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Viral Video: "That's Why I Chose Yale" (Definitely Not to Learn How to Make Musical Videos)

Kara Swisher — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 09:06:20 +0000

Hey kids, let’s put on a show!

But in the case of Yale University’s newest admissions video, maybe not so much.

An extraordinarily awkward effort to capture the attention of the Facebook generation, it appears to be a kind of homage to television hits “Glee” and “High School Musical” and is explained as:

“An introduction to undergraduate life at Yale College. The project was an independent collaboration between Yale undergraduates and recent alumni working in the admissions office. All filming, editing, and vocal recording was done on Yale’s campus exclusively by Yale students.”

That group went further, noting, “last fall a group of yalies set out to reinvent the genre of dull admissions videos. they created something…a little different.”

And different it surely is, as you will see, clocking in at close to 17 minutes in length. At times campy, at times innovative and at most times simply painful, people are still watching, with close to 400,000 views on YouTube so far.

The best moment is at the end with the line: “‘Cats’ was better.”

It was, but you be the judge:

RealNetworks' Rob Glaser Talks About Giving the Internet a Voice and, Yes, Woolly Mammoths!

Kara Swisher — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 13:20:16 +0000

Rob Glaser (pictured here) called BoomTown when he landed in Washington, D.C., only a few hours after he announced Wednesday he was stepping down as longtime CEO of RealNetworks (RNWK).

Digital Daily reported there was some contention between Glaser and the Real board around his departure from the Seattle-based company he founded 16 years ago, a move that has actually been in the works for some time.

While Glaser did say that he had been through the “most intense two weeks of my life,” leading up to that, he declined to comment more about the specifics of his leaving.

That was fine with me, because–although execs come and go in various and sundry ways–you simply have to give Glaser credit for his pioneering work in bringing both audio and video to the Web.

So Glaser and I talked about this and more, from what he thinks are the key highlights of his Internet career until now to what he plans to do next.

First and foremost, Glaser did “give the Internet a voice,” as I wrote in a 1998 profile of him for The Wall Street Journal about his company’s introduction of its first RealAudio product:

“RealAudio was greeted with more than a little disdain from the Internet elite because it was a tinny and unsatisfying experience for most users. But it gave the Internet a voice, and Mr. Glaser kept plugging away, improving fidelity and striking deals with more content providers to use it on their Web sites.”

Glaser said that was the simple idea behind Real, to “turn the Web from text and static links to a dynamic media space for the mainstream to enjoy.”

That effort began in earnest in the mid-1990s, he noted, by selling “tech enablement,” which simply meant hawking servers and software to companies interested in adding audio and, later, video, to their Web sites.

So successful was Real then that many big companies tried to buy it for huge sums. But ever the aggressive entrepreneur, Glaser never sold–unlike Mark Cuban at Broadcast.com–although many wished he had.

But that was simply not his style, he said; plus, business was booming and it was “like selling pickaxes during the Gold Rush.”

It is an apt metaphor since the next major moment for the company came when the Web 1.0 bubble burst in 2000.

“A lot of great–and also not so great–companies just died,” he said.

To avoid that fate, “We pivoted in a hard way to consumer services and avoided the tailspin,” Glaser added. “It was kind of like when the woolly mammoth evolved into an elephant, while the pterodactyl did not turn into anything.”

That meant creating a variety of consumer-focused media offerings that used Real technology, such as its casual games business and its Rhapsody music service.

Real also shifted its tech licensing business to a carrier services model, Glaser said.

He regularly tangled with Microsoft (MSFT), where he started his career as a very brash 21-year-old. The software giant targeted Real’s business, but also cooperated with the company at times.

And, while the games unit and Rhapsody hit some major bumps, Real did score a whopping $761 million antitrust settlement in 2005 from Microsoft.

But that win was some time ago, and Real idled too much, as did its stock, in the following years, even as Glaser plugged away at creating a variety of new businesses and strategies.

Some were off limits, he said when I asked him why he did not come up with a service like YouTube, given Real’s advantages in video early on, noting that his public company could never had created a service that so antagonized Hollywood partners.

But Glaser did just that more recently with one such innovative idea for a “legal” DVD ripper, called RealDVD.

Though very interesting, RealDVD hit the skids quickly when a federal judge last week dismissed Real’s claims against Hollywood studios seeking to shut down the service before it could be widely distributed.

While that specific defeat was not the reason for his leaving RealNetworks, the idea that it was time to bring new blood to the company finally gained traction with investors, the board, employees and, yes, Glaser too.

What the notoriously hard-charging executive–“My intensity sometimes manifested itself in less positive ways,” Glaser conceded in my 1998 interview with him–will do next is anyone’s guess.

Including his own.

Glaser noted that he would remain chairman of Real, although his day-to-day engagement there is now over.

“It is a big transition for me, because I am closing a chapter I have been in for a very long time,” he said, adding that he would probably do more philanthropic and political work.

(That’s no surprise. After all, Real was once called Progressive Networks, after his liberal politics, and Glaser once had a newspaper column called “What’s Left” while at Yale University.)

Glaser said that on the flight to Washington he thought about the advice Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, one of Real’s earliest investors, gave him when he left Microsoft and was thinking about his next step:

You should take time to figure out what you want to do next and know why you want to do it. Because if it’s successful, once you get going you won’t have time to think through those issues as clearly as you can now.

That’s pretty much been Glaser’s modus operandi over his many years at Real and in the larger Internet space: He pushed his vision of a live Internet forth, he never cut and ran, he never sold, he kept pushing forward.

And you have to admire that kind of gumption, no matter the outcome.

In any case, it is likely Glaser will keep doing so in the years to come.

In fact, pointing out that the movement of entertainment and content online has “come a long way, but still has an even longer way to go,” Glaser started rattling off ideas about where the online media sector needs to go in exactly the same fashion I described a dozen years before.

I described Glaser then as: “speaking in staccato bursts and radiating so much intensity that his face resembles a clenched fist.”

In other words, for all the the lively entrepreneur has been part of as a key pioneer in the development of the Internet, some things will never ever change.

If you want to see Glaser in action, check out these three videos of him, two from the fifth D: All Things Digital conference and one of him talking to me about RealDVD when he introduced it at Demo:

Session interview at D5

[ See post to watch video ]

Demoing RealPlayer 11 at D5

[ See post to watch video ]

Talking about RealDVD

[ See post to watch video ]

BoomTown's 1998 Rob Glaser Profile: A Web Pioneer Does a Delicate Dance With Microsoft

Kara Swisher — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:48:04 +0000

BoomTown did an interview last night with outgoing RealNetworks (RNWK) CEO Rob Glaser after the announcement yesterday of his departure from the company he founded and led for 16 years.

That will be posted later today, but here is a profile of Glaser I wrote after spending time with him in Seattle, when I was covering the Internet for The Wall Street Journal.

It’s from Feb. 12, 1998–yes, that means Rob and I are genuine Web antiques–and focuses on Glaser’s decidedly complicated relationship with his former employer, Microsoft (MSFT).

As you will see, it comes from a much different era of the Internet, when Microsoft was much scarier, RealNetworks represented innovation and the medium was still in its infancy. My favorite line is a description of Glaser as “radiating so much intensity that his face resembles a clenched fist.”

Here it is:

Rob Glaser learned the software business as one of Bill Gates’s most aggressive proteges at Microsoft Corp. So he knows all too well the anguishing strategic decision that most software entrepreneurs inevitably confront: Go head-to-head against Mr. Gates and risk annihilation. Or cooperate with him–and risk annihilation.

Now an Internet entrepreneur himself, Mr. Glaser thinks he has another strategy: A delicate dance with Microsoft that combines a little bit of competition and a little bit of cooperation.

His newly public company, RealNetworks Inc., popularized the use of realtime audio and video on the Internet’s World Wide Web. It already has more than 18 million registered users of its free “streaming” software for receiving multimedia over the Net. It also has a rapidly growing business selling server software for transmitting audio and video to Website operators.

But it stands squarely in the path of the strategy that has drawn Microsoft into trouble with antitrust regulators: Emulating innovative products, integrating them into its operating systems and then giving them away free. RealNetworks’ daunting task is to prove it can do a better job of outmaneuvering Microsoft than Netscape Communications Inc., the browser pioneer whose market share and profitability have been devastated by Microsoft’s integration strategy.

Mr. Glaser insists he and the software giant can coexist. “I learned an amazing amount from Bill,” he says, speaking in staccato bursts and radiating so much intensity that his face resembles a clenched fist. “We knew we could either compete head-on like Netscape or do something a lot more interesting.”

His strategy is known internally as “coopetition.” Out of mistrust, Netscape two years ago rejected an unsolicited offer from Microsoft to become a partner and investor. But Mr. Glaser approached his former colleagues last summer seeking just such an alliance. In July, he sold a nonvoting 10% stake to Microsoft for $30 million, and licensed RealNetworks’ technology to the software giant for another $30 million. Microsoft also agreed to bundle RealNetworks’ software with Internet Explorer.

In making the deal, Mr. Glaser helped himself to Microsoft’s cash and prestige and calculated that Microsoft wouldn’t consider streaming technology to be as strategic to its future as the browser.

“What we were trying to do in the partnership is to set it up so that our success would not disadvantage their core business,” Mr. Glaser says. “Microsoft is a very paranoid company and so we have tried to create an environment where while they might be covetous of some of our success, analytically they would not fear it.”

The deal gave Mr. Gates the opportunity, if he so desired, to clone RealNetworks’ products during the period when they were licensed to Microsoft. “There’s no question they could use our own technology to become extremely vigorous competitors and try to put us out of business,” says James Breyer, a director and member of Accel Partners, a venture-capital firm that helped finance RealNetworks.

So Mr. Glaser needs to stay ahead of Microsoft by rapidly improving his software, accumulating enough customers to become the standard for sending audio and video over the Internet and diversifying into related businesses.

Last month, for example, he announced an agreement with one of Microsoft’s archrivals, Sun Microsystems Inc., to finetune his software to perform better on Sun’s popular Internet servers than on Windows-based servers.

“They are neither friend nor foe, but Microsoft is most certainly the environment we live in,” says Mr. Glaser, now 36 years old. “It’s how we work within that environment that will make all the difference.”

Mr. Glaser’s own personality seems suited to the relationship’s contradictions. He has been a committed liberal since his days at Yale University, where he wrote a column called “What’s Left” for the student newspaper. He initially named his company Progressive Networks to reflect his politics. And he donated 700,000 RealNetworks shares to causes related to freedom of speech and environmental issues after the public offering, and promises to contribute 5% of the company’s future profits as well.

But he became a notoriously hardcharging and sometimes arrogant manager after he joined Microsoft in 1983, at the age of 21. Some colleagues dubbed him a “screamer.” When deadlines approached for projects, several former colleagues at Microsoft say he became increasingly revved-up, downing one Diet Coke after another and erupting at even tiny mistakes. “My intensity sometimes manifested itself in less positive ways,” Mr. Glaser concedes.

“Like Microsoft, Rob was smart, young, perhaps a little hard to take, and convinced he was absolutely right about a lot of stuff,” recalls Mike Slade, a friend of Mr. Glaser’s at Microsoft who now runs an Internet publishing company, Starwave Corp. “But that was what was rewarded at the company and everything was going too fast there for a lot of management training.”

The pace did take its toll. Even though Mr. Glaser rose to become vice president of multimedia systems and one of Mr. Gates’s favorites, his last years at Microsoft were rocky. Some at the company point to an internal power struggle with Microsoft’s head of technology, Nathan Myhrvold. “They both wanted to be Bill’s boy genius and visionary for the company,” says a colleague. “Obviously, Nathan won.”

Mr. Glaser dismisses tales of infighting, blaming his departure on a diminishing feeling of “joy” in his work. “I began to think that Bill had the best job of all,” he says. In 1993, at the age of 31, he resigned, with about $15 million of stock in his pocket.

His retirement didn’t last long. Soon after, he saw a version of the Mosaic browser, the first graphical interface software for navigating the Web. He had an epiphany, he says, realizing that the Internet could eventually become a major purveyor of audio and video.

Mr. Glaser sank about $1 million of his own money into a start-up that would first produce software for compressing and transmitting sound. With additional funding from friends, such as Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, RealAudio 1.0 quickly made its debut in April 1995.

RealAudio was greeted with more than a little disdain from the Internet elite because it was a tinny and unsatisfying experience for most users. But it gave the Internet a voice, and Mr. Glaser kept plugging away, improving fidelity and striking deals with more content providers to use it on their Web sites. The hook: Free player software for consumers.

He is attempting to repeat the process with RealVideo. It currently provides small, jerky moving pictures but will, he believes, someday transform the Internet as data transmission speeds increase. In a recent demo of the player, Mr. Glaser selected a music video by the languid singer Jewel, he joked, “because she doesn’t move around too much.”

Meanwhile, Microsoft has been developing its own Media Player and NetShow streaming software, partly with technology acquired by purchasing VXtreme, a RealNetworks competitor.

The Microsoft products are now free. But the company may decide to charge for the latest version of NetShow coming out this year, which would be good for RealNetworks. Meanwhile, Microsoft will continue to bundle RealNetworks’ player software with the Microsoft browser, also good for RealNetworks. And the day after RealNetworks’ Sun deal, Microsoft announced an agreement to make its own Media Player compatible with RealNetworks’ server software, yet another positive development for RealNetworks.

“The user only wants it to work,” says Rich Tong, a Microsoft marketing vice president. “So it is good business to work with RealNetworks to set standards for compatibility and expand the market for all of us.”

Skeptics assert that RealNetworks has forged only a temporary truce with Microsoft. Like Netscape, it must continually confront the challenge of trying to make money on technology that Microsoft gives away. RealNetworks charges $29.95 for an enhanced version of the player it gives away free, and $695 and up for its most powerful server software.

Some large companies are snapping the products up. Mercedes Benz, Eastman Kodak and Lockheed Martin are buying RealNetworks’ latest software, RealSystem 5.0, to bring their internal networks to life. Boeing Co., for example, uses RealNetworks’ software to communicate with employees world-wide and conduct training sessions. A variety of media concerns such as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the Public Broadcasting System, AOL, Fox News’s 24-hour newsfeed and Paramount Pictures use it as well.

Mr. Glaser recently cut a deal with Macromedia Inc., the largest provider of animation-editing software, to transmit animated material over the Internet. RealNetworks is also operating multimedia Web sites for other companies, and has a joint venture with MCI Communications Corp. to create a broadcast network on the Web.

All these initiatives are running up big bills. Earlier this month, RealNetworks reported that revenue more than doubled for 1997, to $32.7 million from $14 million the year before. But heavy research and development spending tripled losses to $11.2 million, or 40 cents a share, from $3.8 million, or 14 cents a share. The company’s high costs, plus the looming threat of Microsoft, have depressed the stock, which hovers at around $16 a share, only slightly above the $12.50 a share it opened at when it went public in November.

But Mr. Glaser exudes confidence. His intense personality seems calmer these days. Once divorced, he now has a steady girlfriend and is traveling more frequently, including a summer trip to New Zealand, Australia and French Polynesia, where he made the decision to take RealNetworks public. His 13.5 million shares are worth $218.5 million. And he thinks he has Microsoft figured out. “People in Silicon Valley see things unnecessarily in black and white: You either hate Microsoft or you are a vassal of them. I am saying there is a third way.”

Van Natta Takes Playlist CEO Job, With New Investment by Pittman

Kara Swisher — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 05:00:39 +0000

Former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta will take the CEO job at a music discovery site called Playlist, a move that had been speculated last week, after he did not end up taking another position as head of MySpace Music.

Van Natta’s arrival at Playlist was not the only news for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based start-up–former AOL exec Bob Pittman’s Pilot Investment Group is also investing an undisclosed amount of money in Playlist. Pittman will also join its board.

Playlist has previously raised several million dollars, said sources, but the new funding is many times that, to total about $18 to $20 million.

The move to Playlist is an interesting one for Van Natta, who has looked at a number of jobs since leaving the high-profile social-networking site earlier this year.

He has talked to a wide range of companies, sources said, including Microsoft (MSFT) and a range of start-ups, as well as with MySpace, which is owned by News Corp. (NWS). (News Corp. also owns this site).

Those talks between Van Natta and MySpace to run its new music initiative did not pan out for a variety of reasons.

But he has long expressed a desire to become a CEO of a company, rather than just head to another executive job within a larger company, so the move to run a start-up is not a surprise.

In an interview this afternoon, Van Natta told me he got very intrigued by the possibilities at Project Playlist, which was the first iteration of the start-up and in which he is an investor, due to its viral growth.

And, indeed, Playlist has grown quickly to become one of the larger music communities on the Web, claiming that more than 38 million music fans monthly, sharing playlists via its Web site and also widely distributed embeddable widgets. The site has tens of millions of daily page views, according to surveys.

To get to those big-scale numbers, Playlist essentially has offered users a giant linking service for music, not unlike Google (GOOG) with all information, pointing users to promotional, free and sometimes illegal music and music video tracks all over the Web.

Those links to illegal music have resulted in a lawsuit aimed at Playlist from the music industry, sources said, a sadly typical experience of many online music services.

The usual tactic for the music giants: Sue first and shake down later.

Under Van Natta, I would guess, Playlist is likely to reach out to music companies and strike deals.

The company also needs to settle on its main business plan, which appears to me to have been less important than its explosive growth.

Playlist currently does have some small amount of advertising on the site, and seems to be making most of its scratch from sending leads to ringtone sellers.

Van Natta did not want to reveal specific strategies for Playlist going forward, only noting the opportunity is large.

“Discovery around music is exploding on the Internet,” said Van Natta. “And the company that does the best job of taking advantage of that is really going to be huge.”

That said, there have been a lot of music-aimed efforts like Playlist in the music space, with a lot of different business plans and varying degrees of success, ranging from the Apple (AAPL) behemoth iTunes site, which sells single songs, to the CBS (CBS) music service, Last.fm, which relies more on advertising revenues.

Other contenders in the space include the Rhapsody subscription service from RealNetworks (RNWK), music discovery service iLike and many others. MySpace has also waded deeply into the music space, and Facebook is also reportedly weighing its own service.

Van Natta was one of Facebook’s earliest and most prominent execs, serving in jobs like COO and also Chief Revenue Officer while there.

He came to Facebook in the fall of 2005, after a stint as VP of Worldwide Business and Corporate Development at Amazon, and was part of the founding team of A9, the Amazon search company.

“I am excited to be building a company again,” said Van Natta, who has taken many months off since he left Facebook in February.

If AOL Is Amherst and Yahoo Is Yale, Why Aren't They Giving the Merger the Old College Try?

Kara Swisher — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 23:58:45 +0000

If there is a corporate merger brewing, there inevitably is always a code name for each company involved.

In the case of Yahoo’s merger talks with AOL, which are ongoing, the pair seem to be aiming for a tony image, using the names of two upscale institutions of higher education: Yale University and Amherst College.

Why? Obviously, the first letter of each school corresponds with the name of each company, but BoomTown could not discern the mystery.

It’s certainly not because of the college pedigrees of the players involved.

Time Warner (TWX), which owns the AOL online unit, is run by Jeff Bewkes, who graduated from Yale and then received his MBA from Stanford University.

Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Jerry Yang is a Stanford man all the way, getting undergraduate and graduate degrees in electrical engineering from the famous school in the heart of Silicon Valley.

And, according to sources, the deal might take another semester to come together, not being signed until the end of the year, if it happens at all.

What’s taking so long? After all, two key obstacles are now out of the way–the controversial search advertising partnership with Google (GOOG) and AOL’s earnings (both were bad news, with the Yahoogle deal dumped and the results poor).

Nonetheless, there are still price issues, as Yahoo shares wobble, as well as worries about integration.

But, joked one honest player in the talks: “Neither of us moves as quickly as we need to, which got us into the trouble in the first place and is kind of how this is playing out too.”

Ain’t that the “lux et veritas”? That would be Yale’s motto: Light and truth.