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Posts Tagged ‘celebrity’

There is no doubt that the iPhone and iPod Touch are glitzy game machines (just check out the ads for the IPod Touch). But don’t underestimate the reach and earning power of apps based on the lowly text message. New York City-based Snackable Media sold $170 million worth of text-based games through carriers in 2009, according to CEO Eyal Yechezkell. That number is gross revenue, which it splits about 50/50 with the mobile carriers, and is up from $90 million in 2008 and $30 million in 2007. The company is profitable, says Yechezkell, and it never took a dime of venture funding. It employs 100 people in New York City and Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Snackable Media develops and sells a family of SMS-based games. The most popular one is Predicto, which boasts more than a million monthly active users, all paying a $9.95 per month subscription. Predicto sends players text messages with multiple-choice questions asking them to make predictions about celebrity news and pop culture. “Who will host the Tonight Show by 3/1?” “Will Best Actress nominee Julia Roberts wear an Armani gown to the Golden Globes?” Players text back their answers, and get a chance to win prizes up to $50,000. On average, people sign up for 3 to 4 months.

The company also offers a text version of the TV game show “Deal Or No Deal,” and another game called Celebrity Squares. It’s next game will be called “Guess SMS.” They are all extremely simple and addictive in the way that many causal games are. But why do people pay $10 a month for the mobile equivalent of Zork when they can get full graphics and gyroscopic controls on an iPhone, where a typical game costs $10 or less for a download that lasts as long as you own your phone? Not everyone has an iPhone, but everyone has a mobile phone that supports text messages.

Also when games are added to people’s cell phone bills, they are just not as price-sensitive as when they buy a lá carte. SMS games are an “extension of ringtone clubs,” explains Yechezkell. Remember those? Don’t laugh. The numbers that Snackable Media is posting, along with those of competitors such as SendMe Mobile and Thumbplay show that SMS is far from dead and can support applications beyond just messaging.

But Snackable Media offers another object lesson to mobile game developers everywhere. Much of its success is because it acquires new users through aggressive online marketing. Before changing its name to Snackable Media last November, the company was called Next Web Media because it started life in 2000 as a cost-per-acquisition ad network like ValueClick. They raised $150,000 from Friends and family back then and quickly got to the point where they were self-funding. The company took the marketing skills it learned as an ad network and applied it to mobile SMS games in 2007, and now SMS games make up pretty much all of its revenues.

Snackable Media advertises online directly to consumers, and signs them up by sending them a text message. When they reply “Yes,” they get signed up for a subscription. A newly launched game typically turns profitable after three months. That ongoing subscription revenue is the key to Snackable Media’s business model. It is what allows it to pay for advertising and acquire new customers economically.

Yechezkell realizes that the mobile world is moving towards fully functioning Web phones and graphics-heavy game apps, and he has smartphone apps under development. But Facebook integration will come first (for instance, send a prediction to your stream), and he still prefers the economics of SMS games. He points out: “Right now, these applications are just sitting in the App Store and not really advertised. When you start advertising applications, 99 cents might not be a profitable model. At the end of the day there needs to be some margin.” He thinks it would be better if apps could be delivered directly from ads on the mobile Web or through SMS-linked downloads. In other words, he’d rather bypass the App Store, market directly, and give carriers a cut for delivering the apps and handling billing.

My prediction: Apple is never going to let that happen.

FbFund-backed NutshellMail provides an innovative web-based service that lets users send and receive your messages from social networks, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter, in your email inbox. Today, the application has added a nifty feature that lets any Facebook page administrator create an automated email newsletter campaign.

The NutshellMail Facebook application allows users to easily add an “Email Newsletter” tab to your page, letting fans opt-in to receiving emails that highlight recent content from your page.

The application is fairly simple; NutshellMail collects recent activity from your page, organizes it into an email and delivers it to each subscriber on Facebook as per their own delivery preferences. Subscribers can also comment, like, share or post comments back to your page directly through email. And administrators can determine how often an email update is sent out to fans.

Founded in 2007, NutshellMail was one of twenty startups incubated within the 2009 class of fbFund REV, Facebook’s joint program with Accel Partners and Founders Fund aimed to help foster quality applications on Facebook Platform.

Funny story on Dutch business blog Sprout this morning: Soocial, an Amsterdam-based digital contact management startup, talks about its quarrels with actor and singer David Hasselhoff.

Here’s how the story started: Soocial, an angel investor-backed startup that provides a simple but powerful contact synchronization service for both the Web and mobile phones, figured ‘hassle-free address book management’ fit its core product perfectly as a description when it was founded about two years ago.

As a gimmick, they associated the baseline with the freedom-looking Knight Rider and Baywatch actor and started using images and footage of the Hoff as part of their marketing message (see video below).

Turns out Hasselhoff wasn’t all too pleased with the unauthorized use of his image, prompting him to have his lawyers send a cease and desist letter to the fledgling company. The message was clear: Soocial was to remove all images of David Hasselhoff from its website, videos and business cards or legal action would ensue.

First, the startup tried to stall the process by delaying any response to letters or e-mail that was sent to them, and (unsuccessfully) attempted to make personal contact with the celebrity more than once. They ended up getting Hasselhoff’s agent excited by planting the idea of producing official endorsement videos for Soocial, featuring the actor, in his head.

The initial excitement ebbed away rather swiftly when the agent learned that Soocial wasn’t able to actually pay for those videos: he wanted $250,000, close to the total of capital that has been injected into the startup by angel investors to date.

Soocial didn’t give up and instead took it up a notch: they offered Hasselhoff equity in the company in exchange for a potential endorsement, and tried to sweeten the deal by playing the card of much-needed positive publicity that would ensue should the actor support a small, innovative company.

The Hoff didn’t bite.

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A celebrity Tweet consolidation! Mogul Russell Simmons and hip-hop media platform Global Grind are acquiring CelebrityTweet, which collects and aggregates Tweets from celebrities on its platform. The terms of the acquisition were not released.

Launched in October 2008, CelebrityTweet capitalizes on the growing number of celebs who take to Twitter to connect with their fan base.
Global Grind will be using CelebrityTweet to build its own platform and data base that lets users access Tweets from their favorite celebs. Global Grind also hopes to use the platform as a way for celebs to connect and engage with their fans. As more and more celebrities flock to Twitter, platform like CelebrityTweet can be useful to fans to find their Tweets.

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I’m still not sure if the Twitter stream is the right place to be for advertising, but with the way the company set out to make it easy for developers to build upon their platform with open APIs, it’s no wonder so many ad networks have sprung up since it got started. Its massive growth and the fact that the San Francisco startup is a media and celebrity darling probably helped in that regard, too.

One of the companies that is dabbling with advertising on Twitter – even if Biz & co seem to be reluctant to do some serious testing of their own – is Ad.ly, an LA-based startup that launched about a month ago.

In essence, Ad.ly aims to link up high-profile advertisers with celebrities on Twitter and distribute links to marketing campaigns through the celebs’ tweet streams with full disclosure.

The model is pretty straightforward: the celebrity (or publisher) gets a lot of cash in return for a couple of messages that are under 140 characters, and Ad.ly takes its cut.

As my colleague Leena Rao wrote upon Ad.ly’s launch:

Each publisher sets the price of a Tweet campaign but Ad.ly will give the publisher a pricing suggestion based on variety of metrics. Ad.ly’s proprietary algorithm evaluates follower counts, authority, quality of Tweets and will help determine the Twitter’s value. And when I say that celebs get paid “handsomely,” I mean it. If a celeb has above a million followers, each Tweet gets in the five figures, with multiple Tweets about a product netting the celeb a six-figure reward (yes, for four Tweets!). Ad.ly takes a cut of what the celeb makes, but Rad wouldn’t reveal what the percentage is.

That’s a lot of money for tweets, so time will tell if it’s a sustainable model, if celebrities keep signing up and using the service and if Ad.ly will be able to pay their promised dues. But some investors are bullish on the potential, at least.

Yesterday, GRP Partners’ Mark Suster wrote an interesting blog post on the topic of VC seed funding. In the post, Suster reveals that GRP Partners, where he is a General Partner, has just closed a $500,000 seed round for Ad.ly and that he’d be interested in leading or joining follow-up VC financing rounds if the startup keeps performing well.

A couple of weeks ago, Ad.ly even hired a West Hollywood PR and marketing firm called Entertainment Fusion Group to be its ‘Agency of Record’; EFG will help the fledgling company with public relations and talent procurement. Since it’s deeply embedded in the entertainment industry, the firm should help Ad.ly get some exposure within the circle of movie stars and other celebrities.

So what gives? Has Ad.ly, with its focus on high-profile advertising partners and celeb Twitter users with a large number of followers, cracked the nut of Twitter advertising? Impossible to say without seeing some numbers, but it appears to be striking a chord or two.

Not that Ad.ly is the only one trying to capitalize on Twitter’s growth and celebrities’ massive audience. SponsoredTweets (from IZEA) does much of the same, and then there’s ExecTweets, a cooperation between Microsoft and Federated Media. Others, like Be-A-Magpie and Twittad, have their sights set on the long tail of Twitter.

Whether you think of it as stream pollution or an innovation social media monetization, Twitter advertising is here to stay, for better or worse. And you can rest assured many of these ad networks are going to run a profitable business way before Twitter does. The flip side of that coin is of course the fact that all of rely on the Twitter platform, so if they prosper or perish is partly Twitter’s call.

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It’s just weird.

It’s weird that Justin Timberlake – he formerly of N*Sync and having sex with Britney Spears – is currently spending his days pretending to be the guy who founded Plaxo. It’s also just weird that – along with Shawn Fanning’s pivotal cameo in the blasphemous remake of the Italian Job – both of the founders of Napster have now been key plot points in major Hollywood movies. And furthermore, as if all of that wasn’t just batshit weird enough – I discover that Justin Timberlake – when he’s not dressing up as the dude from the board of Yammer – has started to invest in Silicon Valley start-ups.  Weird weird weird.

Those, roughly, were my thoughts on Thursday evening, as I stood -  clutching a bottle of water – at the launch party for Robo.to, the latest product from Particle, which happens to be the start-up that Timberlake invested in.  Timberlake was in town too – in order to dress up as the guy from Causes – but couldn’t make the party due to work commitments. That was also weird, I thought. Not that he’d bailed in order to dress up as the other Facebook guy, but rather that him doing so had resulted in a reporter from US Weekly (which I discovered is pronounced “us, rather than US – which is also weird, given that it’s not about “us”, but rather about “them”) emailing me for a comment.

The subject line of the email read ” US WEEKLY WOULD LIKE TO CHAT WITH YOU” which made me think, as it would you, Holy Shit! All caps! This must be important!

And indeed it was…

Hi Paul

Just touching base with you in regards to your article you wrote regarding Justin Timberlake snubbing the event. Would love to chat with you. Can be OFF THE RECORD and totally CONFIDENTIAL if you prefer.

How much notice did JT people give you guys? Did he call himself personally to cancel? I heard that he may actually be in San Fran, is there any chance he will make it to the after event festivities?

Give me a call or let me know how I can reach you.

Thanks,

xxxxxxx
Staff Reporter, US weekly.

My first instinct, of course, was to fuck with her. To reply with a whole bunch of lies about how Timberlake had sent me flowers, or written me a really sweet note of apology. That would be hilarious, I thought, especially if it ended up in US Weekly. I mean, the fact that their fact checking doesn’t even extend to ensuring that they’re emailing the right person (it was MG’s story) or even the correct organisers (it wasn’t our event) suggests that I could basically send them any old bullshit and see it in print.

But that would be wrong, and unfair. After all, it was MG’s moment, not mine. So I did the right thing.

I fucked with MG…

from    Paul Carr
to    xxxxxxxx
cc: MG Siegler, Melissa Klein
subject    Re: From blog: US WEEKLY WOULD LIKE TO CHAT WITH YOU

Hi Tanisha,

Thanks for your email. Actually the piece was written by MG Siegler,
who I’m copying in to this email, along with Melissa who is handling
PR for the event.

MG would be better placed to tell you either ON or OFF the RECORD how
he heard the news. As far as I know JT sent him a bouquet of flowers
and a hand-written note of apology, which was both sweet and entirely
unnecessary.

Good luck with your story.

Best,

Paul

For good measure, I also Tweeted MG’s reaction to the fictitious flowers. I mean, sure, anyone seeing the tweet would think it was weird that Justin Timberlake would send flowers to a TechCrunch reporter. But then again, they’d also think it was weird that an US Weekly reporter would email me to ask about Justin Timberlake. They might also find it weird that, despite being in town, one of Particle’s main investors was too busy dressing up as the dude from the Facebook movie to attend his own party. If only Sean Parker had shown up at the party, wearing a three-piece suit and a trilby, the weirdness would have reached such a pitch that the world might have fallen off its axis.

But back to me. As I considered the almost countless ways that Timberlake slowly turning into the character he’s playing is weird, it occurred to me that something very weird is happening to geeks and celebrities generally. It’s been happening for a while in fact, starting probably – and fittingly – with Shawn Fanning appearing in the Italian Job.

For their part, geeks are becoming cool. And by cool I don’t mean ironic cool, like Michael Cera in Juno, or fake cool like Abby the would-be Suicide Girl in NCIS – I mean actual geeks are becoming actually cool, to the point where movies are getting made about them.

At the same time, cool people – celebrities, former boyband members, husbands of Demi Moore – are doing their best to become geeks. It used to be that computer club nerds grew up wanting to be celebrities, or at least to have sex with them. Now those same celebrities are so keen to emulate the nerds that they’ve started Tweeting and blogging and investing in startups. Equally, it used to be the natural order of things that rich movie stars got paid millions of dollars to dress up as people with a fraction of their personal wealth, now it’s the precisely the reverse: Sean Parker is paid considerably more to be Sean Parker than Justin Timberlake ever will.

If this trend continues, there has to be a point when the lines on the dorks/celebrities graph cross: when to all intents and purposes the two switch roles. And that day will not just be weird, but also terrifying. Just think of it for a moment: US weekly reports of Larry Page punching a staffer when he finds a green M&M in his dressing room. Scoble passed out in front of the Viper Room, a dozen paparazzo surrounding him, unaware that he’s already uploaded the photos himself to Flickr. And what’s that commotion in the bathroom stall? Oh, it’s just MG making out with a Pussycat Doll. Meanwhile the old-style celebrities will be working late at the office, pushing out a new release of their iPhone app before heading home to catch Arrington hosting the Soup.

Or at least that’s what I imagined as I stood at the party, holding my bottle of water and listening to the expectant hubbub of people speculating as to whether Timberlake might show up after all. We were all pretending to care about Robo.to, of course, but we all knew why we were really there. And at that, came a shout…

“Justin’s here!”

Holy crap! HE’S HERE! All caps – I panicked. I’m terrible at meeting celebrities; I always say exactly the wrong thing. “Roman, great to meet you. Have you met my 12 year old sister? You guys can use my room.” That kind of thing.

Heads turned. If there had been a piano player, he’d had stopped playing and you would have been able to hear a pin drop. But there wasn’t so he didn’t and you couldn’t – and anyway it was soon revealed to be a cruel joke. Justin was indeed at the party, but the geek Justin – Justin Kan from Justin.tv – not the celebrity one whose mere hint that he might show up at a party guarantees its success.

Saddened yet somehow relieved that – for that night at least – the natural order of things remained intact, I took a final sip of my water and headed home, via dinner at In-and-Out Burger. Meanwhile, somewhere across the city, I imagined Justin Timberlake partying with the Pussycat Dolls, or drunk dialling Britney Spears or whatever it is that proper celebrities do.

I’m only speculating on that last bit, of course, but what the hell – US Weekly, call me. I’ll Photoshop up some pictures.

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It’s time to stick up for the standard-issue video game controller. Yes, new, whiz-bang motion control, like the kind Sony and Microsoft demonstrated at E3 this week, may well be technologically impressive, and I appreciate the amount of work put into their development, but I can’t help but think, “Man, I have zero interest in any of that.” And I’m sure I’m not alone in preferring the standard-issue controller, like the DualShock 3 (or mouse and keyboard, for when I fire up the odd round or two of Team Fortress 2 ) or Xbox 360 control pad. Heck, I’d sooner try to play Fallout 3 with an 8-bit NES controller than punch the air, like a jerk, with Wii Motion Control Plus Boxing

Read the rest here: 
On the onslaught of rubbish motion control in video games today

Over the last few months celebrities have become something of a currency on the social web as services vie to attract big-name stars (and gather the resulting media coverage and new users in the process). Twitter has garnered the most attention for its roster, which includes celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Oprah. Facebook too has been making strides in this area, especially since releasing its redesigned ‘Pages’ that allow celebrities and brands to broadcast their updates to fans.

Another contender in the celebrity hunt is social network platform Ning, which is already home to a number of social networks dedicated to celebrities, politicians, and musicians. Today, the company has announced that it has forged a partnership with The Collective, a management company whose clients include Enrique Iglesias, to create custom networks for a number of The Collective’s biggest clients.

Along with Enrique, Collective clients including comedian Eddie Izzard, and actors John Leguizamo and Taylor Momsen will be deploying their own social networks on the platform. And some clients, including The All American Rejects, Staind, and the Plain White T’s have already launched their own Ning networks as their homepages.

I spoke with The Collective partner Aaron Ray, who says that while the company’s artists will continue to maintain presences on other networks where appropriate, Ning has offered a greater degree of access to support personnel than other social networks have - clearly the site is going out of its way to foster its relationship with celebrities. But Ning SVP of business operations Jason Rosenthal says that the company is only interested in working with celebrities that will use their Ning networks to truly connect with fans, not just as vanilla corporate celeb properties.

Rosenthal also says that while many celebrities maintain presences across multiple sites, they tend to use Ning as their central hub, with their other profiles serving as satellite ’spokes’ linking back to their social networks. This isn’t surprising given the increased level of control a celebrity has over their Ning network, than say, a Facebook page. But celebrities won’t be dropping the other services any time soon - a Ning network may offer a richer experience, but casual fans are more likely to subscribe to a celebrity’s Twitter feed or Facebook page than they are to join an entirely new social network.

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Pop culture’s obsession with celebrities is evolving along with technology. Ashton Kutcher reached 1 million Twitter followers and Oprah is now part of the Twitterati. And there is never enough news or information about celebrities to satiate the thirst of fans; they want more and more insight into celebrities’ lives, especially online. The startup that created Zivity, the adult social network and media site which debuted at TechCrunch40, is hoping to create the next-generation of digital fan clubs with its new site, TopFans.com. The site lets fans create celebrity “fan pages,” and then add content, such as images, video, and news, to the fan page. And the celebrities can also interact with their pages by adding their own content, commenting on content and interacting with fans.

The pages themselves are similar in theory to a MySpace page or Facebook pages for celebrities, but Top Fans hopes to differentiate itself in several ways. First, celebrities can directly import their Twitter feeds into their Top Fans pages. Like on a Facebook fan page, there is the ability to import RSS feeds into an activity stream. But Top Fans’ technology also crawls the web for news and images of the celebrity that will be imported into the main news feed on the page. Fans can also contribute comments and content to the site feed. The pages include a Digg-like button next to each piece of content that allows fans to vote whether they like the content or don’t like it. The highest rated content goes to the top of the feed. And unlike Facebook, where celebrities often have an “official” page and unofficial pages that have been created by fans, Top Fans ensures celebrities that they only have one centralized page with no duplicates. Pages can be created by fans or the celebrities themselves.

Fans are also rewarded when they contribute content to a Top Fans site, thus having the ability to differentiate themselves from other less-passionate fans. Fans are ranked, according to how much content they have contributed, which also gives celebrities a way to see who their biggest fans are. This feature can be especially attractive to a fan of a celebrity with hundreds of thousands of followers, who wants to stand out as one of the most loyal of all the fans.

Currently, Top Fans is launching with just “teen idols” and “professional baseball celebrities” (which amounts to 5,000 fan pages) but the end-game is to include Hollywood, internet celebrities, politicians, musicians, bands, etc. TopFans also also created profiles for the Top 1000 Twitterers, ranked by number of followers. This list includes Shaquille ONeal, John Mayer, Chris Sacca,, Ashton Kutcher and TechCrunch’s own Michael Arrington.

One potentially problematic issue for Top Fans is how to control the enormous amount of questionable content that’s on the web about celebrities, such as content that is taken by the paparazzi or speculative gossip about celebrities. Celebrities would most certainly not want this sort of content on a fan page. Top Fans CEO Jon Elvekrog says that all questionable news is flagged but said that many celebrities have the feeling that “any press is good press.” I’m not so sure that’s the case, considering the growing amount of lawsuits that celebrities are filing against publications that print misinformation.

Top Fans is run by Top Fans Inc., which also owns Zivity. Zivity’s adult site has been able to raise $8 million in funding from top Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors and received widespread press since its launch at TechCrunch40, especially after its co-founder, Cyan Banister, bared all on the site.

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Mobile broadband network developer Stoke has received $15 million in Series D funding from Reliance Technology Ventures Limited, Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Japanese networking company Net One Systems, bringing the telecom network startup’s total funding to $65 million. Stoke raised $20 million in Series C funding in 2007 (led by DAG Ventures), $19.8 million in Series B funding in 2005, and $10 million in Series A funding.

As people are using their mobile phones to download applications, view movies, and listen to music, mobile data carriers need to provide greater bandwidth to support mobile phone usage. Stoke’s hardware provides mobile carriers the technology to let phones access different wireless networks including 3G, GSM, CDMA, Wi-Fi and WiMax and converges wireless coverage to help carriers cope with massive increments in web traffic.

For example, Stoke’s technology lets phones seamlessly detect different networks and will automatically enable phones to switch to available networks based on location and availability. Stoke says the new funds will be used to support continuing partnerships with with mobile carriers.

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