this week after a media report said Microsoft has held talks with Facebook about investing between $300 million and $500 million for as much as a 5% stake in the startup. That would value Facebook at up to $10 billion, although CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his advisers may hold out for a valuation as high as $15 billion, according to the report on WSJ.com. As lofty as that valuation ...

The mysterious world of Planet VC

by John Shinal, September 24, 2007 | Comments

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At its heart, the business of venture capital is the financing of dreams. Like the job of literary agents or Hollywood producers, the fundamental challenge for VCs is to sort through thousands of ideas each year to find -- and fund -- the ones with the potential to be big hits. And because venture capital is a hyper-competitive industry, those who make their living at it face tremendous pressure to grab a piece of a promising business plan before a ...

Visible Tech gets $12 mln in Series B round from Ignition, WPP

by John Shinal, September 23, 2007 | Comments

Seattle-based Visible Technologies said early Monday that it hauled in $12 million in Series B funding as it expands to meet rising demand for its online reputation management services. The fund raising round was led by new investor Ignition Partners, a venture capital firm, and by the global advertising giant WPP Group, an early strategic investor in Visible Tech. Founded in 2003, the startup sells software that allows companies to monitor and respond to what is being written about them in blogs and other social media Web sites. To see Visible ...

Intel's power-saving Linux push highlights big market opportunity

by John Shinal, September 20, 2007 | Comments

Intel's latest effort to help data center operators cut power consumption is a reminder of just how much energy servers consume -- and how big an opportunity there is in the market intersection where info tech meets green tech. Working with open source developers, the world's largest chipmaker has rolled out a Web site, LessWatts.org, that provides tips for reducing power consumption by Intel-based Linux servers. This comes on top of years of research by Intel and rivals such as AMD to produce chips that have more processing power ...

Mobile search opportunities among the giants

by John Shinal, September 18, 2007 | Comments (1)

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The news that Google is expanding its efforts to place ads on cell phone Web pages provides more evidence that the giants of desktop search advertising are the favorites in the race to extract revenue from the mobile Internet. The search leader, which shared details about its AdSense for Mobile product this week, is flexing its muscle in a market where its rivals, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL, are also jockeying for position. Yahoo has extended its desktop ad technology to ...

Everyone from Google to VCs looking for back door into the enterprise

by John Shinal, September 17, 2007 | Comments

Not long ago, corporate IT departments -- from the CIO down to the systems admin -- were the unchallenged gatekeepers of the enterprise market. If they didn't approve, install or support an application, it didn't get deployed in a corporate-wide setting. But that's changing, thanks to the proliferation of programs delivered over the Internet. When consulting giant Capgemini researched how many of its corporate customers were using Google Apps, for example, they found enough stealth users to begin supporting those ...

Lessons Learned: Mark Leslie says be authentic

by John Shinal, September 13, 2007 | Comments

Right product, right market, right time, is better than the right team, wrong product, wrong time

If an entrepreneur with an OK team has the right product, right market, and right market conditions, they have a high likelihood of success because the rise with the tide, and importantly. Importantly, venture capitalists (should they be involved) can swap out the team for a better one. If a group of A-team entrepreneurs get together and create the wrong ...

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