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Posts Tagged ‘Huffington Post’

Amidst Controversy Storm, Kwedit Reveals Repayment Rate Already At 26%

Kwedit, the innovative and suddenly controversial payments platform for virtual goods, is releasing some early data.

The service lets users promise to pay later in lieu of a direct credit card payment when they want virtual currency for social games like Farmville. It’s not a legally binding promise, but users have an incentive to pay amounts owed because that allows them to get more virtual currency through the service. Users can pay by, among other methods, mailing in cash or paying at a 7-11.

When the product first launched they had no idea what percentage of promises would be repaid. Anything at all is incremental revenue to game publishers, and since the stuff they’re selling has no marginal cost (virtual currency), it’s all upside. But after nearly two months of being live, they say the repayment rate is 25.9% If you’re a credit company that would put you out of business.

But for game publishers, that’s a staggeringly attractive monetization option. Hopefully the company (or its partners) will also disclose the monetization rate as well down the road. Because right now game publishers are only able to get cash out of 1-3% of users. If they can get another few percent to pay via Kwedit, and 25% of that money is actually paid, revenue from games can double or more.

It’s controversial because Colbert made fun of it, and then the Huffington Post and CBS jumped on the bandwagon. CBS actually called it “toxic.”

Founder Danny Shader posted a long response here. But the short version is this – the criticism is ridiculous. It’s coming in one case from a competitor (the Huffington Post article was written by the CEO of a company that promotes Visa cards to teens and adults, without any sort of disclosure on the conflict). And the author of the CBS article doesn’t appear to actually understand the product and seems more concerned with getting parents all worked up.

The really scary stuff in social games was the Scamville nonsense where teens and pre-teens where being tricked into putting long term subscription charges on their parent’s cell phone and credit card bills. Kwedit isn’t even close to that kind of evil. It’s simply a very clever way of monetizing social games, and the most innovative new payments product I’ve seen in a very long while.

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In Hindsight: When VC Associates Misread the Landscape

When a startup entrepreneur tells the story of his/her mistakes and how they’ve corrected them, it’s endearing. When an investment associate for one of the more prestigious VC firms does it, it’s surprising.

Union Square Ventures’ Andrew Parker recently started a Got It Wrong Series on his Gong Show blog where he identifies his own mistakes and mis-judgements about the industry.

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While investment analysts and associates don’t directly control the money in the VC world, a large number of our readers believe associates help drive the decision-making process. When someone like Parker decides to air his mistakes for all to see, he’s giving us a glimpse at the information that guides the future of the tech landscape and whether or not the funding will follow. Some of Parker’s mistakes have included:

1. Privacy: Parker was adamant about user privacy and assumed that others were the same. He watched as personal finance site Mint, Loopt and Twitter gained ground despite the expectation that privacy concerns would prove to be a bigger barrier to adoption.

2. Mobile Browsers: In 2006 Parker told investor Fred Wilson that he did not expect the mobile browsing experience to catch up to the laptop in the next 5 years. He believed that the form factor of handheld devices was to small to make it easy to reformat pages on the fly, design mobile web pages and zoom into regular pages. Parker admits he was proven wrong by the iPhone.

3. Taste-maker Risk: Parker explains that certain sites succeed on the ability to popularize content from taste-makers. When he first saw the Huffington Post close a $5 million dollar round he was unsure of the investment thesis. Says Parker, “In hindsight, I think I have a blind spot when it comes to first-party content and editorial choices in web services.  The taste-maker risk is a risk, but it’s not nearly as important as I thought it was, and additionally, it’s a risk that smart technologists can navigate well.”

To keep an eye on the series visit Thegongshow.tumblr.com.

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With $2.5M, Vook tries to reinvent the book

With the upcoming launch of Apple’s iPad and iBookstore, interest in e-books continues to rise. But while companies like Inkling are experimenting with adding interactive and social features, your basic e-book is still just a book in electronic format.

Now a startup called Vook has created a new kind of book that combines video and text, as well as images and social networking tools. For example, one of the vooks featured on its website is Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crush It, the online wine promoter’s book about making money from your passion. The vook version of Crush it combines the book’s text with video of Vaynerchuk’s talks and explanations. Vooks can be read either in your web browser or in a mobile app.

The Alameda, Calif.-based company announced a $2.5 million seed round today, from a number of well-known backers: Ron Conway; Kenneth Lerer, chairman of the Huffington Post; Maples Investments; Baseline Ventures; and Founder Collective. Vook launched last fall, and says it has deals with publishers including Simon & Schuster, HarperStudio and Hachette Filipacchi Media.

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NewsCred Relaunches, Looks To Become “Ning For Newspapers”

Back in 2008, we wrote about a startup called NewsCred, which looked to help identify the most trustworthy news sources using a combination of community voting and algorithms. That didn’t really take off, so the company is now heading in a new direction: it wants to help users build their own custom online newspapers in a matter of minutes, offering a professional-looking site tailored to include the content you’re interested in. And using NewsCred premium features, you could potentially create a combination news aggregator/opinion site in the same vein as The Huffington Post.

Using the site is simple: you choose the title of your new virtual paper, then specify which topics you’re interested in following. The site includes a number of categories to choose from, including tech and politics, but you can also generate one based on a keyword if you’d like. Once you’ve chosen your topics, NewsCred will generate a virtual newspaper containing the latest stories from each area. Stories are drawn from popular relevant news sites and blogs, and you can specify a RSS feed if it isn’t in the NewsCred directory. Along the left side of the screen is a list of sections that you can jump through, much as you would in a physical paper. There are a handful of sample sites you can test for yourself, like this one on Mobile News, Celebrity Gossip, and Manchester United.

We’ve seen news aggregators before, but NewsCred has a few options that are less common. For one, the site allows you to write editorials, which can be incorporated into the front page (or the topic specific sections). And the site will soon offer a premium version called NewsCred Pro, which is designed to help you further customize and even monetize the papers you’ve built. With NewsCred Pro, you can host your paper at a personal domain, run your own advertising on the page, eliminate NewsCred branding, and further customize the layout and newspaper template. Together, these features could allow you to build a Huffington Post-style news hub, complete with your own opinion pieces, focused on whatever topic you wanted.

NewsCred has done a nice job putting their custom papers together, and most of the site looks very well done (though I did find some poor results as I searched for topics to add). But the new space it is entering is going to be competitive. For one, homepage sites like iGoogle allow users to include news feed widgets. And there are sites that are more directly competitive, like Meehive, the Kosmix-powered custom news site (covered here). That said, NewsCred may be able to build a business helping users build their own niche news portals, the same way Ning appeals to users building custom social networks.

NewsCred closed a seed round of funding last year from private investors in the US, UK, and Switzerland, as well as “one of the large Silicon Valley VC firms” (the company won’t disclose the names of their investors).

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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How Serious Is Justin.tv About Fighting Live Broadcasting Piracy?

Justin.tv, one of the most popular live webcasting services on the net, will be testifying in a hearing held by the House Judiciary Committee tomorrow morning. The topic of the hearing: the future of live online sports broadcasting.

We got hold of the startup’s written and oral testimony, which Justin.tv hopes will be enough to convince the Committee that the nature of live video broadcasting makes it impossible for them to avoid copyrighted content from ending up on the site, whether it’s live sports or other content like TV shows.

Ultimately, Justin.tv calls on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which they claim should provide them with a safe harbor for copyright-infringing content that appears on the website before they or the appropriate right owners get a chance to remove it.

In the testimonies, Justin.tv goes to great lengths to make sure they’re considered a technology provider first and foremost, which delivers a platform that can unfortunately be misused by individuals to violate the rights of third parties. The startup states that it aims to bring live video into the mainstream much like Flickr, The Huffington Post and YouTube have done for online images, news and video clips.

The question is: are they really doing everything they can to fight piracy?

In October 2009, Justin.tv claims to have delivered over forty-seven million hours of live video to over thirty million viewers around the world. The company says it has worked with content owners to assure that the appearance of unauthorized content on Justin.tv remains limited, and that they provide rights owners with tools that permit them to monitor the site and directly initiate the takedown of content they claim is being transmitted without authorization.

In addition, Justin.tv claims to have developed a “commercially-viable” system in partnership with Vobile that permits unauthorized content on the site that is not immediately detected by a copyright owner to be identified and removed automatically from Justin.tv. The company says it does way more than the law requires to prevent illegal content from ending up on the site.

But seriously, all it takes is a visit to this page, which features streams from the most popular “producers”, to see that their efforts have been mostly in vain. As you can tell from the screenshot above, that page is (for now) filled to the rim with unauthorized content, which undoubtedly brings a lot of eyeballs with it. Browse Justin.tv long enough, and you’ll discover everything from movies to TV shows to hardcore porn.

How hard can it be to monitor only the most streamed live channels and take down broadcastings of TV shows such as Friends, South Park and The Office? The biggest copyright infringements are the ones going on in channels that get the most traffic – that’s the nature of the beast – so they shouldn’t be too hard to spot.

Either their identification and fingerprinting technology doesn’t work all that well, or Justin.tv isn’t as serious about fighting piracy as they claim to be in their testimonies. Or both, of course.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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The Huffington Post has seen the iTablet… not!

Filed under: Humor, Rumors

TUAWThe Huffington Post has seen the iTablet… not! originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 21 Nov 2009 17:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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From Concept to Cash in 365 Days

I had hoped that by 25, I would have been living in LA, dating actresses, and getting bit parts in bad movies as “the ugly guy”… you know, in the event that the studio wanted a Steve Buscemi-type, but not the Steve Buscemi.

Instead, I’m 26, broke, and trapped in Glens Falls, New York. I vent my frustrations by writing comedy pieces for the Huffington Post, I run a blog about social publishing, and, for some odd reason, I’m more popular than Serena Williams, Newt Gingrich, and Stephen Colbert … on Twitter. Sadly, this doesn’t help my chances with Serena or make me any money.

I’d like to change that this year.

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The Two Traditional Funding Options

I’m not big on corporate sponsorship. I’ll work with a company if it makes sense, but I’m burned out from so many years of chasing sponsorships. Sponsorship is a game for the well-networked or those whose presence is so big that they can’t be ignored.

Nor do I want to deal with investors. I could write a business plan, take it to some venture capitalists, and pull in the money, but at what cost? The last thing I want is a group of MBAs watering my project down to please shareholders.

The Third Way

I started researching crowdfunding as an alternative. I came up with the unusually bright idea of selling advertising space on the back of 300,000 business cards. $1 gets someone an advertisement on one card, and they buy as many as they want. The incentive is that the cards are being used to set a Guinness World Record for “tallest wall made out of business cards,” which makes them desirable and a collectible piece of advertising after the record is set.

A Million High Fives (or #AMHF) is the project I’m attempting to crowdfund and form a new business around. Although #AMHF is supposed to accomplish many things, I also want it to make crowdfunding a cool thing to do. If I can do it, you can do it. And if we can do it, then who needs sponsorship or venture capital?

I’ll be documenting the crowdfunding of A Million High Fives and my new business from concept to cash exclusively here on ReadWriteStart. I have no connections, no money, and no resources — just a big idea and a platform here on ReadWriteWeb. If I fail, you’ll see every step of the fall. If I succeed, we’ll have plenty to learn along the way. Not to mention, we’ll be setting a Guinness World Record together. How cool is that?

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Technorati Launches Twittorati: Top Tweets from Blogosphere

Technorati, the world’s first blog search engine, just unveiled Twittorati – a site where the top 100 bloggers’ tweets are featured and analyzed. The service allows users to view the links most tweeted as well as displaying Technorati’s original concept of showcasing the internet’s top trafficked blogs and content from its contributors. One interesting component of the site is the fact that users can view the pictures shared by today’s Twitter and blogging elite.

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While the community’s words may be articulate and cohesive, the world’s top rated bloggers prove themselves to be a fairly average bunch of human beings. You’ll notice the majority of the photographs feature blurry crowds at networking events, office furniture and gooey plates of food.

With a catchphrase like, “Where the Blogosphere and Twittersphere meet” it will be interesting to see which sphere will hype the service more. Some of the featured bloggerati include ReadWriteWeb’s Richard MacManus, Huffington Post Editor Arianna Huffington and Zen Habits founder Leo Babauta.

Like any good Twitter-related service, Twittorati also has its own twitter account with a feed to the site’s hottest trending topics. We’ll be watching closely to see how the site’s trend results differ from those displayed on Twitter’s newly redesigned landing page.

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