Twitter & Iranian Election

I am sure you all have seen the explosive turn of events happening in Iran after the rigged election by the hard line establishment.

I have been following this all weekend and what has been amazing is the use of twitter by Iranians to do two things:

1. Communicate with the outside world. If you search twitter for #IranElections, you can see the latest messages coming from the frontlines: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23IranElections
2. Mobilize the movement within the country. The Mousavi campaign and the revolutionary leaders have been using twitter to mobilize the events/protests. This has been especially critical because the government shut down mobile networks to prevent mobilization planning.

Additionally, twitter has been powerful in getting mainstream media to cover the true/real story. Twitterers on the streets started using #CNNfail in their tweets and the trend exposed how different CNN's coverage was from what the feet on the street were reporting. Well, the crowds have spoken and CNN has adjusted coverage accordingly throughout the weekend.

It seems that the Mousavi camp learned a lot from the Obama campaign and the use of social media to mobilize movements.

ShortForm.tv

The business model we have at NSVG is very unique. On the one-hand, we work with our corporate clients playing the role of an entrepreneur and advising them on technology innovations they should embrace to remain relevant in the constantly disruptive tech world. On the other hand, we invest in or incubate startups that share our view of the world gained through our work with our clients.

Our most recent incubation that I have been involved in is ShortForm.tv. We are still in early development, but should have our initial Facebook app out in early July. As I have been actively involved in the video space for almost two years now, I am particularly excited about the prospects of this venture. ShortForm.tv solves two inherent problems with online video today:

1. Finding shortform (3 minutes or less) video content is difficult. We are either sent links or have to conduct our own searches on video sharing sites and social networks
2. Quality control is almost nonexistent because of a lack of content editors/programmers that exist in old media (e.g. TV, Radio, etc)

To solve these two problems, we categorize online shortform videos into the equivalent of television channels, a whole new viewing experience for online videos. We classify the most sought after video clips into news, sport, entertainment, humor, etc. channels. We empower content editors to monitor audience viewing patterns and adjust or discard content to maximize time spent viewing. ShortForm.tv's key value proposition is twofold:

1. While we are building a robust crawler to find and categorize videos, we rely on professional content editors to manage content quality and relevancy.
2. We turn online videos from a predominantly pull based model to a push based model. Viewers can select a channel and watch a continuous feed of relevant content or easily skip to other videos within the channel.

In addition, we are building a host of social elements that will allow viewers to easily engage their friends in ShortForm.tv.

Look for our Facebook app in July.

twitter and journalists

The real value in twitter as opposed to FB is that it provides more important information like interesting articles or news from anyone we care to follow (it is fully open, we don’t need people’s permission to follow them). Thus, we are all micro-reporters that people can follow.

A problem will arise when all the so-called micro-reporters (all of us) have nothing to report because all the paid journalists who we reference via links in our tweets go away because the entire value chain that pays them crumbles. You see, twitter works because people have links to share. When all the reporters lose their jobs, we will only have material that is subpar to share. So, while the value chain gets undone and reformed, it is unclear where the money will come from to pay the actual journalists who we all like to reference via links in our tweets. Until very recently, the journalists got paid by the newspapers/magazines, where the real money in journalism was being made. However, as print content continues to fade into the background and more content is consumed online, new forms of online content monetization have not surfaced in a manner that is sufficient to pay the people who actually cover the news.

Simply put, online advertising hasn’t cut it, something else has to come along. Until then, we will lose more and more talented journalists who have to find other means to make ends meet.

More on Google Profiles

The first 10,000 people to sign up will get free business cards of their Google profile. Clearly, they are moving in the direction of disrupting Linkedin.

Google Profile Business Cards: http://www.google.com/profiles/me/bizcards

NVCA's Plan to Revive the IPO Market

The National Venture Capital Association released a four-point plan to revive the market for VC backed IPOs.

1. Tax incentives via low capital gains
2. SOX and other regulation reform
3. More boutique I-banks and accounting firms focused on VC backed companies
4. New liquidity paths through secondary exchanges

NVCA 4-Pillar Plan to Restore Liquidity in the U.S. Venture Capital Industry

View more presentations from NVCA.

Google Profiles

Google announced this week the launch of Google Profiles, allowing people to create profiles of themselves that can be selected to be made available on Google searches for your name. The incentive for people to create such profiles is pretty clear. Google verifies these profiles, giving individuals the capacity to control what people glean about them when they "Google them".

The implications to the internet could be pretty far reaching:

• Through these profiles, Google learns more about individuals, giving them more context to leverage in their expanded advertising efforts with DoubleClick and beyond. It is similar to the type of context that social networking properties are collecting. However, unlike the social networking properties, Google has an established advertising network to expand on with this data.

• There could also be a disruption to Linkedin. With Facebook controlling most communications amongst members of a social graph, Linkedin's core consumer value has been scaled down to enabling people to study other people's backgrounds prior to meetings, introductions, etc. If the Google Profiles become people's primary professional profile, then Linkedin's consumer value will slowly fade into the background, and Google may in fact broaden their profiles to encompass a flavor of social or professional networking as well.
  

online videos

I spent the winter really digging into the online video space with the gang here at NSVG.

Today, the online video market is roughly an $800M business. This is peanuts compared to TV which is closer to $70B. My conclusion from the forces taking shape is that the online video market is poised for explosive growth that will attract new ad dollars, in addition to ad dollars shifting away from TV to online video.

Before explaining the forces taking shape, let me begin with my definition for online video as opposed to TV. I think of online video as any form of video content that is delivered over the internet. I think of TV as broadcast/cable network channels.

Now to the forces:

1. Short-form content: My friends at TubeMogul tell me that based on their data, 75% of online video viewers drop off by the end of the second minute. The reason for this is twofold. First, there is a shortage of compelling content online today. Second, the attention span of online video viewers is in the minutes, not hours. There has been some limited success by groups creating short-form content that are compelling in nature and fit the short attention span, including EQAL (lonelygirl15, KateModern, etc) and Revision3 to name a few. My prediction is that we will see much more compelling content like EQAL's and Revision3's come out of small studios that will fuel the growth of online videos and attract advertisers who want something other than user generated content to put ads on. In a recent trip to LA, I was impressed with the movement of very talented creatives away from traditional studios towards independent production of online shorts.

2. Categorization and Channeling: Today, most of us find new online videos when our friends send us an email with a link, or when we search our Facebook newsfeeds and see videos our friends posted, or when we search video sharing sites like YouTube and Metacafe. The problem is that for the most part, we are pointing/clicking our way through content versus sitting back and being entertained as we are when we tune into channels on our TV. Companies like ffwd and 1Cast are doing some good work in categorizing content into channels that you can sit back and watch. I believe we will see more companies tackling this problem and we'll slowly turn online video viewing into something that you can sit back an enjoy versus point/click your way through. There are challenges though, like deciding on categorization techniques from the limited metadata that exists for online video. That said, it is where we need to go and we are seeing the forces take us there.

3. Advertising: Although part of the reason that online video ad spend is only at $800M today is in fact the lack of compelling content, another reason is the lack of appropriate ad units. While pre/mid/post rolls and overlays on video have had some success, the data suggests that consumers are not happy with them. Clearly there needs to be some innovation around new forms of video ad units that are appealing to both advertisers and consumers. I've seen some interesting seed stage companies recently that are doing very cool things like stitching ads into white spaces in a video or doing post video production product placement. The market is telling us that online video advertising is not working today, and the forces are moving us towards better solution.

4. Convergence: Perhaps the most exciting of the forces is that of convergence. I envision a day when we no longer pay Comcast or Dish a monthly subscription fee because we have all the content we want at our fingertips on the TV through the internet. Yahoo's TV widget platform is one indication of the big boys pushing us in this direction. If the Yahoo TV widgets take off (I think they will), you can envision all the content in the world being available through various widgets on the TV and people can view them for free with advertising or for a fee without advertising. In addition to Yahoo, Apple is making the same bet through their Apple TV service. However, the beauty with Yahoo's TV widget platform is that you don't need another box like you do with Apple TV. You simply connect your TV to the internet and you are off and running. We are still worlds away from this reality, but the forces are clearly moving us in a direction where one day all content will be delivered through the internet.

As these four forces materialize, you can bet that online video will grow from an $800M business to one that could very well surpasses where TV is today.