July 20, 2005
Snap.com raises $10M in VC Funding, led by Mayfield
Mayfield and Snap announced this week that Mayfield led a $10M venture
capital investment round in Snap.com. I am proud to report that I helped to make this
deal happen. My partner at Mayfield, Allen Morgan, will go on the Snap board of directors.
It might seem puzzling why you would invest in a general
search company (perhaps as opposed to
vertical search companies that might have more specific focus and could be
acquired and merged into offerings by the incumbents), in the presence of so many giants. The article about Snap in USA Today suggests that Snap only wins if they can unseat Google. However, I think Snap
represents an good investment, without any need that they become the new #1 or #2 general search engine. Below are my thoughts about the general search landscape and some major themes that Snap addresses. (Disclaimer: I
am currently an Entrepreur in Residence at Mayfield and have a personal
interest in Snap; the thoughts below are my own and should not be taken to
represent the thoughts of Mayfield or Snap).
Online advertising is today a massive market that continues to grow
rapidly. The U.S. paid search component of this market was $4B in 2004 and
is predicted to grow to $6B by ’06, with a worldwide paid search market
growing to $23B by 2010. The paid search market comprises both search
portals (e.g. Google Adwords), where users go specifically to search, and
contextual advertising, where users are exposed to ads in the context of
viewing publisher’s websites (e.g. Google Adsense ads on NYT.com). The
contextual advertising market is growing even faster than search portals (a
desktop client advertising market is also growing quickly, but represents a
much smaller portion of the market).
continue reading the Snap.com raises $10M in VC Funding, led by Mayfield
Posted by barney on July 20, 2005 at 9:18 pm | No Comments
July 20, 2005
Marc Cuban at AlwaysOn05
Fireside Chat with Marc Cuban, interviewed by Allen Delattre
At Always On 2005
July 20, 2005
I thought it was an interesting
discussion. Here are the points I found most noteworthy:
- blog search: I agree with Marc’s comments about the growing importance of
Blog Search, and his view that the aggregators will capture the market
value from the long tail of blog search. I personally like
www.blogpulse.com the best. Cuban’s new IceRocket seems to be direct
knockoff. Blogpulse gets my vote for best blog search engine not just
because my friends from Whizbang days were the founders of this service,
but because it has the best analytics and, unlike Technorati, it hasn’t
yet hit a scaling barrier. - Releasing movies simultaneously in all channels: I think that’s a great
idea, and it is exciting to see Marc Cuban in a position to lead the way
here. - Interactive TV and accountable TV advertising models: I agree with him that models for TV advertising are going to change, and that this will be enabled by interactive TV (and time shifting services like Tivo). The 30 second
spot is dying (George Gilder made a comment about this in a preceding
session at Always On), and new measurable forms of advertising are being
developed to take its place. I don’t expect it will be as simple as
pay-for-placement, but I do think internet and tv advertising models will
come together in some interesting blend over the next few years. - Dennis Rodman and Paris Hilton’s intuitive sense for media
manipulation: indeed! (I hope that previous reference doesn’t cause my blog
to become misclassified…).
Below are my (mostly raw) notes from this session.
continue reading the Marc Cuban at AlwaysOn05
Posted by barney on July 20, 2005 at 7:44 pm | 1 Comment
July 15, 2005
Badly BackBlogged, But Barney’s Back Blogging
After a period of intense work and travel, I’m finally gearing up to do some more blogging. However, so much has happened and there are so many blog entries I want to write about that I now feel severely backlogged. So it only seems fitting to resume my blogging activity by coining some new terms (?) for the feeling I have:
backblog: a set of topics that must be blogged but are now behind in the queue.
backblogged: the feeling a blogger gets when life is happening so fast that you wonder if you can ever work through the backblog.
Now my question is: where to start — with the current or the previous items?
Since currency is everything in the blogosphere, I think I’ll start with today, and hope that new topics come in slow enough that I can hit the older, but hopefully a little timeless, topics.
Posted by barney on July 15, 2005 at 12:40 pm | 2 Comments