Bambi Francisco

YouTube and Paris

YouTube should start filtering what goes onto its site if it wants to keep its service child friendly. You'll know what I mean when you go onto YouTube's most-recently uploaded videos. There you'll get some vides with the title "lick" and "asian girl." I'll just leave it at that.  Seems like YouTube is following in the footsteps of Paris Hilton.

To be sure, YouTube doesn't want this material on its service. The problem is that it's still small and probably doesn't have the man power to police the service. MySpace has 100 people on staff in its customer service department. Videos are filtered before they can be publicly posted.

To be fair to YouTube, the two videos were taken down. I caught them when they were up for 14 minutes. Here's what Julie Supan (spokeswoman) said:
"Our policy prohibits inappropriate content on YouTube.  Our community understands the rules and effectively polices the site for inappropriate material.  The users can flag content that they feel is inappropriate and once it is flagged it is reviewed by us and removed from the system within minutes.  This combined with our proprietary technology helps us to enforce the rules. We also disable the accounts of repeat offenders. Community policing is very effective in open communities, such as ours - similear to the model created by eBay, Amazon.com and Craigslist."

Facebook funding

Facebook received $25 million in funding for a $525 million pre-money valuation.

Nice work for Mark Zuckerberg, who in February 2004  started Facebook in his college dorm. Back then, he paid $85 a month for three months to get his startup going. Zuckerberg -- who turns all of 22 next month - told me once that if his idea failed, there's always Harvard, a fallback notion that Microsoft Bill Gates turned on its ear in 2004, on a visit to Cambridge, Mass. "I encourage you guys to take time off and do something... 'If Microsoft ever falls through, I'm going back to Harvard,'" Zuckerberg recalled hearing Gates say. Looks like Zuckerberg isn't going back for a while.  No wonder 50% of China's undergraduates received degrees in natural science or engineering vs. 15% in the U.S. (according to Lockheed Martin CEO Robert Stevens' opinion piece in WSJ). All the college students here quit before they get their degrees. For the record, Zuckerberg was a psychology major.

Read my Net Sense column on MarketWatch

What would you do? 1) Take the $750 million from Viacom, and work on your tan? 2) Take the $25 million for a $550 million valuation from Greylock, and work on building the business to create even more value to either sell at a higher price down the road, or... dare I say, go public!?!? (If you want to watch Mark, click onto startup interviews.)

Atypical financing

Kaboodle CEO and founder Manish Chandra took $3.5 million in funding from 10 strategic angel investors. It's a large sum for an angel round, hence the large number of angels. In our interview, I asked Chandra why he chose this route over the VC route, and whether he received a valuation in this round.  He did. Post-money valuation = $9.5 million. I also asked him why a Web 2.0 startup needed so much cash to operate a business. After all, don't Web 2.0 companies outsource all the content creation? Chandra has some interesting ideas he needs to build out. For instance, he's working on integrating product feeds from comparison-shopping engines and comparison-shopping travel sites. No partnerships to announce just yet. The goal? To get consumers to create pages of shopping or travel lists and to match these consumers up with the vendors.

Watch interview with Chandra

Video explosion

Michael Eisner just invested in Veoh Networks - one of the many Internet video channels populating the Web. If  you haven't noticed, there's been an explosion of video channels, to meet our most idiosyncratic interests, exploding on the Web.  Want to know about Zardoz, the 1974 science-fiction film? Go onto Revver.com, and you'll find 321 videos that were tagged with the label "Zardoz." Theoretically, those videos should have some relation to Zardoz. If those videos were streamed one after another, so an Internet viewer could watch the videos passively, those video streams would be akin to a channel purely devoted to Zardoz. For those with a broader with a broader scope of interest, say, soccer, there is a channel for that too. Nike on Monday unveiled a television channel for soccer-crazed kids. It's an online channel through which Nike will try to use entertaining content to subtly sell its brand and products. It's a form of "marketing entertainment," says Hilmi Ozguc, founder of Maven Networks, a four-year-old startup creating the Internet channel for Nike.

What are the implications of such diverse creative bottoms-up endeavors? Oh, where do I begin? There are a lot.  Go to MarketWatch to read my Net Sense column.

New York Times television

Recently I saw a video clip of New York Times reporter David Sanger talking about his report. Next to his article on the site was a link to his video report, just in case you preferred watching or listening rather than reading. I had known his name for years from just reading his articles. Now, I'm watching him talk about them. I can't imagine the video clips are super popular. But that's to be expected in these early days of Internet video. What's more important is that the NYTimes.com is creating the image of having news in multiple formats.  Oh, the lines are blurring.  Pretty soon it will be difficult to differentiate between TV and print journalists. The New York Times Co. is exercising its right to sell its 50% stake in digital cable channel Discovery Times to Discovery Communications, according to TVweek.com The company is exiting the four-year-old joint venture because it wants to invest more in Internet video. "There is strong demand for video streaming on our Web sites and advertisers are really coveting that," said NY Times Co. President/CEO Janet Robinson. Read story from TVweek.com

Meat-market cleanup

One of my 10 Internet predictions for 2006 was a "meat-market cleanup" or "social-network crackdown." When I wrote this list on Dec. 28, 2005, I received a number of responses from those who disagreed. Well, looks like that prediction is coming true. Earlier this week, News Corp hired a security officer - Hemanshu Nigam - to police the largest social network on the Web, MySpace.

This is what I wrote last year: "Because of rising concerns that social-networking sites allow people to disguise themselves, and potentially harm unsuspecting members, there will be a social-network crackdown. As part of this, there will be new attempts to monitor members and to make sure that children don't gain access to these virtual meat markets."

MySpace undoubtedly needs a watchdog. It's inevitable that something unfortunate will happen in the virtual world. Earlier this week, I wrote about how far more public we've become because of the benefits received from sharing information. Someone will take advantage of that information, I'm sure. Until that perceived threat of danger becomes a reality, people will continue to share freely and abundantly.

Read my Net Sense on MarketWatch: Our privacy in exchange for...

 

The transparent society

Back in 2003 I gave a presentation to investors who wanted to know about Internet trends.  Truth be told, they cared less about trends and more about stock tickers. My last slide for that presentation was a picture of Tadao Ando's Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.  Essentially, I ended the presentation by admitting that I was terrible at predicting trends. But what I felt strongly about was that we would become more transparent. Whatever the consequence of that would be, I didn't know. Based on their blank stares, they didn't know either. Nor did they quite understand why I was talking about transparent societies. If they could invest in such an idea, however, I'm sure they would have been all ears. Nonetheless, I left it up to them to decide what transparency means to them, and how transparency would change consumer behavior, and create demand for certain products developed by companies they may one day want to invest in. It's been a long time since that presentation. I finally got the chance to use that "Transparent Society" title in a recent column on MarketWatch.

Read my Net Sense column on MarketWatch

Once again, I wondered what the consequence of such a society would be. I think it's that we all get to know who we truly are at the core. And, I'm pretty sure it won't look all that pleasant.  Consider this, would you really want to see those photos of you during your bacchanalian days?  David Sifry - CEO and founder of Technorati - predicts that in 40 years, we won't be asking about whether the presidential candidates inhaled. Rather, we'll be asking: "What does his Facebook profile say about him?" Sifry thinks that transparency will make us all tolerant of one another. I agree. After all, we won't be able to hide from anyone. 

VC investing in search hits record

In 1999, a tiny unknown company received venture capital funding. Back then, 32 search startups received funding. It was the most active year for venture investing in the search space.

That was of course, until the last two years. Last year saw a record number of search startups get funded.In 2005, 47 search startups received an aggregate of $262.9 million in venture funding, according to VentureOne, a unit of Dow Jones. The dollar volume last year was the highest since 2000, when nearly $280 million was invested into 18 search startups. All told, $916 million has been invested in 130 search-related startups in the last five years, with 82 of those deals done in 2004 and 2005.

Last year's recipients include Feedster -- for blog, podcasts and news searches, X1 Technologies -- for desktop search, Onmeta -- a search engine focused on entertainment, and 4Info -- for mobile search, to name a few. 

Why are VCs pouring money back into search startups? Why not? As they say, "Let 1,000 flowers bloom."  Oh, and that tiny unknown search engine that received funding in 1999 was Google.

Read Net Sense on MarketWatch.

Let me know of any search companies you think I should review.

AddictingClips

So you want to share your videos? You might win $250 if you submit your video to Atom Entertainment, which operates AddictingClips and AtomFilms. If you're serious about making movies, you might want to consider this service, given Mika Salmi's track record. AtomFilms helped launch JibJab into stardom. I asked Salmi, who started Atom Entertainment about 8 years ago, how he was going to compete for user video when YouTube seems to be the place to be seen. File-size limit at AddictingClips is 100 megabytes.
 

Jajah founder

Jahah, which received several million from Sequoia back in October, is getting traction these days. Co-founder Roman Scharf says his voIP service is as easy as searching on Google.