July 25th, 2006

ShopWiki founders get $6M VC backing for Panther Express CDN

Posted by Donna Bogatin @ 12:45 pm

Categories: Business Models, CEO Interviews, Enterprise, VC, Venture Capital

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Kevin Ryan, former CEO of DoubleClick online advertising firm and one of the original 1990’s Internet pioneers, has been on a tear of late.

Last week, Ryan’s Web 2.0 social shopping start-up ShopWiki secured a $6.2 million round of private equity funding from Generation Partners.

(See Kevin Ryan ShopWiki interview, “DoubleClick veteran Kevin Ryan wants to pay you $50 for your video" and “ShopWiki attracts $6.2 million in funding”)

Today, Ryan is announcing $6 million in funding from Greylock Partners for his Internet infrastructure start-up, Panther Express.

At Panther Express, Ryan is partnering with fellow DoubleClick veteran Dwight Merriman, as he partners with Merriman in ShopWiki. ShopWiki and Panther Express, however, are run independently as separate, stand alone businesses.

In conjunction with the funding, Bill Helman, General Partner of Greylock Partners, will join Panther’s Board of Directors. Helman said of Panther Express:

Panther Express is superbly positioned in a valuable and growing market. Businesses small and large are understandably eager to embrace a viable low-cost option for content delivery. With an outstanding team and a novel cost-saving infrastructure, Panther is a compelling alternative to existing CDNs.

While ShopWiki targets Web 2.0 social consumer intangibles such as “community” and “sharing,” Panther Express targets the straight forward needs of Web-based businesses to optimize their content delivery.

I spoke with Ryan about his plans for the Panther Express content delivery network.

At Panther Express, Ryan applies Internet infrastructure lessons learned at DoubleClick. According to Ryan:

Panther Express brings ten years of Internet delivery best practices to a CDN with top-tier performance and lowest-in-market costs. We allow companies who rely on the Internet to focus on growing their businesses, not their infrastructure and technology costs.

Panther Express presents a succinct value proposition to client prospects:

High-performance worldwide static content delivery services at lowest-in-market prices
Easy, risk-free business terms: no annual terms or monthly minimums, half page user agreement, best price guarantee
World Class Support - all experts
Platform leverages latest technologies, cost efficiencies and advances, architecture started with a clean-slate for better pricing and performance

Details of the Panther Express infrastructure and business development strategies follow.

SYSTEMS
Linux
High ratio of memory to machine
Node Configurat: 16GB RAM, 800GB RAID, dual Opteron CPUs
Backend system redundancy across multiple locations
No software license costs

NETWORKING
37 globally distributed points of presence
17 gbps of bandwidth capacity
13 domestic and international ISPs

DNS
Anycast from each PoP – high performance DNS routing
Excellent DNS performance and availability (esp. for DDoS attacks)

BUSINESS TERMS
No annual terms
No monthly minimums
Half page user agreement
Best price guarantee
No exclusivity

MORE CEO INTERVIEWS

July 25th, 2006

EXCLUSIVE: Craig Newmark on investment in NewAssignment.net

Posted by Donna Bogatin @ 10:16 am

Categories: Blogs, Business Models, CEO Interviews, Citizen Journalism, Craigslist, Culture, Local, Media, Social Web, User-Generated Content, Web 2.0

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Craig Newmark, Founder, Chairman and Customer Service Representative, craigslist, calls NewAssignment.net “a new approach to networked journalism.”

Newmark comments on the new initiative, led by Jay Rosen, Associate Professor, NYU Department of Journalism, at his personal blog, craigblog:

Journalism’s evolving, and we’re seeing the convergence of professional journalism and citizen journalism. Today, Jay Rosen’s moving this forward, announcing a new way of doing investigative journalism that networks groups of journalists, mainstream and community, that I feel is really important…

I think we’ll see great journalism emerge from experiments like this, including new ways for journalists to earn a living.

Rosen characterizes his vision for collaborative journalism as “enterprise reporting goes pro-am”:

Assignments are open sourced. They begin online. Reporters working with smart users and blogging editors get the story the pack wouldn’t, couldn’t or didn’t. They raise the money too.

Rosen underscores the non-profit nature of the NewAssignment.net initiative and the need for “charitable” donations to support it:

Alright, what is it? In simplest terms, a way to fund high-quality, original reporting, in any medium, through donations to a non-profit called NewAssignment.Net..

So you plan to raise money for this?
Yes. Enough to try it out. And if you’re reading this and want to help with funding, e-mail me at PressThink. Editors have to develop reputations or they’re sunk. In order to do that, they have to be able to fund extremely promising or urgent ideas that for one reason or another are not a “hit” in the online fundraising stage. It wouldn’t make sense to do kick-ass open sourcing and then “lose” it to the vagaries of Paypal. Even though online donations may work well much of the time, we cannot make good ideas hostage to that. So the editors have reserve funds. It creates flexibility for funders too because you can fund an editor directly.

So you’re not only talking about fundraising story-by-story, with click and contribute?
Right. NewAssignment.Net has no dogma about how the money comes in. It’s a charity and will raise funds for high quality journalism any way it can figure out that’s wise, that works and maintains the site’s independence and reputation. It may be that very good editors can raise a lot money for their special funds by developing a track record, knowing their donors, finding sponsors who want to be associated with the work, or buyers in the media who will pay the costs. New Assignment syndicates to Big Media and gets paid that way. Or it could accept sponsorships. We’ll see.

Rosen reports that Craig Newmark is supporting the NewAssignment.net initiative by contributing to its “first reserve fund”:

Yesterday I got word from Craig Newmark that he’ll give $10,000 for an initial test. It’s coming from the Craig Newmark Foundation, his personal charity, not the company. That means we can hire an editor and a reporter and actually do some networked journalism with users. It’s our first reserve fund.

I asked Newmark to share his thoughts on the significance of NewAssignment.net. Here is what he said:

Mostly, this is my way of participating in the evolution of sustainable journalism. I figure there’ll be a number of experiments, a few will work, but we don’t know which ones.

On evaluating the “return” on his “investment” and a timeframe for measuring success:

I don’t see a way to evaluate this, and I guess I’m not too concerned, since this project I figure will mature in the two to twenty year time frame. Sometimes, you gotta stand up, and have confidence in others.

On the convergence of professional journalism and citizen journalism and “equal partnership”:

The convergence, which is already happening, just provides the opportunity for the more effective and trustworthy reporting to be visible to more people. I think we’ll see such a profound merging of both forms of journalism that they’re really won’t be "sides."

On possible reporter subjectivity or biases:

In the current environment, there’s more opportunity for someone self-published to speak (their idea of) truth to power. What readers will want to read will be driven by trust and reputation.

MORE ON CRAIGSLIST

July 25th, 2006

Yahoo Movies fan chatter helps box-office performance

Posted by Donna Bogatin @ 5:10 am

Categories: Advertising, Culture, Social Web, User-Generated Content, Web 2.0, Yahoo

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In “Word of Mouth for Movies: Its Dynamics and Impact on Box Office Revenue” Yong Liu, Assistant Professor of Marketing, Syracuse University, analyzes messages posted at the Yahoo Movies message boards to gauge their impact on movie ticket sales.

Liu characterizes the message board postings as “word-of-mouth (WOM)” and examines “the dynamic patterns of WOM and how it helps explain box office revenue” in the July issue of “Journal of Marketing”:

The WOM data were collected from the Yahoo Movies Web site. The results show that WOM activities are the most active during a movie’s prerelease and opening week and that movie audiences tend to hold relatively high expectations before release but become more critical in the opening week. More important, WOM information offers significant explanatory power for both aggregate and weekly box office revenue, especially in the early weeks after a movie opens. However, most of this explanatory power comes from the volume of WOM and not from its valence, as measured by the percentages of positive and negative messages.

In other words, any WOM is good WOM. Whether Yahoo Movies message board comments are “pro” or “con,” the more messages posted, the more interest is generated for a movie, and subsequently more movie tickets are sold.

MORE ON YAHOO