The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘mtv’

Brands are engaging in the conversations that are taking place on social media sites now more than ever. But in order to tap into the social conversations that are taking place on the web, brands and agencies need to have a powerful tool to track, measure and engage sites such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and others. One of the leaders in the social media tracking space, Radian6, is launching a new Engagement Console to streamline this process.

A desktop client built on Adobe AIR, the engagement console lets your both track and engage in the conversation taking place on blogs, videos, forums, boards, Twitter, Flickr, Google Buzz, LinkedIn, Facebook fan pages, public discussion groups, and mainstream news sites. The site also allows for assigning of tasks from within the platform, enabling users to access workflow from within the client.

You can customize a tracking grid of social media sites by breaking out your conversation into stacks by broad or specific topics, tagged customer lists, or even user assignment. Stacks can also be separated out by media type.

Th workflow feature allows you to tag, assign, and route posts to team members, and track the status of the assignments. Any conversations a user engages in, whether it be on Twitter, Facebook or with a co-worker, will be recorded for both the user and the administrator. And of course, the console allows you to Tweet, reply, retweet, and send direct messages, shuffle through user profiles, and follow new contacts right from the platform. Similar to many of the consumer focused social media clients out there, Radian6 allows for unlimited accounts and includes a URL shortener.

With respect to Facebook, the client allows users to respond to status updates, wall posts, comments, and “likes”. Users can also view news feeds for Facebook friends, and see new photos or videos that have been uploaded from within the console. The dashboard also provides analytics from within the console, such as post volume, and engagement stats.

Radian6 has had considerable success in terms of serving big-name clients. The company is currently helping over 10,000 brands track social media sites, including Comcast, MTV, Dell, UPS, GE and Microsoft. And this engagement console has all the bells and whistles to make any brand marketer content. The console, we are told, will be in private beta until April. That being said, there are plenty of other offerings for companies and agencies to track social media and this is a competitive space. Radian6 faces competition from a number of startups including Scout Labs, Visible Measures, Viralheat, HootSuite and PeopleBrowsr.

SFWeekly Web Editor Alexia Tsotsis (not pictured left) spent some time early this morning trying out Chatroulette, a website that connects random strangers for a video chat. The results are unlikely to surprise you. Unless you are new to this whole Internet thing. Screen shots of some of her more entertaining chats are below the post.

Harkening back to the days of A/S/L, the random vidchat service Chatroulette is one of those online arenas where not being a white male looking to get off puts you in a definite minority. Founded by a 17 year-old Russian high school student named Andrew Ternovskiy, the service is a more successful Omegle, combining elements of the MTV show “Next” with vidchat capabilities.

Aspiring chatees click to play and as an escape latch you or your partner can hit “Next” anytime if you get bored, scared, or have to get back to work. The “Report video as inappropriate” button also seems to provide some comfort, but by judging by the nsfw fare served to me last night, doesn’t provide much of a threat.

I pressed “play” last night at around 3:00 am PST and after about 45 clicks on “Next” encountered 5 straight up penis shots, a lot of “camera disabled” chats, two women who automatically clicked “Next” once they figured out that I too was a female, and a lot of very grateful looking guys, including a Chinese “fan of Google” and a French guy in indoor sunglasses, who asked me whether “I was a more dominate lady or submissive woman” in the hope that I would be the former.

Out of the 10,920 of my fellow Chatroulette participants, my “Roulettees” were a good cross section of Internet humanity. And while I did not encounter the “suicide” hanging videos alluded to in many of the chats, things like “did you hear the one about the guy who shot himself in the bath tub,” were brought up in conversation quite a few times, as examples of just how crazy Chatroulette can get.

Anywhere you get a mass of people communicating uncensored (and yes much like 4chan.org, China has not yet blocked Chatroulette) will be subject to typical groupthink behavior like urban myths and requests for interaction better left to the casual encounters section of Craigslist. Nonetheless, the service’s potential for more substantial acts of communication is formidable.

Chatroulette is what you’d expect it to be, micro-interactive reality TV with a large heaping of cybersex. While most people are (whether they admit it or not) voyeurs – the fact that Chatroulette lets the both participants see each other limits the site’s potential user base to the weirdos – and despite piquing VC Fred Wilson’s interest it doesn’t seem like there’s currently enough weirdos to turn the humble startup into something mainstream.

One “Roulettee,” when asked what he thought the service was most useful for, responded, “connecting with people around the world.” Yeah, and asking them to show you their boobs.

Encoding.com, a startup that provides online video encoding services, has raised $1.25 million in Series A funding. The funding was led by Metamorphic Ventures and included angel investors Patrick Condon, Fred Hamilton, Zelkova Ventures, Dave Morgan, and Allen Morgan. The funds will be used to further sales, marketing, and partnership programs.

Launched in September 2008, Encoding.com provides a cloud-based, video encoding SaaS offering to let users host and encode user-generated and premium video. The company encodes an average of 30,000 videos per day for a variety of well-known media and technology companies including MTV Networks, WebMD, Nokia, and MySpace. To date, Encoding.com has encoded more than four million videos since its launch.

YouTube introduced a new option dubbed ‘Safety Mode’ this morning, essentially giving users a bit more control over what they get to see on the insanely popular video sharing site.

The new setting is browser-specific and opt-in, and helps users screen out potentially offensive content that they may prefer not to stumble upon (or have their family members see), even if the content is inherently not against YouTube’s Community Guidelines.

As an example, YouTube cites news videos that contain graphic violence, such as war coverage. The company is careful enough to say the filter will not be 100% perfect.

From the support page (where you can also find out how to turn on the setting, and even lock your choice on your browser with your YouTube password):

Safety Mode gives users the option to choose not to see mature content that they may find find offensive, even though it’s not against our Community Guidelines. When you opt in to Safety Mode mode, videos with mature content or that have been age restricted will not show up in video search, related videos, playlists, shows and movies. While no filter is 100% accurate, we use community flagging, hide objectionable comments and porn image detection to identify and hide inappropriate content. Safety Mode on YouTube does not remove content from the site but rather keeps it off the page for users who opt in.

The ability to opt in to Safety Mode is available in all languages YouTube currently operates in, but does not extend to YouTube Mobile at this point.

Mobile video advertising startup Transpera has raised $2 million in funding according to an SEC filing. The company most recently raised $8.25 million in 2008, which was accompanied by an undisclosed amount in Series A financing received in July 2007.

Transpera develops an ad platform that enables the distribution and monetization of Web videos on mobile phones. With the so-called Transpera Ad Platform (TAP), the company offers mobile video publishers and carriers a suite of promotional and distribution building tools to enhance the end user experience, and advertisers a way to market their wares by serving targeted ads in the form of interactive display banners, pre-roll videos, overlay ads, post-roll experiences and mini sites. There’s even a spin-off platform tailored specifically to the iPhone, which is steadily gaining traction as mobile web usage skyrockets.

The platform is in use by a number of established information and entertainment brands, including Associated Press, CBS News, Disney, Discovery Communications, Fox Reality Channel, and MTV Networks. Transpera also recently brought on Jason Weisberger as President and COO. Weisberger was the former COO of Federated Media.

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MySpace has just announced the appointment of four new members to its executive team, which saw a major shakeup last April. The new hires include Nada Stirratt, who will serve as Chief Revenue Officer and Dustin Finer, who is now Chief People Officer. Joining them will be iLike founders (and brothers) Ali Partovi, who is now SVP of Business Development based in San Francisco, and Hadi Partovi as SVP of Technology, based out of Seattle.

MySpace acquired streaming music service iLike in August for $20 million.

Other recent MySpace hires include Mark Rosenbaum as CFO and Alex Maghen as CTO (he was formerly CTO of MySpace Music, now he heads technology at MySpace proper as well).

Below is MySpace’s bio about Stirratt, who served as EVP of Digital Advertising at MTV before joining MySpace:

Prior to MySpace, Stirratt served as Executive Vice President of Digital Advertising at MTV Networks where she oversaw advertising sales and strategy, ad operations, Digital Fusion-integrated marketing, and Tribes, the company’s third-party vertical affiliate network. Before MTV, Nada served as Senior Vice President and General Manager of advertising sales at Advertising.com. Earlier in her career, Stirratt worked in ad sales and business development for such entertainment brands as AOL-Time Warner, Moviefone, Allure and Cosmopolitan.

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Yesterday, word got out of Apple’s new iFrame standard, which purports to expedite video editing by keeping the video in “the same format used on a computer.” Really, it’s nothing but a resolution and wrapper. So why am I losing my mind over it? Because the way iFrame is being positioned and propagated is misleading and harmful to consumers. Oh I know, what an alarmist, right? It’s just a video format! But with personal video becoming more and more ubiquitous and invading class after class of gadgets, these former trivialities are becoming more important by the day.

And for once, we are actually gravitating towards a couple unified standards in both encoding and resolution — and then Apple butts in with this ugly stepchild of a format.

You’ve probably read the headlines over the past month stating that teens don’t use Twitter. If not, go here, there are dozens of stories about it, including no less than two TechCrunch posts. What I’m wondering today is if that’s the case, why is there all this fuss over Miley Cyrus quitting Twitter?

Okay, yes, it’s possible that there are plenty of — how do I put this…perverted — gentlemen out there begging for her to come back. And undoubtedly seeing as #mileycomeback has been the top trending topic all day on Twitter, the spam bots are out there latching on to the trend. But still, I’ve seen the story like a dozen times today all over the web. Reuters has it, the AP has it, the Wall Street Journal has it, the Telegraph has it. Then of course, the entertainment press: MTV, Entertainment Weekly, Extra, etc. And I saw it on CNN earlier. Why does anyone care if teens, Cyrus’ audience, aren’t using Twitter?

Looking over the #mileycomeback results, most tweets (and there are a truly massive amount), do appear to actually be from real teens tweeting about it. Many are asking her father (yes, former Mr. Mullet, Billy Ray Cyrus) to persuade her to come back, others are just mad that she quit her nearly 2 million followers. But most do appear to be real people, and yes, most appear to be teens.

So maybe teens don’t use Twitter except when Miley Cyrus quits, to get her to come back to a service they don’t use? Or maybe the idea that teens don’t use Twitter is simply not true. I kind of wish it were true at this point, so I could stop hearing about Miley Cyrus.

Going back to the entertainment press, I’m a little concerned about them encroaching our beat. Normally, its the tech press that gets to bitch about Twitter being down (like this morning) and come up with conspiracy theories as to why that’s the case. But now outlets like Extra are getting on board. “Did Miley Break Twitter?,” they ask. No real evidence to support that — other than, Kirstie Alley not tweeting for over 16 hours? What?

It has come to this.

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I (Michael Arrington) recently had a conversation with venture capitalist and tech pundit Paul Kedrosky about all the criticism being heaped on venture capitalists these days (much of it here on TechCrunch). He has a slightly different view than some others on what VCs are supposed to be doing, and how well they’re doing it. And frankly I tend to agree with him. VCs supply much of the capital that drives the entire startup ecosystem. The world would be a much less interesting place without them.

You can follow Kedrosky on his Infectious Greed blog, or get the cliff notes version on twitter at @pkedrosky.

Hating venture capitalists is profoundly satisfying. After all, they are slack-jawed, monied, oily, know-nothings who carom off innovation, fire capable founders, squash angel investors, and exist mostly to make commercial bankers look smart and interesting.

Or at least that’s the story we like to tell. By “we,” of course, I mean all of us who lovingly poke venture capitalists in the eye with sticks now and then. They are such easy targets, what with making up numbers about how many jobs they create, missing great investments, delivering awful ten-year returns to investors, having higher failure rates among companies they fund than among the ones they don’t, and generally being so self-important and irony-unaware.

But that doesn’t mean VCs are quacks. Or that what they do isn’t hard. Or that it’s unimportant. Because it is important, and the good ones are smart, and what they do is very, very hard.

Creating a successful startup is among the hardest things you can do in a capitalist economy. Entrepreneurs must successfully navigate a sea of multi-dimensional uncertainty, from technology (will it work?), to people (do I have the right employees?), to market (will anyone care?), to financial (can I finance doing this, and can I then sell the produce or service for more than it costs?) At big companies you can fail at launching a product, fail at hiring people, fail at making money on a product, and fail at figuring out whether something will work. Your big company will probably be unaffected, and you may even get promoted. Do any of those things wrong at a startup and, in all likelihood, you’re dead. You are wandering a maze of dark and twisty passages — most of which are paved with trapdoors to hell.

The idea that anyone at all would build a business around funding startups is the remarkable thing. No revenues, no sure market ahead, no collateral, no liquidity, and doe-eyed founders who were in high school when Enron blew up. It all adds up to more ways to break down than an old Winnebago. Far from wondering why so few companies get venture capital, we should perhaps wonder why any do, and how venture capitalists remain so damn optimistic. To borrow an industry adage, the best venture capitalists retain the capacity to fall in love despite having had their heart broken over and over again.

And the opportunities for heartbreak are legion. Even if the mortality numbers you usually hear are wrong, failures rates are high for startups. Across all sectors, about one-quarter of startups die off in the first year, while half-ish make it to the five-year mark. The numbers are different, however, for venture capital-backed companies.
Failure rates among venture-backed firms are lower in the first few years, but higher later on.

Does that sound nasty and mean-spirited? I don’t think so. Matter of fact, it sounds like VCs are being precisely the sorts of patient investors that people say they aren’t. They are giving risky companies a chance to experiment and find something that works, which is crucial, given that most successful startups don’t end up doing what they started out trying. It is a luxury that markets don’t afford other companies.

Another favorite club with which to whack venture capitalists is their supposed inability to create innovative new companies. Just look at Bessemer’s well-known anti-portfolio, with them turning down Google and Apple and Federal Express (seven frickin’ times!).
Imagine if those innovative companies had actually been funded and…oh wait, they were. The companies still happened, and succeeded, even if some venture capitalists said no. Given how often the average VC must say no in a given year – a bazillion times, give or take – it should come as no surprise that they sometimes say no when it turns out they should have said yes (and vice-versa).

The “VCs as innovators” problem wouldn’t be so bad, of course, were it not for the scene-stealing entrepreneurs. Those bastards keep creating risky startups and getting all the glory. Damn you Sergey Brin and Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs. Just in case you needed a reminder, it’s not VCs who create companies, it’s entrepreneurs. Blaming venture capitalists for their capital not changing the world is like blaming Pfizer’s treasury department for Viagra not saving your marriage. Yo, you have bigger problems, so to speak.

Wouldn’t it be nice if venture capitalist drove more innovation? Of course it would. But that’s like saying “Wouldn’t it be nice if supermodels followed you home?” Of course it would, but it’s fanciful. Innovation is one input into the startup business, not its main output. For startups or VCs to pretend otherwise is a speedy path to going bust. Venture capital investing is hard enough without turning it into a Disney-style dream
factory for self-styled social engineers.

Here is what we should want from venture capitalists. They should be trying to find and help early-stage companies at rising above the muck and dirt and crushing difficulties of being a startup. At the same time they must produce hefty profits in a timely way for their own impatient investors. That VCs can’t do the preceding, while simultaneously satisfying their critics by making no funding mistakes and changing the world with every deal, is a feature, not a bug.

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This is probably a question that the record labels should be asking, but I’ll ask it here anyway: how do you guys listen to music in 2009? On your iPhone (or whatever portable device, it doesn’t matter for the purposes of this here post)? On your computer while you surf your favorite Web sites?

See original here: 
Maybe I’m the only one who doesn’t ‘get’ iTunes LP