The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘tiger-woods’

Everyone loves movie clips. But, unfortunately, they’re often hard to find online in one centralized place. There’s a simple reason for this: licensing. If someone could just solve that, they’d have a pretty killer website, right? That’s what Movieclips has. And now they’re trying to extend it with Movieclips Mashups.

The key to this (beyond a killer domain name, movieclips.com) is that they have partnerships with six major Hollywood studios to provide them with clips from films. How many clips? So far, over 12,000. Imagine if the studios could make some older clips relevant again? And what if users could do it themselves? That’s what this new Mashups products is trying to do.

Movieclips went to the studios, pitching them directly about the idea. Co-founders Zach James and Rich Raddon had two key selling points: “How do you make movies more social?” and “How do you make movies more relevant?”

The first question is nothing new (you make it easy to share the clips on the various social networks). But the second questions is interesting. For example, how do you take Top Gun – a movie which is 25 years old — and make it relevant to a 15-year-old? There’s a way — it’s a great movie — they just have to provide context with something relevant today. That’s where the mashup component of their service comes into play.

For example, on stage, they showed a bunch of clips from a bunch of movies to play out the Tiger Woods sex scandal — think: The Ladies Man.

You can also make e-cards of sorts for friends. Is someone sick? Just make them a mashup of a bunch of vomiting scenes from movies! What fun!

And it’s not just quantity. Movieclips also believes its product is superior to the others out there because they tag each of these clips with up to 1,000 pieces of metadata (dialogue, actors, moods, etc). This makes the clips very searchable — and they’ve had 30 part-time employees working on this, so it’s more reliable than machine-tagged data.

Last year at TechCrunch 50, AnyClip debuted with a similar idea. But there’s one key difference: they didn’t have the licensing agreements yet. They still don’t. Movieclips does, and that could make it a killer product.

Movieclips launched its main product (the clip search engine) in beta this past December and released an API in March.

———-Q&A With The Judges—————-

Jason Calacanis, CEO & Founder, Mahalo
Brad Garlinghouse, President, Consumer Applications Group, AOL
Tolman Geffs, Co-President, JEGI
Megumi Ikeda, SVP, Peacock Equity Fund

Q: That was a perfect presentation.

Q: Yeah, the movie clip idea is difficult. But how do you make it unique?

A: The domain is important (movieclips.com). We can also syndicate our player out. We have 2 dozen portals we’re talking to right now. Yes, the clips we get aren’t only ours.

Q: What are the three revenue streams?

A: We’ll give one now — subscription revenue.

Q: It’s a pretty thing, but technically it’s not that difficult. This is won on distribution.

A: Yeah, when we launched we decided distribution was key. We need to make all these deals — like AOL.

Q: You had great video source material. But the clip is derivative. This isn’t anything that innovative. One excellent thing: you bought a great domain name. Two: you got the clips. How did you get those?

A: We were stealth and working on getting the deals before we did anything. So pre-launch we had 5 deals in place. AnyClips was the opposite. We do ad-rev split.

———- The Monetization Portion ————

It was really hard to get these deals. No one has ever done this before. We were able to give them both a piece of the ad revenue and analytics.

Our plan to make money:

1) We’ll have a subscription plan across our distribution. There’s a lot of upselling on our site too.

2) Advertising — You can get a good CPM on these.

3) Transaction — This isn’t our focus, but we did this anyway. In a few weeks time we’ll have a “buy” button. That’s an exclusive deal. It’s for businesses — if you want to use a clip in a demo, you can do it.

It’s all about our great tags. We have 30 people doing it. And we’ll crowd-source it too.

———– Second Q&A —————–

Q: You guys need to be more direct about the issues. Terrible presentation. I wouldn’t invest.

A: We’re working on a round right now.

Q: How much traffic do you need to hit?

A: 3 million uniques is what we want to hit. And I think we will.

Q: In the first presentation you killed it, but you were tired here. I think you should talk about micro-transactions too. This could be a huge app on Facebook. Think JibJab. An iPhone app too. I would also knock on Microsoft’s door everyday. Tell them they need to use your clips.

On the heels of announcing profitability, startup NetVibes is announcing a new feature today to help users monitor the realtime web. NetVibes is launching a personal dashboard monitoring platform, called Instant Dashboards. The new feature allows users to enter a keyword on NetVibes’ site to pull up an instant dashboard that automatically collects all of the latest photos, videos, news, feeds, search results, Twitter conversations and more around that topic. Instant dashboards are automatically updated in near real-time.

The dashboard is essentially a way for users to track content on the realtime web. For example, if I create a dashboard for Tiger Woods, NetVibes will aggregate videos from Google search, news from Google news, photos from Flickr, realtime search results from Yahoo, Tweets about Woods and more.

Users can browse content within their Instant Dashboard using the Netvibes Smart Reader, which lets people view real-time content in magazine-style widgets or in a flowing RSS reader. Dashboards can be personalized and users can also add more content from the Netvibes widget and content ecosystem, which includes a plethora of RSS feeds and widgets from social networks and content platforms.

NetVibes has transformed its product since its launch five years ago. The startup began with personalized homepages, became a distributed widget platform, changed CEOs (when founder Tariq Krim stepped down in 2008 to start Jolicloud), then started appealing to enterprises, brands, and advertisers with intranet offerings and social media dashboards.

And the startup just hit profitability on a net income basis, with revenue from enterprise offerings comprising most of sales. NetVibes offers an enterprise version of dashboards for PR and marketing professionals, which pulls together different monitoring and analytics tools (such as Google Trends, Compete, Yelp, Hootsuite, and Trendrr) all into one dashboard.

Netvibes Showcase from Netvibes on Vimeo.

A new realtime search engine is launching today but this portal is focused solely on images. Startup NachoFoto, is launching a realtime image search engine that helps users find the latest images related to current events.

NachoFoto will autosuggest search terms for you, but the site only indexes photos related to current or trending topics on the web. The site will crawl the web and blogs (but not Flickr or other photo sharing sites) for images related to current topics.

For example, a search for Tiger Woods returns photos of Woods taken at the Masters Tournament that was taking place last week and over the weekend. You can also filter results by time period and NachoFoto will suggest other terms related to your search query that may be of interest. For example, for a Tiger Woods search you can also narrow search to find images for Tiger Woods’ wife.

The site is actually useful for finding the must current images of a particular topic, but is sure to face stiff competition from Google and Bing’s image search offerings. Plus, its unfortunate that the site can’t index photos from photo sharing sites like Flickr.

This post was originally supposed to be a nice little summary of how AT&T would be bringing the 2010 Masters Golf Tournament to their wireless customers. Then we remembered that AT&T bailed as a sponsor of Tiger Woods, a Masters golfer, after something from his personal life became public knowledge. Read the rest at MobileCrunch > >

Read more:
AT&T may have bailed on Tiger, but they still want you to watch the Masters on your phone

No clue what makes this list authoritative, but it’s Friday, and it’s the day before life as we know it changes with the release of… something . Anyhow, it’s a list purporting to show the most valuable autographs you can find. It’s almost relevant because of the person whose autograph has been deemed most valuable

View original post here: 
The world’s most valuable autograph belongs to famous space-man Neil Armstrong

According to a new study released by PR Week and PR Newswire, 52% percent of bloggers surveyed consider themselves journalists. This is an increase from 2009’s study, when just one in three had the same opinion. However, despite this, only 20% of bloggers obtain the majority of their income from their blogs; which is an 4% increase from 2009.

A few other stats caught our attention as well. When it comes to using blogs and social networks, like Twitter or Facebook, for research, 91% of bloggers and 68% of online reporters “always” or “sometimes” use blogs for research. But only 35% of newspaper and 38% of print magazine journalists surveyed use blogs or social networks for research purposes

The stats are even more interesting when it comes to using Twitter, which is often a place for breaking news and consumer trends, alone for research. 64% of bloggers and 36% of online reporters said they use Twitter as a research tool for stories. But only 19% of newspaper reporters and 17% of print magazine reporters use the microblogging network as a resource for research. Newspaper and print magazine reporters also source Twitter less frequently than their online counterparts with 19% and 22% saying they have used a Twitter post in a story, respectively. This is in contrast the higher use of sourcing Twitter for stories for bloggers (55%), online magazine/news (42%) and even TV news (48%).

Here at TechCrunch, we rely on other blogs for research even more than traditional news outlets. And we use Twitter as a tool not just for breaking news, but also to evaluate the sentiment of consumers about a particular product or service. For example, my colleague MG Siegler used the breaking news of Tiger Woods’ car accident to show the inherent value of Twitter when it comes to the speed of reporting news.

Photo Credit/Flickr/MikeLicht

Gossip mongers and sports fans alike are eagerly awaiting Tiger Woods’ press conference tomorrow morning, when he’ll confront the public and apologize for his string of affairs that tarnished both his image as a role model and his endorsement earnings. And, according to one source, you’ll be able to live stream it from the world’s most popular video portal: YouTube.

This is interesting for a few reasons. First, it’s going to get a lot of traffic, as many people will be at work and won’t be able to watch the conference from their TV sets. But it’s also another live video feed on YouTube, which historically has almost exclusively featured recorded content. Over the last year or so, YouTube has been experimenting more often with live feeds, with broadcasts including YouTube Live, numerous political debates and events including President Obama’s record-breaking inauguration, and more recently, earnings webcasts. But the Tiger Woods event, while certainly newsworthy, is a different beast. It’s related more to gossip and sports than it is to our nation’s future or Google news.

It could also be a sign of things to come.  YouTube doesn’t stream these events themselves (they’ve often relied on Akamai), but it’s apparent that they’re becoming more open to featuring live streams on the home page. And even though YouTube’s roots may lie in user-submitted videos, it seems foolish to push users to other video sites whenever they want to see a major event live.

The event starts at 8 AM PST. Other sites that will be streaming the event include Ustream and major news networks.

Update: It’s official, YouTube just announced it here.

The team behind the hot location-based service Foursquare took the time tonight to write a rare longer post about location privacy. Their basic stance: we take privacy very seriously and understand it. Also, that service Please Rob Me should shut up.

In fact, it seems the entire impetus behind Foursquare’s post was Please Rob Me, the mock service set up in an attempt to show the dangers of tweeting out Foursquare check-ins. We, along with several other sites, covered it yesterday. And while it’s hard to take that site itself seriously, it does raise some interesting points.

Yes, as Foursquare notes and Gawker wrote yesterday, it’s just as likely that a burglar knows your home is going to be empty from 9 to 5 when you’re at work (provided you have a 9 to 5 job, of course). But people also aren’t routinely sending out their home address to thousands of strangers as they might be doing if they have Foursquare hooked up to Twitter. And when you add that on top of all of the other stuff that people send out on Twitter that perhaps they shouldn’t (when mixed with location information, etc), things get interesting.

The point here is: does anyone really think Foursquare alone is going to lead to a rise in break-ins? No (I’m not saying that will never happen, but I don’t see it being an epidemic). The main point, as I saw it, is that tying a closed, symmetric network (Foursquare) to an open, asymmetric one (Twitter) is something that’s potentially troublesome for location-based services. But no one really seems to be talking about it.

What I mean by that is that on Foursquare, just like Facebook, you have to explicitly allow someone to follow you (and you follow them back in return). On Twitter, anyone can follow you without your permission (assuming you have an unlocked account). When you tweet out your Foursquare check-ins (some people even do this automatically), it essentially makes Foursquare an asymmetric network. And believe it or not, some people are doing that without really thinking about it. Or they’re doing it because it’s easier to gain friends/followers on an asymmetric network.

This is an issue that Facebook is undoubtedly thinking about right now as it considers how to enter the location playing field. As I said, right now, the network is largely symmetric, but recent changes are making it more asymmetric. And how they handle location information — with their 400 million+ users is going to be very interesting. And potentially, actually scary.

I feel like I should come to Flash’s defense, partially because I gave it one between the ribs last night, and partially because, in the words of Sherlock Holmes, “to see justice done is every man’s business.” Now here we have Steve Jobs saying in a WSJ interview that using Flash for video would reduce battery life from 10 hours to 1 hour, and suggests H.264 as an alternative. Let’s just take a moment to evaluate these plainly inflammatory statements.

Back in October of last year, Google Reader rolled out a nice little update that added a new “Popular items” feed to the “Explore” area of the service. In here, you would find items from around the web that were gaining popularity fast. Of course, one person’s gem of popular content is another person’s crappy video. So today, Google has rolled out another update to Reader, to recommend items more personally tailored to you.

The new “Recommended items” feed replaces the “Popular items” feed in the same Explore area. “With the latest round of improvements, we’ve started inserting items selected just for you inside the Recommended items section,” Google writes.

What’s not entirely clear from Google’s post is how they’re pulling together these recommendations for Reader users. I have to assume it’s the same way they’ve long recommended news feeds to you, which is by looking at your Reader Trends and web browsing history (if you have that turned on), and comparing it with other users.

A quick scan of my own new Recommended items area shows results that are pretty hit-or-miss. But maybe that’s because I’m a writer who has to scan hundreds of sites every day even if not all of them particularly interest me.

There’s another small new feature in Reader today too: related feeds. If you trigger the drop down menu on a certain feed, and hover over “More like this,” you’ll see a list of feeds for what Reader considers to be similar sites. Subscribing to them is then just a button click away.

Using Google Reader this past week has been interesting as Google Buzz has multiplied the number of users following the items I share several times over. This is of course because Buzz and Reader (and the other Google properties) share the same social graph now — the same highly controversial social graph which saw you automatically friending certain people you contact on Gmail or over IM. In fact, Google had to stop doing that.

I’m still not sure Reader, or Google as a whole, gets this whole social thing, but they’re certainly growing their graph quickly now.