Bambi Francisco

More startup interviews

Bebo is set to overtake MySpace in the UK for visits before this fall, according to Hitwise. Bebo climbed to take the No. 2 spot, in the Hitwise Net Communities and Chat category last week, second only to MySpace. MySpace still leads social networking sites. Bebo is No. 2, but Bebo is fast closing the gap. 

Watch my interview with Bebo founder and CEO Michael Birch

Want to know how Plaxo started? Watch this two-part story I did during Plaxo's early years. It aired on MarketWatch's business magazine show on CBS, when the founders and venture investors were seeking a CEO. The story includes the Plaxo founders, Todd Masonis and Cameron Ring, and VC backers, such as Mike Moritz and Ram Shriram.

Watch Plaxo, part I and Watch Plaxo, part II

War of ideas

Do you see napkins flying around?

Watching the emergence of startups in Silicon Valley reminds me of 1999, when a plethora of two-person shops -- that got funding with just a business plan scribbled on napkins -- competed for the same mindshare and dollar. To some extent, the same frenzied environment is shaping up today: Competition is cutthroat for the same eyeball and the same buck.

Venture capitalists -- seeking to fund their own winner -- are investing in similar companies that essentially are doing the same thing. Look no further than video-sharing sites. Blue-chip venture firm Kleiner Perkins has Akimbo, which hosts more than 10,000 shows. Sequoia Capital has YouTube, whose most popular video was watched 9-plus million times. Every VC will have their own Internet TV startup, I’m sure. RipeTV.com -- the Web version of SpikeTV -- is expected to announce a round of VC funding soon, I hear.

VCs are filling the pipeline because they know traditional companies fear their extinction in the new media age and are hungry for ideas. And, while venture investors’ raison d’etre is to disrupt the status quo, in a twisted way, they’re competing with the startups they embraced only a few years back. Google, which was funded by Kleiner and Sequoia back in 1999, is trying to win in the video-sharing world with Google Video. 

The cash is plentiful on both sides. Last year, venture capitalists raised $24.2 billion, which was spread across 199 new funds, according to Dow Jones VentureOne. It’s the highest dollar amount raised since 2001.

Google has $8.43 billion in cash and cash equivalents. Yahoo has $3.8 billion in cash and cash equivalents, is also considering launching its own user-generated video service. Microsoft , which owns MSN and has $34.8 billion in cash and short-term investments, plans to launch its own video sharing service, code-named “Warhol,” that will integrate with its MSN Video and MSN Spaces services. At the same time this user-gen world is cluttering the media landscape, there's another kind of digital content being created as well. This time, it's from people who are already creating content for a living. They are those who have ties with traditional publishers and agents, but are now creating new content that can give them a greater piece of the pie. I call them free agents. IAmplify just got out of stealth mode about 3 months ago. This Manhattan-based company is helping these free agents. Read about iAmplify's business model on MarketWatch.

Read Net Sense on MarketWatch

Read NYTimes on Google/MSFT arms race

Read SJ Mercury News on eBay/Google strained relationship

Check out Yahoo's rival to CNet - Yahoo Tech channel

 

Blog churn

Technorati's David Sifry talks about the many one-hit wonders in the blogosphere. Yikes.

The problem with VideoEgg

I've been testing out VideoEgg - whose tagline is video publishing over easy (love that) -- for a few weeks now. It's one of the few services that allow you to put a player on your site and upload video. It's unlike Revver, YouTube, Google Video and Grouper. Those services are video destinations. While VideoEgg is useful, it doesn't allow you to edit the comments on your post. For instance, I tried to put my AddictingClips video in a "startup interview" folder, and that edit caused my AddictingClips video to disappear. So, I had to republish. As some of my visitors might notice, the Mika Salmi video is back at the top of this blog. 

AddictingClips

So you want to share your videos? You can earn $250 if you submit your video to Atom Entertainment, which operates AddictingClips and AtomFilms. If you're serious about a 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.

YouTube vs. MySpace videos

To everything, churn, churn, churn. There is a season, churn, churn, churn. If there is one word we'll hear often in this new media world, it's churn. Consider: It took MySpace's video service four days to top the charts, surpassing YouTube and Google Video, according to Hitwise, a measurement service company - which sells its data for $30,000 to $50,000 annually. It won't be long for that ranking to change since there's a lot of churn at these user-generated sites, according to Bill Tancer, general manager of global research for Hitwise, who came to the MarketWatch studios recently. Tancer also clarified some traffic data.

Hitwise had been reporting that YouTube was generating more session times than vids.MySpace.com. But Hitwise wasn't exactly comparing apples to apples, resulting in what may have been overinflated numbers for YouTube. According Tancer, all of the hits on YouTube are counted. So, if I'm just navigating around YouTube's favorite or most-viewed videos, these are counted as sessions, even if I don't watch a video. Also, if I click back onto a video just to write a message, the video automatically plays. On MySpace, only videos that are  viewed are counted as sessions. MySpace videos also don't automatically play.