The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘intersection’

Tim Schulz has resigned from his role as Senior Product Manager at MySpace, he confirmed a couple of hours ago on Twitter. Schulz let the MySpace executive team know that he was leaving the social networking company on Friday, and he informed us that starting January 2010, he’ll be running products as part of the general management team at e-commerce startup Magento.

Schulz was hired in the Fall of 2008 to work for MySpace International, and later moved to a senior role in the Product Strategy team together with Todd Leeloy (former VP of International Product and now VP, Strategy under Jason Hirschhorn). Schulz focused a lot on the realtime web.

He said he had a terrific time working at MySpace but decided that the Magento gig was a better fit considering his background as consultant at Sapient, and was excited to join a fledgling but fast-growing company that operates on the intersection of B2B and B2C.

His tenure at MySpace was surprisingly short though, so I suspect there were other things at play too, but we’ll give Schulz the benefit of the doubt because he sings nothing but praise for the company and its executive team.

Schulz also recently launched a tech blog dubbed TrendSlate, which he hopes will compete with TechCrunch some day.

What can we say, Tim? We hope Magento keeps you super busy.

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I’m not sure exactly what MOBshop (the company name is Cross-Platform Corp. but will likely change) co-founder Cyriac Roeding is up to, but he’s convinced some very serious people to invest time and money into his idea. And he has put together a killer core founding team.

The company has raised $2.5 million in an initial round of financing from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and entrepreneur/angel investor Reid Hoffman. Hoffman also joined the board of directors of the company, and Kleiner actually added two board members: Matt Murphy and Aileen Lee. It’s rare for a fund to spend two partners’ time on a single investment. And Hoffman has said he rarely invests in startups any longer, let alone taking the time to sit on the board. Clearly, they think there is something under the hood at the secretive MOBshop.

But just what that something is, we don’t know. Roeding, a German-born entrepreneur and former EVP of CBS Mobile, most recently did a stint as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Kleiner. He will only say that the company will hit the intersection of mobile and physical worlds. That doesn’t really narrow things down much, but Roeding says that it’s still way too early to start talking about the product. They don’t even have a website up yet. Hoffman described the project to me as ” extraordinarily interesting” but wouldn’t go into any further detail at all. He’s not generally one to gush, so I assume he’s genuinely impressed.

Roeding has also put together a strong core team. His co-founder is Jeff Sellinger took over CBS Mobile after Roeding left to join Kleiner. He has also pulled senior people from Loopt (Evan Tana) and Six Apart (Aaron Emigh) to complete the team

One thing the company is being very vocal about is hiring. “Right now we’re looking for a small group of the Valley’s best and brightest developers for the iPhone, other smartphones, and backend systems,” Roeding says. Email resumes to makecontact@mobshop.net.

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Microsoft has a post today on its Bing Community blog alerting website owners that they may start seeing a lot of pings from the user agent “msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)”. Not to worry, they say, despite the scary MSN Web 1.0-name, this is just the BingBot, crawling sites, doing its indexing job.

While Microsoft has updated the bot’s version number (from 1.1), it isn’t changing the name, it notes. But what’s interesting is the part of the post from Microsoft that reads:

We do not anticipate any problems related to our increasing emphasis on MSNBot 2, but the unexpected can’t always be avoided, no matter how hard you try! As such, we wanted to preemptively alert folks to the most effective way to report bot and crawling issues to Bing’s support team in case they arise.

Problems? What sort of problems? Is the BingBot going to become self-aware, Skynet-style? Microsoft gives no details. I’m scared.

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It’s no secret that summer is the season of terrible television, when networks flock to broadcast cheap reality TV and game shows that actually will turn your brain into a slippery pile of goo. Granted, there are a few gems out there (particularly on the cable networks), but for the most part TV fans are out of luck during the dog days of summer. At least, that’s the way things used to be.

Earlier this week I had something of an epiphany. Hulu, with its mountains of movies and prime-time TV shows, is the perfect answer to the summer doldrums. I’m finally free to catch up on those shows that my friends have been talking about for years, or at least watch the first few episodes of a show to see if it’s worth buying on iTunes or DVD. Eureka!

Unfortunately, when I went to catch up on a few shows the other night, I fell prey to a problem that’s nagged the site since it launched: content owners frequently impose bizarre restrictions on which content you’re allowed to watch on Hulu. The number of episodes available for each show vary wildly, and serial dramas will sometimes only offer a smattering of episodes scattered across a season, which makes it impossible to follow the story line. Hulu does its best to explain the situation to users with messages like “We are able to run five trailing episodes of this series”, but these bulletins don’t do much to ameliorate the frustration and apparent lack of logic. In short, it leads to a bad user experience on an otherwise highly-polished site.

A quick spin through the site reveals how bad the problem is. Rescue Me, which I’d heard was quite good, has a measly three episodes available, all taken from the end of the fifth season. Given that I know absolutely nothing about the show other than that Dennis Leary plays a firefighter, I figured this probably wasn’t the best way to get hooked. Fox’s popular serial drama 24 is currently offering a whopping five episodes, but these are taken from the middle of the first season (for those that haven’t seen 24, trying to pick up the story mid-season is an exercise in frustration). Battlestar Galactica is similarly limited. The list goes on.

In case it wasn’t obvious, Hulu has very little control over what it’s allowed to show users — it’s forced to bow to the whims of its content partners. And while it’s easy to point the finger at the studios and accuse them of simply being withholding, the reality is likely a bit more complicated. Distribution of this content is impacted by ‘windowing’ — the time periods when the rights to a show or movie belong to different mediums like Cable, syndication, or DVDs. So in some cases, studios really may have their hands tied.

That said, it’s hard to imagine that some of these media companies couldn’t do a better job with their licensing deals, and I suspect some of them really are withholding content because they’re afraid of undercutting their DVD and iTunes sales. In those cases, they’re shooting themselves in the foot.

If I can’t begin watching a show from the start, the odds of me watching it at all plummet. Sure, I could probably buy the first season on iTunes, but I’m not likely to pay for TV unless I’m quite certain I’m going to like it. Studios should be doing everything they can to introduce Hulu users to new shows during these summer months, perhaps going as far as enabling access to a show’s entire first season. Yes, I might wind up skipping buying the first season on DVD, but I’m also far more likely to go out and buy seasons 2-3 so I can continue watching from the comfort of my couch.

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You think you have it bad, Mr.-Silicon-Valley-entrepreneur-trolling-Sand-Hilll-Road-for-cash? Try life on the other side of the pond.

Out of 39 firms that were active investors in British start-ups over the last five years, only thirteen venture firms have £5 million or more left in their coffers to invest, according to NESTA, the UK agency that advocates for start-ups and also sponsored the recent Traveling Geeks blogger tour.

That’s right: All but thirteen firms in the United Kingdom are either completely tapped out or have committed the rest of their funds for follow-on investments in existing portfolio companies. In total, NESTA estimates there’s about £400 million left that’s uncommitted among the thirteen, with only half of that available for brand-new series A deals. To put that into perspective, there’s roughly the same amount of money in the fund Marc Andreessen just closed than there is for new companies in the entire United Kingdom right now.

This is coinciding with a precipitous drop in UK firms closing on new funds thanks to the global credit crunch. In 2008, only seven firms closed new funds, and NESTA expects fundraising to be even weaker in 2009.

As most people know, I’m a pretty big advocate of the idea that many of the next great high-growth companies will be founded outside of the U.S., but these stats starkly demonstrate a undeniable advantage of being Valley-based. Even when fundraising slows and VCs save bigger reserves than usual for current investments, there are still billions sloshing around to fund new deals. Sure, it’s hard during times like these even in the Valley, but raising venture capital should be hard.

As with most research reports on the venture business, it’s the trend line that’s important to note here. It’s probable that NESTA isn’t counting a firm here or there. But it can’t be too far off. Indeed, the stat explains a lot of the anecdotal evidence that hit me in the face as soon as I arrived in London two weeks ago. Many of the entrepreneurs who’d pitched me on my last visit to London in November have already shuttered their companies and were unsure of what to do next. I have exactly one friend in Silicon Valley who has been forced to that point.

Even the good UK early stage names are struggling to close deals. It took AlertMe—a hot energy home monitoring company that won the Europa for best clean tech company last week—a whopping nine months to raise money almost landing the company in bankruptcy. (Index Ventures and others finally snapped up the deal a few months ago.) “I don’t want to go through that again,” the very polite and British CEO Pilgrim Beart demurred.

It’s that kind of bleak desperation that lead the infamous Paul Carr to pronounce the UK Internet scene dead….just before his own column in the Guardian became its own victim of the economy a few days later. (See Mr. Butcher’s TechCrunchEurope rebuttal here.)

Indeed “the scene” may be dead, but there’s an upside here. The companies that are still around have a much greater emphasis than Valley companies on making money. The Traveling Geek contingent went to Accel’s London office to meet with a handful of start-ups, and each one emphasized revenue and profits in their five-minute elevator pitches.

One that caught me by surprise was Michael Smith’s Moshi Monsters, a social network/ virtual game for kids. Cute idea, but sounds like it should be road kill in this environment, right? Nope. Its revenues are growing 35% month-over-month, it has 85% gross margins, and just five months after launching the site is cash flow positive. Nicely done, gents. (BTW, Smith isn’t all business. His house was the setting of those famous Scoble pictures…)

Indeed, there’s always something healthy about startups having to work within constraints. There will be fewer of them, but it’s possible that the companies that make it in this environment could well make up one of the most promising crops of UK companies we’ve ever seen. After all, Skype was laughed out of VCs’ offices when it started in the wake of the dot com bust.

In the coming days, I’ll be writing several more posts about the London companies that impressed me the most. Stay tuned.

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Remember Philip Kaplan, better known as “Pud,” the guy who created FuckedCompany at the tail-end of the first Internet bubble? Yeah, him. He just joined Charles River Ventures this week as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence. The EIR position is usually where venture firms park executives they want to work with but who don’t yet have a company. EIRs get to see a lot of deal flow, work with the portfolio companies, and usually end up starting their own companies which the venture firm can invest in.

For those of you too young to remember, FuckedCompany was the original deadpool site. Mike once wrote an April Fool’s joke announcing that TechCrunch had acquired the site, which some people still ask us about seriously. But it was always just one of many projects.

Kaplan went on to found AdBrite, which is now one of the top 25 ad networks. Kaplan is still chairman of AdBrite, but he’s been tinkering with his own projects for most of this year, including several fun Twitter apps like flirt140 (Twitter dating), fast140 (a typing challenge game), Tweetname (domain name registry via Twitter), and AlumTweet (Classmates.com for Twitter), and href=”http://www.hitmelater.com/”>HitMeLater (a snooze button for email). He says he has about 16 sites or apps that are currently live.

So what’s the big idea he will be pursuing for Charles River Ventures? He’s still figuring it out, but he think sit will have something to do with the intersection of business networking, social networking, and finance.

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I don’t know about you, but when I look at an online map and see outlines of buildings, I get a little frustrated. I want to be able to click somewhere, and find out exactly what’s there. And with a new feature in Google Maps, you can do just that.

If you right-click somewhere on the map, it will bring up a menu with a bunch of options. The new last option allows you to select “What’s here?” And if Google knows — which it does for a lot of places — it will pop up information about what is actually at the location you’re pointing at. If it knows the name of say, a store that is there, it will give that to you. Otherwise, it will give you the address of where you are pointing.

And if you’re zoomed out, it works too. The example Google gives is that if you’re looking at a zoomed out view of the Galapagos Islands, using this feature can get you the name of each individual island. Same with Hawaii, as you can see below.

Sure, in some cases you could find out what was at certain points on a map previously by switching to satellite view, or better yet, Street View. But this is much easier.

And this technique, which is called “reverse geocoding,” has been a part of the Maps API for a little while now, according to Google. So you can use it on your maps as well.

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If your annoyed by TPS reports right now, consider yourself lucky. This week saw the staff reduction of MySpace by 30%, to bring the total number down around 1000 employees. Things dont look good abroad as well.

But the situation might be turning a corner. Last week the U.S. Labor Department issued their Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report. While it showed an increase of 608,000 in jobless claims last week, the number of continuing claims dropped to under 6.7 million.

Here is our layoff tracker, which is updated regularly. If your on the hunt for a new job, CrunchBoard may be the place to find a new opportunity. Check out a snapshot of the jobs available below:

• Sr. Java Engineer
  Cramer Production Business Trust - Norwood, MA

• Senior Brand Strategist
  Red Lever Inc- Santa Monica, CA

• Sr. Front End Developer
  eHarmony - Pasadena, CA

• Member of Technical Staff- Systems
  Kosmix - Mountain View, CA

• Ad Product Manager
  Cirius Technologies,Inc. - Sunnyvale, CA

For job hunters in Europe, check out our Europe CrunchBoard.

Don’t forget we’re looking for a few good hackers here at TechCrunch.

Click here to see all the jobs on CrunchBoard.

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I post this because it’s Friday, because it’s freaking hilarious, and because it could be a killer last-minute Father’s Day gift. Go visit ManBabies.com right now. I cannot stop laughing.

Babies are cute, and men are usually normal looking — but when you swap their heads, the results are truly terrifying. ManBabies does just that, both by creating its own images and accepting user submissions for photos that are then voted on by the community. And you can easily share all these pictures via the normal means: Twitter, Facebook, email and you can even embed them.

And they’ll even take your photographs and do the swap for you, if you’re willing to pay them — $15 per Manbaby photo.

If you’re interested in submitting your picture, just like Fight Club, the first rule is the most important one:

1. The picture MUST have both a man and a baby. Man + baby = ManBaby. Get it?

Below find a few of my favorites:

[thanks Adam]

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