Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Funny or Die mines laughs, proftis on Web and Tv.

January 4, 2012 by Steven R. Gerbsman

Article from SFGate.

Funny or Die, the comedy website founded by Will Ferrell, is pointing the way for Web-based entertainment companies by combining the scrappiness of an Internet startup with A-list talent that attracts viewers.

What started as a lark for Ferrell and writing partner Adam McKay has become a profitable company, with revenue approaching $30 million this year, according to a person with knowledge of the Los Angeles business.

Funny or Die’s third show on cable TV, “Billy on the Street,” started last week on Fuse network. The first feature film, “Funny or Die Presents Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie,” premieres at the Sundance Film Festival in January.

“Somebody is going to figure out the strategy of marrying traditional media to this new-media model, to the way people are now consuming content, on a massive scale,” Funny or Die Chief Executive Officer Dick Glover said. “We’re doing it in our little world. We’re doing OK.”

Since the dawn of the Internet, entertainment companies have struggled to make money on the Web. Walt Disney’s interactive unit has lost money for 12 consecutive quarters. The company said Nov. 7 that it formed a partnership with Google’s YouTube to create short, family-friendly videos. YouTube is investing about $100 million to add channels in collaboration with celebrities such as Amy Poehler, Ashton Kutcher and Shaquille O’Neal.

Mark and Michael Polish, the writer-director team behind “Twin Falls Idaho” and “The Astronaut Farmer,” have turned a modest profit from “For Lovers Only,” a feature they started on Apple’s iTunes and video on demand.

“The bottom line is, you have to have the right product because you really depend on word of mouth,” Mark Polish said. “Are they going to like it and link it to Facebook or tweet it?”

‘Landlord’ pulls traffic

Funny or Die’s ethos was established with its first Internet video, “The Landlord.” The two-minute sketch featured McKay’s 2-year-old daughter, Pearl, as a foul-mouthed landlady who intimidates a tenant played by Ferrell. Shot with no budget in 60 minutes at Ferrell’s house, “The Landlord” attracted 78 million views, according to the website.

The success generating traffic enticed stars willing to work for free for the exposure Funny or Die gave them with young, Web-savvy audiences. The money came later, as marketers bought ads on the site and film studios hired Funny or Die to create videos for the stars of upcoming films.

Funny or Die is backed by Sequoia Capital, the Menlo Park venture capital firm that has put $15 million into the company. Owners also include Ferrell and McKay’s production company, Gary Sanchez Productions, director Judd Apatow, HBO and Creative Artists Agency.

“The Landlord” remains the website’s most-watched, followed by a Justin Bieber sketch that drew 40.8 million views, according to rankings on funnyordie.com.

“We walked into Funny or Die looking at it as a clubhouse for our friends,” McKay said. “The quality didn’t have to be that high. It could be goofing around. What we didn’t anticipate was how much people would like that approach.”

Website ads account for about two-thirds of revenue. The rest comes from branded entertainment, 50 or so videos the company is hired to make each year to promote movies and products. The site has kept its credibility with fans by maintaining tight control over the creative process. Typically, the only reference to the product being promoted is made at the tail end, after the sketch is over.

Moving to movies

“Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie,” the first feature film under the Funny or Die brand, stars frequent collaborators Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim. In the picture, two friends get a billion dollars to make a film, the biggest budget in history, only to see the project fall apart. Ferrell also appears, and Gary Sanchez Productions and Mark Cuban’s 2929 Entertainment are among the backers.

“Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie” will be offered through video on demand and for sale at Funny or Die’s site on Jan. 27, and it will reach theaters on March 2, according to the duo’s website.

“Billy on the Street” features comedian Billy Eichner approaching New York pedestrians with questions about pop culture. The company’s other shows on cable are Comedy Central’s “Jon Benjamin Has a Van” and HBO’s “Funny or Die Presents.”

Funny or Die can charge $100,000 or more for custom-made videos and promotional campaigns, fees that include salaries for staff and payment to the stars, said the person, who declined to be named because the company is private.

“There’s an idea that young people reject advertising,” Glover said. “That’s not true. They reject bad advertising. They love advertising that talks to them in a certain way.”

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/12/26/BUSJ1MFPA0.DTL#ixzz1hvEx9sQU

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

3 startups that showcase the future of chips

January 2, 2012 by Steven R. Gerbsman

Article from GigaOm.

Mobility has changed the chip industry already, but the rise of the iPhone and devices such as e-readers are only the beginning. If we’re going to create an Internet of things that connects back to a cloud powered by millions of servers, the chip world will have to change drastically to reduce power consumption, shrink in size and embrace new architectures. Fortunately these things are already happening, and here are three startups that showcase the big upcoming shifts.

SuVolta

SuVolta doesn’t want to design chips, it wants to make the process that fabrication plants will use to build the devices. Its technology cuts the energy used in chips in half, and requires a fairly simple tweak of the chemicals layered onto the chip during the manufacturing process. The resulting chips made using SuVolta’s process are just as fast but consume about half the power.

This power reduction is cool, but it’s not the main reason why SuVolta’s on this list. SuVolta tweaks both the manufacturing process and the circuit design. But the process works best for systems on a chip, as opposed to stand alone processors. A System on a chip (SoC) is when multiple types of processors are placed on a single chip as an integrated package.

SoCs are common in the mobile world because they are a way to cram more functionality into a smaller package and they consume less power. SuVolta’s President and CEO Bruce McWilliams, believes SoCs will be the way of the future for how most chips are built.

Ambiq Micro

Ambiq is commercializing technology out of the University of Michigan to build a real-time clock designed for sensors. The clock consumes less power, but also takes over functions that currently involve other chips in order to reduce the power usage of the sensor even further (yup, it’s like an SoC microcontroller). Scott Hanson, the CEO and co-founder of Ambiq explains that today’s sensors usually contain a microcontroller, a clock that puts the chip to sleep and wakes it as necessary, a power supply, a sensor of some sort (typically a MEMs device) and a radio.

But Ambiq combines the clock and the microcontroller so the chip requires less power and takes up less space. Some proposed uses of the chip include implanting it inside the human body, or a chip that can run on tiny solar cells the size of a penny (see image).

As we put more sensors on devices and inside our infrastructure, Hansen believes we’re about to open up a new frontier for chip design firms who can build chips for the sensor web. Ambiq is his bet on this, but he expects many more. With an investment from ARM, he’s not the only one betting on a new generation of chips that will need specialized microcontroller and a smaller size, the British licensing company clearly sees an opportunity as well.

Adapteva

The demand for power in mobile devices and in the servers that power large web sites such as Facebook or Google has led to a boost for ARM, which licenses a chip architecture that trades performance speed for power efficiency. For phones this is fine, but for tablets and even servers, it may be time to think up an entirely new architecture. That’s where Adapteva comes in. The company has rethought a RISC-based architecture for chips and built massively multicore chips that are built to run in parallel or independently.

Much like an older startup called Tilera, which is also building massively multicore chips for data centers, Adapteva thinks that x86 doesn’t offer the energy efficiency needed, while ARM doesn’t offer the performance that next generation mobile devices such as tablets and servers will need. So it’s borrowing the concept of massively multicore chips from the high performance computing world and dialing it down for tomorrow’s mobile applications and up for the next generation of HPC. In the coming years, we’ll see more massively parallel chips, but we’ll also see a willingness to jettison the tried and true architectures as we embrace more specialty computing.

Read original post here.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

How Wayfair quietly built a $500M a year web business

December 30, 2011 by Steven R. Gerbsman

Article fom GigaOm.

In today’s crowded world of e-commerce, it’s not easy to make a name for yourself. New niche sites pop up constantly, while big players such as Amazon are work to undercut the growing competition by spreading into new territories and offering low prices and lots of perks. Meanwhile, the brick-and-mortar retail giants game such as Walmart are getting savvy to e-commerceand investing more and more in building strong online operations.

That’s why it’s particularly impressive that Wayfair, a relatively little known e-commerce company that deals in home furnishings and decor, is set to make more than $500 million in top-line sales for 2011. I talked recently with Wayfair’s CEO Niraj Shah to get details on how the company quietly built a half-billion-dollar-per-year business, and where it plans to go from here.

Start small and widespread, consolidate later

Wayfair as it stands today was founded by Shah and his business partner Steve Conine nine years ago as CSN Stores. At its inception in August 2002, CSN operated a single website, racksandstands.com, which sold storage and home entertainment furniture. Gradually CSN expanded its holdings to include number of individual sites that sold other kinds of home and lifestyle goods, with domain names such as strollers.com and cookware.com. By 2010, CSN had slowly but surely grown to more than 600 employees, and its family of more than 200 websites was bringing in $380 million in annual sales. All this time, CSN had not taken a dime of institutional capital.

It wasn’t until 2011 that Shah and Conine decided to consolidate CSN’s operations under one brand name of Wayfair and take the business to the next level by raising outside funding. In June 2011 Spark Capital, Battery Ventures, Great Hill Partners and HarbourVest Partners pitched into a $165 million funding round. Wayfair now operates under three brands: Wayfair.com, which sells a variety of mid-range home goods; AllModern, which sells higher-end brands such as Alessi and Herman Miller; and Joss & Main, a flash sales site for designer home goods.

Beating out brick and mortar

The consolidation and rebranding is serving Wayfair well. The company now has nearly 1000 staff and a catalog of more than 4.5 million items from 5000 brands. Now it’s closing out its best year ever, with 2011 holiday season sales 30 percent higher than they were in 2010. Cyber Monday 2011 was the best single day of sales in the history of CSN/Wayfair, with an average order size of $143 per customer.

So what’s next? According to Shah, the company is looking at some pretty big players as its competition. And the most pressing competitors are more traditional physical retailers, not other online companies. “We were really focused on online competitors when we started, but over time as we’ve grown we’ve found that our competitors really include Walmart, Target, and folks like that,” Shah said. “We tend to win if someone is looking at our site along with another site. But if people just go directly to a brand they already recognize, like Target, then we may not get the chance to win that business.” That’s exactly why Wayfair has decided to focus on building up its own brand recognition right now, Shah says:

“Right now the home market is a little over half a trillion dollars in the United States, but only about 5 to 6 percent of that is online, and it’s a highly fragmented market within that. That’s all starting to really come online, so we want Wayfair to emerge as a household name. We want to seize the opportunity to be the go-to brand for home decor online.”

The road to an IPO

Ultimately, Shah says that Wayfair plans to return its shareholders’ $165 million investment with an eventual initial public offering. But he also noted that Wayfair’s investors are quite patient, especially seeing that the company was operating with comfortable profits well before outside money was brought in.

“In general for tech companies it seems to be a good time in the market to go public. But part of why we never took investment capital early on is that we didn’t want any time pressure regarding an exit,” Shah said. “If your business is going well you still try to time an IPO well, but it’s not like you’re going to miss a ‘window.’ We could see being publicly traded in five years’ time, but it’s not a big priority now.” In the near-term, he says, Wayfair’s focus is on international expansion and boosting its brand worldwide.

To me, it seems likely that Wayfair could become an attractive acquisition target for Amazon as it proceeds toward an IPO — Amazon has been known to snap up niche competitors with big price tags before, such as its $540 million acquisition of Diapers.com owner Quidsi. Whatever happens, Wayfair will certainly be a company to watch in the months ahead.

Read original post here.

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Economy, Gerbsman Partners, Intellectual capital, internet, Investments, IPO news, Market research, Marketing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Facebook, Yelp likely leaders in 2012 IPOs

December 29, 2011 by Steven R. Gerbsman

Article from SFGate.

“Facebook and Yelp are set to lead the biggest year for U.S. initial public offerings by Internet companies since 1999, testing demand for IPOs after investors lost money on Zynga and Pandora Media.

With Facebook considering the largest Internet IPO on record and regulatory filings showing that at least 14 other Web-related companies are planning sales, the industry may raise $11 billion next year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That would be the most since $18.5 billion of IPOs in 1999, just before the dot-com bubble burst.

While surging sales growth may lure investors to Facebook, the biggest social-networking site, heightened stock volatility and Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis could temper the pace of global IPOs after a 38 percent decline in 2011. Even Internet companies may cut valuations for their offerings after Zynga, the largest developer of games for Facebook, and online radio company Pandora slumped following share sales this year, according to researcher Morningstar.

“Technology is still a place where you can get outperformance in terms of growth against a tepid market backdrop,” said David Erickson, global co-head of equity capital markets at Barclays. “You might see more IPOs emerge if we get resolution in Europe or stability that makes investors more comfortable with the overall market.”

IPOs raised $155.8 billion in 2011, compared with $252 billion a year earlier, and U.S. initial offerings generated $38.8 billion, about 10 percent less than in 2010, Bloomberg data show. In Asia, IPOs this year have raised $79.2 billion, less than half the $176.5 billion last year, Bloomberg data show.

While funds raised in Europe rose for the year, they sank more than 95 percent since August from a year earlier after the worsening debt crisis and a cut to the U.S. credit rating sapped confidence in global markets.

Morgan Stanley

Morgan Stanley took the biggest share of both U.S. and global IPOs for the second year in a row after working on initial share sales by Glencore International, HCA Holdings and Michael Kors Holdings. Pen Pendleton, a spokesman for Morgan Stanley, declined to comment.

The bank also was the lead underwriter on Zynga and Pandora’s IPOs. The stocks’ declines following those public debuts may prompt greater scrutiny of valuations in 2012, said James Krapfel, an analyst at Morningstar in Chicago.

“Investors will take a harder look at the numbers going forward and need to see strong revenue and profit growth,” Krapfel said. Bookings, an indication of deferred revenue, at Zynga have increased more slowly this year, suggesting the company’s IPO price was too high, according to a Dec. 9 Morningstar report.

Zynga, which raised $1 billion in its IPO this month, has since fallen 2.5 percent after going public at a valuation three times that of Redwood City rival Electronic Arts. Oakland’s Pandora has plunged 36 percent since its June 14 IPO.

Facebook, based in Menlo Park, is examining a $10 billion offering that would value it at more than $100 billion, a person with knowledge of the matter said last month. Total sales at Facebook in 2012 may surge 52 percent to 62 percent from this year’s projected $4.27 billion through increased ad revenue, according to Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst at EMarketer. Industrywide, the display ad market may surge 24 percent to $12.3 billion this year.

“Tech offerings generally offer real growth, and investors get very excited when they can’t find growth in the broader market,” J.D. Moriarty, co-head of equity capital markets for technology in the Americas at Bank of America, said at a briefing this month.

Yelp, the consumer-review website operator, and e-mail marketer ExactTarget both filed for IPOs in November. This year, 19 Internet companies generated $6.6 billion in U.S. initial share sales.

Going public

Glam Media, a Web-advertising company that targets women, plans to make its first IPO filing by the end of the second quarter, people familiar with the matter said. AppNexus, the online-ad company backed by Microsoft, may go public in late 2012, Chief Executive Officer Brian O’Kelley said. Companies like MobiTV and Eloqua, which rely on the Internet to distribute cloud- based software products to clients, may seek an additional $650 million, regulatory filings show.

In Europe, the IPO market has “essentially come to a halt” as the sovereign-debt crisis spread from Greece to Portugal and Italy, said Mary Ann Deignan, head of equity capital markets for the Americas at Bank of America. In September, Siemens AG suspended an IPO of its Osram lighting unit and Spain pulled the initial public offering of its lottery operator as global stocks headed for a one-year low.

“There are companies that would like to go public but are waiting for the right market environment to do so,” said Deignan, speaking at a briefing this month. “As long as policymakers and politicians control the headlines, Europe remains a challenge.”

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/12/28/BUE01MHK4V.DTL#ixzz1hv9KomS3

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Economy, FaceBook, internet, Investments, IPO news, Market research | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

The Fashion Whip: 2011’s Best Dressed Politicians (It’s Not Who You Think!)

December 28, 2011 by Steven R. Gerbsman

The Fashion Whip: 2011’s Best Dressed Politicians (It’s Not Who You Think!)
The Fashion Whip is a political style column in the Huffington Post by Lauren Rothman and Christina Wilkie. Rothman is the founder of Styleauteur http://styleauteur.com

WASHINGTON — What does it take to land on The Fashion Whip’s list of the best dressed people in American politics?

Simply put, it’s power dressing — the kind that moves crowds and makes voters and congressional colleagues take a second look. This is a list of politicians who cultivate their power through their public image — and this being politics, it’s always deliberate.

Power dressing in politics is not just about what (or who) you are wearing — it is also about how you communicate your message. Body language, charisma and the ability to carry oneself well factor heavily into the overall look. You have to own it. This list of politicians includes heavyweights with decades of experience in the public eye, as well as a healthy dose of newcomers — all of whom have the political clout to move (and sway) people.

In a place where many of the most powerful roles are occupied by men, freshman Rep. Frederica Wilson’s (D-Fla.) matching cowboy hat and suit ensembles (Wilson reportedly has a room where she keeps more than 80 hats!), and the sharp panache of Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) exemplify the unique way these women occupy their own political stage. Among the ‘gents, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney are high-budget veterans, and the standard they set influences relative newcomers like Reps. Cedric Richmond (D-La.) and Aaron Schock (R-Ill.), who have an impressive collection of designer suits between them.

Click through the slideshow for the trademarks and tactics that shaped and maintained Washington’s reputation for power dressing this year.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christina-wilkie/best-dressed-politicians_b_1172131.html?ref=style

Posted in Fashion, Styleauteur | Leave a Comment »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »