Bronte Media

Tell us what you really think Brian :

“It’s no wonder that Claria got out of the adware business and WhenU is dying an excruciating death (after fleecing investors out of $35m). Oh, and Yahoo! should be shot for providing life support to WhenU - every WhenU pop is now comprised of Yahoo Sponsored Results.”

I spent the last few hours with Jellyfish’s Smack Shopping Deal of the Day in the background of my browser. Basically they put up an item that starts off at a highish recommended retail price and ticks down until someone buys it. The list of merchandise that sold today is here.

It was one of the most engaging experiences I’ve had on the Internet in a while. Kind of like eBay the first time you used it. I even thought about buying a kid’s snowboard when it reached down to 65% off (sidenote: for the movification of this type of behavior and an insight into Australian culture, be sure to get this DVD).

Just brilliant. They are using the deal of the day to bring people back to the shopping community because shopping comparison is inherently task oriented and relatively infrequent. Great way to build the brand as well (i.e. if you view a few deal of the day, you’re more likely to visit the site a few months down the track when you are buying an LCD TV), and I am guessing not too much marketing spend (company is VC funded).

More coverage of Jellyfish from Brian-the-master-of-comparison-engines. Extra kudos also because one of the founders commented on this blog a while back too

While there may be some ‘creases’ to be ironed out, crawling is a fundamental part of today’s web.

So for job name of the day: Crawlmeister at Krugle. I love it! There will be a growing demand for these type of people and let’s hope the name catches on.

Crawling is the inefficiency that APIs take away. But since most everything does not have an API, crawling is the way to glean information on the web for now. Like anything technology related you can use it for bad (arbitrage, made-for-adsense sites, copyright infringement etc.) or good (like say as a piece of a puzzle to help someone to make a better decision at Homethinking ).

Interesting meme from Charlie around small companies that are acquired in their early stages that don’t go on to greater things when they are part of a larger company.

One possible answer and our quote of the day is from Jim Leff, founder of Chowhound, a forum for food worshiping, whose company was acquired by CNET early this year for a price in the low millions:

“Mr. Leff said his arrangement works like this: “Insofar as my input, there’s a lot of meetings where I’ll say, ‘I think we should do this,’ and they say, ‘I don’t think so,’ and I say, ‘O.K.’ ”

Classic.

Interesting article by David Kesmodel on a few of the domain names in Marchex’s 220,000 portfolio. Essentially, who knew there were a few trademark typos and some adult ones?

My reaction is that there are sure to be many more, but who really cares? As one of the commenters points out: Google has essentially set the industry’s benchmark as ‘trademarks what me worry?’

As context in a journal article about Hotjobs’ deal with a series of newspapers was this:

“Currently, CareerBuilder has 32% of the North American revenue for online job listings, according to Morgan Stanley, with Monster Worldwide Inc.’s Monster.com following closely behind with 31%. HotJobs has only 9%.”

Morgan Stanley tend to follow the classifieds space well, so I would have confidence in them.

Monster is valued at a little less than $6bn. Now Monster derives around a third of its revenue from international. So let’s call the value of the US operations an even $4bn.

Yet Gannett and Tribune upped their stakes in Careerbuilder at a valuation of $1.55 billion! Which I think will go down as one of the smartest Internet deals this year. What a steal!

Either way, Tribunes 42.5% stake should be worth nearly that in the company auction, considering Monster’s valuation and Careerbuilder’s momentum in the market.

I attended the NextNY event organized by Charlie and Marti last night on Biz Dev 2.0.

Ed Costello took great notes on the event, so I will point you there if you’d like to read more. But basically I think the conclusion out the discussion was:

• Self-service business development allow small companies to prove themselves and when offered by large companies, sponsor innovation that would not have happened otherwise.
• It’s not really anything new. In fact it’s heavily borrowing from the basic concepts of affiliate marketing mixed in with advances in web technologies.
• It’s easier to do traditional biz dev deals with small companies than large ones. I think that is just a fundamental byproduct of the people interests in running the firms. Startups by their nature are very experimental and obsessed with product development in the early stages. Larger companies are primarily plagued with problems of scale. More integrations run counter to that, so they naturally have to be more risk adverse.
• Biz dev folks should not worry. If anything API implementations add a better filter as to who they should be speaking to

Charlie also launched the NextNY blog and if you aren’t on the mailing list, then be sure to sign up. The discussion is always great and the events small enough that you actually meet interesting people at the moment (although I think with the Tech Meetup you could see how popularity might change that).

Speaking of popularity, is anybody going to the TechCrunch party tonight? I’ve asked a few people (who probably constitute the entire audience of this blog) but just in case, if you are going tonight ping me on email (niki dot scevak at gmail)

One area that I do think there is a bubble is mobile email. Bill Burnham’s piece is one of the best you will read about the state of the market. I mean bubble as in the actual definition of a bubble, not the term that is thrown around web 2.0 when people hear about too many companies with no funding chasing a solution to the same problem. Bubble’s require over-investment in one area relative to the expected returns in a reasonable time period (< 5-7 years).

Mobile email companies that raise $200m are one example of that. But if Motorola buys the company for $500m, then the music clearly has not stopped and their are still empty chairs waiting to be seated upon. Or to use another metaphor: there are more suckers down the line.

People talk about free 411 as being a disruptive market - one that shrinks the size of the total market while creating a great business for the firm that does so. Craigslist would be another great example.

There is a lot of money in Ringtones. Alot of it by convincing unsuspecting teens to pay $10 a month. But now a company called Phonezoo is aiming to create a free ringtone mixer and creator for people to change their phone ring. For free. Copyright material too, if the person uploads a copy of the song to the server, ostensibly proving they own the music (or have committed the act of stealing elsewhere at the very least). I love it. Matt Marshall has a fantastic review of the company over at VentureBeat. Fascinating stuff.

Why oh why would Eric Schmidt flatly deny that Google’s acquisition of YouTube did not involve setting aside a portion for legal defence in the case that the firm was sued? Especially when the deal was set to close one week after where they would be obliged to disclose the fact. He just looks like a complete idiot. The strange thing is, if he did say that the deal had some negotiated portion involved then he would have looked like a savvy negotiator. I can see no reason to lie. People would have found out anyway (and he must of known that it was close to closing if it was just one week away). It just puzzles me the personality required to be universally evasive in the media.