Global Grind: Ajax, Finally, For The Hip Hop Demographic

The global hip-hop community: twenty four million people between the ages of 19-34, from a range of nationalities, ethnic groups and religions. Their collective spending power is $500 billion annually in the U.S. alone. Naturally, there are lots of online properties dedicated to Hip Hop culture. And now they have a customizable Ajax home page, too.

New York based GlobalGrind launches this morning with some serious backing, a venture round (size undisclosed) from Accel Partners and Russell Simmons.

The service is essentially the same as Pageflakes, Netvibes and other customizable Ajax home pages.

Users set initial interests (video, comedy, news, etc.) and get a set of pre-made modules. You can also add feed URLs directly, create multiple tabs, etc. All standard stuff, even if Global Grind has slightly edgier design than the others.

A lot of the pre-made content is directly related to Hip Hop, though, such as one that shows the most recent beefs between rap artists (just like blogger wars apparently, plus money, sex and guns - see image to right). Users can also make tabs public and share content.

The company was founded by Navarrow Wright, formerly the CTO of Black Entertainment Television. The company has twelve employees.

So…will it work or will it drown in the competition? Frankly, I’m in favor of any experiments which bring technology to people beyond the early adopter tech geek crowd. The Global Grind user base is already tech savvy, though, and aware of a lot of the new web products out there. That means they have to be cool and edgy enough to attract and keep users who wouldn’t think of using, say, Netvibes. Having Russel Simmons involved will certainly help in that area. We’ll check back in on them in six months or so and see how things are going.

$15 Million For VideoEgg As They Redefine Their Business

VideoEgg has just closed a $15 million series D round of funding led by Focus Ventures with WPP, Maveron, and August participating. VideoEgg cites plans to accelerate the development of their ad products and international sales network as the reasons behind the investment.

VideoEgg started off as a white-label video host, powering some notable web properties such as AOL sites, Bebo, hi5, Piczo, myYearbook, Dogster, Tagged and others. They then quickly incorporated an ad network. Like many other video startups, they did it through overlay advertisements (Yes, before YouTube). Startups are experimenting with other video ad formats “>as well. VideoEgg has been driving “significant” revenue through their overlay advertising.

Recently they applied that overlay model to Facebook as a new ad network, helping users monetize videos and applications. They reportedly pay a healthy CPM (developers have reported ~$8-10 CPM). Other Facebook ad networks include Lookery, RockYou, SocialMedia, and FB Exchange.

VideoEgg wants to continue developing their ad platform, moving from an impression model to an engagement model, while making ads more social. Although they remain tight lipped on the plans, ad networks on Facebook aim to make ads more engaging by tying virtual rewards to user’s contributions.

More Competition For IPTV: HP Launching Next.TV

Hewlett Packard has announced a deal to ship a P2P IPTV system with their notbooks (notably the Presario and Pavillion models) beginning in late September. It will also be available as a system update for exiting HP Vista computers. The system is called Next.tv and powered by Dave Networks, a white label IPTV provider. For the launch, Next.tv will feature content from CBS, Freemantle, and Endemol. Their sneak preview also includes MGM, eye.tv, Lazy.tv, and Reality.tv as well. Other partnerships, filling a total of 50 channels, will be announced throughout September.

Next.TV has plans for a desktop version for non HP users as well.

Rex Wong, the former CEO of Applied Semantics (later Google Adsense), is the CEO of Dave Networks. Wong previously expressed a desire to do for video what AdSense did for text. Last April, Rex Wong said, “We will be using the same technology used by Homeland Security to monitor [telephone] chatter. Audio keywording will allow us to contextually figure out where to sell ads and to place more than just pre- and post-roll ads.” He planed to launch the contextual video advertising service on their YouTube competitor, Dave.TV.

While Next.tv’s distribution deal through HP gives them a good head start, they’re going up an increasingly crowded marketplace. Joost, Babelgum, Veoh, British Telecom, Zattoo, and Vuze are amongst the competition. Scoring the best content deals will likely determine who makes IPTV work.

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Damsels In Success: Networking For Professional Women

Damsels In Success has officially launched with a networking platform that is targeted strictly at professional women.

The service positions itself away from the usual range of social networking style clone sites by being more LinkedIn than MySpace and Facebook, with a dose of content chucked in for good measure.

Members are able to connect and discuss topics including job opportunities, entrepreneurship, mentoring, returning to work after parenting, gender issues in the workplace and more. The discussion forum is supplemented by a blog network of around 50 professional women who blog about issues related to…well, professional women. A job board also connects professional women with potential employers.

Suffice to say, being male I am totally unqualified to pass judgment on Damsels In Success. It’s certainly a well designed site with a clever name. Function wise it seemingly offers a variety of content that could make it a compelling site for professional women. I’ll let TechCrunch’s female readers be the ultimate judges in the comments.

Damsels in Success was founded by Harleen Kahlon, a former lawyer and executive recruiter, and is based in New York.

Eventbee: AdSense for Events Has Busy Plans

Eventbee an event management startup out of Sunnyvale, CA has been a busy little bee lately. They are rumoured to be launching two Facebook apps (one for event registration and one for event recommendation) in the next week or so (who isn’t?). They are also developing a channel on Ustream.tv to cover local events. The company provides a great package of event management tools including online registration, email marketing (souped-up spam) and online event promotion.

Their online event promotion tools include a nifty service called Event Network Listing that can only be described as “AdSense for events.” The service lets event planners for a fee list an event on any site or blog in Eventbee’s growing partner network. The partner network consists of sites and blogs that have AdSense-like code embedded on their sites. This allows for highly targeted and controlled event promotion. You can see Eventbee’s network event listings in action on Rajesh Setty’s LifeBeyondCode.

Eventbee partners get paid in two ways. First, they get an initial listing fee for each new listing that they get to set in advance. Second, when event ticket purchases are initiated from their site they receive a commission. The commission amount is set in advance by the event planner. Eventbee keeps 29% of the total earnings partners make.

Event planners can create customizable event pages on Eventbee’s site just like you can with Eventbrite (see our Eventbrite TC20 page here). Tickets sold from event pages start with fees as low as 1.45% of ticket price, plus a minimum fee of $0.25. RegOnline and Acteva also offer online event registration.

Eventbee’s glorified spam, I mean, email marketing service is tightly integrated with their online registration. You can create beautifully designed emails by importing HTML code or using their WYSIWYG editor. The service allows you to track bounced emails, opened emails and online registration URL click-throughs.

They currently have over 6,000 event managers. They are self-funded with CEO Bala Musrif claiming to be profitable since 2005 with no plans for raising money.

Romney faces fierce fight for the right

His weekend victory in an Iowa straw poll only highlights the tough competition he faces for the conservative vote. By Michael Finnegan, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer DES MOINES -- Former Massachusetts Gov.
Huckabee, Iowa Poll's Real Winner? Wall Street Journal
Iowa: Huckabee pulls second, Paul finishes fifth Monsters and Critics.com
Yahoo! News - Taipei Times - Chicago Tribune - MSNBC
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Pickle Purchased For $4.1 Million

Photo and video sharing site Pickle.com has been purchased by Scripps Networks for a reported $4.1 million. Scripps is the company behind many lifestyles brands like DIY, the Food Network, HGTV, and Great American Country. This is their second web purchase after Recipezaar last month. We covered the site’s launch last June.

Pickle is different from a lot of other sharing sites in that it relies heavily on email and mobile phone submissions to personal and shared project pages. It’s essentially a multi-modal service for dumping your content into a bucket of content that you can expose through their widget. The service supports uploads of photos and videos from computers, mobile phones or digital cameras to any Web site. Scripps plans on incorporating the product into supporting content sharing across their existing lifestyle properties. It was created by an Arlington based company called Incando.

You can see an example of their content sharing widget after the jump (auto-plays).
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Hearst Acquires Kaboodle for $30+ million

This is the second recent acquisition announcement for Hearst Interactive Media - UGO for around $100 million last month, and tonight they are announcing the acquisition of Kaboodle, a social shopping service that launched in late 2005.

Kaboodle, founded by Manish Chandra, Keiron McCammon, Chetan Pungaliya, closed a key distribution deal with eBay a year ago. Comscore numbers show rapid growth, with 2 million or so unique monthly visitors currently.

The acquisition price is not being disclosed, but we’re hearing it was somewhere between $30 - $40 million, all cash. The company raised three rounds of financing totaling $5 million from Shea Ventures, Kanwal Rekhi, Jeff Clavier, Ron Conway, Garage Ventures, Georges Harik, Rajeev Motwani, Iggy Fanlo and others.

One other thing we’ve heard - investor Ron Conway was “instrumental” in putting this deal together.

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