Ajax Girl

We’ve said this before - it’s always the deleted blog posts that get the most attention. In this case it’s a blog post by Sab Kanaujia, VP of Digital Innovation at NBC Digital Media. On December 26, 2006 he wrote a long post on his blog outlining NBC’s vision for social networking. Sometime After January 9 the post was removed, although a cached version is here (and a copy of the text is below).

NBC is clearly trying to find their direction in the social networking space, and they need to make their move soon. They almost acquired Tribe last year, although the deal eventually fell through, apparently over scaling issues.

Kanaujia’s post was surprisingly (and refreshingly) blunt. He says “We know we’re already late” and “Instead of buying an existing social networking destination…the decision was made to internally build the platform grounds up.”

The key strategic decision they made, suggests Kanaujia, was to have a distributed social network instead of one large central property. He says they will build “official communities/fan sites around all our TV shows and movies” for example, and “the current valuations…[of large social networks] do not provide an attractive cost/benefit proposition for ownership.”

Whether this is still their strategy (it’s only been a few weeks since it was originally posted) or they’ve changed it isn’t clear, nor is the reason Kanaujia chose to delete the post. Perhaps they just made a decision that having their go forward social networking strategy out there for the world to see wasn’t good for competitive reasons. Or perhaps they finally acquired another social network, something Kanaujia discusses in the last paragraph of the post. Either way, he just guaranteed that far more people will now read the post than if he just left it up on his blog.

The full text of the blog post is below.

NBC Universal’s approach on social networking

It won’t surprise anyone that my team at NBC Universal Digital Media is currently leading a major social networking initiative. I guess every online media firm is doing something in this area. We know we’re already late. But unlike Fox, our approach has been different.

Instead of buying an existing social networking destination (Digital Media evaluated some candidates back in the summer before I joined the team), the decision was made to internally build the platform grounds up - we do have a few 3rd party partners to give us a jump start. The decision not to buy was mainly due to integration challenges and the inability of most of 3rd party social networking destinations to scale, a key aspect for a large media firm like ours.

Social networking became a platform long back (it started as a product), in which several products can be plugged in to enhance the overall functionality and user experience.

NBCU is building a core social networking platform that will provide various tools and functionality on all our major properties to enable users to self-express and find, interact and share with other like-minded users. We’re not launching separate stand-alone destination(s), ala MySpace, Facebook, etc. We’ll have the first launch on one of our biggest properties early next year, and then roll-out on all remaining major properties (over 12) in a phased manner before the end of Q3.

The underlying communities and how to make/keep them vibrant on all NBCU properties will be our primary focus. Creating official communities/fan sites around all our TV shows and movies will be part of it. There is no reason why users should go to/create The Office community on MySpace when NBCU has the competitive advantage and the ability to provide a differentiated experience on NBC.com (e.g., get cast members involved, exclusive content, etc). We’ll also work on creatively linking 3rd party communities for NBCU shows/movies to our official communities.

Recently I had an interesting lunch conversation with a GP of a major VC firm. He argued that instead of building social networking features on existing properties, it’s more important for NBCU, and any other major content firm, to own a highly popular, stand alone social networking destination from distribution perspective. I do not disagree with the distribution/promotion potential of highly popular social networking destinations, both in the U.S. and globally, and NBCU is already leveraging these channels. The current valuations, however, do not provide an attractive cost/benefit proposition for ownership. It’s not surprising that my lunch partner is also pitching NBCU to acquire their social networking portfolio firm.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/75400140/

Building a business on the back of MySpace is now a proven business model, and some MySpace parasites with traction (albeit no actual revenue model) are starting to raise big money.

The key to success is creating a viral product, and slowly leaching traffic off to your own site. Flikzor, a new video comment product that Mashable found, does both well. It is currently in limited beta with a few passes still available.

Flikzor users create a video greeting and place it via a Flash widget on any website. Visitors to the site view the video and can leave a response comment of their own, although they need to register with Flikzor to do so. See the Flikzor MySpace page to see the widget in action. After viewing a few comments you are directed to the Flikzor site to see the rest.

SnapVine and Evoca (both mentioned here) do something similar with audio-only.

For the blogger crowd, it would be very useful to have a plugin that works directly with the standard comments feature that allows users to leave text, audio, or audio/video comments at their election. If someone builds a stable plugin that does that, we’ll be integrating it across all the TechCrunch network blogs.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/75317811/

Dan Webb asks what are your JavaScript essentials? Those bits and pieces you can’t live without that get copy/pasted from project to project. His pragmatic list includes the $ function, getElementsByClassName, Dean’s event handling, the JS 1.6 array methods, and the DOMContentLoaded event. His full script that he guarantees he _won’t_ support is here.

Do you start with a full on framework or library no matter what the project size, or do you have a small script you use similiar to Dan’s? Do you go with a clean slate until you really feel pain, or do you just swear off javascript and start with GWT or a drag and drop IDE?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/javascript-scripting-essentials

The last time we wrote about Findory was over a year ago. Ironically, it was to note that they had turned cash flow positive. Today, founder Greg Linden said he’s going to stop development of the site and put it on “autopilot.”

Findory is a personalized newspaper. It looks at stuff you tend to like to read, and compares that to others’ tastes, and presents customized news to you. The more you use it, the more it knows about you and the better the results.

The site hasn’t made much progress over the last few years. It peaked in early 2006 according to Alexa and has gone sideways since then - Linden tells me the site generates 1 - 2 million page views per month. This is another sign that the online news space is grossly oversaturated. It will take a significant technology step forward for a new startup to get traction.

Findory is now in the DeadPool.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/75293722/

Napster is one of the oddest companies. It is a deeply unprofitable startup trying to grow a business, and with a huge war chest of cash. We have the rare ability to see deep into its financial situation because it is publicly held.

Napster sells music subscriptions and the odd DRM’d download. Pay $10 per month and listen to any of the music in their library. This is a tricky, low margin business. There’s lots of price competition (see our comparison of the space here), and the labels and credit card companies take the vast majority of the revenue. In the last fiscal quarter, Napster had nearly $26 million in revenue but just $7 million of that didn’t go the labels and other costs of goods sold. Caving into this margin pressure, Virgin Music bailed out of the U.S. market just a few days ago.

Napster hired an investment bank in September to sell themselves. At the time they were losing $10 million in cash per fiscal quarter, and had $100 million in the bank. I called them unhealthy. Since that time, they’ve reported another fiscal quarter. They had stellar subscription growth, adding 48,000 subscribers. But they lost even more cash - another $11.6 million. This is a company with operating margins of -38%. And they were sued for patent infringement just a week and a half ago.

Now they’ve announced the acquisition of AOL Music’s subscription service. They’ll add 350,000 new subscribers, get promotion on AOL, and pay just $15 million in cash. It’s not a bad deal, except it adds more unprofitable customers to the struggling company, and the company’s war chest just got significantly lighter. That’s one less fiscal quarter Napster has in operating cash.

It’s unusual to see a company make acquisitions when it is itself on the market. Maybe this is Napster’s signal that the sales process isn’t going well. Or perhaps they just took this opportunity to further consolidate the market. Either way, I’m looking forward to next quarter’s financial results, which should be announced shortly.

One point of clarification. The New York Times reported that Napster paid just $43 per AOL subscriber, compared to their own valuation of $328 per subscriber. Their calculations were incorrect - they used the Napster stock price after the deal was announced, which had spiked sharply. And they failed to take into account that the majority of Napster’s market capitalization is from the $90 million or so they have in cash. Take those factors into account, and Napster’s per subscriber valuation is around just $90.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/75124044/