AllThingsD » Jeff Clavier

Start-Up Byliner Thinks the Digital Ink Isn't Dry on Long-Form Writing

Drake Martinet — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 17:23:16 +0000

There are at least a few of long-form writing’s elite who don’t believe the Internet is out to kill the written word. In fact, they’ve gotten together and built Byliner, a discovery platform for fans of long reads to chat about at their next wine, cheese and turtleneck party.

Byliner aims to become the new hub of authors, fans and the writing that connects them.

To do so, it has collected links and excerpts of contemporary non-fiction of greater than 1,500 words — pieces a reader could get through in a sitting or two.

Then, around the writing and associated metadata, Byliner has built a free platform for discovering other works and sharing them with people both on and off of Byliner.

“We think of it as the Pandora for writers,” said author John Tayman, Byliner’s CEO.

So far, Byliner has raised venture funding from Josh Felser of Freestyle Capital and SoftTech VC Jeff Clavier, with a recently closed $1 million seed round.

But it’s not a new model: Aggregate links provide a service on top of the stuff other people create and try to draw a user base around it. That said, it hasn’t been applied to this particular form of writing before.

With a database that now spans more than 40,000 articles, Byliner’s long-term vision is to become the hub for this type of content on the Web.

The site features the chunky fonts, shades of grey and conspicuous white space typically found in a coffee table book about design. Like those coffee table books, the site is also free of advertising.

All of Tayman’s talk of discovery and readability ultimately left open a fairly important question: How will it make money?

That’s where Byliner Originals come in, and where the funding model starts to look a little more like a regular publisher.

The Originals are written works available only through Byliner, purchasable through the site and transmitted to your device, or delivered to you on paper, for a few dollars.

Early figures on sales of the Originals seem promising. A high-profile riveting exposé by Jon Krakauer on Three Cups of Tea author Greg Mortenson sold 100,000 copies in the first two weeks in an exclusive deal with Amazon.

Byliner’s COO Ted Barnett thinks that modern devices have opened a hole in the market — and in readers’ attention spans — that is large enough to cram in one of Byliner’s exclusive works.

“Before [modern reading devices], it only made sense for someone to publish a book that took 10 hours to read,” he said. “But these devices have made the purchase and delivery of individual works of this length possible.”

Still, the site has a way to go if it wants to become a true platform.

As of today, for example, integration with the popular Read it Later service and the usual panoply of social network sharing buttons are all Byliner has mustered in the social category.

But, according to Tayman, Byliner doesn’t have to do much to be the leader.

“Short of doing some power-Googling, there is no other place to do deep cross-discovery around longer articles and writers,” he said.

He said as much, and a little more, about Byliner’s core mission during my recent visit to their HQ in San Francisco’s Presidio district:

[ See post to watch video ]

Do Us a Favor and Read About This Social Start-Up Called Favo.rs (Video)

Drake Martinet — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 18:52:54 +0000

Adam Rodnitzky would like you to do him a favor. Actually, he’d probably prefer you do a bunch of favors for other people.

Favo.rs, a new social Web tool in private beta, is building a layer on top of social networks so that users can trade favors in social capital.

Let’s say a user wants to meet AllThingsD honcho Walt Mossberg, but they don’t know him or anyone who does. They post a request on Favo.rs — and, since I know Walt, I could choose to grant the favor and make an intro.

So far, nothing new here — this is how the world works.

What Favo.rs does is log the social transaction (if you want to call it that), track relationships and help favor doers and seekers gather around common areas of interest. As users interact more they will be able to see who is doing the most favors and how frequently they are paying back into the system.

“We’re trying to play off that Silicon Valley ‘pay it forward’ economy where people are willing to make connections for other people,” said Rodnitzky.

This type of interaction can be incredibly valuable, but until now has gone unquantified online.

Favo.rs has taken about $1 million in funding, including a chunk by Jeff Clavier who advises the start-up.

A lot of this is just beta dreams, explained Rodnitzky.

“Today, Favo.rs is a skeleton version of what we will be in a few months,” he said. “Right now, the only favor you can ask of people is that they promote something for you on Twitter.”

But Rodnitzky has been heartened by the early users already asking favors of each other that are outside of the first test.

He believes it fills a gap: “We think the biggest weakness in social networks today is that they treat all connections equally.”

And there seems to be something to that frustration.

Facebook, which is where Rodnitzky sees a future for Favo.rs, has always had a clunky system for managing relationships that are often difficult to describe in real-world terms.

Some describe Facebook as building an analog for human social interaction online. If that’s the case, than there is likely a lot of nuance left to integrate.

The personal connection economy that Favo.rs is trying to tap into may seem like a tough nut to crack. It’s unclear whether it will become a data dashboard or a marketplace for favors — or both.

Sink or swim, Favo.rs is going to be faced with answering the kind of questions that will define the next era of personal capital online.

I sat with Rodnitzky in his San Francisco office to ask a few of those questions and got his answers on video.

Do me a favor and watch:

[ See post to watch video ]

Gigwalk Allows iPhone Owners to Stumble Into Part-Time Work

Ina Fried — Wed, 04 May 2011 11:00:13 +0000

The idea of using the Internet to parse out small jobs is not new. But a new crop of businesses has popped up that use the iPhone to help people find and perform small tasks near them.

One of the most ambitious of these projects is Gigwalk, which lets anyone with an iPhone sign up to perform tasks such as photographing an intersection or documenting a restaurant using nothing more than the camera on their device.

Although the tasks performed by each individual are small, the idea behind Gigwalk is to find large companies that need tasks performed that would otherwise be to costly and laborious to complete. In private beta for the last few months, the service is already being used by GPS mapping firm TomTom and restaurant listing service Menupages to crowdsource tasks that are core to their businesses.

“You can take care of a lot of scenarios that were too expensive or too slow,” says CEO Ariel Seidman, who left Yahoo and started Gigwalk with two other former Yahoo workers last year.

Part of the impetus, he said, was the fact that everyone at Yahoo seemed to bemoan the cost of doing local products.

“I was so frustrated by everyone saying local is so expensive,” Seidman said. “That was one of the inspirations.”

Gigwalk lets iPhone users see available tasks near them and decide whether any are appealing enough. If they want a task, they have to go to the location, to avoid one Gigwalker claiming a bunch of gigs all at once. The pay ranges from $3 to $90 per task, with the amount varying based on the amount of work involved. Users start out being able to perform only the simplest and lowest-paying gigs, but with each completed task they earn a “street cred” reputation score that qualifies them for higher paying opportunities.

Gigwalk is announcing on Wednesday both its exit from beta and that it has raised $1.7 million in seed money from investors including Michael Dearing of Harrison Metal, Mint.com investor Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.

The initial funding, though, came from money the founders got as part of the Microsoft-Yahoo search pact.

“I was, like, something good should come of this because not much good has,” Seidman said.

The company isn’t saying how many workers or companies are taking part so far, but Seidman said that “many thousands” of gigs have already been performed in the seven cities where Gigwalk is doing business. Over time, Seidman said he would like to have millions of gigs and workers across the globe. While many do just an odd job or two for $10 here or there, some regulars make an extra $100 a week or more. One of the most prolific Gigwalk workers is Andrew Schut of New York, who has made more than $2000–an average of $400 per week–doing more than 270 tasks since signing up in March.

“It’s a nice little bonus to get paid to do work that is so easy and fun to do,” Schut said in an email interview. “I moved to New York City about a year ago and the opportunity to explore all the fabulous restaurants, hotels and other places of interest in the city while picking up some extra cash along the way is irresistible.”

Schut, who consults in the medical device industry, methodically maps out his Gigwalk routes to maximize his efficiency, much the way FedEx drivers have their schedules planned.

“Before I set out on my Gigwalking day, I use the map feature on the app to plan my route,” he said. “I can shrink and expand the local area map to look for clusters of gigs I can hit in one shot.”

Schut and another Gigwalk worker have even set up an independent Web site to share tips. The best gigs, Schut says, are the restaurant ones, while his least favorite are time-consuming hotel reviews.

“There are many questions to be answered about the property and photographs to be taken,” Schut said. “The work needs to be done well and meticulously in order to be approved by the client. It can take anywhere from one to two hours to complete a hotel gig.”

Gigwalk is not alone in seeing the smartphone as a good conduit for odd jobs. One such start-up is a venture called AirRun that is designed more to link individuals looking to have a task performed with someone willing to do the errand. The app, which launched in the iTunes store, has had just 430 people download it, but has seen a range of tasks from washing a car in Long Beach, Calif., to picking up laundry in Kansas to helping buy a load of lumber in Georgia.

Seidman said his hope is that by working with large companies that need a lot of tasks done, his venture can scale in ways that the one-to-one services just won’t be able to.

I initially included Uber in this crop of companies, however, that was based on my misunderstanding of how the system works. With Uber, iPhone owners can summon a professional driver rather than hailing a taxi, but the system doesn’t let anyone with a car act as a driver. Thanks to the Uber community for bringing that to my attention.

Topguest Hustles Its Way into Making Travel Loyalty Pay (Video)

Liz Gannes — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 17:17:57 +0000

Topguest co-founder and CEO Geoff Lewis says he figured out a way to hack the near-impossible problem of hiring engineers in Silicon Valley: find them in Australia.

Apparently the U.S. visa process coming from Down Under is relatively pain-free, and at a cost of “a few thousand dollars” Lewis now has four Australians and himself, a Canadian, working on Topguest. “No Americans,” he said as a point of pride in an interview at his San Francisco office this week.

Lewis’ explanation for how a small, less-than-a-year-old start-up with relatively few users can score deals with the likes of Virgin America, Hilton and InterContinental Hotels Group is similar: “Just hustling.”

[ See post to watch video ]

Topguest ties customers’ geo-located social media activity with existing loyalty rewards programs. “We have no loyalty or travel domain expertise,” Lewis said.

Topguest doesn’t have its own check-in app, but it plugs into users’ Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram accounts to pull in their posts. For instance, getting the most likes on Instagram for a picture taken at a U.S. airport this week will earn Topguest users 1,000 Virgin America Elevate points (the minimum amount needed to buy a flight is 2,500).

In comparison to the fleeting attraction of a nearby special offer on Foursquare, Lewis said, “deals and discounts aren’t loyalty.”

Lewis said Facebook is by far the most-used check-in service by Topguest users, and the company’s recent Instagram integration has doubled unique visitors to its site.

This weekend, Topguest is launching a partnership with Caesars Entertainment Corp in Las Vegas that will earn users rewards points to spend at the company’s 1,000 venues.

Topguest makes money by receiving an activation fee for users who participate in loyalty programs (so far 10 percent of its users have signed up for a new loyalty program), as well as a monthly fee in some cases.

Ultimately, said Lewis, Topguest wants to act as a personalized concierge tool for its users, helping them make travel reservations to earn and spend loyalty points.

The company does have to fend off users who game the system by checking into multiple hotels in order to accrue more points. Lewis said Topguest has banned hundreds of users already for such abuse.

Personally, I might tend toward the opposite inclination and resist publicly checking into places where I plan to spend the night. But earning miles for airport check-ins? Sure, why not!

Topguest raised $2 million in Series A funding last year from investors including Founders Fund, as well as angels such as Ron Conway, Keith Rabois, Jeff Clavier and Naval Ravikant. After closing the funding, the company moved from New York City to San Francisco.

Mobile Printing Start-Up Breezy Raises $750,000 in Seed Funding

Ina Fried — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 19:24:44 +0000

Breezy, a mobile printing start-up, said on Tuesday that it had landed $750,000 in seed funding from investors including Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC, Aydin Senkut of Felicis Ventures, Rich Wong of Accel Partners and others. The company was started last year by Jared Hansen, a former corporate lawyer who bemoaned the fact that his BlackBerry lacked a good way to print. The company said it has about 20,000 users for its mobile printing apps.

Topguest Checks In With $2 Million Series A Round (And Peter Thiel as Adviser)

Kara Swisher — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 15:33:57 +0000

Topguest, a check-in loyalty service that was founded just five months ago, has gotten $2 million in Series A funding, as well as nabbing well-known Facebook investor Peter Thiel as an adviser.

Investors in the round include: Thiel’s Founders Fund, as well as angels such as Ron Conway, Keith Rabois, Jeff Clavier and Naval Ravikant.

Topguest is exiting its beta phase today with partners that include Virgin America, Hilton, Wyndham Worldwide, Kimpton and others.

Using Topguest, those companies can offer deals, making large travel and hospitality loyalty programs social by plugging them into smartphones and geolocation.

Users check in with their existing services–such as Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook Places and Gowalla–in order to get benefits such as air miles for your Virgin Elevate account and hotel points for Hilton HHonors.

Topguest is competing in a crowded market, where a lot of such services are offering many kinds of deals.

The San Francisco start-up is most like another service aimed at retailers called Shopkick, where you get points when you check in to its mobile app.

Topguest said the differentiator is that it links into geolocation services already in use, instead of requiring another different check-in and offers points in already existing loyalty programs.

Tapulous Investor Jeff Clavier On Casual Gaming "Explosion"

Timothy Hay — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 07:00:26 +0000

Last week, the Walt Disney Co. (DIS) acquired Tapulous Inc., a game company whose first home was Palo Alto, Calif.-based SoftTech VC, a seed-stage venture firm headed by noted angel investor Jeff Clavier. Tapulous is behind the popular Tap Tap music games for the iPhone and other devices in a fast-growing and lucrative area known as casual, or social, gaming.

So how did Tapulous go from obscurity to gaming poster child in less than three years? We recently chatted with Clavier, an active investor in gaming companies, to get a better read on this emerging area. Here’s an edited excerpt of that interview:

Q: The casual gaming space is very lively and interesting these days. What is your assessment of this market?

A: We’re seeing an explosion of social games on Facebook and on Apple (AAPL) distribution platforms. Suddenly, games are the premium place for people to interact. What’s really fascinating with this new wave of social games is the wide footprint they’ve built, in terms of gamers.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Series Seed Documents Legal Guru Ted Wang Speaks! (Plus Get Your Free Term Sheet Here)

Kara Swisher — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:30:38 +0000

BoomTown finally got to meet Silicon Valley lawyer Ted Wang today, which was kind of a thrill since most tight-lipped attorneys run in the other direction when they see me coming.

But Wang–who works for Fenwick & West and is a popular legal adviser to a spate of digital start-ups, such as Facebook, Aardvark and Twitter–has a lot to talk about with the launch of a new Web site called Series Seed Documents earlier this week.

It’s a laudable effort at simplifying the complex–especially since most lawyers mostly like to complexify the simple.

Instead, Wang has made templated but flexible legal documents available for free for entrepreneurs to use in seed-stage deals, and his effort is getting support from the top venture and angel investors in the arena, such as Andreessen Horowitz.

The point: So new companies don’t waste time and money negotiating often unnecessarily complicated–but usually standard–legal papers.

Wrote Wang in a blog post on the Series Seed site, titled “For the Faithful”:

Up until now, various smart people have talked or blogged about reducing the transaction costs associated with seed stage investment without rallying around a particular attack. Of course both entrepreneurs and investors would rather see their investment dollars used toward developing a new product and bringing it to market than toward what are usually routine transaction costs. The problem has been crafting a set of documents that provide adequate protections without being unduly burdensome. While traditional financing documents give broader rights and protections to investors, for a seed stage investment the benefits of simplification in the Series Seed documents outweigh the value of these additional rights and protections…

This endeavor will only be successful if the Documents gain widespread adoption–and that will require lawyers to get out of their comfort zones and think about the trade-offs suggested in the Documents. It will not be easy, but once a practitioner takes the plunge and makes the effort to think through the changes, I am convinced that a well thought-through standard set of seed documents will emerge. Moreover, if folks in our line of business do not come up with a set of documents that enable seed financings at a reasonable cost, the market is going to solve this problem in another way. To quote Gen Shinseki “[i]f you don’t like change, you are going to like irrelevance even less.”

Andreessen Horowitz, which was the first to agree to use Series Seed Documents, has been joined by a spate of high-profile angel and early-stage venture investors.

The group includes SV Angel’s Ron Conway, First Round Capital, “micro-cap” investor Mike Maples, SoftTechVC’s Jeff Clavier, True Ventures, Polaris Ventures, Charles River Ventures and Harrison Metal.

For a legal look-see, I embedded the four documents from Seed Series Documents below, which include: A Restated Certificate of Incorporation, an Investors’ Rights Agreement, a Series Seed Preferred Stock Purchase Agreement, and a Terms for Private Placement of Series Seed Preferred Stock of [Insert Company Name], Inc.

And here’s Wang talking about the effort–which he has been blogging about since 2007, actually–at Fenwick’s Mountain View, Calif., offices, with an impressive range of legal tomes behind him:

[ See post to watch video ]

SeriesSeedFormCOI

SeriesSeedIRA

SeriesSeedFormSPA

SeriesSeedTermSheet-1

Series Seed Documents–With an Assist From Andreessen Horowitz–To Help Entrepreneurs With Legal Hairballs

Kara Swisher — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:03:48 +0000

Series Seed Documents, templated documents for entrepreneurs to use for seed-stage deals, will be launched today, part of an effort by Silicon Valley lawyer Ted Wang and pushed by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

The point: So new entrepreneurs don’t waste time and money negotiating often unnecessarily complex legal papers.

Series Seed Documents was planning its announcement tonight, after briefing reporters. But BoomTown was alerted to the move by a tweet last week from Fenwick & West lawyer Wang that read: “Excited about launching Series Seed documents next week.”

Oops!

The Twitter post has since been taken down (but here is an image of it, below, natch!).

“Who even knew that a corporate attorney would have a Twitter account?” joked Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz in an interview this morning.

Actually, Wang (pictured here) is Twitter’s lawyer!

His practice, which focuses on representation of “emerging companies,” as noted on his Fenwick & West Web site, also includes Aardvark, Billshrink, Clicker, Facebook, Flixster and Widgetbox.

Andreessen Horowitz, which was the first to agree to use Series Seed Documents, will be joined by a spate of high-profile angel and early-stage investors.

“We want to make the process as transparent as possible, which is to say, we want to take all the mystery out it,” said Andreessen. “And it is online for everyone to understand.”

Of course, noted Andreessen, the price for the round is still open to negotiation, but wrangling over typically standard legal issues often hurts deals.

“The big reason we are doing it is that we think for these early stage round, bashing over these terms does damage only brings mistrust,” he said.

Andreessen noted that this template approach is only appropriate for small, early rounds of about $500,000 to $1 million.

“VCs who do angel rounds should be acting like a VC in a VC round and acting like an angel in an angel round,” he said. “The problems come when VCs act like VCs in angel rounds.”

Andreessen said using Series Seed Documents would cost start-ups about $7,000 compared with a low of $15,000 and up to $100,000 in many similar deals.

“It helps streamline the process and makes starting a company easier and more efficient,” said Conway of SV Angel, who is a well-known angel investor. “And cheaper–all in all, it is a benefit to both the entrepreneur and the investor.”

Loïc Le Meur Speaks About New (and Improved?) Seesmic!

Kara Swisher — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 11:11:21 +0000

When BoomTown went to visit serial entrepreneur Loïc Le Meur early last year at his San Francisco HQ, he was stoked about the prospects of his “video conversation” community start-up called Seesmic.

That was especially due to the influx of $6 million into his bank account by high-profile angel investors like LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, former AOL head Steve Case, SoftTech VC Jeff Clavier, Zynga’s Mark Pincus, investor Ron Conway, FON founder Martin Varsavsky and others.

Fast-forward to today and the entire business plan of Seesmic has been upended, with the video part pretty much junked.

Now, Le Meur is focused almost entirely on his social media desktop client, as well as Web and mobile versions, which began as a dashboard for Twitter called twhirl.

If at first you don’t succeed, dump and change again–the motto of Silicon Valley!

Seesmic has added a lot more Web services to the client to make it stickier, such as announcing yesterday that it would allow users to access and manage Facebook Pages.

The idea behind Seesmic, as well as competitors such as TweetDeck, is to allow users to manage their various social media tools much like their email accounts.

And while the service’s desktop client software has been a focus, Le Meur is also pushing its Web and mobile versions, all in the hopes that the newest innovation is the right one.

Here’s a tour I did of Seesmic’s new HQ and a video interview I did with Le Meur about all the changes:

[ See post to watch video ]

Is a Shorter Web Address Worth Big Money? bit.ly Raises $2 Million

Peter Kafka — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:30:36 +0000

Here’s another Web 2.0 riddle that seems particularly hard to solve post-Lehman: What’s the value of a service that takes a long Web address and makes it shorter?

One answer: Several million dollars.

Oh, and did I mention there’s no business model attached to said Web service?

Still with me?

OK. Here are the details: Betaworks, the incubator/start-up platform best known for selling Twitter a search engine for $15 million last year, is taking in-house project bit.ly and spinning it out as a separate company. A group of new investors, led by O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, has poured about $2 million into the company, which implies a valuation in the midseven figure range.

Other investors include Howard Lindzon’s Social Leverage group, Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC, and uber-angel Ron Conway. O’Reilly’s Bryce Roberts will join the board of the four-man company.

bit.ly is one of roughly a gazillion url-shorteners, all of which do the same thing. They take an unwieldy Web address like, say, this one: “http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090330/huffington-post-pays-for-content-after-all-via-175-million-investigative-fund/” and turn it into something concise like this: “http://bit.ly/14WdlB.”

If you spend much time on Facebook, Twitter or any other Web service where brevity is useful, you’ve encountered a shortened URL, and you’re likely seeing more and more of them all the time. The bit.ly guys say people clicked on 20 million of their shortened Web addresses last week, and that the number is increasing by about 10 percent a week.

Great. So where’s the money? Many of bit.ly’s competitors, like the aptly named tinyurl.com, generate modest revenue by running Google (GOOG) ads against the many eyeballs that come to the site to use the service. But bit.ly won’t sell ads, and it plans on distinguishing itself by tracking all the clicks and streams that come through the service and using the data to provide interesting analytics and insights into who’s looking at what on the Web, in real time.

The logic: If you’re impressed with the possibilities of Twitter’s real-time search capabilities (see above), you’ll love bit.ly.

Great. So where’s the money? bit.ly is free to users, and the company says it doesn’t plan on selling its analytics or other tools to publishers. Team bit.ly says revenue will come sometime down the road, from something else–when they figure out what that is.

That kind of shrugging was par for the course during Boom 2.0 days. But in the dark days of last fall, even the sunniest Web optimists, including Betaworks founder John Borthwick himself, were telling start-ups that they had to face reality and start making money.

So either things have gotten much better than we realized or the bit.ly investors think it’s still worth betting on fast-growing, revenue-free start-ups. It’d be nice if both things are true.

A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words–So What Does a Big Smile in a Layoff Story Mean?

Kara Swisher — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 16:42:04 +0000

Maybe: Happy days aren’t here again?

BoomTown always enjoys chatting with the always sunny Loïc Le Meur of Seesmic (and will, in fact, be appearing at his Paris-based digital conference in December, called Le Web).

But I am not quite sure what to make of his big, happy smile that was in this picture above (click in the image to make it larger), which went with a story in the New York Times about start-ups cutting costs.

In fact, the whole Seesmic crew is grinning awfully hard, putting a very game face on recent layoffs that cut the staff at the video blog service by more than a third.

Money–or, more accurately, non-money–quote from the Times piece:

“To preserve cash, many tech start-ups are rushing to lay off employees and cut expenses. They are shelving their dreams of Google-size riches and getting small, humble and thrifty, all with the more modest goal of surviving the coming economic winter.”

In a less puritan mode, Seesmic raised $6 million in May from a bunch of high-profile angels, of $12 million total.

They include LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, former AOL head Steve Case, SoftTech VC Jeff Clavier, entrepreneur Mark Pincus, former Goldman Sachs analyst Michael Parekh, entrepreneur Ariel Poler, investor Ron Conway, FON founder Martin Varsavsky and an investment group called Atomico founded by Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. Tech bloggers Jeff Pulver, Michael Arrington and Dan Gillmor have also invested.

Now, Le Meur is trying to stretch his dollars in the economic downturn, spurred by venture capitalists who have been pressing entrepreneurs like him to do so.

“If I can’t make this work in three years it will be a failure,” Mr. Le Meur said to the Times. “If I can and I get through this, it will be much stronger.”

In other words, what doesn’t kill us …

C’est la vie in Silicon Valley!

But in more bon-vivant times, back in February, I did a video post on my happier visit to Seesmic’s San Francisco HQ.

(Note: Many in the video are no longer at Seesmic and neither are the shows discussed, as well as the now-defunct Web 2.0 sentiments about growth without revenue.)

Here’s the video:

[ See post to watch video ]

Image Credit: Jim Wilson/New York Times

Debating the "Real-Time" Web at Stanford University

Kara Swisher — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:15:46 +0000

Last night, BoomTown was invited to moderate a panel for MIT/Stanford Venture Lab at Stanford University’s Business School on the topic of lifecasting.

In other words, the digital version of TMI (too much information!).

Called “Lifestreaming: The Real-time Web,” it was aimed at debating the trend toward “sharing our lives with others as they happen,” with three entrepreneurs and a venture capitalist in the space.

The panel included Bret Taylor, Co-Founder of FriendFeed; Seesmic Founder Loic Le Meur; Pownce Co-Founder Leah Culver; and SoftTechVC’s Jeff Clavier.

It was a lively discussion, which was also focused on monetization–or lack thereof–issues in the instant Internet space, in which users share every detail of their lives with friends and family in a digital millisecond.

Like I said, MTMI (much too much information!!).

In any case, here’s a video I did of the event, including snippets of the company presentations, as well as interviews with all the panelists:

[ See post to watch video ]

The GigaOm Show's Interview With Zimbra's Satish Dharmaraj

Kara Swisher — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 07:04:48 +0000

This week Om Malik and his co-host, Joyce Kim, interview Satish Dharmaraj of Zimbra, on the online GigaOM Show on Revision3.

It’s a nice get in the wake of the $350 million sale of the email start-up to Yahoo, a story we broke last week in this column here.

They also chat with VC Jeff Clavier, who has a new seed-stage fund.

Here also is the video interview I did with Brad Garlinghouse of Yahoo, who led the acquisition of Zimbra, the morning the deal was announced:

[ See post to watch video ]