Angel Investors ABCs: Patrons of Innovation
Venture Hacks does a great walkthrough of “How to Be an Angel” – from Naval Ravikant, who breaks down the three must-haves: access to capital, proprietary dealflow and good judgment to how to evaluate pitches and start-up teams.
Social Media’s Conversation Prism Map
For those looking to better comprehend the sinews of social media platforms, apps/utilities and publishing players in the space, Brian Solis and JESS3 have a fine looking prismatic aperture diagram below. [More sizes via the link.]
Social media is moving beyond a quantity palatte – just how many platforms can you splatter brand paint on, really? – into a quality distribution play where you niche out your followers and program content and community to them individually. And then, think out of the Facebook and Twitter “shared” box that 99% of companies subscribe to, as well. Think consumer-generated media beachheads (insert inane acronym)…
Open Angel Forum and AngelList
Two relatively new resources for startup entrepreneurs looking for angel investments. AngelList springs from the VentureHacks group, while Open Angel Forum was founded by Jason Calacanis, after he challenged all of the angel forums and keiretsus who charged fees to startups seeking angels.
Via WSJ: Earlier this year, Internet entrepreneur and blogger Jason Calacanis started Open Angel Forum, which holds free pitch events in various cities where entrepreneurs selected from a pool of applicants can pitch to about 20 to 30 angel investors. [...] Another free service, AngelList, started in February by angels Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi, vets dozens of deals before highlighting the best ones in emails each week sent to a group of 200 investors.
These are open source solutions, like Y Combinator, for startups and angels:
- Open Angel Forum: http://openangelforum.com/
- AngelList: http://venturehacks.com/angellist
- Y Combinator: http://ycombinator.com/
Overnight Startup Successes, Unfair Advantages and VC Pile-Ons
The nature of really breaking out of the startup pack these days is becoming a viral or word of mouth (WOM) overnight success. Outside of Facebook’s social graph anaconda, Twitter has been parlayed forward by Ashton, Oprah, Britney and many of the other known-by-one-name celebs into the next Digg/Facebook/etc.
If American Idol is a barometer of talent – or Susan Boyle, an example of instant stardom (even if it took xx years to get there); then Twitter and now FourSquare are showcases of how to enter the media fray successfully. Read more >>
Ken Auletta’s Googled: 25 New Media Maxims
Ken Auletta’s new book is a journalist’s take on the Google phenomenon. He conducted interviews with some 150 current and former Google employees as well as the CEO Eric Schmidt and the normally media-shy founders Larry and Sergey.
Read the transcript from the Charlie Rose interview. And the addendum of 25 media maxims to create a consequential media empire in the digital age. Full download after the jump…
25 Media Maxims
- Passion wins
- Focus is required
- Vision is required
- A team culture is vital
- Treat engineers as kings
- Treat customers like kings
- Brand often means trust
- Every company should strive to take the risks out of capitalism
- Every company is a frenemy
- The speed of change accelerates
Read more >>
The Ten Spot: Nov 7, 2009
Spielberg: Have Movies Will Travel…. Again? – BusinessWeek
Even before Steven Spielberg’s newly reformulated Dreamworks SKG makes its first film, his studio is moving for a third time – well, sort of. BusinessWeek has learned that the Dreamworks operation, headed by Spielberg and producing partner Stacey Snider, is moving the rights to show its movies on pay TV from Starz (LMDIA) to Showtime (CBS).
The Hot New Business Of Virtual Goods – SAI
NYT: Analysts estimate that virtual goods could bring in a billion dollars in the United States and around $5 billion worldwide this year — all for things that, aside from perhaps a few hours of work by an artist and a programmer, cost nothing to produce. “It’s a fantastic business,” said Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners, a venture capital firm that has invested $10 million in several virtual goods companies. “Because it’s digital, the marginal cost for every one you sell is zero, so you have 100 percent margins.”
FunnyorDie.com: ‘SNL’ for the online crowd – LAT
Since its launch, the site has transcended the initial hype of Ferrell and McKay’s debut video, “The Landlord” (with 66.7-million views and counting). Now it’s a fledgling new media studio with a CEO, a Silicon Valley office and a reported ($15-million investment. (Though the site is making money, it hasn’t turned a profit, according to those familiar with its finances. McKay calls it “our not-for-profit theater.”) For the legions of comic unknowns out there, the site offers another way to network and possibly get discovered. For the A-listers, it is a creative outlet, set apart from the conglomerates running entertainment, that may not earn them a dime but pays off with street cred on the comedy scene.) Read more >>
The Ten Spot: Oct 30, 2009
via HuffPost Game Changers: Who Is The Ultimate Game Changer In Philanthropy: The Extraordinaries
Making it effortless to add brief volunteer activities to your busy day. The Extraordinaries delivers information via mobile phone about micro-volunteer opportunities that can be done on-demand and on-the-spot. Standing in line at the DMV? Sure you can listen to music on your iPhone, but won’t you feel better about yourself if you use that iPhone to spend those stray minutes adding identifying tags to museum photos, or translating a Spanish document into English? With over 700 million smartphones expected to be in use by 2012, these innovators see billions of hours of spare time ready to be tapped into for the greater good.
Killer Quote: “We hope people might look differently at that ride on the bus and not just play video games. Micro-volunteerism is perfectly suited for the Millennial Generation. They are used to text messaging, MySpace, Facebook, get-in, get-out, instant gratification.” Must Click Link: BeExtra.org
via Sony Posts Fourth Consecutive Quarterly Loss SNE | SAI
Sony SNE lost $292 million in the quarter ending in September, the company announced this morning. This marks the fourth consecutive loss for Sony. It is now predicting that losses for the year will total ¥95 billion ($1 billion).
via The New York Times’ Coming Jihad Against The Huffington Post | 24/7 Wall St
There has been a great deal of speculation about what the basis of a suit of The Huffington Post by The New York Times would look like in legal terms. First Amendment attorney David Marburger has said in widely circulated comments that the best legal leverage that the old media has is to get Congress to amend the Copyright Act to restore the common law as a way to fight unfair enrichment that aggregators get by utilizing content created by other media.
The Huffington Post recently passed The Washington Post and LA Times in terms of the visitors each has to its website each month. Huffington’s revenue is rumored to be small, perhaps as little as $8 million this year. As that number grows, it will take more advertising share from its old media rivals.
Update: Several sources have told 24/7 that a suit by old media may be brought under the Interstate Commerce Act.
via Can Nintendo Rebuild? – BusinessWeek
Nintendo President Satoru Iwata told financial analysts and journalists that the company had been unprepared for the sudden drop in sales of its Wii living-room game console. “We sensed that the market mood was cooling off in the spring,” he said. “But frankly, we hadn’t expected to get as bad as it did by summer.” In the past six months the stock has slid 22%.
In the July-September quarter, Nintendo’s operating profit dropped 52%, while sales slid 28%. Nintendo now expects full-year profits of $4 billion on $10.9 billion in sales, instead of $5.4 billion in profits and $19.7 billion in revenues. Last fiscal year, the company had its best year ever, raking in profits of $6.1 billion on revenues of $20.1 billion. Read more >>
Part I: The Curse of the Mogul
A must-read for followers of Big Media – or would it be High Media given the mogul personalities involved(?) – The Curse of the The Mogul delivers an academic treatment on how digital media is forcing the studio or communication mogul’s work to be more transparent and hence more competitive. It’s argued that in the past, the lure or image of Hollywood allowed more mogul leeway as running a studio, handing the creative industry, “managing a Jennifer Lopez,” etc. was harder to quantify. With digital both making the studio returns or numbers easier to read, public and shareable, creating transparency; and, lowering the cost of entry for new digital companies to immediately step into publishing, video and home entertainment, creating more competition, the mogul is more and more clearly “wearing the emperor’s clothes” in a quickly diminishing empire or moguldom. Read more >>
Imagenation: Hybrid Marketing & Distribution
These players certainly don’t need “help” in the global economic sense. Imagenation out of Abu Dhabi – with $1B in film capital – continues to create ties in the world of cross-culture film financing. In a recent expansion with early partner Hyde Park Entertainment ($250M in Imagenation funding) into Singapore with $75M towards four films, Imagenation looks keen to transition its financing into Asia, which many say is the next big Hollywood donor after the Middle East and India (Reliance and Dreamworks).
It’s an intelligent play to bridge capital between markets, i.e., share risk globally. Per Imagenation CEO: “It give us a focus east – Singapore, China, India – which is something that we want to do. And as Abu Dhabi and Singapore have a very close relationship, as city states, this strengthens our bonds with Singapore.” It also opens up their early production resources to digital effects, animation and gaming, including EA and Ubisoft. Read more >>
The Future of Pay Walls
With Rupert Murdoch’s mention yesterday of making consumers pay for all content, no matter the relative quality, e.g., WSJ, NY Post, Telegraph, Fox News, etc. has again paved the way for a heap of dicussion about “pay walls.” With the WSJ’s 1 million users bringing in $65 million per year, and the FT free-to-pay model working, Murdoch is trying to lead by supply, and see if demand and the rest of the competition accept the anti-free model. While this may momentarily resuscitate some of the publishing models, while recreating the cable model where free tv became paid, will it also curtail more voices or media navigators (read: niche blogs and news aggregators). Read more >>
Backgrounder: Liberty Media’s John Malone
An interesting Financial Times interview with John Malone, who epitomizes cable holdings in the US, and with Liberty Global, the world. The interviewer, Richard Milne, focuses on Malone’s rise through his $48 billion sale of TCI to AT&T, then spin off of Liberty Media with holdings in DirecTV, Discovery Channel, QVC and the Atlanta Braves. Read more >>
Media & Entertainment CEO Salary Breakdown
Bernstein Research analyst Michael Nathanson broke out Media CEO and CFO compensation for 2008, with special attention on CBS and Fox, giving Disney a slight pass as its exec bonuses are tied to shareholder returns. The top six include the major studios minus Sony (Stringer, Pascal, Lynton, Wiesenthal), NBC Universal (Immelt, Zucker, Meyer), Viacom/Paramount (Redstone, Grey) and upstart Dreamworks (Spielberg, Katzenberg, Geffen, Snider) .
Via Broadcasting & Cable and Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily:
- CBS CEO Leslie Moonves, who was paid $31.9 million last year
- Disney CEO Robert Iger, who earned $30.6 million
- News Corp #2 Chase Carey, who could haul in $43.1 million over the next year
- News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch, who took home $27.5 million
- Viacom’s Philippe Dauman, who was paid $23 million
- Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, who made $19.9 million
Looking for Ideas: A Media + Entertainment Perspective
From today’s keynote on “Looking for Ideas: a Media+Entertainment Perspective” at X|Media|Lab – good turn-out in Auckland, with start-up interest in content and social media.
My keynote was preceded by 42 Entertainment CEO Susan Bonds with her imaginative distribution narrative-styled ARGs (alternate reality games for The Dark Knight‘s “Why So Serious” and Halo 2′s “I Love Bees”), followed by a cross-platform magazine company HB Media Ltd director Vincent Heeringa, who reminded me of a Kiwi equivalent of early Richard Branson and Felix Dennis.
The ARGs were very convincing, and talking to Susan afterwards, there’s more intellectual property here than the studios take advantage of, in terms of content communities created and unique registrants. Early beginnings of a new production model for marketing (and monetizing that marketing).
On the HB Media front, leading with a well designed mag called “Idealog” – very tough model in print media; everyone wants to read magazines and newsprint – especially in bathrooms – but the model needs to be social news crowdsourced…to survive. More updates to follow…
# Apologies on Slideshare crunching the text.
Future of Journalism, Huffington on Ads and Non-Profits
Via Gerd Leonard’s brilliant Media Futurist: Arianna Huffington talking to the House Committee about the Future of Journalism. Basic points: there’s no “way back” machine, tax subsidies and bailouts are like “putting [one's] finger in a dike to stop the flow of innovation.” I.e., not going to happen. Her two thoughts on saving journalistic media: online advertising and investigative journalism increasingly done (aka “rescued”) by non-profit foundations.
Anti-Studio: Media Rights Capital(izes)
MRC, Media Rights Capital, is quickly becoming the new model for production companies and talent agencies – a hybrid of financing, rights ownership and innovative packaging. Its rights’ model shares ownership equity with film talent, moving beyond the usual pay-or-play contracts. After the jump, we’ll dive into their recent formation, industry perspective and what their success means to the market. Upcoming MRC titles include:
- Brüno- $42.5 million from Universal, rights revert to MRC; received new R-rating instead of NC-17 yesterday
- The B Team – Will Ferrell+Mark Wahlberg action/comedy, rights to Sony
- The Adjustment Bureau – Matt Damon action/romance/sci-fi, $62M budget, rights to Universal for 20 years, then revert to MRC; 20% first-dollar-gross backend. The studio puts up P&A and gets worldwide distribution rights. Read more >>
Breaking Through the Broken: Innovate Your Capital Goals
For those innovative startups feeling the credit crunch – and which of the few/many aren’t(?) – an intriguing 33-slide read from North Venture partners, aka former Virgin Interactive team members. Given the lack of investor appetite these days, many newco’s are going the bootstrappy, ‘develop revenues first’ route. This “Breaking” deck talks about getting past the filters and gatekeepers of capital. And speaking of Virgins, Sir Richard Branson is running an interesting PitchTV or pitchfest online, via his Business Stripped Bare blog, and airing on Virgin Atlantic planes. The 33-page deck after the jump… Read more >>
Slumdog Benefactors
Watching Jerry Lewis receive his humanitarian award at the Oscars tonight, I was struck by the swell of respect that I felt for this classic comedian, who had raised $2B for muscular dystrophy. Showing his first function in 1951 for the Muscular Dystrophy Association (yes, 58 years ago), it was hard to pull back and enjoy the extravagance of the Oscars afterwards. On the other hand, seeing “Slumdog Millionaire” take home award after award with such honest dignity and a sense of humanitarian-meets-cinematic integrity was rewarding. Read more >>
The Crisis of Credit – Visualized
Finally, a JibJab-esque (“This Land is Your Land”) video on the credit crunch. As a thesis project, the practicality and enjoyment factor created by Jonathan Jarvis’ innovative little short is well worth publication (outside of academia). Boing Boing does a pretty fair job, via its comments, in analysis how correct the video is. As far as PSAs – public service announcements – there has to be some model in original programming online and off that will support artists reinterpreting modern society. Last year’s great example was GirlEffect.org, funded within the $100M that Nike Foundation and Warren Buffett put together. Who are the Sinclair Lewis’ of modern video exploration+creative visualization today?
TED Conference 2009: Corporate Sponsors
From Google.org to Gucci, TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design.) boasted 39 corporate sponsors – 17 with noted initiatives – for it’s recent 2009 conference, TEDTalks line-up on Feb 2-7, 2009. This appears part of a growing trend for brands to bring more meaning to their advertising. Other than outpricing or simple descriptive / comparison branding initiatives, the focus has shifted into“What are you doing to make a difference?”, tell me about it and I’ll be more likely to listen. Read more >>
Dreamworks’ Reliance on Disney
Just in case you actually might have been living in Fantasyland for a portion of last month, and missed the news of the Disney/DreamWorks (with Reliance funding) deal here’s a recap, background info and a few innovation questions good measure. Walt Disney Studios will be marketing 6 DreamWorks live-action features per year. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Disney will earn at least an 8 percent fee off the box office gross of DreamWorks films, and would lend the studio $150 million. Read more >>