Once a month, I’ll publish an article on MediaPost that touches on a handful of interesting stories around the Web that affect new media and online video. continue reading...
In this week’s show, we run down the list of candidates that I included in my last TechCrunch article on who the Next Talisman of Tech might be. continue reading...
One of the leading storylines of 2011 will no doubt be the radical shift across the Arab and Muslim world: Tunisia’s dictatorship fell, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak was toppled, Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi was killed by those he oppressed and last but not least, President Barack Obama got the man behind the 9/11 attacks: Osama bin Laden. In all of those stories, the mainstream media was amplified and accelerated by social media and the proliferation of wireless and recording technology added more imagery and context than ever before. Similarly, when Steve Jobs resigned and then passed away, the outpouring of emotions in the online and offline world was never before seen for the CEO of a company. continue reading...
This week marks the one-year anniversary of AOL’s acquisition of 5Min for $65 million. The purchase was a big deal because it marked the first large acquisition in online video since Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube. The divergent purchase figures capture not only the different sizes of the companies but also the frustration that investors have faced in online video despite lofty expectations and frothy forecasts over the past five years.
When 5Min launched, it aimed to aggregate user-generated, 5-minute how-to videos to build a destination. Over time, it shied away from UGC and embraced aggregation of “premium” content (that’s when my company’s relationship with 5Min started.) 5Min not only shied away from UGC, but also never attempted to license “super-premium” content from Hollywood studios and networks. Indeed, when CEO Ran Harnevo praised evergreen videos he was describing not just our type of content but the hundreds of thousands of videos that the company ended up licensing via partnerships with E!, IGN, CNET and many others. continue reading...
With the AOL/TechCrunch soap opera finally coming to an end, we thought we would see the forest through the trees and focus on Mergers and Acquisitions, or M&A, in general. continue reading...
In segment 1, we shift our focus away from the debacle at AOL and look at Yahoo!’s own soap opera by expanding on a couple of articles I published on TechCrunch, namely why and how Yahoo! could make a run to Hulu and Yahoo!’s options. We cover a lot, and in there I go over a lot of numbers explaining the financial engineering, so I included the numbers below. Watch the video below (and scroll down to get the financial engineering math) continue reading...
The guys at NMA are good… and have a lot of time on their hands… but mainly good: continue reading...
Before venturing into the HipMojo show, I hesitated to do a weekly (or even daily) show because I still believe that pumping out articles (or nowadays, tweets) is much more logical for the breakneck, fast-paced world of news. But, a lot of people said “hey, you write all of these business articles and run a video site, why not do a weekly show on business?” continue reading...
It was a matter of time, really. When The Guardian bought PaidContent.org, it was reasonable to assume that sooner than later, the talismanic founder Rafat Ali would leave. That was Rafat and the Guardian. continue reading...
