Several cable television veterans are putting their band back together and taking their act to the Internet.
Next New Networks, a New York-based Internet start-up run and backed by former executives of MTV and Nickelodeon, will announce plans today to begin a series of video-oriented Web sites — what the company calls micro-networks — on niche topics like do-it-yourself fashion, comic books, car racing and cartoons.
[Snip ...]
Next New Networks plans to blend elements of old and new media into a type of hybrid entertainment that is different from traditional television and user-generated sites like YouTube. Its various Web properties will revolve around professionally produced videos of three to eight minutes, which it plans to pitch to sponsors as safe and predictable places to advertise online.
Many of the programs will solicit contributions from their audiences, but the company will screen submissions before they approved as final product. The company plans to generate some programming itself while also identifying talented video contributors and bringing them into the Next New Networks fold.
It is starting with six Web sites, including Fast Lane Daily (fastlanedaily.com), which features a daily news program for auto enthusiasts, and ThreadBanger (threadbanger.com), which offers a five-minute weekly show with MTV-style anchors who discuss the homemade-clothing culture.
Mr. Seibert, the creative director, is bringing two existing video sites to the network: Channel Frederator (channelfrederator.com), a weekly program on animation, and VOD Cars (VODCars.com), a curated collection of video clips from the car culture.
The founders believe the Internet offers a programming opportunity similar to the early days of cable, which traditional media firms are not exploiting.
“The nature of big media companies is about incumbent brands and repurposing and refashioning their material for the Web,” said Mr. Scannell, the chief executive. “We have no incumbent brands. We’re a white sheet for creative people.”
Mr. Miller, who left America Online last October under pressure from his bosses at Time Warner, cited the founders’ cable experience as the reason he is backing the company.
“To me these guys are returning to their roots,” he said. “They are unshackled from large media environment where it is much more about what your quarterly goals are, and can go back to developing new networks and ways of communicating with audiences.”
In part, Next New Networks is also challenging the idea that the chaotic terrain of sites like YouTube and MySpace can be a friendly place for advertisers.
“Video sharing is awesome, but advertisers are knitting their brow,” Mr. Scannell said. “They want to know what they’re backing. There is a place for brands to deliver something that is consistent.”
John Geraci, a well-know builder of virtual communities
A high-profile investor and lots of high-profile angels and advisers .. in the first camp Union Square (Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham) ... and in the second
We've still got a great list of angels involved as well. Marc Andreessen just wrote in out of the blue to say that he really liked the site, and to ask if he could help out with the financing. Esther Dyson, John Borthwick, George Crowley, and Richard Smith -- it's a fantastic list of people to have behind you. (Along with our other founding investors, John Seely Brown, Mark Bailey, and Andy Karsch.)
Neighbors are registered users of outside.in. Each neighbor has a profile page that shows a bio, photo, neighborhood, website, plus all the stories, comments, and places they’ve contributed to outside.in. (Right now it’s a little tricky to find a specific neighbor, much less communicate with them — but we’re working on it!)
Stories and Comments are the content you add to outside.in about your area. When you add them to the site, they appear on the home page of the area you specified for everyone to see, as well as on your neighbor pages.
Stories are content that comes from other sites, like blogs or newspaper websites, that you submit to the site via the submit a story link in the right column of the page. Add stories to outside.in that relate to your neighborhood and that you find interesting and want to share with your neighbors.
Comments are content that you write yourself, directly to the outside.in website. You add comments to Places, which are any location or venue in your area. Add a comment to any Place you want, either to point out something you like, or just to talk about something interesting in your neighborhood.
Places can be everything from restaurants to playgrounds to schools — or even more subjective categories (most dangerous intersection, best spot for winter sledding.) Any story or comment can be attached to a Place. The cool thing about these Place pages is that the become an archive of everything that’s been said online about a given place — comments from outside.in Neighbors, blog posts, newspaper reviews, discussion threads.
Qumana has been selected as one of the select IT companies in British Columbia on Rocket Builders ‘Ready to Rocket - Ones To Watch’ list for 2007
Compiled by the Canadian-based firm Rocket Builders, the ‘2007 Ready to Rocket - Ones To Watch’ named a small select group of British Columbia technology companies gaining traction within the information technology trends that contribute to faster growth than the IT sector as a whole. These companies represent high-potential growth in revenue and profile and that are beginning to be of real interest to potential partners and venture capitalists.
“Companies that make our annual ‘Ready to Rocket - Ones To Watch’ list come from a variety of technology businesses and industry sectors across British Columbia, and Rocket Builders has a credible track record of identifying these emerging companies,” says Geoffrey Hansen, managing partner at Rocket Builders. "Many promising companies are too early in commercialization, too early in first revenues, or in transition to new markets or business models. Based on the potential of their technology alone, we recognize their potential in a "Ones to Watch" list."
About the Ready to Rocket 25 and the Ones To Watch
Each year, based on analysis of trends that will drive growth in the information technology sector, Rocket Builders identifies twenty-five (25) private companies that are best positioned to capitalize on the trends for growth. This selection methodology has been an accurate predictor of growth with "Ready to Rocket" companies exceeding the industry growth rate. Also, many of these companies raise investment capital and each year many of the profiled "Ready to Rocket' companies are acquired. To be eligible for selection to the "Ready to Rocket 25" list, companies must be a nominated Canadian-Controlled Private Corporation, and have a commercialized product on the market that has customers and is generating ongoing revenue.
Additionally, Rocket Builders also identifies early-stage high-potential companies it places on its 'Ones To Watch' list
"Many promising companies are too early in commercialization, too early in first revenues, or in transition to new markets or business models. Based on the potential of their technology alone, we recognize their potential in a "Ones to Watch" list." Visit: www.readytorocket.com
About Rocket Builders Rocket Builders is a market strategy and consulting firm focused on helping technology companies to capitalize on market opportunities. Since 2000, we have been engaged in market research, market planning, business development initiatives, strategic selling, and product launches for over 100 organizations. As a service to the local community, each year Rocket Builders shares its insight on market trends to showcase the most promising information technology companies in British Columbia through its “Ready to Rocket” event. Visit: www.rocketbuilders.com
The recent announcement that YouTube will share advertising revenues with members who contribute their work to YouTube is yet another marker is the steady march towards dissembling the structure and dynamics of the traditional broadcast media industry.
The other service cited in the article has been sharing revenue for a while, but is not the Web 2.0 darling status acquired by YouTube based on it's acquisition by Google.
Qumana's business model has since the beginning been based on sharing advertising revenue with users who use the Q-Ads service to attach relevant advertising to their social media content.
The bulk of social media sharing (the 'social' in the term social media, tho' there's more to it than that) still happens on and in blogging networks, and IMO this is unlikely to change in the near future.
As advertising gets more and more relevant to niche markets, and gets easier to identify, pull and place into or alongside media-born work created by personal publishers, we believe that Qumana's value proposition will get stronger and stronger.
Joe Eigo, a martial arts expert in Toronto, used to pay hundreds of dollars a month for computer and hosting services to distribute his own acrobatic and martial arts videos on the Web, in the hope of raising his profile in the TV and film industry.
Today, not only is he able to distribute his content to millions of people at no cost using a popular online video-sharing site, he has also been paid nearly $26,000 (U.S.) by the site owner.
Welcome to the new world of user-generated content on the Internet. What some people consider quirky material at best, companies are increasingly starting to view as a valuable asset. So valuable, in fact, they're willing to pay for it.
Metacafe, a private firm based in Palo Alto, Calif., and Tel Aviv, has been paying thousands of dollars to participants for over a year.
Every video on Metacafe that is watched more than 20,000 times, and is rated 3 out of 5 or higher by viewers, starts earning the producer $5 for each subsequent 1,000 visitors.
Metacafe rates Mr. Eigo as its top earner. One of his clips has been viewed more than five million times and has helped him attract the attention of several producers and film companies, he said.
“It's an amazing opportunity for anyone who wants to produce their own material now. The Internet has become more popular than television,” he said.
The author of the banned articles, a young journalist named Fang Xingdong, was an outspoken critic of the software giant Microsoft. But two hours after his critical essays about the company were published on July 6, 2002, they suddenly disappeared from every website in the country, deemed too controversial.
"I had been one of the pioneers of the Internet in China," he recalls. "Yet after six years of being published on the Internet, suddenly I couldn't get on any websites."
Frustrated and angry, he talked to a friend who mentioned the emergence of blogging in the United States. He glanced at a few blogs. At first they seemed too primitive. But as he thought about it, he began to see the creative possibilities.
"I was very excited," he says. "I couldn't sleep all night."
Four years later, Mr. Fang is chairman and chief executive of China's biggest blogging empire. His company, Bokee, is host to about 14 million bloggers, a quarter of the entire Chinese market, and it gains more than 10,000 new bloggers every day.
Blogging has become the hottest media trend in China. And his company is so popular that it has attracted the interest of media tycoons such as Rupert Murdoch.
It's becoming increasingly popular to use a video clip as an integral part of a blog post, and usually to help "anchor" a post's focus and meaning.
Its also becoming clear that advertising can be shaped to fit the ambient or direct subject area of a blog post, and that paradoxically using keywords to choose and place ads gives you more control over the advertising strategy for your blog.
Here's Joe Q. Public, talking about getting paid to blog about a product or a service using PayPerPost.
Re: the video clip ... I surfed over to YouTube, ran a quick search, found this and viewed it. Then, it took me one click to save the embed code, one click to open the Insert HTML function, and one click to say OK ... then finally one more click to publish the blog post.
Content in circulation in various social networks where people are sharing ... video clips, songs, recipes, recommendations ... is what advertisers are after. They are seeking better ways to reach increasingly harder-to-reach niche markets.
Put the tools into the hands of the people who are making and growing the networks, and who are "using" other people's content and mashing it together with their own.
Offer Qumana and Q-Ads to your audiences ... use them to reach into and "shake hands" with your readers, advertising-wise.
Ok .. so we've rearranged our priority list to move to the head of the list making Qumana 3.0 operate smoothly once again with the newest version of the Blogger platform.
None of us here use the Blogger platform.
Would any of you out there who used to use Qumana with Blogger (and hopefully still use it if you operate blogs on other platforms) mind giving us a hand by helping us zero in on what doesn't work, what Qumana does poorly, rudely, or not at all when attempting to publish to Blogger using it ?
Your help will be invaluable .. we want to modify / repair Qumana as quickly as possible.
... for bloggers not to download and try the new Q-Ads tool and service, other than a blogger exercising a complete ban on advertising.
There are many many bloggers who put up Google advertising on their blogs and then basically forget about it ... or if they are really serious about advertising on their blog will expend a lot of effort creating interesting content but just leave the delivery to Google without any means of controlling what they receive as advertising, since Google's algorithm's deliver what they are designed to deliver.
Using categorized keywords tailored to your audience(s) is an effective way to begin developing an advertising strategy and tactics for your blogging that allows you to control what advertising you choose to expose to your readers, and this ability to choose and control advertising has always been at the heart of Qumana's tools' ability to insert advertising with the selection of a keyword and a click.
2. Signing up for a Q-Ads account is free, and only takes 5 minutes
3. The Q-Ads revenue-sharing program is generous and fair.
4. There is a powerful and easy-to-use ad design function available in both the Q-Ads tool and the Qumana editor. We intend to add templates and other ad formats just as soon as humanly possible.
WE WILL BE ABLE TO CREATE AND DELIVER MORE INNOVATIONS SOONER IF WE GET MORE AND MORE USERS ... IN OTHER WORDS, HELP A FRIEND OR THREE TO DOWNLOAD AND TRY QUMANA AND THE Q-ADS TOOLS.
5. Once signed up, you don't HAVE to use advertising all the time, or in every blog post .. it's completely up to you as to how often you insert an advertisement.
6. If you download the Qumana editor, you can choose to advertise or not .. if you don't want to, just don't use the Insert Ad function. You still get to use a powerful, feature rich and versatile blog editor, whether you blog using a Mac or a PC.
For the last 8 weeks or so we've known about and have been searching ways to resolve the problems which showed up the most recent Mac version of Qumana, with OS X 10.4.7+ ...
I think we are just about there in terms of being able to offer users a new release for the Mac that operates pretty effectively ... so far I have found just one instance of quirkiness (a previous post that did not fully refresh) on one of the various blogs I maintain for testing purposes.
Thus far I have tested posting to Wordpress, Typepad and Blogware platforms ... mixed results. Typepad fine, Blogware fine, and I knew Wordpress would not publish the Q-Ads I inserted ... but I was not prepared for it to ignore the YouTube html.
So, with a bit of fair weather following the pretty substantial snowfall here in Vancouver, we should be able to post a link to the new version of Qumana for Mac within the next 24 hours.
We will also update the download link on the Qumana website.
UPDATE #2: We are tracking down the issues reported in our comments section. It seems that a crucial step in the uploading of the new version to the Qumana web site was not carried out yesterday due to power outages off the coast of British Columbia (the joys of a decentralised organization ;-)
We have people working on the problem(s).
UPDATE #3: We think that all that remains to do is refresh the server upon which the Qumana site is hosted ... unfortunately the person who can do that is located on an island 30 kilometres to the west of Vancouver, and it seems the power is still off over there.
More news re: the live updated Mac OS version as we get it.
UPDATE #4: It should be correct now ... the download will appear on your Desktop, and then just drop it into Applications.
It's probably a good thing to do to uninstall any previous application of Qumana, just for the hell of it.
Another sign o' the times, via the NY Times ... this news nicely reinforces the trend we reported on last month in our post No Surprise ...
Help speed up the changes to the publishing and news and advertising industries .. sign up for a Q-Ads account, download the free ad insertion tool, and help accelerate the changes that are underway.
Help make it easier for the little guy or gal to advertise post by post, right where your readers are paying attention.
A consortium of seven newspaper chains representing 176 daily papers across the country is announcing a broad partnership with Yahoo to share content, advertising and technology, another sign that the wary newspaper business is increasingly willing to shake hands with the technology companies they once saw as a threat.
In the first phase of the deal, the newspaper companies will begin posting their employment classified ads on Yahoo’s classified jobs site, HotJobs, and start using HotJobs technology to run their own online career ads. But the long-term goal of the alliance with Yahoo, according to one senior executive at a participating newspaper company, is to be able to have the content of these newspapers tagged and optimized for searching and indexing by Yahoo.
In that way, local news — one of the pillars of the newspaper business — would become part of a large information network that would increase usefulness for readers and value to advertisers.
“Now the industry has religion about the Internet, based on what has happened to the business in recent years,” said the executive, who declined to be identified because he was not authorized to speak for his company. “So there is a lot more genuine enthusiasm today.”
Please remember that sociology will always trump technology ... I suppose what that means is that if 50% of organizations will be using wikis by 2009, a lot more organizational culture change and work re-definition is coming.
There used to be just one wiki known to all: Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that embraced user-generated content and its rejection of hierarchy.
Chief among the principles of Wikipedia is that everyone can be an expert.
In its simplest form, a wiki is a Web page that can be edited or created through a browser and linked to other Web pages.
Unlikely as it may seem, wikis are now being adopted by enterprises large and small more quickly than celebrities adopt African orphans.
So much so that Gartner analyst Kathy Harris predicted that by 2009, 50 percent of U.S. companies will be using wikis. That helps explain why vendors large and small are lining up to provide enterprises with enterprise-ready wiki solutions.
Large outfits, such as IBM (Quote) and Microsoft (Quote) , are wrapping wiki functionality into their real-time collaboration tools, respectively Lotus Sametime and Sharepoint Server.
Smaller vendors like Jotspot, Socialtext, CustomerVision and Klir Technologies are among the vendors offering stand-alone wiki solutions.
Rather than being driven by senior management, however, adoption is coming mainly from project managers and department-level executives.
"In almost every big corporation, some group is already using a wiki," said Andrew McAfee, associate professor of technology and operations management at the Harvard Business School.
One reason is that wikis hold the promise of helping companies stimulate more innovation by their employees.
That's important: 80 percent of CEOs see collaboration as being critical to growth, according to a survey conducted by IBM last March.
Jeff Nolan, the former head of venture capital at enterprise software vendor SAP (Quote), agreed that enterprises are struggling to find ways to stimulate innovation.
"Large enterprises are at the barrier of how they can create new ideas," he told internetnews.com.
Blogs of all political stripes spent most of yesterday detailing reports of voting machine malfunctions and ballot shortages, effectively becoming an online national clearinghouse of the polling problems that still face the election system.
And in a new twist this year, many bloggers buttressed their accounts of electoral shenanigans with links to videos posted on the video Web site YouTube
That's an environment custom-made for inserting relevant ads wherever you want to IN the content.
Try out Q-Ads and get accustomed to it. We think that the ease of use and pacing ads close to content is going to become one of the ways many publishers will address "small targets, loosely joined".
Blogs are where the content provided by mainstream media circulates; more and more that is the case. Become a Q-Ads user and help us get more profile, more ad impressions and a wider range and depth of ad inventory, for your use.
I ran into my old friend Paul Chaney last week at Blog Business Summit. He finally took the chance to try the newest version of Qumana while he was there. He was impressed to say the lest. His review says it all.
Here's a brief and interesting white paper titled "Making the Case for a Social Media Strategy". It clearly lays out and reinforces that it's the end user - the personal publisher sharing their voice, ideas, or opinions - who is exerting more and more choice and control over the ways the media - including advertising - is being created and distributed.
This is an important element of Q-Ads' value to end-users ... the ability to exercise more choice and control over what advertising they use and where they place it alongside or within the content of a blog post.
Social media – online sites like blogs and discussion boards where consumers create and share information and opinions directly with each other -- are beginning to affect brands. Examples like the Kryptonite lock crisis and Intuit’s continued success have convinced marketers to incorporate social media into their plans. In many companies, marketers must convince their senior management executives who don’t understand the influence the social aspects of the Web experience is exerting on their brands.
Here’s the elevator pitch to give to a busy executive:
The influence traditional media and marketing have over consumer perception is waning as people use the plethora of digital technologies to circumvent traditional sources to obtain information and entertainment from each other. But these social media outlets are more than another channel through which to deliver messages to the marketplace. Companies like GM, Microsoft, Intuit and New Line Cinema are successfully using social marketing strategies to understand and engage their audiences more deeply – with demonstrable business results.
We've gotten some reports and have confirmed that the latest version of Qumana and the lastet version of OSX aren't playing nice together. We're working on the fix and will have a new version of Qumana for the Mac out as soon as possible.
