News aggregators and music jamming sites

Esther Dyson helps us evaluate Socialmedian and Indaba

We've come a long way from getting the news dropped off at our doorsteps. Even though I still read the paper version of the Wall Street Journal, most of the news is coming from emerging aggregators, such as Alltop, Socialmedian and even Fark. These days, news is created by everyone and anyone with an online connection. It's not a surprise therefore that the business of aggregating that news - however worthy of being collected - has become an opportunity. Just recently, Tina Brown launched The Daily Beast, a political news aggregation site, similar to other news aggregation sites Huffington Post and Drudge Report. Other emerging news aggregation sites include Socialmedian and Alltop. and, sites like Publish2 and Zemanta are helping anyone become journalists and curators of news. 

Of course, there are the more established sites where stories bubble up to the top depending on votes and submissions, like Digg, Fark and Yahoo Buzz.

Is this field worth investing in? Or is it too crowded? In this Vator Box episode, Esther Dyson is our guest host - yet again - and helps us evaluate the prospects for Socialmedian, an emerging news aggregation site founded by Jason Goldberg. Socialmedian, which Liquid Scenarios estimates is worth $2 million based on comparables, essentially lets people personalize their news down to the topic. Additionally, Socialmedian allows people to follow others who they believe are newsmakers. 

"I love Jason. He’s smart. He’s experienced. If I did invest in it, it would be in the basis of him running it," she said. "The real challenge is how do you differentiate yourself from the nine other things like this," she added. "There's too much stuff out there. Maybe one or two of them will bubble to the top. But I wouldn’t be in the sector."

Ezra praised Jason, who's raised some $600,000 in seed money, for being prudent about his fundraising approach. He's been "very smart about managing the equilibrium between the amount of money he raises, his exit potential and the business he builds," said Ezra. 

Esther was asked to invest in Socialmedian, but she declined. You'll have to watch the show to see why.

We then set our sights to Indaba Music, a site that lets musicians jam with one another. Already, Indaba has a subscriber list of 75,000 people. Esther, who's invested in eJamming, said she likes the concept. 

Indaba, which has not yet taken venture funding, makes money by charging marketers and promoters a fee to use its service. For instance, Indaba recently announced that it's working with Yo-Yo Ma whereby the artist has posted a pre-recorded melody of its piece "Dona Nobis Pacem" on the Indaba site. Members of the Indaba community are challenged to create variations of that piece to create new songs. Indaba's business model is not dissimilar to Mozes, which is also trying to tap into the marketer and promoter budgets. 

As for who we'd bet on? You'll have to watch the show to find out. 

(Note: We're not experts. We're just trying to create a dialogue around the topics. So, if you disagree with us, let us know. We welcome your input about the companies we talk about on Vator Box. We especially welcome input from the founders of the companies we talk about.)