Media

12.14.06

Traffic Warrants Media | Comments
Takkle is a Brooklyn, NY-based social networking site for high school athletes that has attracted venture financing from Greycroft and received news coverage this week for a strategic partnership with Sports Illustrated - a big step forward for what looked like a flat startup in August. In short, SI is partnering with Takkle as a lead generation (and branding) tool for its "Faces in the Crowd" column. Clever. But what really struck me about the partnership was Staci Kramer's analysis of the deal. She writes the following: Price [Jeff Price, President of SI Digital] said the revenue opportunity 'comes from SI monetizing the Faces in ...
12.13.06

Swivel Set My Data Free Media | Comments
The economics major in me is drooling over a new site called Swivel whose founders describe the service as "YouTube for data." Users upload data sets via a clean, intuitive interface, add metadata (description, source, tags), and publish for the world to parse as it wishes. I'm excited because a) data sets can be notoriously difficult to dig up (and either time or cost prohibitive), b) the field could use a nice injection of creativity (a la Steven Levitt) which scores of data sets in a single place are bound to generate, and c) Swivel makes data fun. Last ...
12.11.06

How to Craft a Social Networking Invite Life, Media | Comments
What's funny about "social networking" is that it emphasizes the fact that few of us are gifted socializers, though we're often ferocious networkers. LinkedIn, the "put on your good suit, good manners, and good networking skills" social network is interestingly, no exception. Sure, it lacks the lascivious photos and the tired pick-up lines - okay, maybe not the latter, which is exactly the point. If one doesn't take a few minutes to personalize the virtual business card exchanging and colleague backslapping, the experience degrades quickly into the standard "popularity contest." I decided to hop on the ...
11.22.06

Salaries Gone Social Entrepreneurship, Media | Comments
Louisville's digital media scene has just added a new player: SalaryScout. The company is the brainchild of Ben Thomas, an IT security specialist and moonlighting entrepreneur. Locally Ben is known as the organizer of periodic "Louisville Geek Dinners" and has had a few side projects up his sleeves for a while so it's nice to see SalaryScout launch. The company asks new users to answer a series of questions about their job compensation and responsibilities, and delivers in return full access to the anonymous data of other users. Unlike competitors Salary.com (which recently filed to go public as ...
11.08.06

Two Healthcare Related Startups Worth Knowing Entrepreneurship, Healthcare, Media | Comments
As follow-up to this morning's post on a grocery chain's nutritional rating system, I thought I'd point out two healthcare startups worth keeping tabs on and, incidentally, applauding. DailyStrength, which offers a health-focused social network, just received a glowing review on TechCrunch. I've long thought that this market was ripe for "entrepreneurial picking" given the great lengths that health sufferers will go to in order to connect with others suffering from similar conditions (Yahoo! groups, forums, etc) and the lack of any company addressing such a need in a comprehensive, polished way. MyCancerPlace comes to mind as a niche ...
11.06.06

Who Clicks on Feed Ads? I Do. Blogging, Media, VC | Comments
After seeing Paul Kedrosky's readership survey, I've been expecting some high-end advertising on his site and in his feed (like the Maserati ads that show up in the PAW). After all, 29% of Paul's readership earns more than $250,000 a year and 30% of his readers are CEOs/Presidents/Chairpersons/Owners of their respective organizations. As Guy, Rick, or Oskar Schell might say, Holy Shitake! Welcome to the world of uber-niche media consumption. And so it was with baited breath that I clicked on an ad in Paul's feed today. Despite my not fitting the above demo, it was perfectly targeted - venture information services! [On further reflection, I ...
11.01.06

Aggressive Ringo Tactics (continued) Entrepreneurship, Media | Comments
On Saturday I wrote about Ringo's aggressive customer acquisition tactics. To summarize, the company is pushing users to open their email contact list kimonos in order for Ringo to gain new users. That's a harsh way of saying the company is encouraging its users to invite friends, which is how Ringo puts it. After experiencing this "sell" in the registration process itself several weeks ago, I created an additional account on Saturday (with pseudonym "Chris") to test the waters again. I found no email contact list overtures during registration, but lo and behold, three days later (tonight), I receive the following: ...
10.31.06

Mind Your Web Presence Entrepreneurship, Media | Comments
My friend Michael Fertik has launched a nifty web service called ReputationDefender and it's received a fair amount of coverage in the last week across the blogosphere (see here, here, and here). Ostensibly, ReputationDefender is addressing the fear factor of personal (or familial) PR on the web. For a monthly fee (ranging from $9.95/month for a 24 month subscription to $15.95/month for a six month sub), the company will track mentions of one's name across the Internet and allow users to request what I would call "PR interventions" (for an additional $29.95 per intervention). In other words, ReputationDefender ("RD" - my term) might discover that someone I barely ...
10.28.06

The New Face of Customer Acquisition Media | Comments
I often hear the following refrain from an Internet services executive: "People are willing to share a LOT of information when they register at our site." There are caveats of course - ease of sign-up, for instance, can accelerate a company's growth trajectory (see Ed Sim's thoughtful words here) - but many companies use the registration process itself to extract significant value. When I recently registered on Ringo, a photo-sharing site and a division of venture-backed success Tickle, the company employed a rather aggressive tactic that I couldn't help but share. Expect this one to proliferate rapidly to similar services. After offering my vitals (name, email, birthday), Ringo presented ...
10.17.06

Print Has a Lot of Fessing Up to Do Media | Comments
DODO (Raphus cucullatus), originally uploaded by happy via. After fielding a couple questions from interested parties on my prior post, The Consumer's Media Primer, I wanted to follow up on a particular point. In that post, I wrote: Still, there are challenges to the digital ad model. Today, thereâ€™s a big ad rate gap in most verticals (information tech media is a significant exception) â€“ the COO of Dow Jones mentioned some time ago that the CPM for print readers of the Wall Street Journal is $75 vs an online CPM of $25 (from a blog post which ...

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Welcome to Punctuative! Here you'll find occasionally insightful comments on entrepreneurship, venture capital, technology, and the future, as well as a nifty tool meant to help open doors in the financing world. Go ahead and explore.