Citizen news site NowPublic has been sold to another company in the "hyperlocal" space, Examiner.com, the two companies announced Tuesday.
The two sites will operate independently, but Examiner will integrate NowPublic's technology into its site and will encourage NowPublic's contributors to also write for Examiner--right now, the buyer says it has grown 200 percent since the beginning of the year (it launched in April 2008) and has 15,000 active contributors, hoping to hit 30,000 by year's end.
NowPublic's executives, including CEO Leonard Brody, will join the management team of Clarity Digital Group, parent company of Examiner.
"Every day, we hear discussions about whether hyperlocal content will ever be scalable, sustainable, or profitable as a business entity," Examiner CEO Rick Blair said in a release. "With the acquisition of NowPublic, we have the technology to further engage our community of more than 17 million unique visitors per month, and distribute our stories in new and innovative ways."
Was this a bargain-basement acquisition? The companies did not disclose financial terms. But an insider in the space told CNET News that NowPublic had been shopping itself to some pretty big media companies for some time at a higher price than potential buyers were willing to pay. The company had raised about $12 million in venture funding.
Many media companies have simply been launching their own "citizen journalism" initiatives, like CNN's iReport and blogging experiments from newspapers like the Washington Post, which could make an exit tougher for the smaller players.
Digital-media companies like AOL and InterActiveCorp have also made plays to dominate the local-news market--AOL recently acquired local-focused start-ups Patch and Going, the former of which was already a personal investment on behalf of CEO Tim Armstrong, and the Barry Diller-run IAC has been placing a big emphasis on business directory Citysearch.
There aren't many new companies launching at this year's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, which runs Tuesday through Friday. One of the few that are is Lunch.com, which strives to get a little more juice out of user-generated publishing.
Here's the premise of Lunch: You can review anything you want, from a TV show to a restaurant to a food product to a household appliance. I guess it aims to be, sort of, a Wikipedia for opinions. Founder J.R. Johnson, who started building the site after he sold previous creations VirtualTourist.com and OneTime.com to Expedia, said that Lunch started filling up its private beta by reaching out to frequent Amazon reviewers and received a very positive response.
You're also encouraged to network with other members and filter reviews through its "Similarity Network" function, an algorithm for finding like-minded users and matching them to one another. To ramp up Lunch's assessment of your preferences, you can play "speed-rating" games called Exhilarate, which are structured much like Netflix's recommendation feature.
Quite honestly, I have a hard time seeing people turn to a general reviews site when there are already well-established sites for reviews of businesses, books, movies, and the lot--not to mention a plethora of "social shopping" sites for consumer products. I feel like Lunch could've gained a lot more traction if it had made its debut two or three years ago, when user-generated content was a lot more noteworthy. But maybe that's just me.
Auditude, a video advertising company best known for technology that can identify clients' video content and run ads against it, has raised a $10.5 million Series B funding round from Redpoint Ventures and existing investor Greylock Partners. This brings the company's total funding to $23 million.
Last time we checked in with Auditude, the company had inked a deal with News Corp.'s MySpace and Viacom's MTV Networks to detect both official and user-uploaded MTV content on the social network's MySpaceTV platform. It was seen by many as a savvy antipiracy measure. Since then, Auditude has started powering a broader variety of video ads on MySpace and its MySpace Music product, as well as partnered with Warner Bros. Entertainment. More content deals are on the way, CEO Adam Cahan told CNET News.
"From our perspective, we are looking to work with everybody," Cahan said. "We are trying to tackle what I think is one of the biggest opportunities and challenges on the Internet right now, which is (that) tons of people are watching video, 80 percent of folks out there, and yet very few people are really making a business of this yet."
Redpoint partner Chris Moore will join Auditude's board of directors, which also includes former Facebook executive Owen Van Natta. A member of the short list for the top post at MySpace Music, Van Natta instead took the CEO role at rival streaming service Project Playlist.
A guy I know created an Elf Yourself video of his friends. Um, I'm on the bottom right.
(Credit: OfficeMax/JibJab, user-gen work by Peter Feld)Because we need to ensure that silly do-it-yourself comedy will stay alive during these harrowing financial times, the magic venture capital fairies have infused JibJab.com with a $7.5 million Series C round. And by "magic venture capital fairies" I actually mean Overbrook Entertainment, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and existing investor Polaris Venture Partners.
Founded in 1999 by brothers Gregg and Evan Spiridellis, JibJab started as a hub for funny political song-and-dance videos that the two created, but in 2007 the company began an e-card service called "Starring You!" in which visitors to the site could insert photos of themselves (or their bosses!) into geeky cartoon videos. For the '08 holiday season, JibJab partnered with office supply store OfficeMax for the third annual installment of those "Elf Yourself" greeting cards that I'm sure more than a few of you were sent. (See image for embarrassing example.)
JibJab says a whopping 35 million of its holiday greeting cards were sent across the Web this winter. That's a lot of elves.
JibJab forged a deal with CNN Politics around that time last year when everyone was either thinking about Halloween or the presidential election, launching a zombie politician video creator.
The site has a business model beyond advertising and sponsorship, thank goodness: some of its content is subscription-based, and JibJab also sells additional video. To keep an "Elf Yourself" video past the holidays, for example, you can pay to download it.
"We sensed that customers would pay for access to unique, high-quality entertainment that they could use to express themselves online," co-founder and CEO Gregg Spiridellis said in a release. "With this thesis well proven, and the capital from this financing now in place, we plan to aggressively innovate the online greetings category in the months and years ahead."
Hey, guys, I have a suggestion: recession-themed dance video greeting cards!
This post was updated on Friday at 7:26 a.m. PT to note OfficeMax's creation of "Elf Yourself," which is now presented by JibJab.
Anyone who's ever edited or created a Wikipedia entry can attest to the fact that it's not that self-explanatory. They're in luck--the nonprofit anyone-can-edit encyclopedia has received $890,000 from the Stanton Foundation in order to make it easier to use.
More specifically, the grant was given to the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that encompasses Wikipedia. It'll fund the hire of three new software developers in the foundation's San Francisco office. Then, per a press release, the team will "commission research to identify the most common barriers to entry for first-time writers, and then work to systematically reduce or eliminate them...hiding complex elements of the user interface from people who don't need them."
Wikipedia will make all new code open-source.
"Wikipedia attracts writers who have a moderate-to-high level of technical understanding, but it excludes lots of smart, knowledgeable people who are less tech-centric," Wikimedia Foundation executive director Sue Gardner said in the release. "One of our key priorities is to attract those people and persuade them to help write and edit the encyclopedia. I am thrilled that the Stanton Foundation recognizes the importance of that work, and will be helping us with it."
Also a plus for a more user-friendly Wikipedia: Ideally, its millions of articles will have a broader depth of coverage. My colleague Declan McCullagh did an assessment last year of the skew toward geeky pop-culture content: the article for the mythological figure Vulcan, for example, is about one tenth as long as the article for the Vulcans of Star Trek fame.
The Stanton Foundation was founded by broadcast executive Frank Stanton, who served as president of CBS (which publishes CNET News) from 1946 to 1971.
Amazon has enlisted a half dozen of its most dedicated (addicted?) reviewers to act as holiday gift experts this season. They'll be responsible for providing gift picks, tips, and other advice regarding their favorite products available on the mega-retail site.
Putting a "real people" face on holiday shopping is key for Amazon in a season full of thin wallets and nervous spenders: research firm eMarketer just lowered its projections for online holiday shopping. Many of the tips provided by Amazon's reviewers, for obvious reasons, deal with cost-cutting recession strategies.
Amazon has offered customer reviews since 1995, and says that over 5 million people have submitted reviews so far. Its "Holiday Customer Review Team" members have between 367 and 1,483 reviews under their belt apiece.
The six chosen ones, in case you happen to live next door to any of them or anything, are: Mark Espinosa of Jersey City, N.J.; Debbie Lee Wesselmann of Allentown, Penn.; Marty Hogan of San Francisco; Zack Davisson of Seattle; Joseph Boone of Irvine, Calif.; and Ed Uyeshima of San Francisco.
Wow, way to ignore the "Real America," Amazon! What would Sarah Palin think?
AOL is ending its foray into user-generated video, the company confirmed Monday after a weekend of blog reports. On December 18, its AOL Video Uploads service will officially close its doors.
Users who have videos currently hosted through the service will receive an e-mail this week, and will be given the chance to transfer their videos to AOL's preferred alternative, start-up Motionbox, before December 18. If they don't, their videos will be deleted.
AOL has made a concerted effort to shake off some of its older and less successful properties--Journals, Hometown, and AOL Pictures, to name a few, not to mention the fact that parent company Time Warner plans to spin off its flagging dial-up service--while forging ahead with newer, shinier projects. The company continues to launch new blog titles and beef up its Platform-A advertising product; it's also modified its homepage to bring in feeds from multiple e-mail and social-networking sites.
The Google-owned YouTube remains the overwhelming leader in amateur video uploads.
But AOL's not the only one reworking its service priorities. Earlier this fall, Microsoft announced that it was shutting down its MSN Groups service in favor of starting the new Windows Live Groups, and that MSN Groups would be effectively ported over to social network Multiply.
CNN is close to expanding its "iReport" user-generated reporting initiative into a separate Web site, MediaWeek wrote Monday.
The new site, to be hosted at iReport.com, will be a repository for user-submitted news content--video, audio, and photos. Visitors can navigate through categories of news (like sports, weather, and politics), rate content, and embed it elsewhere on the Web. Contributors will be able to create profiles, and regulars can build up individual followings. As for filtering, the new site will be moderated once content has already been posted to the site; this is a change from CNN's current strategy with iReport, in which only select contributions are posted to CNN's Web site. This obviously means that the news runs the risk of inaccuracies and pranksters, but one could assume that moderation as well as community interaction could keep the fake-news factor to a minimum.
Right now, hubs for "citizen journalism" on the Web include well-backed companies like Current Media, which recently filed for an IPO, as well as start-ups of varying size like NowPublic and GroundReport.
CNN first launched the iReport project in August 2006, and since then has received over 100,000 photo and video submissions, according to MediaWeek. In October, the Time Warner-owned news brand established a presence for the initiative in virtual world Second Life.
Zuda is a new Web site from DC Comics, makers of big comic franchises like Superman and Batman. Come October, Zuda will be opening its doors to aspiring comic book creators to submit their work for a chance to make it big, or at least get their work hosted and published on DC's dime.
Zuda is giving users two ways to reach potential fame. The first is by keeping an eye out for particularly impressive submissions and offering the artist work at DC. The other is a public system that lets Zuda users vote and rate submitted comics after a select group of 10 has been picked out by Zuda editors. This is a monthly process, whose winner gets a one-year contract with DC to produce a weekly Web comic.
DC has come up with a specific format it wants all its submissions to be in, a 4:3 rectangle that it claims to be "industry standard." Creators must build their comic entirely within the box. To me this seems a little silly, as many popular Web comics tend to run the gamut in width and height. While this works for some comics like Family Circus and Ziggy, it seems somewhat limiting in the long run.
Zuda will continue to add more information about how to submit and present work. For now, it's limited to a set of forums and a sign-up to be alerted when the site goes live.
See also: DrunkDuck
One of the companies showcasing its wares at the Web 2.0 Expo is LuckyOliver, a stock photography service that sells user-submitted digital photographs for use on Web sites and printed materials. The service has a kitschy carnival/circus theme, right down to calling its users 'carnies.'
LuckyOliver employs several Web 2.0ish technologies to categorize photos, including tags, a cloud of similar or related images, and a prestige system for heavy users of the site. Esteemed photographers also get special badges. Other users can comment on their work, and browse through their portfolio.
As a photographer, submitting photos to the service is fairly straight forward. You've got to upload three of your best shots, which get scrutinized by LuckyOliver's human quality control agent. If they think you're good enough, they'll get back to you to add more to the service.
Each photography sale on LuckyOliver is divided up into tokens. Smaller sizes of a print will only cost a few tokens (valued at $1 each); all the way up to the high resolution versions, which run up to 50 tokens for buyers interested in using the shot on things like promotional materials or product packaging.
LuckyOliver is one of many online stock photography services, and has been around since late 2005. For Web site designers, sites like these are a quick and easy resource for art. For photographers who take good pictures, they're a chance to sell and promote their work. Sites like iStockPhoto, ShutterStock, Fotolia and Dreamstime provide a similar 'you shoot it, we sell it' service, they just don't do it with nearly the peculiar sense of humor LuckyOliver is bringing to the table.
