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Tech Stocks Take It On The Chin As Market Continues To Freefall
It’s a blood bath out there this morning. The S&P 500 is at a four-year low as the credit crisis keeps getting worse, despite the passage of the government’s $700 billion bailout plan. The market is taking tech stocks down with it. Google is down 4 percent to $368, its lowest point since 2006. Apple is down 6 percent to $91. Microsoft is down nearly 5 percent to $25. Amazon, Yahoo, eBay—all down.
Fears of a credit freeze are growing as the contagion spread to banks in Europe. The Fed is already flooding the market with more cash through new powers it was granted in the bailout package. All of this makes you wonder if A) the U.S. government acted fast enough and B) whether the bailout package is going to end up doing any good.
As far as tech stocks are concerned, already as I write this, there seems to be somewhat of a rally going on in some of these stocks (particularly Google) from the lows where they opened. But if the economy falters, tech stocks won’t be a safe haven for investors, even if they are cash-rich and not as exposed to the credit debacle as companies in other sectors. The markets always tend to overreact to systemic risk because nobody knows how far the problems are going to spread. What we are seeing is panic in the face of the unknown. It reminds me of the market panic after 9/11. Investors whop loaded up on tech stocks then ended up making a lot of money.
Does this signal a buying opportunity, or are investors better off running for the hills? Who is buying (or selling) what out there? Tell us in comments.
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If Sales Of Halloween Masks Could Predict The Election, Obama Would Be President
Everyone has their favorite way to predict who will win the Presidential election. Amazon likes to keep track of Halloween mask sales. Supporters of either candidate can buy rubber masks of each to wear for Halloween. So far, 57 percent of the masks Amazon has sold have been Obama masks, versus 43 percent for McCain masks.
The weird thing is that is right around the same number that McCain is getting in the latest tracking polls (Obama is tracking closer to 50 percent support). If you want some real helpful stats and links, check out Google Director of Research Peter Norvig’s Presidential Election 2008 FAQ page. He’s got links to all the latest polls, election prediction markets, truth scorecards, and studies measuring media bias.
Or you can just buy a mask. I’m not sure if they’ll let you in the voting booth with that, though.
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It’s Going To Be A Grinch Christmas: Slowdown Forecast For Online Holiday Sales
With credit tightening and consumer confidence shaky, you know this is going to be a tough year for holiday sales. A forecast that came out this morning from Lehman Brothers (now Barclays Capital), puts Internet sales over the upcoming holiday season growing at just 8 percent, compared to 19 percent growth last year (and 26 percent in 2006). That’s still better than the one percent growth in holiday ales expected at physical department stores, but the fourth quarter is make-or-break for many e-commerce sites and the slowdown in growth is not going to help.
A slowdown in demand will also hurt sites that depend on advertising, including Google (search in the fourth quarter is “largely driven by retail,” says the Barclays report. It is no wonder that other analysts are also beginning to cut back their expectations for Internet advertising revenues overall.
Despite the trimmed forecasts, the Internet remains the most likely sector to see the strongest growth in both retail sales and advertising. Just don’t get your hopes up too high.
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No Exits. Liquidity Dries Up Even More For VC-Backed Startups In Third Quarter
The liquidity drought for venture-backed startups, which was already declared to be a crisis in the second quarter when not a single VC-backed IPO went out, continued in the third quarter.
For the first three quarters of the year combined, IPOs brought in only $470 million and M&A activity totaled $11.3 billion, a steep decline from prior years (see chart). Don’t expect the situation to get better any time soon.
Although there was one IPO in the third quarter, RackSpace, which brought in $187.5 million, that was less than half of what the company had expected to raise when it initially filed. In the third quarter of 2007, by comparison, IPOs brought in $945 million. Mergers and Acquisitions activity was also down in the third quarter, bringing in $3.5 billion compared to $10.8 billion in the third quarter of 2007, according to The National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Reuters.
In terms of number of deals, there have been 199 M&A deals so far in 2008 and only 6 VC-backed IPOs. By comparison, for all of last year there were 359 M&A deals and 86 IPOs. In the third quarter alone, there were were 58 M&A deals, compared to about 70 in each of the previous two quarters (numbers which have been revised upwards since the last report came out). And the single IPO is at least better than the big fat zero that came out in the second quarter.
Breaking the numbers down a bit, IT startups accounted for 38 M&A deals in the quarter (or 65%), and $1.7 billion of the total disclosed deal value. Of those, only 9 were Internet startups, which accounted for only $251 million of disclosed deal value.
The charts above compare the first three quarters of 2008 to previous full-year totals. So the last data point is not completely apples-to-apples, but it gives you a sense of how much would have to be made up in the fourth quarter to get back to parity. (Anyone wan to take bets on that happening?). You can see the underlying data in the table below:
Update: I’ve now added two interactive iCharts of the graphs above with quarterly data.
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Want A Free Pass To All TechCrunch Events For A Year? Fund A DonorsChoose Classroom Project
The economy might be about to tank, but why should the children have to suffer? If you are going to give to charity this year (and you should, every one of you), we highly recommend giving to DonorsChoose. Each donation funds a classroom project or equipment for teachers who too often have to fund supplies out of their own meager paychecks. This year we are once again participating in the Donors Choose Blogger Challenge, which raised a total of $420,000 in 2007.
You can give as much as you want (the minimum donation is $10). Last year, I bought a digital camera for a classroom in Illinois, and got hand-written thank-you notes from each student. It really brought home how a few hundred dollars can make a big difference to a roomful of students. But to encourage some serious donations, we decided to make it a little more interesting this year. The top three donors who give at least $1,000 each will receive an All Events pass from TechCrunch. This pass will be good for two tickets to any MeetUp or conference that TechCrunch helps to put on between November 1, 2008 and November 1, 2009. All of them, including TechCrunch50 and the Crunchies. (A single ticket for TechCrunch50 alone cost $2,995 this year).
Not only that, but as an extra bonus, whoever donates the most will also get a one-hour pitch session with angel investor Ron Conway, who has generously agreed to donate his time for this worthy cause. All proceeds go to DonorsChoose, a tax-deductible charity. We’ll even throw in five TechCrunch t-shirts as runner-up prizes (they are very rare, you know).
We’ve picked some classroom projects worth looking at, or you can find your own. As long as you donate via this TechCrunch page or through the widget below, it will count towards our total and put you in te running for the tickets and the Ron Conway session. Also, if you are an American Express cardholder, vote here to give DonorsChoose a chance at an extra $1.5 million donation.
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Top Secret MI6 Camera Sold to the Highest Bidder On eBay
A 28-year-old delivery man from the UK who bought a Nikon Coolpix camera for about $31 on eBay got more than he bargained for when the camera arrived with top secret information from the UK’s MI6 organization.
Allegedly sold by one of the clandestine organization’s agents, the camera contained named al-Qaeda cells, names, images of suspected terrorists and weapons, fingerprint information, and log-in details for the Secret Service’s computer network, containing a “Top Secret” marking.
Once he downloaded the contents onto his computer, he immediately went to the police to explain the situation. The police originally treated it as a joke, but within a week, anti-terror officers started investigating and demanded that he not talk to the media about the contents contained in the camera.
Journalist and author Neil Doyle told The Sun that the contents are “MI6 documents relating to an operation against al-Qaeda insurgents in Iraq. It’s jaw-dropping they got into the public domain.
“Not only do they divulge secrets about operations, operating systems and previously unheard-of MI6 departments, but they could put lives at risk.”
MI6 is currently trying to track down the agent who made the mistake. If caught, the agent could face serious legal ramifications and face suspension. (Here is CrunchGear’s take).
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VCs (And Startups) Won’t Be Immune To The Credit Crunch
So far the downward spiral of credit and financial markets seems to have left venture capital firms and startups relatively unharmed. Even though the IPO market closed completely in the second quarter (and opened again only slightly in the third), venture capital firms continue to raise money and invest in startups at a healthy pace. During the first half of the year, venture capital firms raised about $16 billion in 141 funds and invested about $15 billion in nearly 2,000 deals.
But it is not clear how much of those funds already raised can be counted on. Generally, the investors in a venture fund (the limited partners) commit a certain amount of cash to each fund, but only pony up the cash when the VC fund needs it to make an investment. With wealthy individuals taking losses in the stock, credit, and real estate markets (the stock market is sharply down this morning, and even hedge funds are not safe), VC funds are already beginning to feel the trickle-down effects.
As investors suffer large losses elsewhere, they are not able to fulfill their commitments to the venture funds. This will hurt small funds first, which may already be scrounging for new limited partners to replace the money from existing investors who are beginning to come up empty-handed. Less money for VCs would mean less money for startups. Are any VCs or LPs out there seeing this trend? (Do tell in comments).
On top of that, the exit environment for existing startups is not looking any better. A new MoneyTree report by PricewaterhouseCoopers that is out today notes that both the number of IPOs and M&A exits for startups declined precipitously:
Resulting in the number of IPO registrations far exceeding the number of actual IPOs (in a healthy market it is usually the other way around):
And, not surprisingly, Silicon Valley VC confidence is at the lowest point in seven years:
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Glam Media Turns German Counterpart Codex Media Into Glam Deutschland
Editor’s Update: Glam actually acquired Codex Media back in July. What it is doing now is integrating Codex into Glam Deutschland.
Glam Media, the content network that mostly targets females, may have acquired a large German content network aimed at females, called Codex Media.
A tipster who has a connection to Codex Media first told TechCrunch about the possible acquisition this morning after receiving a letter from Codex saying “Codex Goes Glam.” On the company’s website, the same statement is used at the top of the page [Google Translation Warning].
Codex Media offers a similar service to that of Glam Media. The site offers a slew of premium female content to German women across a wide array of markets, including fashion and celebrity gossip. More importantly, many of its properties are highly sought after in the space: it owns Cosmopolitan Germany and Elle Germany, to name a few.
Neither company has made an announcement at this time about the acquisition, but considering Codex Media is now saying it has “gone Glam,” there’s little doubt that there are some major changes afoot.
And considering the rumors persist that Glam will lay off a part of its workforce or try to appeal to men to increase readership, it only makes sense for the company to try to put the $85 million it raised earlier this year to good use.
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Why Twitter Needs to Do More
In case you missed the news, Twitter announced a new election page that will help its users filter all the election tweets across its network so users can find what they’re looking for as soon as possible. Twitter claims it decided to launch the service after seeing a spike in the number of tweets surrounding the election and the candidates.
The page is different than your run-of-the-mill Twitter page and it does a fine job of finding what you want, when you want. But it highlights an important point that shouldn’t be overlooked: Twitter needs more of these pages.
One of the most appealing aspects of Present.ly, a Twitter clone for the enterprise, is its ability to offer groups. In other words, if you own a company and you only want management to correspond on Present.ly without letting the other employees see what they’re saying, it’s quick and easy to set that up. But in the world of Twitter, you can’t create groups among your friends.
But what if you could create a group of like-minded individuals with interests much like your own on Twitter, regardless of whether or not they’re your friends? It would not only appeal to the majority of users who are trying to meet new people who are “in” to the same things, but it will help Twitter finally address some of its users’ desires.
And now that the election page has launched, we know that it’s possible. After all, how many people who couldn’t care less about the election will really go to that Twitter election page? What Twitter has done with that page is create an environment where people who care about the election and want to see what everyone else thinks can congregate and have a real discussion on the topics that interest them.
That functionality provides significant value to users and it adds a totally new layer of usability that simply can’t be overlooked. Twitter should start creating pages on other popular topics, like sports or celebrity gossip — things that a large group of people can get behind.
Once that proves successful (and it will), Twitter can use that $15 million in funding it just raised to give some of that functionality to its users. Why can’t I create a writing group on Twitter? Why can’t you create a TechCrunch reader group? Both would help us connect with those who have similar interests and we can probably do a better job of meeting new people and getting to know others through Twitter.
Twitter offers an experience that appeals to those who want to only converse with their friends. But now that it has launched an election page, it’s abundantly clear that there’s simply no reason why you can’t create groups to extend the functionality of Twitter and create an experience that goes beyond the basic functionality already being offered.
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Cramster Raises $3 Million to Expand
Cramster on Thursday announced that it has raised $3 million in a Series A funding round, which was led by Shai Reshef, an online education industry veteran. Reshef has also been appointed Chairman to help steer the company in the right direction.
Cramster is a global study community that helps students across the globe understand math, science, and engineering. Students can share notes on the site, review practice exams, and walk each other through homework problems while using the service. The site is populated by college students, high school students, educators, and those that are knowledgeable on the subjects to help students.
The company said it will use the funding to expand its operation and bring more users into the fold.
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State of The Blogosphere: The More You Post, The Higher You Rank
All week, Technorati is releasing data from its 2008 State of the Blogosphere report. On Monday, Technorati told us that bloggers only need 100,000 visitors a month to make $75,000 a year (yeah, right). Today, it offers up something more believable: the more you post, the higher you are likely to rank on Technorati.
Blogging is a volume game. The more you post, the more chances there are that someone else will link to one of your posts. (Technorati rank is based on the number of recent links to your blog). The majority of the Top 100 blogs tracked by Technorati post five or more times per day, and a full 43 percent post more than 10 times per day. Meanwhile, 64 percent of the 5,000 blogs ranked lower than 600 post two to four times a day, which is still a serious commitment.
In fact, about a quarter of all bloggers spend more than 10 hours a week posting, and 66 percent spend more than 3 hours a week.
To summarize some of the findings, from the first two days if the State of the Blogosphere report, iCharts, one of our TC50 finalists, put together the following interactive graphs from the data. Mouse over each part of the graph for more information, and use the sliders to limit the data set. Don’t be shy.
This one shows that collectively, blogs a bigger audience than Facebook and as big an audience as MySpace:
Most bloggers aren’t in it for the money (but you knew that already). Three quarters do it for pure personal satisfaction. Bloggers measure success by how many posts or comments they can generate on their blog (58 percent), how many visitors they get (53 percent), how many links they receive from other blogs (46 percent), or how many RSS subscribers they can amass (39 percent). In other words, they measure success by how much much recognition they get. Only 16 percent measure success by how much money they make.
In terms of demographics, Bloggers are predominantly male across America, Asia, And Europe:
And here are some more detailed demographics of bloggers, based on Technorati’s survey:
Update: Here are the first two charts in iChart form for those who want to play around with the numbers.
And this one’s cool, drag the slider at the bottom to collapse the bars together:
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CityVoter Captures $2.6 Million In Series B Funding
Cityvoter.com, a user-generated city guide that competes with services like AOL’s City Guide, and countless others, announced that it closed $2.6 million in Series B funding.
The round was led by Allen & Company and Dace Ventures and Curt Viebranz, former CEO of Tacoda, as well as Bradley Wechsler, co-CEO of IMAX, joined the company’s advisory board.
CityVoter features business profiles, user-created guides, and recommendations on more than 55 cities and recently released a geo-targeting feature to let users find places to eat, drink, and visit beyond the pre-defined metro areas. Most importantly, though, CityVoter has teamed up with Belo, FOX, Gazette Communications, and others to provide its services on their respective sites in an attempt to increase localized user engagement.
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Beet.tv Gives You Even More to Enjoy From TechCrunch50
Beet.tv, a media company that specializes in providing videos for business-oriented individuals, was busy at TechCrunch50 this past month. The company recorded videos with over 30 companies and has posted them to its site for the world to see.
Want to find out what Me-trics had to say after it got off stage? Interested in a one-on-one discussion with Yammer about how the company works? You can check all that out at Beet.tv’s TechCrunch50 page.
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State Of The Blogosphere: Get To 100K Uniques, Make $75K/year
Technorati, the blog search engine, put out Part I of its sporadic (now-annual?) State of the Blogosphere report this week. This year, it conducted a random survey of 1,079 random bloggers (a statistically significant sample) to paint a more detailed picture of just who exactly is out there blogging. Technorati has indexed a total of 133 million blogs since 2002. In terms of how many are active, 7.5 million blogs have added a new post during the last four months, and 1.5 million have been updated during the last week.
And the average blog that runs ads, according to Technorati, is actually making money:
Among those with advertising, the mean annual investment in their blog is $1,800, but it’s paying off. The mean annual revenue is $6,000 with $75K+ in revenue for those with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month.
The $6,000 a year I can believe. The $75,000 figure is harder to swallow, especially with only 100,000 visitors a month. But directionally there is no doubt that blogs are bringing in more cash.
Who are these bloggers? Technorati breaks that down as well. The vast majority of all bloggers (79 percent) write about their personal interests. No surprise there.
But more than half of all bloggers also write about business. While only 12 percent identify themselves as official “corporate bloggers,” a full 46 percent consider themselves “professional bloggers” (meaning that they write about their industries, but not in an official capacity).
Blogs are also mostly a male affair: 57 percent in the U.S. are written by men, 42 percent went to graduate school, and 50 percent earn more than $75,000 a year, and 58 percent are over 35 years old. (Someone call the diversity police).
More than half have a separate full time job. More than half of survey respondents have been blogging for more than two years.Geographically, North America dominates, with 48 percent of respondents living here. San Francisco and the Bay Area has the most bloggers in the U.S., with New York City, Chicago, and LA also having a strong showing. Although, as the map below shows, the geographic distribution is actually pretty wide.
And blogs continue to be read: blogs in the aggregate now attract 77.7 million unique U.S. visitors per month according to Comscore, nearly double the number of people who visit Facebook.
This is just the first day of the report, so get ready for a lot of data over the next four days. A complete index of the State of the Blogosphere going back to 2004 is here.
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The Pirate Bay Is Getting Into Streaming?
The Pirate Bay, the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker (and one of the most hated by studios), may be getting into streaming, a tipster told us.
The Pirate Bay, which has 3 million users and is closing in on 15 million peers, first mentioned the possibility of a streaming service back in May, but little was heard about it until a cryptic birthday wish to co-founder Peter Sunde (aka Brokep) was posted (Google Translation Alert) on the service’s blog in which a mention of the upcoming streaming service was spotted briefly before it was taken down.
The Pirate Bay may be on to something with its P2P streaming. P2P downloading has always been the toast of the town in the piracy community, but the next stage may be a move towards streaming, which makes it easier for users to watch movies and TV shows. And if that will really happen, it only makes sense for The Pirate Bay to lead the way.
(Update: I contacted Peter Sunde at Pirate Bay, who has confirmed that The Pirate City is not one of the Pirate Bay’s properties, but he did not give any indication of when or if a streaming service would be made available.)
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Envato Launches Theme Marketplace For Your Blog
Envato, a company that operates a set of marketplaces for digital goods, tutorial sites, and a handful of other “projects,” announced that it has launched a new service that will let you buy and sell Web templates for your Wordpress blog and just about any other CMS in existence.
Dubbed ThemeForest, the service runs off the engine that powers the company’s Flash and royalty-free music loops marketplaces. Items on ThemeForest sell for $10 to $50, depending on the quality of the theme and the developer’s greediness and the library currently has 150 themes in place. The site said that its membership tally is already 75,000, but that’s because the same username is used across all of the company’s marketplaces.
In an attempt to make it easier to buy the templates, users can deposit cash on any of Envato’s three sites and that money can be used on any of the others.
So far, ThemeForest offers a healthy amount of nice themes, but can it really compete with Wordpress itself? There are a slew of themes already in the wild and it’s debatable whether people want another marketplace to buy anymore.
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Yahoo And Rhapsody Team Up For Full Song Playback In Search Results
Searching for music is one thing, but have you ever wanted to search for an artist and play their songs without needing to visit other sites? If so, Yahoo and Rhapsody have launched a new service that will let you do just that.
Staring today, users who search for an artist on Yahoo Search will be able to play the artist’s songs in the search results, thanks to a shortcut sitting at the top of the page. Even better, the songs will be played in their entirety through Rhapsody’s FoxyTunes Player. According to Yahoo, the new feature is just another elemt of its “play the Web” strategy and its desire to open its site for outside content and services.
Yahoo said that about 5 million tracks are currently supported, but there’s just one catch: the partnership with Rhapsody only allows users to listen to 25 free full-length tracks every 30 days. Once that limit is reached, users have the option of subscribing to Rhapsody Unlimited for $12.99 per month or continue to listen to an unlimited number of 30-second samples until the next month begins.
When the user searches for a song, the artist’s picture is displayed along with music videos and tracks. Once they pick which song they want to listen to, the FoxyTunes Player launches near the bottom of the window. The player displays artist, track, and album information, along with a Yahoo search link to find the song’s music video. Song playback doesn’t stop users from scrolling through the results, but once they input another search query, playback stops.
All in all, the service works well. I searched for a slew of songs and Yahoo found them with ease. Even better, it doesn’t count a “listen” until you play the song for one minute, so if you’re not sure whether you like a song or not, you have up to a minute to figure it out.
More importantly though, this move puts Google and Microsoft on notice. Now that song playback is available in Yahoo Search results, you can bet that both companies are looking for ways to catch up right this moment. And considering companies like MySpace and others are getting into the streaming music business, they better move fast to gain a foothold as the trend picks up steam.
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Searchme Launches Visual Search Engine For Mobile Devices
Searchme is starting to focus much of its time in the mobile space. Last week, it said it will launch an iPhone app and today it announced that it has launched a visual search engine for mobile devices that can be accessed by surfing to the company’s mobile page.
Searchme’s visual search engine delivers results as a browsable list of “pages,” which are actually images of websites that can be viewed before visiting them. To help users during the search process, Searchme’s search engine suggests categories that have some relevance to the query you’re inputting into the service if you want to drill-down into related topics, and provides shortcuts to the best results to try to cut down on search time.
Searchme’s mobile search engine is quite fast and generally does fine on returning the best search results. But if you’re looking to do extensive searching (who would on a mobile device?) and you judge the quality of a search engine by the number of indexed pages, you’ll be disappointed by Searchme — it only returned 103,000 results for “TechCrunch” compared to 6.9 million returned by Google.
On simple queries like “TechCrunch,” the mobile search performed well and the categories displayed above the results were highly useful. But on more complex queries like “how to have a dog meet a puppy,” it didn’t perform well at all and returned a visual list of useless pages. But Searchme’s main goal isn’t to supplant Google, it’s to offer an experience that’s different and simple to use for those who needs something relatively straightforward as quickly as possible.
Mobile Searchme is a fine solution if you’re looking for a new way to experience search on your mobile device. But if you’re already using Google or Yahoo search on your mobile device, I doubt Searchme’s tool will make you want to switch.
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Beacon Is Baaaaack!
Tom Kincaid, a top platform developer and blogger mentioned in the Facebook Developer Forums last night that Beacon seems to be rearing its ugly head once again. (Update: And although Facebook’s Beacon platform was never actually removed from the service and the feature is not new, partners had backed off from it, which gave the perception to some that it was dead. Since then, Facebook has improved the service to make it more amenable to partners and users alike.)
According to Kincaid, he signed up for CBS Sportsline and got a Beacon-like pop-up, which he thinks may have used a Facebook cookie.
“I signed up on CBS Sportsline and joined fantasy football,” he wrote on the forum. “I got a pop-up on the bottom right. It looks like the old beacon stuff. I thought that didn’t work anymore, but it published a story to the homepage. I didn’t go through any kind of connect log in, it must have used the Facebook cookie somehow.”
I joined CBS Sportsline myself and added a Fantasy Football league to recreate Kincaid’s experience. Once I joined CBS Sportsline, I didn’t see the Beacon pop-up. But as soon as I created a team, the Beacon pop-up was displayed saying I created a fantasy football team, which gave me the option of “learning more,” saying it wasn’t me, or simply saying, “No Thanks.”
Much like Jesse Stay from the Staynalive blog, I found the same Beacon script (src=”http://www.facebook.com/beacon/beacon.js.php?source=10228841580″>) in the source code. I then clicked on the “Learn more” button and was brought to a Beacon information page.
After seeing the Beacon pop-up on CBS Sportsline, I went to other original Beacon partner sites to see if I could recreate the same experience on sites that Facebook may have been able to coax back into the fold, but I wasn’t able to. I signed up for TripAdvisor, but no Beacon pop-ups were displayed and I had another failing experience when I signed up for Zappos.
It now looks like Beacon gives you the option of posting Beacon updates in your timeline. If you click OK, it will be posted. But if you instead choose to remove it, you won’t find any mention of it in the timeline.
(Update: This is not new. Since late 2007, Beacon has been available on dozens of participating sites after the company made a series of improvements to ensure that users have control over what information is shared with their friends on Facebook.)
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Amazon Gets In On the Content Delivery Business
It was only a matter of time before Amazon would decide to release a Content Delivery Network, and according to the company in an official statement released today, it has done just that.
Designed to complement its S3 storage service and EC2 web services, the CDN will be available later this year and will provide users with a high performance method of distributing content to end users. Amazon claims it will have low latency and high data transfer rates when users access the content and it will be specifically designed (in the beginning at least) for “developers and businesses who need to deliver popular, publicly readable content over HTTP connections.”
Although the CDN space is crowded with similar services from Akamai Technologies and Limelight Networks, Amazon thinks it knows how to be successful in the space. And one of the key components of its plan is to undercut others on price and make it much easier to buy CDN services.
According to Amazon, it will charge customers based on usage instead of the common practice of charging through long-term contracts, but it would not discuss pricing at this time.
Amazon getting into the CDN business seems like the ideal move for a company that’s trying to provide storage and on-demand computing services already. And considering its size makes it easier for it to adapt its business model to satisfy smaller businesses and those that are less likely to want to enter into long-term agreements, Amazon could quite easily push its competitors aside and cement itself as the leader in the market.
And with a video streaming and distribution service already in place, Amazon is quickly becoming a CDN for itself, so it may know a thing or two about providing a robust service to its customers when its CDN becomes available later this year.
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WEbook Raises $5 Million In Latest Round of Funding
WEbook has raised $5 million in funding. The round was led by WEbook’s new investor, Vertex Venture Capital and its existing backer, Greylock Partners Israel. The round also included investments from eight unnamed angel investors.
WEbook is an online platform where the site’s users — authors, writers, and even readers — collaborate to write books. Since its April 2008 launch, WEbook has added thousands of writers, editors, illustrators, and readers to its service and the site is currently hosting 15,000 book projects in genres ranging from short stories to non-fiction. Once a book is completed, it goes through a community vetting process where the users vote on books. Those that perform best during the process will be published by WEbook. WEbook shares 50 percent of the profit on sales with the author and the book’s major contributors as a fee for publishing the title.
So far, it looks like WEbook’s efforts are working. The site’s unique visitor count is on the rise, according to Compete data, and it witnessed 17 percent growth over the past month.
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The Mess On Wall Street: Four Trillion Dollars Down The Drain
October 7, 2007
September 12, 2008
The collapse of so many major financial institutions in the past year, and over the past few days especially, is hard to fathom in its enormity. Sometimes you need a good visual to put things in perspective. The New York Times has an interactive graphic up on its site that pretty much says it all. It shows that $4 trillion has been wiped off the total market capitalization of the U.S. stock market since last October. Of that, nearly $1 trillion is from the decline in the financial sector alone.
Each box in the graphic is proportional to the size of the market capitalization of the biggest financial firms then and now. As you mouse over the squares, you can see how much each value each company lost between October 9, 2007 and September 12, 2008. Here are some of the individual losses by market cap:
Citigroup: $236.7 billion to $97.8 billion.
Bank of America: $236.5 billion to $150.2 billion.
AIG: $179.8 billion to $32.3 billion
Goldman Sachs: $97.7 billion to $61.3 billion
American Express: $74.8 billion to $45 billion.
Morgan Stanley: $73.1 billion to $41.1 billion.
Fannie Mae: $64.8 billion to $700 million.
Merrill Lynch: $63.9 billion to $24.2 billion
Freddie Mac: $41.5 billion to $300 million.
Lehman Brothers: $34.4 billion to $2.5 billion.
Washington Mutual: $31.1 billion to $2.9 billion
It is staggering when you look at it all together, and when you realize that the companies still standing like Bank of America and Citgroup, have seen bigger market cap declines than some of the institutions that have gone under (Lehman Brothers) or that had to be bailed out (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac). For the estimated 150,000 financial sector employees who have already lost or will lose their jobs this year, the outlook is bleak. (Although, First Round Capital and Union Square Ventures are already openly trying to recruit a select few of them for their portfolio startups—quant jocks are especially welcome).
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MTV Wants To Sell Ads On Like-Minded Sites
It is not enough to be a destination site anymore. Everyone now wants to become an ad network. MTV Networks on Monday announced that it has expanded its vertical ad network strategy by building ad networks around the service’s core properties.
Each vertical ad network will be called a “Tribe.” Much like In contrast to what LinkedIn is trying to do with its new ad network (reselling access to its audience no matter where they may roam on the Web), MTV.com is basically reselling access to its advertisers audience. It is striking deals with other sites that share a similar audience (i.e., speak to the same Tribe) and offering its existing advertisers inventory on those hand-selected sites.
Each Tribe is made up of the partner sites and the people who visit them. In this case, the “MTV Generation Tribe” is supposedly made up of sites targeting that hard-to-reach youth demographic that is interested in music, movies, videogames, sports, and sneakers. According to MTV Networks, each of its online properties has users that are staggeringly similar and can form the basis of an advertising Tribe. (Yeah, we thought tribes were made up of people, but MTV thinks that Websites can be grouped into tribes as well. Who knew?)
Once the Tribe is formed, MTV will sell advertising inventory and packages using demo-targeting, geo-targeting, day-parting and contextual targeting that it believes will capture the right audience for the right advertiser.
The MTV Tribe ad-network, which is anchored by MTV.com, launched today with Pepsi as its hallmark sponsor. CMT, Spike, and VH1 Tribes will be launching later this month and the Comedy Central Tribe will launch during the first quarter of 2009.
MTV Networks’ decision to categorize each service into Tribes is following a trend across the Web. In essence, companies are taking a destination site’s targeted audience and repackaging it into an ad network in the hopes that it will garner more revenue for all parties. The strategy assumes that advertisers will want to spend money targeting that specific audience based on their shared interests.
This will only work for destination sites that attract enough unique visitors that have enough overlap with other Websites to make them want to sign up as advertising partners. (MTV had 9.4 million U.S. visitors in August, ac