The following 8-video Decade Rewind 2000s series is a pretty impressive display of creativity and execution from the WatchMojo.com team, a 2000s decade recap and review where we rewind the events of the past 10 years in the Auto industry, Business & Technology, Entertainment, Fashion, Music, Politics, Science & Space and Video Games.  continue reading...

Background continue reading...

Yesterday I suggested that Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom are better off letting bygones be bygones, but today the Skype saga got juicier and Mike Volpi is painted as the main culprit.

From GigaOm: continue reading...

Kazaa/Skype/Joost - and I guess Joltid - founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom are richer than God.  Let’s get that out of the way. continue reading...

It is astounding that eBay forked over $3B for Skype and didn’t actually buy Skype’s underlying technology. continue reading...

“The biggest lesson - people want to watch great content,” former Joost CEO Mike Volpi.

“The challenge with the online video business is pretty straightforward - most of the economics accrue at this point to the companies that own the content itself and, for the intermediaries, there aren’t any, that I can think of, profitable business models out there. The challenge is that media companies have approached the sector with more of a self-publishing model, meaning the content comes from their websites, as opposed to through aggregators. continue reading...

Say what you want about Bittorrent’s troubles, but the VCs here are basically ensuring that what few quality startups remain out there look the other way when VCs come knocking:

John Furrier, who’s got the scars from his venture-backed startup days chimes in, here. continue reading...

Our friends at Joost took a major step forward: GigaOm broke the news today.  I’ve know about this for a few months, but naturally could not comment much.  Man it’s hard to be a CEO blogger sometimes.

As a distribution partner of Joost, we have a lot of content on the service and having gotten a sneak peek at the social media bells and whistles I think this will push them ahead… a bit. In all fairness, the company - armed with a massive $45M and rumored to have raised even more this year - did lose a whole year in the market… in that time span, Hulu - armed with $100M and News Corp. and NBC’s content libraries - managed to crack the Top 10. continue reading...

Hmm… not sure if such a confession is wise, but let me say that the porn industry’s concerns over piracy are somewhat misguided.  Not because piracy won’t decimate it, like it decimated music, but because smut’s larger problem is user generated porn.  Yeah, I know, sounds crazy.  But make your way over to YouPorn.com (hmm… so not safe for work - or your productivity) but UGC does not pose a risk to mainstream publishers advertisers revenue because most marketers don’t want to advertise alongside UGC.

But, with porn, advertising is not an issue, it’s all about subscriptions, and I got news for you: if “consumers of porn” (whoever these people are, of course) had to choose between a pay-to-watch porn flick that is largely fluff and filler or a free user generated video that is largely, well, porn… I think we know who will win.  Of course, there is the quality of the actresses… but the, have you seen Jenna Jameson lately? continue reading...

Didn’t notice much that Skype was down, I think I’ve used it 5 times in my life.  The initial few times it was flaky, then when the service got better I had tuned out.  Of course, I am clearly not in the majority, as over hundreds of millions of people use the service… it did make it onto our Top 13 most explosive web startups of all time.

Anyway, Skype finally shed some light on the matter, the problem?  According to their blog: continue reading...