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Lessons Learned: Being smart is a commodity

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, May 15, 2008 | Comments

Leonard Brody is a very smart guy. But many smart people smartly say that one should always hire people who are smarter than themselves. In fact, to Brody, founder and CEO of crowd-sourcing company NowPublic - thinks "smart is a commodity, something that you hire." He's got a point. Too many smart people often mean too many Chiefs, and not enough Indians. The best quality an entrepreneur can have is to have "drive and resiliency," he said. "The difference between ...

Seesmic expands video comments through Disqus

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, May 14, 2008 | Comments

Pretty soon, video commenting will be a requisite feature on traditional media sites. And, Seesmic - in partnership with Disqus - hopes to be that underlying platform. Seesmic, a video Twitter with aspirations to be a 'worldwide talkshow in video, and Disqus, a hoster and aggregator of comments across blogs, are partnering in Seesmic's effort to be the video commenting platform across publishing sites. Disqus, a two-person team co-founded by Daniel Ha last year, hosts comments for 13,000 blogs, including my ...

Bambi's blog: Target entrepreneurs, investors via Vator

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, May 14, 2008 | Comments

Do you want to have a pre-roll graphic before one of our many shows or segments, like Vator Box with yours truly, or "Lessons Learned" or "Reena Jadhav's IvyBrain?" Or, maybe you'd like to have your logo on our competition pages. Well, you can. Many people have approached me about getting in front of our great demographic of entrepreneurs and investors, and the many tech and Web people who make up the Silicon Valley ecosystem. To this end, we're going ...

What Scott Banister looks for as an angel

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, May 13, 2008 | Comments

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If you're an angel investor, I bet you'd love to have Scott Banister's line-up of angel deals. Scott is an investor in Facebook, Powerset, Hi-5, Zappos and Zivity - a company he co-founded with his wife Cyan and helped raise $7 million for. Zivity recently announced that it hired Jordan Ritter as is CTO. Ritter co-founded music-sharing site Napster. (Also watch my interview with Cyan and story about Zivity, titled: You know it when you see it.) Scott is also ...

Sex and the City in your iPhone?

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, May 12, 2008 | Comments

Apple, which has resisted flexible pricing with its content partners, appears to be ready to make acceptions. The company is nearing a deal to sell HBO shows on its iTunes Web site, according to Josh Saul at Portfoliocom. HBO is behind such mega-hit shows, such as "Sex and the City" and "The Sopranos." If a deal is struck between Apple and Time Warner, the parent company of HBO, it will be the first time that Apple agrees to a different ...

Google confirms Friend Connect

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, May 12, 2008 | Comments

Google on Monday confirmed rumors that it would release "Friend Connect," a service that helps Web sites grow traffic by adding features. Essentially, Friend Connect gives sites the ability to add social components, according to a press release.Here are excerpts from the release: "Visitors to any site using Google Friend Connect will be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends, or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, ...

Vator Box on P2P renting and Wiki-sheets

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, May 11, 2008 | Comments

This week on Vator Box, we look at Zilok, a recently-launched online rental marketplace where anyone can rent anything, like a Porsche 911 GT3 for $900 a day, or an inflatable castle for $200. Zilok is one of the companies emerging to enable online peer-to-peer rentals. Others include U.K.-based Rentmineonline and Los Angeles-based iRent2u. We also discuss SmartSheet, a software as a service (SaaS) company that enables teams to coordinate projects. Deva Hazarika, founder of enterprise software company ClearContext, and ...

Surf Canyon raises a seed round

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, May 9, 2008 | Comments

Surf Canyon, a company that adds a "real-time implicit personalization layer" to search results, just raised $600,000. When I first saw Surf Canyon's company profile and video pitch on Vator, I thought it was a cool company. It also looked like it had similarities with Browster, a company that tried to make the "browsing" experience easier by allowing people to get a snapshot of a page by just scrolling over the link. Mark Cramer, the founder of Surf Canyon, had ...

How Vinod Khosla pitched Sun Microsystems

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, May 8, 2008 | Comments (1)

High-profile VC shares the virtues of a short and sweet business plan

We had highlighted Vinod Khosla's "lessons learned" in our newsroom last year, when he advised entrepreneurs to have "passionate conviction." This time, for his lessons to entrepreneurs, Vinod talks about how he pitched Sun Microsystem to investors about 25 years ago. Vinod started Sun with his cofounders Scott McNealy, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Bil Joy. According to Vinod, a short and ...

Demand Media comments on Vator challenge

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, May 7, 2008 | Comments

After a successful run the first time Vator held a competition in partnership with Demand Media, the two companies plan to launch the second Demand Media/Vator Challenge in a couple months. Keep watching our competitions section for new contests. Caith Chapman, one of the senior mergers and acquisitions executives at Demand Media, was the point man on the first Demand Media and Vator competition - a contest seeking the top niche vertical social network or digital media company. In this ...

Open-innovation platform gets funded

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, May 7, 2008 | Comments

We've been covering "wisdom of crowds" markeplaces and predictive markets a lot at Vator.tv as they've emerged as areas of investment interest. Moreover, Vator.tv's competitions are, in a way, an open platform for organizers, investors or schools to find hot startups. So, when I saw that InnoCentive received $6.5 million in new funding, I had to post this. InnoCentive is a marketplace for solving scientific problems. Spencer Trask Ventures led the round, with Omidyar Network and Eli Lilly & Co. ...

VC Experts CEO Michael Ostendorff on private valuations

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, May 5, 2008 | Comments

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Michael Ostendorff, Director of Sales & Marketing, VC Experts, tells Vator.tv's Bambi Francisco how his company pores over regulatory filings to get information on funding rounds, valuations and other data on privately-held companies. The company is taking on larger rivals like Dow Jones and Thomson Financial in providing entrepreneurs and investors with information that can help them negotiate deals.

Aggregate Knowledge CEO Paul Martino on recommendations

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, May 2, 2008 | Comments

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Aggregate Knowledge CEO Paul Martino tells Vator.tv's Bambi Francisco how the site's Pique Discovery Network is helping online advertisers and publishers get their content or ads in front of consumers who are predisposed to want to view them but are not sure what they're looking for. The startup says that its technology puts 1 billion content and advertising placements in front of 100 million users every month. Martino, on his fourth startup, shared the lessons he learned as an entrepreneur in ...

Lessons Learned: Wigix CEO James Chong

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, May 1, 2008 | Comments

	Wigix CEO James Chong shares his entrepreneurial advice with Vator.tv's Bambi Francisco. Earlier this week, the company launched an online trading platform for goods.
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Wigix launches an eBay for 'passive' sellers

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, April 29, 2008 | Comments

Wigix, a company founded by former Charles Schwab executives, on Tuesday announced the public beta service of a NASDAQ-style trading platform for goods, rather than stocks. The items that will likely fill this platform are those typically found in your attic or garage. While that may sound a bit odd, remember that eBay - which sports a $41 billion market cap - was founded in 1995 as a platform to sell PEZ dispensers. So, is Wigix out to compete with ...

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