AllThingsD » MC Hammer

Tech Firms Log On to San Francisco's Mayoral Race

Vauhini Vara — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 10:00:49 +0000

In Tuesday’s mayoral election here, 16 candidates will battle in one of the most competitive contests in years. And to influence the race’s outcome, Silicon Valley technology players are getting involved in the election to an unprecedented degree.

In the past several weeks, founders of San Francisco-based Salesforce.com Inc., Twitter Inc., Zynga Inc. and Yelp Inc., along with several investors in those companies, have contributed thousands of dollars to try to keep interim mayor Ed Lee in office. They support Mr. Lee’s policies that have shaved millions of dollars from some Web companies’ tax liabilities in an effort to ensure they remain based in the city.

One high-profile result of their effort is an online video that appeared last month and that has since gone viral. It features San Francisco Giants pitcher Brian Wilson and musician and Bay Area native MC Hammer singing to the latter’s 1990s hit “2 Legit 2 Quit,” with new lyrics that endorse Mr. Lee.

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For the Person Who Has It All, Skyara Sells New Stuff to Experience (Video)

Drake Martinet — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 18:10:31 +0000

Does tea with Silicon Valley venture capitalist Ron Conway and 1990s rap legend MC Hammer sound too legit? What about spending the day harvesting crabs under the Golden Gate Bridge? Or maybe a hands-on coffee-crafting session with an expert barista?

Skyara, a buzzy little start-up has created a marketplace for people to sell experiences to folks who are looking to do something other than the same old thing.

“It’s sort of like Airbnb for experiences,” co-founder Dennis Liu explained, referencing another buzzy start-up.

He continued: “It’s one part Etsy, some Expedia and a little of Groupon built on top of our own robust scheduling platform.”

In practice, users log in and are asked if they want to purchase or provide a service. The providers are taken through a process of describing their offering, providing images, setting up times and providing enough personal info so the Skyara team can contact them and verify they are legit. Skyara takes a 12 percent fee on the transaction on the seller’s side.

The purchasers can currently browse or search through about 200 different experiences, ranging from a boudoir photography session (Skyara checked–the photographer is well known in the arena) to the less understandable half-hour of punching dozens of plastic inflatable clowns that someone has collected in an apartment.

But according to Liu, the service has an almost three percent conversion rate from visit to actual sale on their Web site, including all the diluting traffic it gets from outside of the San Francisco area, Skyara’s only market so far.

He said that about 10 percent of all visitors do something valuable on the site, whether that’s offering a service, buying one, telling Skyara where they live and that they’d like to have the service there or signing up for updates.

An interesting wrinkle has emerged in the last few days, as Skyara has partnered with the ongoing UCSF Children’s Hospital charity challenge. This is where the current deal to meet Conway and Hammer came from–which you may enter to win by donating to the UCSF challenge. It brings the “experience sales” idea right back to its ancestral home–charity auctions.

Skyara came together as the brainchild of Liu and Jonathan Wu, former classmates at the University of Pennsylvania, who had moved to New York for jobs as business consultants.

They originally conceived of it as an Expedia for outdoor activities and brought on Steven Ou, the third co-founder, to help them build out the scheduling platform.

The trio was accepted into the i/o Ventures incubator this past March and decided to pivot into Skyara’s current “experience marketplace” model shortly before its first public demo in late September.

“It was like two weeks of fighting, but we decided to pivot because we’d all spent several weeks cold-calling outdoor activity businesses and it was really slow,” Liu said.

Wu, who now heads business development, explained that the founders were concerned that they were going to have an “Open Table” problem, referring to the restaurant reservation service.

“We didn’t want it to take 10 years to have it be really useful,” said Wu.

The whole team agrees that their growth model will be all about expanding into new markets, the first of which will be New York and Chicago. Skyara plans to raise capital to expand early next year.

Besides new markets, the company is adding tools to help people come up with ideas for experiences to offer, and to boost the community aspect of the experience, building a little more of Etsy’s users-as-both-buyers-and-sellers model to its service.

Said Liu: “I’ve met some incredible people on these experiences, and that should be a part of it.”

We spoke with the fresh-faced Skyara trio at Park Chow restaurant in San Francisco. Here’s the video:

[ See post to watch video ]

Katie Couric: I Got Help Before My Sarah Palin Interviews

Peter Kafka — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:43:11 +0000

So who said what at Quadrangle’s Foursquare conference, and was any of it interesting?

You got me. The media and tech confab is off the record. And so far, the members of the fourth estate who attended the event yesterday seem to be keeping their mouths shut.

But I did talk briefly with an attendee, who told me that the most interesting panel was the one that Portfolio’s Matt Cooper conducted this afternoon with television personalities Katie Couric, Brian Williams and George Stephanopoulos.

That would be an interesting group under any circumstance, but even more so since Couric’s interview of Republican VP candidate and Alaska governor Sarah Palin for CBS (CBS) is now considered to be a turning point in the 2008 election.

And while Couric hasn’t talked publicly about the interviews yet, she apparently did dish a bit today, according to a source who talked to Portfolio.com’s Jeff Bercovici:

Couric shed some light on her preparation for the interviews: Beforehand, she sought advice from former senator Sam Nunn and Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haas. They told her to draw Palin out on her geopolitical worldview and urged her to let the governor speak at length without interrupting her. Maybe she should bring them along with her when she takes over at Meet the Press?”

UPDATE: Bercovici’s report has been pulled. Details here.

One newsworthy item not covered in Bercovici’s account: After the event, Couric gave Twitter correspondent MC Hammer a smooch, which was apparently well-received.

MC Hammer, Conference Correspondent

Peter Kafka — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 23:26:22 +0000

Earlier today I was grousing about not getting into the big-deal Quadrangle Foursquare conference, and suggested that I might park myself in the Plaza hotel’s lobby, in the hopes of meeting some of the boldfaced names at the event.

Couldn’t make it (never-ending layoffs news to write about, but maybe tomorrow).

So for now, I’m making do by following the Twitter stream for 80s icon/entrepreneur MC Hammer, who did get an invite. (Thanks for the tip, Tim Geisenheimer.)

Alas, Hammer may be a better dancer than he is a writer. Or maybe he just hasn’t figured out the best way to use Twitter. In any event, I don’t think I’m getting the full flavor of the conference:

Can anyone else suggest other conference attendees who are Tweeting (or otherwise communicating) about the event? Send me an email at peter@allthingsd.com or leave a comment below.

Dancing With the Avatars?

Kara Swisher — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 08:01:50 +0000

In my Internet holiday party video posted yesterday, I talked to entertainer and entrepreneur MC Hammer about his new online dance start-up called DanceJam.

At one point, I kid him, noting, “You can’t dance on the Internet.”

So, of course, it took about two seconds to get an email on the subject decrying my ignorance, including a link to Second Life Ballet’s first production from about a year ago.

Called “Olmannen,” it uses original animations, music and choreography, put together by a choreographer and director whose Second Life name is Inarra Saarinen. And, apparently, the virtual-reality dancers are real ones manipulating the avatars.

While I am not a big fan of Second Life, this is oddly riveting and works well in the avatar medium.

The SLB’s newest production is, no surprise in this holiday season, “The Nutcracker,” which just premiered in Second Life and runs through January.

Here’s “Olmannen,” in two parts:

Part 1

Part 2

Kara Visits Holiday Parties, Internet Style!

Kara Swisher — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 11:27:47 +0000

Yes, indeedy, this is about as insider as you get in Silicon Valley. But we are just addled enough by all the spiked eggnog we drank this weekend to think you might be interested in this video we did at a variety of industry holiday parties BoomTown attended.

They include a stop at angel investor Ron Conway’s Pacific Heights (San Francisco) apartment, where we talked to Ron, entertainer and entrepreneur MC Hammer, blogger Om Malik and The Wall Street Journal’s Kevin Delaney.

Then, a visit to investor Ram Shriram’s home in Woodside, Calif., where VC James Joaquin and YouTube’s Chad Hurley are harangued by our Flip camera.

And also, a sojourn at the downtown San Francisco abode of Google’s Marissa Mayer, where we interfaced with her, as well as Google’s Sergey Brin, WSJ’s Rob Guth and, yes, someone we can only call Hot Santa.

No surprise, but BoomTown just could not resist that one.

Here’s the video:

[ See post to watch video ]

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

TechCrunch40: Rich Media and Mash-Ups

John Paczkowski — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 23:18:25 +0000

MC Hammer in da house yo, and sitting on the afternoon judges panel as well. Please Hammer, don’t hurt ‘em…

Another round of presentations by start-ups at this session of TechCrunch40, this time a group of mainstream (and not-so-mainstream) media-manipulation companies. In addition to Hammer, the panel of judges (new for this session) includes Caterina Fake of Flickr, Yahoo’s Brad “Peanut Butter Manifesto” Garlinghouse, journalist Sarah Lacy and French entrepreneur Loïc Le Meur.

Extreme Reality (XTR3D): A software-only 3D human/machine interface. Now this is impressive. Presenter is navigating Google Earth with body movements recorded by Webcam. Wait ’til the gaming industry gets hold of this … Aha, next demo is of a boxing game. Rudimentary, but you can clearly see the applications.
BroadClip: The company is launching MediaCatcher, an application for Facebook users that amounts to a simple means of recording and storing streaming audio. Pitch seems to be TiVo for Internet radio. For example, if you like the Pixies, it will scan the Net for streaming audio that includes the Pixies, intercept it and save it as an MP3 file. Neat idea, but good luck getting it past the recording industry.
mEgo: Interactive portable profiles. An avatar with substance and utility. Basically, a universal profile widget that you can insert into Facebook, LinkedIn and whatnot. Update your mEgo and the changes proliferate across all the sites you’ve installed it on. Also features a customizable avatar. MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” plays over the sound system as they conclude. (Wonder how many times we’ll hear it played this afternoon?)
Wixi: Answer to preceding question: at least twice. Presenting their media social network, Wixi’s founders also play “U Can’t Touch This.” (What a long afternoon this is going to be.) Wixi offers users the ability to share content of all types, including photos, audio and video.
BeFunky: Suite of avatar, photo and video customization tools that seems to be built on the old MacPaint code base. Helps users build (sigh) “YouAtars.” Tagline: “Funky ways to represent yourself.” Pretty much says it all.

Judges Panel:

Hammer enjoyed mEgo and BeFunky.

Surprisingly, Garlinghouse agrees with Hammer. (Wonder if he’s got a pair of Hammer pants in his closet.)

Fake likes Extreme Reality (XTR3D), but hates the name (“extreme” is overused, too ’80s). She pokes holes in everyone else. Doesn’t buy into avatars.

Lacy seems to agree with Fake.

Chatterboxes next to me make it impossible to hear Le Meur’s thoughts. In any event, they’re brief. Perhaps he agreed with Fake as well. (Where are Kawasaki and Dyson when you need them?)

Hammer butting heads with BroadClip over copyright and licensing issues. BroadClip claims it’s going to generate revenue for the recording industry, which will then embrace it. Don Dodge, who spent six years at Napster, stands up in the audience to side with Hammer and tells BroadClip guy he’s essentially full of it.

Correction: An earlier version of this post had erroneously switched the descriptions of the offerings of BroadClip and Wixi, and had incorrectly assigned Hammer’s and Dodge’s criticism to Wixi instead of BroadClip. (See comment below.)