AOL Archive

The big news in the startup world is that Israeli startup Shaker won the big prize at the Techcrunch conference this week. Many, including AOL employees, wonder what it is that Shaker is “disrupting” while others are talking about the conflicts regarding the finalists and AOL/CrunchFund’s funding of 2 of the top 3 and an upcoming investment in the winner. Of course questions are nothing new with Techcrunch (now aol) conferences – heck, I wrote about MC Hammer investment questions with regards to DanceJam at the first TC40.

When I saw Shaker, the first thing that popped into my head was, “oh it’s the new version of that game!” But I couldn’t remember the name of the game until Dean Collins replied to my message on the NYTM messageboard noting that Shaker is Leisure Suit Larry! And yep that’s exactly what it looks like.

TC writer Leena Rao describes Shaker as, “…a mixture of Second Life, The Sims, and Turntable.fm all mixed together using your Facebook data and connections. Your Facebook profile becomes a walking avatar, your pictures are placed on an virtual wall, you can choose what music is playing in the room for everyone to hear and you can even buy people drinks.”

Shaker looks like a fun game but what frustrated me in the Shaker demos is that the founders kept suggesting that this virtual world was, ” just like real life”. It is absolutely nothing like real life.

Rackspace startup blogger Robert Scoble seems to love Shaker – I just don’t see it here. I mean seriously – maybe I am missing something – but it’s a virtual world where you walk around and chat – AOL 1996 called. Sure you can click on a person and get their info but otherwise what, you dance on a bar? And just wait – the minute a woman “walks in” to the virtual chatroom, you will watch all the males run over. Something tells me these “bars” will be all male. Maybe it will work for the concert concept but even that will be a stretch.

As I watched the two demos of Shaker, I could only think of one thing (which applies to more than just Shaker)…

HOW ABOUT CALLING UP A COUPLE OF YOUR REAL FUCKING FRIENDS AND GOING OUT TO A REAL FUCKING BAR AND HAVING A DRINK OR DINNER AND SOME FUCKING CONVERSATION INSTEAD OF SITTING IN SOME FUCKING VIRTUAL WORLD.

And if you don’t have local friends or are new to your town, go to Meetup.com or Plancast, find a freaking meetup and get the gosh damn fuck out of your house. Walk up to a person, shake a hand, exchange a business card (heh), and smile. Learn something in your conversation.

I know it’s not easy to go outside and it’s way easier to stay home/office and chat on a social network or, now, play some 2.0 version of Leisure Suit Larry. But trust me, the more we sit at home and live online, the less we will be able to live offline.

Ok I am done. Now get out there and do something.

AOL’s Going.com has announced it will be closing on May 1, 2011. Below is the email that AOL (NYSE:AOL) sent to Going.com community members earlier today. Kara Swisher reported on AOL’s acquisition of Going back in 2009 at a value of $10 million. Interestingly, if you visit going.com, they offer you the option of browsing in a brand new beta version of Going.

Here’s how AOL CEO Tim Armstrong referred to Going upon the acquisition, “Going has developed a local events platform to discover and share information about things to do in a number of leading cities across the country. Under the leadership of CEO Evan Schumacher, Going has launched sites in 30 cities–including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Miami–and provides users with RSVP tools and advertisers with self-service event advertising.”

Dear (redacted),

First off, we’d like to thank you and the Going community for your support and your feedback over the years. With your contributions we built a very special site that has helped make the city a place to live in to the fullest and has gotten the word out about thousands of great local happenings, artists, and places. We can’t thank you enough!

As part of AOL’s refocusing, Going will be going away as of Sunday, May 1st, 2011.

We wanted to give you as much notice as possible so that you can grab anything you’ve contributed ahead of that date. Please save out any of your messages, events, photos, profile information and other personal content you’d like before May 1st.

After that date, Going.com will have a new home in Moviefone and Patch which have movie and event listings at a national level. Hopefully that will ease the transition and help you continue to discover great things to do around town!

Please note that the Going mobile site and iPhone and Facebook applications will be discontinued as well. Feel free to reply to this email if you have any questions, and thanks again.

Sincerely,
Roy Rodenstein, Going co-Founder, and the Going Team

I wonder if AOL will keep the strong domain name or if they will try to sell it.

Earlier this month AOL (NYSE:AOL) acquired the Huffington Post blog for $315 million. I posted on Twitter that I wondered if online video hosting service Viddler would be next for the “new” AOL. I still think the acquisition makes sense for both companies.

AOL has a large number of brands (and will be even larger once the above acquisition is complete) and I have to imagine that video will be a large piece of AOL’s pageview generating strategy going forward. Today AOL has a video site and they also own the Truveo video search engine.

Viddler currently works with AOL’s Engadget tech blog for their gadget videos. AOL’s Techcrunch blog uses Ooyala for their video hosting and this hosting could easily move to Viddler if there was an acquisition. It appears that the videos on AOL’s video site are self-hosted.

I am not 100% sure but I think Viddler has only raised some angel funding (which is quite impressive considering they are in the video hosting business). Viddler also received $50,000 from Ben Franklin Technology Partners last April. Viddler lists a team of 16 people based outside Philly and in Poland.

My guess is that AOL could acquire Viddler for a very reasonable price and bring a strong base of video hosting, video analytics and monetization inside the company. If there was an acquisition, Viddler would become the corporate hosting platform. This central repository would help AOL cross-promote videos across all of their channels. There is tremendous opportunity in cross-promotion that AOL is losing everyday by hosting with so many different video partners. For example, when you are finished watching the latest iPad 3 unboxing video on Engadget, you could jump over to Techcrunch to watch the latest TechCribs video.

AOL would also gain the ability to use their internal ad sales team to sell and integrate video ads across all of their properties.

The only question I am left with regarding a potential acquisition is whether Viddler would remain open to other companies to use — they currently host video content from a variety of companies including Gawker and the Cheezburger Network.

Last night sure was interesting — everyone on Twitter was bitching about the Groupon ads, cheering for the Chrysler ad, and there was very little actual football chatter from what I could tell. Then at 9:01 Pacific time, the conversation on Twitter changed in the tech sector. Kara Swisher and the NYT posted that the Huffington Post was acquired by AOL. Congrats to everyone involved – looks like this was a very large acquisition for the content network that recently acquired a number of blogs and technology providers.

What I immediately thought was, “wow, this fits perfectly with the AOL Way where they want to generate massive pageviews with little work”. Last week I put a URL into my bookmarks for later usage on a story about content scraping. The URL was from a post on HuffPo about some topless photos of actress Olivia Wilde. Apparently Wilde did a shoot (she was covered) in FHM magazine. The reason the link was interesting to me is that FHM magazine goes after any outlet that posts their images online. So could the HuffingtonPost really have posted these images? NOPE! What do you get when you land on the page titled, “Olivia Wilde Goes TOPLESS In FHM France (PHOTOS)”? You get one tiny paragraph of content and a link to another website. But you also get thousands of pixels in other non-related “stuff”.

When you put something in parens (Photos, Video, etc.) in a story title, you expect that the thing is actually located within the post.

So what did AOL pay for when they acquired HuffingtonPost for $315 million? Did they get one of the biggest SEO plays out there? Today on the investor call, Ariana Huffington said something about how they create quality content at cost-effective prices. I am not a regular reader of the HuffingtonPost – mainly because every link I follow ends up being a scrape or a let down in quality or quantity of content.

I am certain that most of the content on HuffPo is probably of good length and quality — but is it these types of articles that drive the pageviews to let them create the other quality content?

Continue reading “Just What Did AOL Get for Their $315 Million?” »

Evelyn Rusli, anchor for Techcrunch TV has announced that she has resigned from the AOL-owned Techcrunch blog and will be moving to NYC and will begin working for the New York Times. Rusli left Forbes in mid-March to join Techcrunch and just six months later she is off to the land of Yankees, Giants, knishes and the best subway system.

Techcrunch founder Michael Arrington noted on Evelyn’s hire, “(she) will be our main anchor for breaking news content as well as planned shows”. So what happens to TechcrunchTV now that the main anchor has left? My guess is not much as most of the content on TechcrunchTV are interviews and weekly series rather than only breaking news.

Good luck to Evelyn in my home city – I am sure she will love it there!

Update: Some new questions have come up in chats I’ve had since this post went live. The questions all revolve around whether the NY Times will be looking to get more into video with the hiring of Rusli. Based on her messages, it does appear she will have a larger content scope than at Techcrunch.

Last month AOL made three large acquisitions: video service 5min, tech blog network Techcrunch and Thing Labs (makers of the Twitter client Brizzly).

Louis Gray reported that the Thing Labs acquisition price was $18 million with a total including earnouts of $30 million. Peter Kafka reported that the 5min acquisition was an all-cash deal valued at somewhere between $50-65 million. Most have suggested the Techcrunch sale price at between $25-40 million. (Om Malik originally broke the news of the Techcrunch acquisition.)

Assuming all three acquisition reports are correct, that would mean a total acquisition price of ($18 + 50-65 + 25-40) between $93-123 million. So assuming the lower numbers are correct, that would fall in line with today’s announcement.

Update: the AOL 10-Q notes the 5min sale at $64.7 million (that’s what Kafka initially reported) which leaves $32.4 million for Techcrunch and Thing Labs. If Gray is correct that Thing Labs was acquired for $18 million, that would leave $14.4 million for Techcrunch, a much lower number than the $25-40 million reported by some outlets. But the only confirmed number at this point is the 5min acquisition price so the other two are still a mystery. These amounts don’t include the earnouts – much of which I assume goes to TC because it’s critical that some of their staff stay on board.

AOL has released their Q3 earnings today and the announcement includes a short brief regarding the acquisitions. Total price for all three: $97.1 million plus $23.1 million in earnouts over the next three years. They were able to lump all three acquisitions together which means we may never know exactly what each acquisition price was.

Here’s the bit regarding the acquisitions, “In late September 2010, we completed the acquisitions of 5Min Media, Thing Labs and TechCrunch for $97.1 million in the aggregate, net of cash acquired. In addition, we have agreed to pay an aggregate of $23.1 million in total to certain employees of the acquired companies over the next three years contingent on their future service to AOL.”

I’ve been suggesting for a long time that inch by inch, day by day, Facebook moves closer and closer to becoming AOL 2.0. I am not talking about the new AOL that’s a collection of blogs, I am talking about the 14.4 dial up, 3.5″ floppies, look at photos of Cindy Crawford and email “You’ve Got Mail” AOL.

It’s easy to see how hooked people are to Facebook when the service is down as it has been a couple of times the past month. It’s the same crack that had me and lots of my friends hooked to AOL back in the 90s and pushed my first bill over $600.

In February I took a long look at the components of Facebook and compared them to the old AOL. Facebook had a press conference today to discuss a variety of updates at the social networking service. Next Web has a recap of all of the changes. The Facebook Groups update was the most interesting to me. It was fun to watch how quickly everyone ran for a group and how many updates were posted on my Facebook page about x person joining y group. It was interesting to note that groups can have email addresses @facebook.com which is one of the items I noted back in February would be coming. I still believe we will see full username@facebook.com email addresses coming soon. Email was the core functionality of AOL so it’s easy to see why I think it will be coming to Facebook.

Email is really the only function left that keeps Facebook from being its own complete island. Almost all of the other services a normal Internet user uses on a regular basis are provided by Facebook. From photos to videos, groups, IM, chat, apps, games, what else is there where a person would need to go outside the walls of the Facebook?

While many compare Facebook and Google, I would actually suggest Facebook’s next battle will be with Apple.

I’ve been watching how my sister has been using Facebook as of late and it is EXACTLY the same way she used AOL.

Continue reading “Facebook Takes Another Step Towards AOL 2.0” »