I was at last week's Accel party for portfolio companies and partners at San Francisco's Fluid lounge (Accel is one of Kosmix's investors)
Apart from our investors, the most interesting person I saw there was MC Hammer. He, of course, started DanceJam.
Who cares how long its been since his last hit, I'll visit any startup of MC Hammer's!
Here's MC Hammer at the TechCrunch party. And below, the old, wilder, balloon pants Hammer!
There is an update to my earlier update on Chrysler's plant shutdowns and layoffs. Seems Chrysler is more than doubling the number of full-time workers getting laid off - the number is 5,000, or a quarter of Chrysler's full-time workforce.
This doesn't even tell the full story; the company has a very large number of contract employees. Chrysler has mentioned a quarter of them will also be let go.... but it doesn't need to specify the number of contractors let go, so there's probably a lot of blood-letting there.
What does all this point to? Chrysler putting itself up for sale, or something else equally drastic. Or, only selling a much smaller sub-set of their current auto lines (eg: selling off Jeep). Wow. I wonder if this will be another car company from a developing market (think Tata buying Land Rover and Jaguar), or time for the Private Equity firms to get back into action.
Check out the page on Chrysler in RightAutos, a Kosmix site. (Ankur Jain is the product manager).
Consolidation in the Health space continues, and now at bargain prices. WebMD, the gorilla in the space, is acquiring MTS (Marketing Technology Solutions) and its subsidiary Quality Health for about $50 MM.
Given that MTS had revenues of ~$21 MM in 2007, this is indeed a poor price for their shareholders.
Why does this make sense? Well, WebMD is far and away the leader in CPM advertising, and sponsored sites/ areas. And Quality Health is the best at CPA for health advertisers, or what they like to call 'performance-based marketing'. So the theory would be that health advertisers and agencies now need only make one stop to find their advertising dollars.
Cons - by the same token, though, now advertisers and agencies suddenly find a large part of their budgets in one publisher's hands. That will probably not be viewed in a positive light; after all, marketing 101 includes lessons on diversification for risk mitigation as well as spreading your message across more eyeballs. You wouldn't just advertise on NBC on TV now, would you? You would also keep some budget for comedy central, for the young crowd, for the Oxygen channel, for women, and finally for Monday Night Football... because we're in America, and not advertising on football programs gets your TV advertising license revoked. So this should make things easier too for the other publishers, such as RightHealth, which is owned and operated by Kosmix, my employer.
The announcement took away the thunder from Steve Case's Revolution Health and Everyday Health. Let the shake-ups continue!
Cuil has barely launched, and they're already airing out some dirty laundry. Louis Monier, their VP of Product, is departing (he is no longer on their About page).
TechCrunch reported that he and CEO Tom Costello had different ideas about the product road map; one would have hoped they were on the same page, given they had similar backgrounds, and that Monier was barely a year old at Cuil.
Monier is considered one of the leading authorities on Search, having worked at Google, eBay for search, and of course having co-founded AltaVista. So this is a blow.
Forget the botched launch. I think Cuil has a lot of potential... potential it is not easy to see currently, since whats visible is their lack of relevancy in their search results. But getting relevant search results takes a long time and lots of money (Kosmix knows!). What Cuil's main claim is to index faster and cheaper than the mother-ship, Google (see the number of web pages they claim to have indexed, below their search bar, below). And if that is true, then it has a huge amount of value.... and can potentially be the right piece of the puzzle for Microsoft to bring out the best from its acquisition of PowerSet.
Cuil also has $33 MM in funding, so hopefully are set for a while (their last round of $25 MM was around April of 2008). I don't know how much of their money is left, but I would guess that with ~30 employees (per Crunchbase) and being in the Search space, they're probably burning about $700K/month. So they can weather this storm.
I talked about Kosmix, the company I work for, during my lecture at SFSU's MBA class MGMT 831: The Entrepreneurial Process, which is taught by Professor Geoffrey Desa.
The students had some good feedback on Kosmix in their (anonymous) class feedback, which I have written down below:
Following my older blog post on Revolution Health possibly looking for exit strategies (http://techperspectives-vikram-singh.blogspot.com/2008/09/revolution-health-up-for-sale-or-just.html), now there is talk of them merging with Everyday Health, which belongs to Waterfront Media.
I'm not sure how much conjecture there is in this news - the Washington Post was the only major news outlet that seemed to carry this article. Plus, we've heard stuff like this before - layoff news from Revolution seems to come every couple of months. And around August, there was talk of them merging with Glam, which would have been funny.
So why might this merger make sense? Well, to begin with, WebMD is the big bully in the online Health space. Most Health sites need to sell display and other advertising to make money, and everyone plays second fiddle to WebMD. With the market softening, this starts hurting even more.
Everyday Health and Revolution Health could merge, and start showing their combined traffic to potential advertisers and media agencies - this at least shows them having traffic levels comparable to WebMD.
At the same time, though, there is one issue - this would be the same as the old Daily Strength-Revolution deal, where Revolution signed up to have their ad sales team represent Daily Strength. And they would get to show DS metrics under the Revolution name in comScore, if they needed to. But if agencies thought about it, they would really be paying not for this combined set of eyeballs, but a lower number, since the sites would have a large overlap of users. i.e. the true unique visitor traffic would need to be figured out, to ensure that advertisers and their agencies were getting the best deal.
Both sites were already doing this anyway - Waterfront Media operates a plethora of websites, including the one-dimensional-but-very-popular SouthBeachDiet.com site.
In terms of other strengths, Everyday Health is much better than Revolution at SEM, getting more traffic at lower cost. And I like Revolution's branding and web 2.0-is look better. So maybe there are synergies.... I just don't feel the combination will be greater than its parts.
Where does RightHealth, my employer Kosmix's big Health property (#2 Health Information site per HitWise) end up with all these changes? Well, for one thing, competition suddenly goes down in all aspects, if EveryRevolution is formed. In my job, I'll fight against one less sales team and one less Business Development team (I'm ignoring the benefits of more competitors right now, they are outweighed by the cons), we'll get more traffic, the online Health space loses one major contributor to fragmentation....
To end this post, I'll throw out some potential names for the combined entity; pick your poison:
If one of these is picked, I expect a royalty check.
On Tuesday September 9th, I was an expert speaker/ guest lecturer at San Francisco State University's MBA class, for the course:
MGMT 831: The Entrepreneurial Process
http://www.sfsu.edu/~bulletin/courses/mgmt.htm
I spoke on 'Creativity and Idea Generation', and wove my talk in with the class's professor (Geoffrey Desa). (slides are attached below). The class was very interesting - I learnt one new tool, and got some great examples from the class of products and companies they considered creative.
Another of my favorite parts of the class - we had some group discussions and role plays. Coming from a company and surroundings immersed in tech, it was very interesting to hear the different ideas being discussed, which covered retail, gambling and the food industry, among others.
I also demo'ed our new Kosmix site; I loved the reactions of the class. We also got to talk about Cuil's launch, and I could give some info as a search insider.
Finally, I thought through how I could have improved my part of the talk. The class will also send feedback next week, which will help me further refine my part.
Overall, the experience was amazing, and I'm looking forward to next time!
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