Jeff Clavier's Software Only

SDForum Search SIG: The growing online video ecosystem - October 10th 6:30pm @ Microsoft - Featuring VideoEgg, Dabble, CastTV, POSTRoller

Update: we are trying for the first time to video stream the session at this address (QuickTime 7).

Close to 300 video hosting, sharing and editing sites have been counted to date, serving hundreds of millions, if not billions, of videos a day. Video creation is also growing exponentially, and the availability of decent video recording capabilities in cell phones will only accelerate it. It therefore made to us to organize a session on the developing online video ecosystem, ranging from editing, hosting, advertising to search and aggregation. And to make the picture complete, we have also invited the video content production side of things. We expect, and actually wanted, that we’ll discuss topics broader than search per se - but as we’ll establish it, search and discovery mechanisms are fundamental enablers in the world of videos.

To MC the event, we have also decided to innovate: we will have two moderators, who – amongst so many things – produce the “Om & Niall Podsessions” podcast. Om as in Om Malik and Niall as in Niall Kennedy, who are both actors and commentators of the evolving development of online media. Their recent podcast on the topic of video led to their leading this session.

Will be joining us on October 10th for that session:

• Video Editing and Hosting: VideoEgg – Matt Sanchez
• Video Search: CastTV – Alex Vikati
• Video Bookmarking: Dabble – Mary Hodder
• Video Advertising Network: POSTRoller – Tod Sacerdoti

The event will take place at the Conference Center of the Microsoft Silicon Valley Campus (Building 1, 1065 La Avenida St., Mountain View) which has a capacity of 270 attendees. We suggest that you pre-register on this page of the SDForum web site. Note that we will only be able to accept sign-ups at the door based on the remaining capacity. This will also help us figuring out required food and beverages. To speed up the signing process, please print, fill in and bring this form if you are parking your car on the Microsoft campus

The now well established Search SIG Agenda format will be used:

6:30-7:00pm - Registration / Food & Drink
7:00–7:05pm - A few words about the Search SIG
7:05-8:15pm - Act I: The growing online video ecosystem
8:15-8:30pm - Intermission: Search Networking & Geeking Out
8:30-9:00pm - Act II: Product Demos from VideoEgg, CastTV, Dabble and POSTRoller– and Q&A with the audience
9:00-9:15pm - Open Mike Geek: Announcements (30 seconds of fame & fortune)
9:16pm - You Don’t Have To Go Home, But You Can’t Stay Here

Do get in touch with us (searchsig [at] gmail [dot] com) if you want to use a demo slot to launch a new search startup (one, and maybe two companies can take advantage of that).

And remember, there is a distribution list for Search SIG announcements – if you want to join, send an email to sdforum_searchsig-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

Tags: searchsig

Mo' money to build a bigger Dogster niche

A year ago (give or take 10 days) I wrote about Dogster Inc. – the maker of the highly popular dogster.com and catster.com – turning profitable, an unusual fate among Web 2.0 companies. It was still a very small business, but gave co-founders Ted Rheingold, John Vars and Steven Reading a foundation to grow their company at the pace free cashflows were being generated. Up until then I had considered Dogster as an amusing parody of other social networking sites, and suddenly realized that there might be much more than met the eye.

A few metrics caught my attention: the size of the user base, the consistent growth, a promising ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) and a CPM which was higher than I expected, thanks to an advertising program that was more than pure banner and text ads. These metrics doubled in a few months, allowing the company to scale its operation to 10 salaried employees while increasing its cash balance. The other thing increasing was the list of brand advertisers interested in reaching out to this thriving community of passionate dogs and cats lovers, including the likes of Disney, Target, PetSmart, Clorox/FreshStep, Gap/Old Navy, Warner Brothers, Nintendo and VPI Pet Insurance.

As the company turned in its first six-figure revenue month, it became clear that the small Dogster “niche” was turning into a real business. The economics of that market are indeed significant: 63% of US households have cats or dogs (160M pets total), yearly spending is around $36B, and advertising budgets on pet products are in the billions of USD. It also became clear that the solid organic, and profitable, growth of Dogster could sustain a bit of a booster in the form of an outside financing – which leads to today’s news.

A couple of hours ago, CEO Ted Rheingold announced on the Dogster blog that the company had closed a $1M Series A financing from a roster of angel investors – mixing successful Internet entrepreneurs and experienced investors. As a matter of disclosure, but you already guessed, I am thrilled to be involved in this great syndicate (*). Joining the Dogster board as the representative of Series A investors is Michael Parekh, an active angel investor – and blogger, who in a previous life founded the Internet Research activity of Goldman Sachs. The official press release is here.

Dogster will be using these funds to accelerate the development of new features, hire a number of new employees including a kick-ass Marketing Director, launch a number of new properties in -ster, build new distribution partnerships like the VideoEgg or Userplane one, and more generally have additional means to engage and support our users.

Staying true to the values of the community as it grows 4 to 5–fold over the next 12 months is certainly going to be challenging for the team, but I have total confidence in their ability to bring the company to the next level. Congratulations for the success to date, best of luck for the future.

Now, esteemed reader, give us a hand: think of 5 of your favorites dogs and/or cats, and point their owners to the registration pages of Dogster and Catster.

And yes: Woof!

Oh, I was SO waiting for that headline: “the bubble is back, the new sock puppet got funded”. Greg (Linden), have you noticed the “profitable for 3 quarters”, “positive cashflows”, “making money” mentions ?

(*) Just to list a few of these angel investors: Joshua Schachter - del.icio.us./Yahoo, Adam Beguelin - Truveo/AOL, Michael Tanne – Wink, Jim Young – hotornot, Mike Arrington – TechCrunch, Mike Jones - Userplane/AOL, George Sarlo - Walden Funds, Frank Caufield - Darwin VC, Aydin Senkut - Felicis Ventures, Robert Simon - Alta Partners, Brad Feld – Mobius Ventures,… and more.

More:

• Yes, it is true that Dogster had several funding avenues, and the team elected to only raise a $1M round that ended up being oversubscribed (a lot).
• A great coverage is developing: Matt Marshall on VentureBeat, Liz Gaines on GigaOm, Dan Farber on ZDNet, Bambi Francisco, Tom Taulli on BloggingStocks.
• Rafat is already betting on a CNet take-out. Dude, please let me pay long term capital gains on an exit for once.
• Here is the TechMeme thread.

A few data points on Digg from Kevin Rose at the Future of Web Apps

Kevin Rose is presenting at Ryan Carson’s Future of Web Apps in San Francisco. He spent quite a bit of time covering the functionality of Digg, and briefly shared a few interesting data points:

• Starting in October 2004, Kevin funded the initial build of Digg by himself, paying co-founder Owen Byrne (who he found through eLance), $10/hour for his development work. Then, and still now, Kevin acted as the product architect of the service.
• After launching via Kevin’s blog, the growth of the service led to increased capital requirements to build a scalable back-end. One of Textamerica’s founders, and friend of Kevin, provided angel funding to the tune of $50K.
• The rapid growth continued and required some “serious” funding – matetializing as a $2.8M investment led by Greylock’s David Sze.
• Digg hit scalability issues upon the launch of version 2.0. Throwing in a bunch of servers did not have any effect, it was necessary to re-architecture Digg’s database layer to optimize it.
• Digg has 15 employees, of which 3 PHP developers and 4 guys in charge of operations and scalability. There is a cool picture of the whole crew on the Digg site.

More: As usual, Wikipedia has quite a complete coverage of Digg, and Richard McManus recently published an interesting interview of Kevin (part 1, part 2).

SDForum Search SIG: Search Analytics - September 12th 6:30pm @ AOL - Featuring FeedBurner, Google, Hitwise & MyBlogLog

After an extended summer break (as explained by my esteemed co-chair, Dave Mc Clure, we both have been quite busy), the Search SIG returns with a very interesting program on September 12th, focusing on Search Analytics. And since this is a wide subject that touches other types of metrics and usage, we have decided to broaden the scope quite a bit by inviting a set of companies that measure, track and analyse traffic and behavioral patterns of web sites, blogs and feeds.

Panelists:

Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics
LeaAnn Prescott, Hitwise
Don Loeb, FeedBurner
Scott Rafer, MyBlogLog

Agenda:

6:30-7:00pm - Registration / Food & Drinks
7:00-€“7:05pm - Intros & Announcements
7:05-8:15pm - Episode I: Search Analytics Panel
8:15-8:30pm - Intermission: Networking for Geeks (and non-Geeks)
8:30-9:00pm - Episode II: Live Demos
9:00-9:15pm - Open Mike for product launches or announcements (please email me at searchsig [at] gmail [dot] com)
9:16pm - End of the session

Location & Directions:

We are most grateful to AOL for hosting us on very short notice at the AOL Campus, Bldg #12, Shasta conf room. The address is 401 Ellis Street, Mountain View, CA 94043 (click for map)

Take the Ellis St exit from 101, and head west about 1/4 mile. The AOL building is a 3-story mirrored glass facility, about 3 blocks down on the left hand side. (note: if you get to the light at Middlefield you've gone too far; make a U-turn and come back 1 block)

PLEASE PRE-REGISTER on the SDForum website if you plan to attend (to help AOL plan for enough food & drink to go around)

Dave will emcee the session solo as yours truly will be in (hum) Vegas to attend the first day of TechEd - a long time commitment that unfortunately means that I won't be able to attend this very interesting session.

Tags: searchsig

Public Speaking 101: Turn off your microphone before a loo stop

You might heard of the story of the CNN anchor, Kyra Phillips. who went to the loo with her microphone still on… the air, and whose chatter ended up as a voice over on a segment about Georges Bush. The chatter was relatively benign - she just bitched about he sis in law – as portrayed in some comedies. She then went on to appear on the “Late Show with David Letterman” (a very popular late night show on CBS), and presented the “Top 10” segment with… her top ten excuses regarding the incident, courtesy of  the Washington Post:

10. "Still haven't mastered complicated On/Off switch."

9. "Larry King told me he does this all the time."

8. "How was I supposed to know we had a reporter embedded in the bathroom?"

7. "I honestly never knew this sort of thing was frowned upon."

6. "Couldn't resist chance to win $10,000 on 'America's Funniest Home Videos."'

5. "I was set up by those bastards at Fox News."

4. "Oh, like YOU'VE never gone to the bathroom and had it broadcast on national television!"

3. "I just wanted that hunky Lou Dobbs to notice me."

2. "OK, so I was drunk and couldn't think straight."

1. "You have to admit, it made the speech a lot more interesting."

Pretty darn funny, and a gutsy move as you can imagine how petrified she must have been at 1) what happened, and 2) how much worse it could have been.

Bonus: the footage during which you hear Kyra’s voice over – on YouTube.

Photo credit: NewsBusters