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A VC | Advertising Spending Trends: Bullish (Internet) Investment Signals

Jun 12010

Ad Spend Trends

This chart is from a deck put together by Hal Varian, Google's Chief Economist

 

The thing that jumps out at you is the long and structural decline in newspaper ad revenue as a share of the total market. And that's why Hal put this slide in his deck.

But the thing that jumps out at me is the line called Internet. I don't know what that includes. It could just be display. It could be all Internet. I don't have time this morning to do the legwork to figure that out.

But what this chart says is that over that past decade Internet has gone from nothing to 5% of all the ad spend in the US.

That is the most bullish signal about investing in the Internet that I have seen this year.

More ...

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/06/ad-spend-trends.html

The New York Times | Imagine YouTube For Traders ...

For half an hour last Thursday afternoon, CNBC was the most exciting place on television. Watching Erin Burnett and Jim Cramer try not to freak out — they acquitted themselves nicely — while the market tumbled like a drunken rag doll down a long staircase was amazing television.

The rest of the time, as when the market is not suffering the largest drop within a single day of trading? Um, not so much. Even if you are an avowed business bobble-head, most of the time, CNBC and other financial channels are a kind of wallpaper. Business people mostly live in narrow verticals. If you follow and trade in uranium, it’s not going to pop up all that often on the linear channels of television.

So Thomson Reuters is trying to change television. Its new product, Reuters Insider, is a Web-based video service that captures myriad streams of information produced by the company’s reporters and 150 partners. The service, which will begin Tuesday, is something like a You Tube for the financially interested, albeit one that is available only to Reuters subscribers, who pay as much as $2,000 a month.

Using the main window of the service, called Channel One, subscribers can navigate by sector, date, markets or region, or apply filters to create their own personalized channels.

Thomson Reuters, which was formed in a merger in 2008, creating a $30 billion behemoth in financial news and information, is making a big bet on Insider, about $100 million. While its chief competitor, Bloomberg, is making inroads into consumer media with its purchase of Businessweek, Thomson Reuters is going in the opposite direction.

Why try to sell advertisers on a broad television network when you can get subscribers — investment banks, analysts, market players — to pay and pay dearly for the information ginned up by 2,800 reporters from 200 bureaus around the world, not to mention lots of other technical business intelligence from a curated group of partners?

More ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/business/media/10carr.html?ref=technology

The Economist | Liking Versus Linking.

A couple of thoughts came in yesterday after my post on liking and linking. From @mattmoorek, a journalism student in Edinburgh,

Is to 'like' to link? Surely not. Linking is far more weighty. 'Liking' is ephemeral.

In our own comment thread, steven314 writes

Most of the 'likes' of facebook at the moment are instantaneous and throwaway: at that second, something is slightly better than anything else around and so someone "like"s it. ... The advantage of links is that they cost something to make: a small piece of your time to write a blog post or (maybe) even send a tweet. The cost of clicking a Like link is too close to nothing.

In an Economist special report in February, Kenneth Cukier describes the value of "data exhaust", the information we create accidentally as we wander around the web. As we choose an item in a list of search results returned by Google, for example, Google records that click and feeds it back into its search algorithm. That choice is a data point; it signals to Google which link was most valuable to you, information that can in turn improve the value of future search results. Mr Cukier calls this "spinning dross into gold".

More ...

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/04/liking_and_linking

Fast Company | President Obama: Information Becomes a Diversion ...

President Obama gave a commencement at Virginia's Hampton University over the weekend, and used part of his speech to criticize, as he's been doing publicly since his fantastic smack-down of Republican House members, the torrent of incomplete information or downright incorrect information that flows so easily in the modern 24-hour news cycle. He added in what seems at first to be a little dig at gadgetry--but really, he's not criticizing the hardware or software so much as the content.

"You're coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank all that high on the truth meter," Obama said at Hampton University, Virginia.

"With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, -- none of which I know how to work -- information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation," Obama said.

More ...

http://www.fastcompany.com/1642640/obama-on-ipods-ipads-xboxes-and-playstations-information-becomes-a-diversion

GigaOM | Hiring Picks Up at VC-backed Startups ...

Hiring at venture-backed startups picked up speed in the first quarter of this year, according to figures released by the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and job board StartUpHire.com. A total of 13,314 jobs were posted by startups on the web site in the first quarter — an average of 4,400 new positions each month — and a 16 percent increase since the end of 2009. The report is another indicator that the pace of hiring is starting to recover in the technology sector, after a downturn caused by the recession and other economic factors over the past two years.

There have been other recent signs that the technology job market could be turning around: Google told analysts in its earnings conference call last week that it hired 768 new employees in the first quarter, and Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette said it expects to “continue hiring aggressively through the year.” Intel has also said that it plans to hire between 1,000 and 2,000 people this year, its first major hiring wave in five years, and Cisco is planning to expand its workforce by 2,000-3,000 employees. LinkedIn has also been hiring, adding 154 people already this year, and Twitter has boosted its headcount to 170 from about 45 in the past year and says it plans to continue hiring.

More ...

http://gigaom.com/2010/04/21/hiring-picks-up-at-venture-backed-startups/

VentureBeat | Question-and-Answer Startup, Quora, Valued at $86m

Quora, the question-and-answer site that has become the new obsessive past-time of Silicon Valley insiders, raised funding in a first round led by Benchmark Capital. The company’s co-founders,  Adam D’Angelo, who was Facebook’s chief technology officer and  Charlie Cheever, who was another early Facebook engineer, also invested.  Matt Cohler, another early Facebook executive, joins the board from Benchmark.

D’Angelo confirmed the round through Quora, but didn’t disclose the size. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch says sources are telling him Quora’s valuation is $86 million and the company raised $11 million. We have a Q&A with the pair here. They’re a team of four, with two employees coming on shortly, Cheever said.

The funding marks yet another success for startups from former Facebook employees. Benchmark also backed Asana, the productivity startup from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.

At its core, the company’s model is pretty simple. Ask a question. Get an answer from the crowd.

More ...

http://digital.venturebeat.com/2010/03/29/quora-2/

TechCrunch | Google Reader Play - RSS Gets Spiced Up

Google launched a new service today in from its Labs called Google Reader Play. It is a more visual way to browse through the most popular items being saved and shared on Google Reader. When you launch it, you are presented with a large photo, video, or text excerpt on the main part of the screen, and can flip through by clicking on arrows or selecting an item from the filmstrip at the bottom of the screen.

Google Reader Play doesn’t require you to sign in, but if you do then you can star, share, and like items, and it starts to recommend things to you based on what your friends share, star, and like in Google Reader. The user interface seems to borrow a lot from StumbleUpon, with its concept of randomly flicking through the best stuff on the Web. In particular, it’s very similar to StumbleVideo, except it includes more than just videos. It is very image-heavy. The user interface reminds me of some elements of enjosythin.gs as well in the way that it presents images and text excerpts in a blown-up manner. The arrows are very Fast Flip, another Labs experiment for the Google News in making magazine and newspaper articles more visually browsable.

More ...

http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/10/google-reader-play/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

GigaOM | Real-Time Search is a Bit of an Oxymoron ...

The major search engines and many upstarts are doing their best to innovate to make search quicker, in part by incorporating Twitter’s full “firehose” of results. Google, in addition to being the biggest search engine on the planet, has the deepest and longest integration of the Twitter firehose, showing tweets and other real-time updates on its main search results page for three months now.

Eye-tracking on this Google search for Etsy showed that users may not look low enough on the page to see real-time results.

Though you can’t find something until it exists, so real-time search is a bit of an oxymoron. An eye-tracking report from OneUpWeb posted by Kara Swisher today rightfully compares the challenge of finding information that’s both relevant and new to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. But the study did find that users are already responding to real-time results, especially when they’re seeking out news. Those seeking products, on the other hand, clicked less and found real-time results less useful.

OneUpWeb found Google searchers seeking current news and information clicked on real-time results 30 percent of the time, while users seeking products clicked 20 percent of the time. It also noticed a bias for Google to display real-time results (when it does, which isn’t for every search) lower for consumer goods than for information, which probably had an effect on whether people looked at them or not.

More ...

http://gigaom.com/2010/03/05/real-time-search-better-for-news-than-products/

Mashable | Trendrr Releases Twitter Dashboard for Entertainment Industry

Social media measurement platform Trendrr has just released a new real-time dashboard — targeted toward TV networks and brands — that tracks online conversations by gender, location, sentiment, influence, reach and volume.

The Trendrr real-time dashboard — now available to all Trendrr Pro users — may sound like yet another social media monitoring product, but this is all about presentation, and on that front it delivers. You can get a better idea of data presentation from the screenshot of the Winter Olympics dashboard below.

The dashboard is configured to look at Twitter conversations in compartmental buckets that provide a comprehensive picture of all the online chatter pertaining to a brand or entertainment entity. So Trendrr Pro users now have an alternative way to view their data; it’s less about charts and graphs, although those are included, and more about providing a lens to better consume the data powering the reports.

At the top of the dashboard you get a real-time glimpse at keywords (which you can select to further filter the dashboard view) that are trending around the topic of interest, a count of real-time results since you started, and a number that projects total reach.

More ...

http://mashable.com/2010/02/23/trendrr-real-time-dashboard/

GigaOM | Gowalla CEO on the Future of Location-Based Apps ...

Josh Williams, chief executive officer and co-founder of Alamofire, a Austin, Texas-based company behind the location-based mobile application Gowalla, stopped by our office last week to discuss his company and its future. (How Gowalla and similar apps work: You visit a place, you fire up your app and check in on your mobile phone, announcing to your friends that you’re at that location.)

Gowalla, which recently raised nearly $8.4 million in venture funding from the likes of Greylock, Shasta Ventures and Maples Investments, is still relatively young and has far fewer users than Foursquare. I’ve heard that the company has between 85,000 and 100,000 users — and that’s despite the backing of web celebrities (startup founders and angel investors) Kevin Rose, Gary Vaynerchuck, Chris Sacca and Jason Calacanis — who have been pushing it hard.

More (incl. video interview) ...

http://gigaom.com/2010/01/22/gowalla-williams-video/