metarand

The Future of Media is Salient

I went along to Ross Dawson’s Future of Media Summit yesterday. Kudos to Ross for pulling off what appeared to be a seamless transcontinental event.

My only piece of event-management related feedback is that in keeping with the culture of participation theme running through the media these days it would have been good to have had a roving camera and/or pans so that the audience in Sydney could see and engage with the audience in Mountain View.

To some degree this was achieved in true guerilla-style by the uber presence of Phil Morle’s conference chaser. His chaser approach is to hook up ustream to tangler to create a livestream of an event together with a rich seam of commentary. He did this to great effect at the Sydney MySpace Developer Platform launch a few months back and again yesterday.

Yesterday however, the chaser took a cool twist. Phil was located near the back of the room in Sydney and wasn’t getting good video. So he tapped into the video feed from Stilgherrian, who was seated near the front and mixed this with his audio on ustream.

My biggest take away from the time I spent at the event was captured in a comment by Mark Pesce – “Content requires Salience”. I’ll let you ruminate on that for a while.

Stephen Collins has a great wrap up of the event.

Twitter Goes In Search, Finds Summize

I’ve been a big fan of Summize, since this Twitter search engine launched a few months ago. Whenever I’ve wanted to get an accurate snapshot of the conversation on the Twitter microblogging service about a brand, company or person I’ve used Summize.

Twitter has now announced that is has acquired Summize in what will transpire to be a mainly stock-based deal, and the Ney York-based Summize team of five will take up roles at Twitter in San Francisco shortly.

Twitter plans to merge the Summize service and API with their own and integrate it under the Twitter brand. It will be interesting to see if this enhances the Twitter experience or detracts from the Summize search function — I’m hoping it’s an improvement all round.

IGNite The Site Applications Competition Launches at MySpace devJam

At today’s MySpace devJam in Sydney I launched the IGNite the Site competition. With a cash prize of $4,000 and the opportunity for the winning app to be showcased to over 2.5 million MySpace users, this is a fantastic opportunity for Australian and New Zealand app developers.

To be in the running, developers will need to utilise the MySpace Developer Platform to create an app that both promotes and captures the spirit of IGN.com, the number one gaming and entertainment website in the region.  The winner will be selected after the competition closes on Friday, 5 September 2008 and the judges will be looking for originality and usability and the app’s ability to promote IGN to the masses.

Go here for more info, and to submit an entry send a friedn request for your app to myspace.com/jocorotten with the title of your app and your contact details.

[Disclosure: Randal Leeb-du Toit is an adviser to Fox Interactive Media, the parent company of both MySpace and IGN.]

VentureWrap: Trulia Lays Foundations For Growth With $15M

Residential real estate search engine, Trulia has increased its venture funding by $15 million to a total raised to date of $33M.

The latest round was led by Deep Fork Capital and included Accel Partners, Fayez Sarofim and Sequoia. The San Francisco-based company will use the capital infusion to expand their advertising services across the Trulia Ad Network and self service offering, Trulia Pro.

Trulia has around 5 million uniques a month and over 100,000 real estate professionals as registered users. They’ve managed to collate over 70 million property records, which feature constantly-updated comparable sales data.

They are one of the fastest growing US real estate sites and this has positioned them well for the growing hunger for data as the housing market in the US goes through a slump.

Metarand Unplugged: Graspr’s Teresa Phillips Talks About Their Venture Funding

Based in Sunnyvale, California, instructional video company Graspr has raised a $2.5M round of funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and a number of angel investors.

In this edition of Metarand Unplugged Teresa Phillips, Graspr’s CEO talks about the space and the steps she went through to get this capital infusion, which will be used to build out their syndication platform.

Stream the Session in Quicktime:

here

Stream the Session as an mp3:

here

Tags: Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Graspr, Teresa Phillips

Apple’s iPhone App Store Open For Business

Apple’s iPhone App Store has launched. To access it you will need to upgrade to iTunes vers. 7.7 and go here.

Featured below is the main page for the MySpace Mobile app.

LookSmart Shuffles The Board

Nasdaq-listed online advertising and performance solutions provider LookSmart (LOOK) has appointed Mark Sanders as Chair of the Board.

Mark has served on the former Australian company’s board since 2003. He replaces Edward West, who is CEO and President, in a move aimed at beefing up the company’s corporate governance regime.

The San Francisco-based company’s shares were down 1.28%.

VentureWrap: MEVIO Goes Vertical With $15M

MEVIO, the broadband entertainment network formerly known as PodShow, has raised Series C funding of $15 million.

The round was led by Crosslink Capital and included DAG Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital and Sherpalo Ventures.

The funding will be used to launch vertical entertainment networks with the aim of offering advertisers a “brand safe” platform with the reach they currently receive from traditional broadcast networks.

MEVIO’s stats for May 2008 were up 800% in the last twelve months, with over 9 million unique monthly visitors. They will be exploring syndication opportunities that are expected to dramatically enhance their reach.

Is Google’s Lively A Second Life-Killer?

It’s almost a year to the date since I decided not to move forward with my virtual world startup Yoick. We were building what many fervently hoped would be a Second Life killer.

But our approach had been more focused on creating cosy spaces that were interoperable between 2 and 3d. The vision also involved an open-architectured platform with a closed commerce engine so users could buy and sell virtual and other digital goods through our system (Facebook‘s F8 Platform launched some months after we had constructed the blue print for this architecture and has become a great proof of principle for this model).

It was a hard decision to make, but considering the trends and the trajectory we were on I knew we would intersect the timeline at a point that wasn’t sufficiently ahead of the market to be a winner.

You see, many of the big corporates were diving into the virtual world arena, many with the wrong approach, but a few, the few that really mattered were chasing the same space we were.

Today we would have been venture backed, have built up a head of steam and burn rate that required refuelling and yet still have been too early to have released enough of a product to ensure sufficient traction to see us through a true gorilla entering the market moment.

Stage right: enter Google with their cosy spaces,
virtual world product – Lively.

The LA Times has a good write up:

Unlike popular virtual worlds such as Second Life, Lively doesn’t require you to download new software. All you need is a browser plug-in. The service is also more distributed than Second Life: Its rooms will live on Web pages on Facebook and other sites, so you might stumble across them when browsing the Internet. Rooms can be private spaces, with entry by invitation only, or open-topic rooms, where you can meet people interested in discussing topics you love, like Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Aniston or Google. It also ties into other Google services. You can stream YouTube videos into your virtual living room or post your Picasa pictures on your walls.

It’s definitely not a Second Life-killer. Sorry Michael Arrington, I totally disagree that this sucks for Second Life. It is a completely different genre — for one this is not a single, charded or otherwise, virtual world and for two it is targeted more at a mass market audience.

It does suck however for the other startups who were targeting this space. Many of them will have to totally rethink their go to market strategy. The glass half full view is that Google’s entry legitimizes the genre, but this will not be sufficient to assuage follow on investors…

Scrabble Officially On Facebook

Electronic Arts has teamed up with Hasbro to bring SCRABBLE to Facebook and Pogo.

Launching later in July, SCRABBLE will be the first EA Hasbro-licensed property to go live on a social networking site. EA has plans to release a number of other Hasbro properties later in the year.

The SCRABBLE Facebook app will allow head-to-head challenges and players can choose between a real-time turn-based game or pause and pick up the play later. Scores and stats wil be tracked and players can be ranked. In addition, players will have access to built-in chat, dynamic animations and be able to access world lists.