Bronte Media

One of the fun byproducts of living in New York is running into the familiar streets and locations that have appeared on movies and television series. My apartment, for instance, is around the corner from where Miranda proposed to Steve on Sex and the City. That level of disclosure may be troubling to you and if so I apologize.

Anyhoo, here is a fascinating history of video games that have been based in New York. I haven’t seen my apartment near any of them unfortunately.

Looks like Lionsgate is making a movie of Atlas Shrugged and Angelina Jolie is in as the heroine Dagny Taggart:

“Some of the chess pieces are already in place. Lionsgate vice chairman Michael Burns has acquired the rights. Vadim Perelman, the director of The House of Sand and Fog, will direct the movie, which will star pillowy-lipped, bedroom-eyed actress Angelina Jolie as the heroine, Dagny Taggart.”

Also, see three books that have changed my life so far.

I know. I know. The only constant in media coverage of the Internet industry is the perennial navel gazing question of ‘are we in a bubble?’ Like a broken clock that is right twice a day, people are ever so proud when they are actually right.

I don’t really think there is a financial bubble. Yet. But here are two very frothy transactions that made me say ‘huh’ this morning:

Cox buys Adify for $300m. The company had $7m in revenue last year. But that’s gross revenue.

Without a hint of irony, Adify CEO Russ Fradin pointed out on Techcrunch that Adify is better described as a platform and services company, not a network.

What does that mean for the rest of us? Well platform and services companies get paid less than ad networks basically.

From an early story on the company when it raised its most recent $19m round:

“Adify is only taking 20 percent of what the advertiser pays to the publisher, somewhat less than the 30 percent or higher that others take.”

So the $7m gross is actually $1.4m. But that is expected to grow to $35m (or $7m net revenue) this year. Bravo Cox.

The second bubble alert was Jeff Dachis teaming up with Austin Ventures and $50m to “create an industry leading strategic consulting practice and an enterprise class Social Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) suite.”

What the fuck does that even mean? Do they sell and integrate Microsoft Exchange and Outlook? Install the Cisco phones?

This just in:

“Well-traveled Larry Brown has reached an agreement to return to the NBA as coach of the Charlotte Bobcats, a person familiar with the decision told The Associated Press on Monday.

[…]

Reached early Tuesday, Vincent said he wasn’t surprised that part-owner Michael Jordan decided to bring in a veteran coach.”

Brown is over-rated and a dinosaur in the world of Greg Popovich and Bryan Colangelo.

Jordan is proving that exquisite on-court skills don’t transfer off-court, where he has bungled time at the Washington Wizards and now the Charlotte Bobcats.

I used to bank with them when I lived in Australia:
“Commonwealth Bank of Australia Ltd (CBA) will spend $580 million over the next four years replacing 45-year-old technology systems to improve efficiency and customer service.”

This is similar to the walking zombie airlines like United and US Airways and American Airlines who I avoid like the plague when traveling.

Why advertise the fact that you have currently-active 45 year old technology at all?

Remember way back last year when Google banned Seth Godin’s publishing free for all Squidoo? How they were screwed?

Well I randomly came across this chart in another blog post I was reading:

Yeah, so it really looks like they are struggling in bansville.

Economists and other financial watchers have valued the observed over the said for many centuries. During the Jupiter heyday, Evan Neufeld was famous for using the phrase “shit or get off the pot” frequently. Essentially: don’t talk about doing it, do it. The former isn’t valuable and the later is all that matters.

In all the surveys Jupiter did, consumers would say they would do things and said they felt positively but in the end there was a strange factor of three. That is, three times as many people said they were going to do something than actually ended up doing it.

That’s why the financial management startups like Mint and Wesabe are so exciting to me. They capture real world observed data, rather than self-reported data (surveys, reviews etc.). They literally could build the utopian yellow pages company.

Brad Burnham has a great post up on the Union Square Ventures weblog on the company’s new release:

“Wesabe anonymously aggregates spending data from thousands of “neighbors” so you can now know that, on average, a service visit to the Weatherford BMW dealership costs $700 more than a visit to a visit to Bavarian Professionals and yet users rated Weatherford 17 on a scale of 100 compared to the independent shop’s rating of 96. Aggregating data on spending patterns and satisfaction for the hundreds of merchants and service providers we depend on in our everyday lives, and making that data available to consumers will empower consumers to make better choices with their money.”

There is one small problem: user’s don’t explicitly want to create a utopian yellow pages company through Wesabe. So the challenge is giving users enough value in an online version of Quicken that they are happy to contribute their data to the service.

Also one other point may be that not a lot of personal people like to manage their money (or not enough to get representive scale). Rather, the majority of Intuit’s customers are small businesses who definitely all want to manage their money.

So maybe instead of a consumer utopian yellow pages company, Wesabe and Mint might end up creating the utopian small business B2B yellow pages company. Still each are huge opportunities to be had.

Poker can describe almost any situation in life. And if the Yahoo, Microsoft dance was a poker hand, Yahoo just missed its inside straight draw.

The core revenue numbers were: O and O search +16%, Display +15%.

But all the search gains seems to be pricing (i.e. no query growth). From the call: “15% RPS gain goal. In Q1, we made that.” RPS = Revenue per search.

So on the whole, very lukewarm numbers and certainly not bastions of success. But this was the killer for me: International was up 7%.

The problem it seems is that much of international is levered to affiliate partnerships and not Yahoo’s owned and operated properties. Google is absolutely killing it outside of America and surely it’s only a matter of time before partners switch over to Google, who are able to offer them better rates. It also means Yahoo won’t participate in another huge growth driver as the online populations of countries the world over mature and the corresponding advertising dollars follow the maturity.

My take on Yahoo has been all along that they should give up on Panama, fire every person to do with it and switch over to Google for search monetization. They should not junk their crawler and organic search efforts. The two are not mutually exclusive.

They should refocus around remnant display and their grab bag of leading assets they’ve acquired, which seem to be showing some signs of life. And of course over-arching all of this, if they can’t grow queries or they can’t grow impressions, then they’re fucked anyway.

Given the assumed fat padding in the results to stave off Microsoft, on the whole the results are a little disappointing and certainly change nothing in the negotiating scheme.

Yahoo should now fold on the river. If they aren’t acquired in the next few months, then it will be by this time next year.

p.s. Also see Card’s write-up and an interesting point around a jump in fee revenue.

This smells a little too much to me. I am sure all the world will come to the rescue of ‘little Craigslist’ against big corp eBay but there is this “eBay says, Craigslist’s board [..] unilaterally acted to dilute eBay’s economic interest in Craigslist by more than 10 percent.”

There are no specifics and the case is sealed. Perhaps they re-capitalized the company. Perhaps they changed the voting rights and preferences of each owner’s stake. It will be interesting to see whether it makes the results make it into eBay’s filings. Stay tuned.

Hugely important, major content management systems have been spun out of CNET in some way. In the early days of the Internet, Vignette was spun out of CNET and now it is a large and lumbering public company. Matt Mallenweg moved to the bay area to work with CNET and moonlighted by writing Wordpress. It’s now a very promising startup but I don’t believe CNET invested any money in it and so will see zero benefit from its incubation. David Karp was also working for CNET (on Urban Baby) when he wrote Tumblr. Again, I don’t believe CNET invested in Tumblr. Perhaps Tumblr will be CNET’s last famous content management system? Three’s a charm.

The word portal in an Internet context is bothering. Initially it was to describe the transporting of a user to where they were looking to go to as quickly as possible. Then the tension shifted to increasing the user’s utility on the portal’s own site and not transporting them. So now we have a prevalent term that represents the exact opposite of its definition. Search is called search, but the word search really only implies the first step: the user entering in keywords. And not the actually second step, the finding, which portal does ironically perfectly capture. I doubt we will change our meaning of portal but perhaps the world would have been better place if Google would have been a ‘portal’ and MSN, Yahoo et al ‘gardens’.