Bambi Francisco

Twitter's Jack Dorsey talks about monetizing his company

In 2004, I wrote: “I’m searched, therefore I am. To borrow from Rene Descartes' philosophy, in today's Internet-obsessed world, we know we exist, not because we think, but because we're searched.” Today, thanks to Twitter, it's more like "I'm followed, therefore I am." Indeed, even Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey says Twitter essentially captures the "status of everything." Wait, I thought Google was God?  Anyway, Jack came to the Vator studio for a three-part interview to talk about Twitter’s business model, the Summize acquisition, the introduction of video updates, and how he views Seesmic, which calls itself a video Twitter, FriendFeed and Twitter clones, such as Pownce, Plurk and Identi.ca. This is the first part.

Seesmic expands video comments with Disqus

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 personal Bambi.blogs, as of yesterday. (Thanks Daniel for helping set that up on TypePad).   

It's a good partnership as Seesmic, which has $6 million in funding from some high-profile angels, like Ron Conway, seeks to ramp up its user base, which now stands at 15,000. As Seesmic CEO and founder Loic Le Meur will tell you himself, at this point, it's all about getting users, users, users! He's determined to reach 1 million, though he won't commit to a date he thinks he'll reach that milestone. (Watch Loic's Seesmic pitch in this video.) 

Given that the site is invite-only, once he opens it up officially in mid-June, I'm sure the adoption rate will accelerate, especially with partners like Disqus. By partnering with Disqus, all of Disqus members will automatically be part of Seesmic. That could be 100,000 new users immediately. Daniel says that he has an active commentator base of 100,000. An active user is someone who comments in the past seven days. Moreover, Disqus' approach to getting new users is pretty clever. Partner with the most active blogs that generate dialogue and claim users commenting as your own.

Read the rest of the article on Vator.tv

Zivity - You know it when you see it

Capturing the female body in an artistic form can be tricky. The subtlest of adjustments can move a piece from inspirational to offensive. The former attracts a female audience, the latter – more likely males. Zivity wants to attract both, raising questions as to whether men and women, when dealing with “art” that dallies in moral obscurity, really want the same thing.

Seems to me that there is a reason that men read Playboy, women read Cosmo, and men read Playgirl. Essentially, men tend to like photos that help them get right to point while women generally like photos to show them how to be beautiful. Plus, women like to spend a bit more time on the experience. Zivity may have its work cut out for itself trying to please both.

If Zivity slips to the wrong side of that fine line between smut and beauty, it risks losing the female audience. And, it'll be pretty obvious if it does slip. As Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart prophetically stated about obscenity vs. art “I know it when I see it.”

Zivity is a new experience oriented, subscription site for females to share risqué, provocative and sometimes nude photos. It’s attracted about 100 amateur female models, including Zivity’s founder Cyan Banister, as well as Bella Sioux and Doll (both can be seen in Zivity’s Vator profile). Many of the models bare it all, though Zivity keeps the ratio of nude to non-nude to 50%, said Cyan in her interview with me.

(Go to Vator.tv to read the entire piece.)

 

Vator Box opens the kimono (Zivity, 23andMe)

This week, the theme on Vator Box is transparency. We look at two women-started social networking sites that reveal who we are at some core level. The first one is Zivity, a $7-million-funded company that founder Cyan Banister describes in her video pitch as a beauty site that "sits at the intersection of MySpace, Playboy and American Idol and Playboy." This is not your mother's iVillage. We also looked at 23andMe, a personal genomics company with $10 million in funding from Genentech and Google, that hopes to create social networks around a person's haplotype. (Watch interview with 23andMe cofounder Linda Avey in 23andMe ushers in social 'DNA' networks.)

The high-profile startup lets people get access to their genetic information and learn their predispositions for health conditions, or get a better understanding of their ancestry and traits. Our guest host and Simon Cowell for this segment was Deva Hazarika, founder of enterprise software company ClearContext. Even though Deva applied 27 times and has been rejected for the Zivity beta program, he still gave worthwhile observations, like this one: "What we can do is use the genomic social network to get the early indicators of who's going to be able to be on Zivity later."

In all seriousness, the conversation around Zivity really zeroed in on whether the site - with 50% of all photos being in the nude - could maintain a level of integrity and standards around high-brow, tastefully-shot females. The jury is still out. To that end, it was unclear to us just how Zivity reaches its goal of having 100,000 subscribers paying $10 a month for a subscription. But one thing was agreed upon, it's pretty clear that most sites that show a little flesh are probably going to be popular businesses.

We then spent some time on 23andMe, one of the up-and-coming companies in the personal genomics field that competes with Navigenics. (Watch my interview with Navigenics CEO Mari Baker).

Even though we dove into the concerns around privacy and discrimination and health care, the big question for us was how much genetic testing improves people's health. Studies are mixed. One study on smokers conducted at Georgetown University Medical Center found that "giving smokers information about their genetic risk of lung cancer upped the motivation to quit -- but a year afterward, they were not more likely to quit smoking than people who received counseling," according to a Los Angeles Times article. Another study at Boston University tested people for Alzheimer's. According to the same article, people who were tested for high risk for Alzheimer's changed their behavior in favor of a healthier lifestyle, but it was unclear if that change in behavior could ultimately prevent the disease. We were mixed on the price point. Deva thought $1,000 was minimal for the information. Ezra and I were skeptical about whether that fee was low enough for the average person to pay. 

Overall, we liked both companies. 

Slide's Max Levchin on making money in social media

Social networking is undoubtedly a ubiquitous feature of our online lives. But whether these platforms can make a lot of money is a big question. To this end, the business models of widgets - Slide, Flixster, iLike, RockYou - built atop of these “social graphs” seem somewhat tenuous.

Max Levchin knows this all too well. He recently raised  $50 million for what many consider to be a widget company. That company – Slide – now has a market valuation of half-a-billion. With such a high bar, comes hard work. Max’s mission over the next year or two – besides continually finding more ways to iterate upon Slide’s popular SuperPoke -- is to get profitable. If Slide isn’t making money in a couple years, as Max puts it: “I’m really screwing it up.”

Before jumping into the “making money” question, first a refresher on what Slide is. Slide is a place where 18-to-34 year olds hang out and express themselves with photos and videos. It was only after Slide made an application on Facebook that it grew like a weed, much like the other popular Facebook apps, Flixster and iLike.

“So, how does Slide make money?” I asked, in this recent interview in the Vator studios.

Slide primarily makes money through advertising, though users also feel that to SuperPoke someone is worth paying some money for, said Max. SuperPoke is an offshoot of Facebook’s “poke” concept that allows someone to send another person a communication without actually communicating at all. Much like a poke in real life. It doesn’t mean anything. It just gets your attention. SuperPoke builds upon a poke by making the gestures more expressive, like a slap or hug, and adding icons. Think of SuperPokes as virtual Hallmark cards or fancier emoticons  - those fun yellow smiley faces on our IM. 

Max wouldn’t get too in-depth about the business model of Slide. But he did say that he needs to understand the world of Madison Avenue better. Indeed, he should. After all, without convincing Madison Ave. to consistently embrace new media companies like Slide, it may be difficult for Max to convince Wall Street that Slide is worth taking public. This exit - which is rather ambitiuous in this market-meltdown environment - is seemingly something Max is gunning for.

“It was a pretty zesty affair,” said Max to me in a recent interview in the Vator studios. Max was referring to the time PayPal, a company he co-founded, went public back in February 2002, and was sold within six months to eBay for $1.5 billion. "I wouldn't mind doing it again."

(Note: This is the first of a two-part series with Max Levchin. The next interview will be on the evolution of online expression).

Vator Box on voyeurism and brand control

We're back again with Drew Curtis of Fark.com fame. This time we looked at fast-growing FriendFeed, and the appetite for voyeurism and socially-produced content. We then look at Gorilla Spot, which lets consumers create video ad mashups. The company competes with MixerCast and Genius Rocket, and is part of the booming, video-ad-solutions industry drawing up-and-comers like ScanScout, BrightRoll, Digitalsmiths, VideoEgg for publishers, and HotPluto, Spotzer and Turnhere - video solutions for small businesses. advertising. Finally, we look at file-backup company Carbonite. It has nothing to do with the other two companies we looked. But it's a company with real revenue and a real value proposition. 

Let’s start with FriendFeed, an easy-to-use service that lets you see the content across the Web that your friends or people who randomly end up in your network are using. The content comes from services, like Twitter, Yahoo's Flickr, Netflix Queue and Google's YouTube. (Read and watch my interview and analysis of FriendFeed with Paul Buccheit, FriendFeed founder.)

Ezra Roizen – Vator Box regular guest – raised the point that it’s unclear what the demand is for other people’s “dribble,” though clearly it’s a fascination among those who Twitter and use Seesmic, a video Twitter.

Drew said that as a whole, socially-collected content and contributing commentary around them generate a lot of pageviews, but the “actual product sucks.” 

Indeed, FriendFeed’s traffic has exploded since March, according to Alexa. But much of the content shared (including some from yours truly) and comments offered belong on the editing floor, and definitely have a short lifespan. As Drew pointed out in a separate interview I had with him, of the 2,000 articles posted each day on Fark, only about 100 are deemed worthy of being showcased by the Fark moderators.

Now, Ezra did point out that there is value in creating “discussion around content” or a “shared experience.” I could not agree more. In a recent interview (to be published next week) with Slide CEO and founder Max Levchin, he tells me that the key to keeping fickle Web users glued to a particular product is to ensure that their content is mixed with other content that is not theirs.

In other words, a person can and will easily move his/her own scrapbook-like content from one social network to another. But if he/she cannot take the contributions of others, they’re more likely to stay put.

Indeed, I have had profiles on Tribe, Friendster, MySpace, and on social-activity sites, such as Kaboodle and Plum. I’ve not stuck around. I just moved onto the next site that lets me create a presence. There are no switching costs, besides lost photos (but given the abundance of such photos, I'm hardly emotionally attached to any digital content I've collected in the past. I'll just make new memories.)

But - to Max's and Ezra's point - in time, if my content mixed with others creates something even more valuable, and if I can’t take that finished or ongoing product with me, then I’d more likely stick around. Social-activity sites aren’t something to sneeze at. Soical-shopping site Kaboodle was purchased for $30 million by Hearst in August 2007. I remember when Kaboodle was valued at $9 million in 2006. (Full disclosure: Paul Buchheit is an investor in Vator.)

Speaking of mixed content, social sharing and mashups, Gorillaspot is a company that lets marketers involve their fans or customers in the promotion of products. In the Gorillaspot video pitch, you can see how Viacom’s Paramount Pictures used Gorillaspot to promote Sweeney Todd.  According to Athan Stephanopoulous, the company’s founder and CEO, those participating in the Sweeney Todd campaign spent an average of 30 minutes editing the movie trailer. I can definitely see this happening. Ezra's son Tanner spends about 30 minutes or more creating scrapbooks of Star Wars characters. I wouldn't doubt that the next step for him is editing an entire video.

But the challenge for such user-generated advertising services is getting marketers/advertisers comfortable with the unpredictable personal touches that can hurt brands. Advertisers are "scared to death," said Drew, who talked about a campaign he held on Fark. "You can't stop anyone from putting a big giant P.. (bleep)" on an ad, he said. "How do you get around that?" I asked.

"You don't," he responded. "It's a flawed concept."

The upshot is if consumers know that what they're viewing is a "derivative" product, a brand may not be tarnished regardless of the mixed content. You'll have to watch the video for our collective thoughts on user-generated ads.

Finally, we looked at Carbonite. Hands down, this company is worth taking a look at. It's not a cutting-edge,  sexy idea or business. But it makes money and it's growing fast.

Vator Reports on the changing advertising landscape

Vator.tv’s new managing editor John Shinal and I highlight the rapidly changing online marketing and advertising industry. In our new 'Vator Innovation Minute' John zooms in on online reputation management. Featured in this episode are the following companies we found on Vator.tv: Visible Technologies, Buzzlogic, Videoegg, Outerjoin, AdKrakr and Genius.com. [in the context of online reputation management specifically you may also want to check out the company Rapleaf]. To check out our upcoming Demand Media/Vator.tv Competition seeking the next big media company click here. Enjoy the show and see you on Vator.tv!

Vator Reports on discovery tools across the Web

This episode of the Vator Reports is all about online discovery. Tony Perkins and I discuss the different approaches that new Internet ventures follow in providing contextually relevant information to their users. Highlighted in this episode are the founders of the following companies many of which have the potential to define the future of Internet discovery: Wize, Aggregate Knowledge, Flixster, ThisNext, HailCab, Spotplex and Sphere.
Bambi’s 1:1 interviews with the founders of Aggregate Knowledge, Flixster, Wize, Spotplex and Sphere can be found here: Aggregate Knowledge/Flixster, Wize, Spotplex, Sphere. Enjoy the show and see you on Vator.tv!

Ross Levinsohn on Web trends, Velocity

Two big Web luminaries - Ross Levinsohn, who was Fox Interactive Media President at the time News Corp bought MySpace, and Jonathan Miller, who was AOL CEO when the Internet company bought Advertising.com -- have finally revealed their new venture - Velocity Investmet Group. As Ross tells me in this interview, he and John knew each other for the last 15 years. They realized that they "agree on most things" about the Internet and, in fact, competed for acquisitions while they were both at their respective companies. As luck would have it, they both left their companies within two days of one another and thus began brainstorming for the last five months. Both worked on various ideas, including the idea to raise funds for their own venture. In the end, being advisers to deep-pocketed General Atlantic was the way to go. (Go to Vator.tv for more of the story.)

Calling all female entrepreneurs!

On August 1, 2007, SF New Tech Meetup is holding an event for female entrepreneurs. The gathering will be held at the Metreon in San Francisco, CA. There will be five or six women presenting, including yours truly. I'll be demonstrating Vator.tv, the online venue for innovation and innovators. For those who don't know Vator.tv, it's a place where anyone from around the world can pitch their idea and be discovered by like-minded innovators or investors or service providers who can help build that idea. It's also a place to discover ideas, collaborate and exchange knowledge. That's my brief pitch. But check out Myles Weissleder's Vator pitch on his conference.