Internet Week New York Archive

Earlier today I had the chance to sit down with Rubicon Project co-founder and CEO Frank Addante. Frank is here with his team during Internet Week and will be part of the Mashable Expo on Friday evening. Frank is a serial entrepreneur, having started 5 companies. Two of the companies were acquired and one went the IPO route. Rubicon is very well funded, probably because of Frank’s past successes.

I am very into the online advertising and analytics space so I was very much looking forward to the conversation with Frank. The conversation didn’t disappoint. Sadly the online advertising market as a whole is still stuck in the late 90′s. I rarely see any innovation – and please don’t tell me that Facebook ads show innovation.

Frank explained that Rubicon is focused on "advertising technology innovation." The idea is simple — for publishers, the system offers you a way to make more money with less effort. Instead of managing multiple ad networks and trying to decide which order to route them in, when to show what, and having to deal with all of the paperwork, Rubicon takes care of all of that. The system can give you back many hours of frustration a week to instead use to grow your business. During their beta period they signed up 625 publishers and now have passed 1,000 publishers. He didn’t share actual active publisher numbers. Some of their largest clients include Slide, JibJab and eHarmony.

The Rubicon system is processing 250 million ads/day with 150 million unique users/month passing through their engine.

We discussed their "default killer" technology which is similar to PubMatic’s default optimization service. Frank says they have submitted patents on this techology. The idea is that the system knows when a "default" ad is displayed and can re-route accordingly. If it works, the idea is great as it would remove the need for "chaining" of ad networks.

Rubicon charges publishers 10% of any income generated from the ad networks served through Rubicon. In speaking with a few people today who have used the system, overall the feeling was that the system hasn’t increased their revenue enough to make them want to continue. And Clicky CEO Sean Hammons reported that the system was just a fairy tale back in February.

The truth is that if they are able to sign the largest publishers/applications to use their service, then frankly it won’t matter if small publishers see no value in using Rubicon. Frank wants his service to be beneficial for publishers of all sizes and he noted that Rubicon focuses on the publisher first. This is something we normally don’t see – most focus on the advertiser’s needs and could care less about the publisher.

Other companies in this space include PubMatic and YieldBuild.

The Rubicon Project team is located in Los Angeles and made up of about 50 people, up from 10 when they launched the beta in October 2007. We may test the Rubicon Project this summer and will report back on our findings. If you plan to test any of these new publisher ad maximization services, I’d suggest giving it at least three months before drawing any conclusions. So many factors affect ad revenue and using at least a quarter’s worth of data will provide some level of comfort in whether the selected system will work over the long-term. And to be honest, I’d test all of the services before selecting one and then pick the best one for your particular site or app.

I am glad we are seeing some innovation in the ad management area, now we need to innovate in the actual ad area. I still believe widget advertising will be huge once brands realize that for them, it doesn’t matter where consumers interact with their brands, as long as they do.

This week is Internet Week in NYC and many folks are here from out-of-town pitching their startups and ideas to the NY tech scene. This morning I met up with Phil Libin who is CEO of Evernote. Phil describes Evernote as an "external brain" and they built the system to give you a better memory. Going into this meeting, there were two big questions on my mind. First, why do we want a tool that will scrape content without giving anything back to the content publisher and what’s their take on data portability.

Before I get into my questions, Phil walked me through the application and let me just say that not only is it very slick, but it’s potentially ultra-useful. He showed me the demo he’s been using since their initial launch, in which he shows his flight information which includes lodging receipts and he also took photos of his airline tickets. Evernote reads the text off documents that are clipped into Evernote but also optically recognizes the content from images. So he can take a photo of his travel e-tickets and then refer back to them via a search for the cities, price, brand, etc. The visual search is quite strong, whatever we threw at it, worked.

Phil took a photo using his iPhone of my business card. Within 3 minutes the card was sync’ed between his iPhone, desktop client and Web interface. He was able to search for my name, company name via logo, phone or email and it appeared immediately. Phil says that Evernote has made business cards actually useful now. He takes a photo of every business card and then can reference them back later. Previously he says, he wouldn’t ever look at a business card to find a phone number or email address and this routine has changed for him with Evernote.

One of the things you can do with Evernote is to highlight anything (image, content, pdf, Web page, etc.) and it instantly becomes a "memory" inside of Evernote. My concern with this functionality is what happens to the content producer when the Evernote user moves the content into Evernote and outside of the original content source. For example, once it’s in Evernote, it’s no longer updated. Phil says this is the way they want it as it’s a memory of that moment in time. If it changes or keeps accurate, it’s no longer a memory. Let’s assume you clip some very useful document, perhaps a Japanese-English phrase list into Evernote from xyz.com. You can return to the clipped document hundreds of times without ever visiting the original source who spent time creating the content and monetizes it via CPM-based advertising. My concern is that once you clip something, you have no real reason to ever visit the source again and are basically "stealing" the impressions that the phrase list creator should be receiving.

Phil says that first, the Web site is linked on the Evernote content page. Second, he is committed to working with content publishers in a variety of ways as the tool moves forward to create relationships with publishers. One of my suggestions is to create a publisher control panel in Evernote so that anytime something from CN is clipped, I can add my logo, perhaps a note if that piece of content has been updated since it was clipped, and maybe an ad of some sort if I run ads on my site. Phil was very receptive to this idea and he has some other ideas that will be launching in the next few months. Evernote is the first company I’ve met to actually want to work with content publishers when they scrape content. Most don’t care (I won’t name names but you know who they are).

The last topic we discussed was data portability. If I am sticking potentially thousands of elements into Evernote, what happens if I want to get them out? Phil explained that they have full XML feeds which contain all of your data that you can take at any time. You can also export any of the images or other content. I was a bit shocked by just how much they’ve thought about data portability. In fact, they will be launching something soon (again he swore me to secrecy) that will take this to the next level – should be out in a couple of months.

Phil also shared a variety of upcoming additions to the service which he asked me not to write about yet. The news should be out in about 2-3 weeks. There is an API coming which will allow publishers to pull information out of Evernote and to extend the application.

I was extremely impressed with Phil’s openness to my suggestions about his application and on our discussion about content publishers thoughts on his application. I look forward to watching how he implements many of the tools and ideas he has for Evernote. It’s the action I want to see.

Yesterday I attended a panel discussion on the "Future of Media." As a side note, it would be nice to stop using the word "future" as rarely do these panels ever actually discuss the future. This event was the same, it focused on today. Another note, several people made comments that apparently there are no women in the future of media as the panel was made up of all men. I’ve embedded the video below from GroundReport. The discussion around today’s media was relatively good.

Here are the panelists:

• Patrick Phillips, Moderator, I Want Media
• Michael Wolff, Vanity Fair media columnist
• Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch co-editor
• Kenneth Li, Reuters global media correspondent
• David Carr, New York Times media columnist
• Johnnie L. Roberts, Newsweek senior writer covering media
• Keith J. Kelly, New York Post media reporter

Opening the conversation, the panelists seemed to agree that music is the most hurt industry by online and that print was second. Michael believes that print will be gone within five years. Michael also goes off About.com as the source of traffic for the NY Times (which owns About).

Most of the conversation took place as a battle between Michael and David. Patrick did a poor job in giving equal time to all of the panelists. Not all people will want to talk over other panelists and the moderator’s job is making sure each panelist gets a chance to speak.

Johnnie suggested that Newsweek wants to tap into the blogger audience and that bloggers want to tap into the Newsweek audience. I can only tell you that bloggers already have the Newsweek audience.

Erick explained that while he loves the NY Times, the actual paper rarely gets to a story first, he normally reads it online first somewhere. He suggested that the NY Times strength is in their editorial. He also said that media is about a two-way conversation. Thanks to Erick for the CN shoutout as well!

If you are interested in four guys talking about how print is using online today, watch the video below. If you are looking for where media will be in five or ten years, don’t click play.

Next week (June 3-10) is "Internet Week" here in NYC. Below are the events during the week – I’ve noted the events CN plans to attend in bold.

Tuesday, June 3

• NY:MIEG – topic, "Shifting the Paradigm: Young Women with Cool Jobs Making a Difference in Digital Media and beyond" – 7:30am
• Applied Cryptography and Network Security Conference – all day
• Associated Content’s Ultimate Call for Content Contest – all day
• Columbia Business School New Media panel discussion – 12:30 – no link provided – it’s at the Columbia University School of Business
• Applied Cryptography and Network Security 2008 – Columbia – $500 – all day (tuesday-friday)
• EconAds: Economics of Ad Deals – $300 – 1:30pm – by the PaidContent people – should be good
• Drinks4Startups – Startup Mixer – CN is a media sponsor – 6:00pm-all night
• NY Tech Meetup – same one that happens every month – back at crappy IAC – 7:00pm

Wednesday, June 4

• Internet Marketing Conference – all day – $700
• Sun – Managing Identity – all day
• Time Warner’s Conversations on the Circle: News & Politics – 8:00am
• Advertising 2.0 – full day (wednesday-thursday) – $875
• Future of Media – NYU – 1:00pm – looks good, some big name journalists/bloggers will be speaking
• Live Diggnation – 6:00pm – Brooklyn – you can watch Kevin Rose and the other guy drink beer and talk about what was on Digg
• Financing Your Internet Startup – put on by David Rose and the NY Angels – if you plan on getting funding, you should absolutely attend this event – $10 – 6:00pm
• Forum on Online Political Participation – 6:00pm
• Hatch Match – brings founders and advisors/experts/investors together – 6:00pm
• Red Bricks Media’s Panel on Media and Entertainment – 6:30pm
• Thrillist’s Information Superparty: Web 1.0 Awesomeness to the Maximum Extreme! – 7:00pm (rsvp asap)

Thursday, June 5

• Time Warner’s Conversations on the Circle: Entertainment Culture – 8:00am
• Media Meshing – Mixer – 6:00pm
• Media: Overseas Conversations – panel on media as design – 6:30pm
• Hungry Man – donate your old electronics and join this "old" party – 7:30pm
• Internet and Film Collide: Watch – 7:30pm – at the IFC studios

Friday, June 6

• Time Warner’s Conversations on the Circle: Health – 8:00am
• Mashable’s Exhibit Hall – 6:00pm
• Sosauce Social – new NYC startup – party with the founders – 6:00pm
• NextNY Softball Match – Founders vs. World – 6:15pm

Saturday, June 7

• Wiimbledon 2008 – play Wii Tennis and win prizes – and let me just say, I will kick all of your arses. – all day
• Festival Travel Channel Beer Bash & Screenings – 7:00pm

With Internet Week NYC just a couple of weeks away, I’d like to provide an overall event update. Below are all of the events for the week in a simple bullet format with my notes – the Internet Week site has more information as well. If you plan to attend any of these events, book them now – many are already sold out and the free ones are going quickly. Unless noted, the events are free.

Tuesday, June 3

• NY:MIEG – topic, "Shifting the Paradigm: Young Women with Cool Jobs Making a Difference in Digital Media and beyond" – 7:30am
• Applied Cryptography and Network Security Conference – all day
• Associated Content’s Ultimate Call for Content Contest – all day
• Columbia Business School New Media panel discussion – 12:30 – no link provided – it’s at the Columbia University School of Business
• Applied Cryptography and Network Security 2008 – Columbia – $500 – all day (tuesday-friday)
• EconAds: Economics of Ad Deals – $300 – 1:30pm – by the PaidContent people – should be good
• Drinks4Startups – Starup Mixer – CN is a media sponsor – 6:00pm-all night
• NY Tech Meetup – same one that happens every month – back at crappy IAC – 7:00pm

Wednesday, June 4

• Internet Marketing Conference – all day – $700
• Time Warner’s Conversations on the Circle: News & Politics – 8:00am
• Advertising 2.0 – full day (wednesday-thursday) – $875
• Future of Media – NYU – 1:00pm – looks good, some big name journalists/bloggers will be speaking
• Live Diggnation – 6:00pm – Brooklyn – you can watch Kevin Rose and the other guy drink beer and talk about what was on Digg
• Financing Your Internet Startup – put on by David Rose and the NY Angels – if you plan on getting funding, you should absolutely attend this event – $10 – 6:00pm
• Forum on Online Political Participation – 6:00pm
• Hatch Match – brings founders and advisors/experts/investors together – 6:00pm
• Red Bricks Media’s Panel on Media and Entertainment – 6:30pm
• Thrillist’s Information Superparty: Web 1.0 Awesomeness to the Maximum Extreme! – 7:00pm (rsvp asap)

Thursday, June 5

• Time Warner’s Conversations on the Circle: Entertainment Culture – 8:00am
• Media Meshing – Mixer – 6:00pm
• Media: Overseas Conversations – panel on media as design – 6:30pm
• Hungry Man – donate your old electronics and join this "old" party – 7:30pm
• Internet and Film Collide: Watch – 7:30pm – at the IFC studios

Friday, June 6

• Time Warner’s Conversations on the Circle: Health – 8:00am
• Mashable’s Exhibit Hall – 6:00pm
• Sosauce Social – new NYC startup – party with the founders – 6:00pm
• NextNY Softball Match – Founders vs. World – oh yea this is going to be good, I may jump in there as the umpire or the pitcher! – 6:15pm

Saturday, June 7

• Wiimbledon 2008 – play Wii Tennis and win prizes – and let me just say, I will kick all of your arses. – all day
• Festival Travel Channel Beer Bash & Screenings – 7:00pm

Sunday, June 8

• Internet and Film Collide: Learn – sponsored by IndieGoGo – 3:00pm
• Internet And Film Collide: Meet – sponsored by IndieGoGo – 8:00pm

Monday, June 9

• Conversational Marketing Summit – sponsored by Federated Media – all day (monday/tuesday) – $1,400!
• NYSIA Social – 6:00pm – $15

The first-ever Internet Week New York will take place from June 3 – June 10, 2008 and will include a variety of events around NYC. The executive council includes a variety of names from around the country who specialize in online media including individuals from: AdAge, Federated Media, The Onion, BoingBoing, Avenue A/Razorfish, WNBC, and CondeNet.

An initial schedule has been posted which includes information on the Conversational Marketing Summit and the Webby awards. Both of these events were held outside NYC last year. The full schedule will be posted in April.

From what I gather, this is a combination of some NYC companies, some NYC events plus events and companies from outside the NYC-metro area. It looks like it’s going to rock. Just one question, couldn’t we have pulled off this on our own as a showcase of what NYC has to offer?