Video Archive

Last year we covered the announcement that early-stage venture capital first First Round Capital (FRC) would be opening an office in NYC. We also covered the Entrepreneurs Roundtable when FRC partner Howard Morgan discussed the overall early-stage capital market.

Today the partners from FRC took a tour of the various startup incubators around Manhattan. For those new to the term, incubators is basically a fancy word for “shared office space”. I attended the first bit of the tour and will have a few more videos and photos over the next day. Mary Kathleen Flynn from The Deal and an editor from VentureBeat (I didn’t catch his name) also participated in the tour. I wore two hats today: first as a writer for this blog and second as an entrepreneur looking for space for my startup.

They also announced that their NYC office will be located at 200 Park Avenue South (23rd Street) and will be opening in March.

First Round Capital partner Josh Kopelman began the discussion with an overview of FRC and what they look for in a deal. The video of Josh’s discussion is available below. Some notes:

• they have invested in 80 companies
• average initial investment in NYC is $600k
• about 15 investments in NYC
• they like to invest very early – they fund Powerpoint and pre-launch companies

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Here’s a great stocking last minute gift or a way to spend the day on Friday. Amazon is offering $4 credit for their “video on demand” store. The credit is good through the end of January.

Just add the code “AVODGIFT” and you can grab $4 in free movies. Load this Amazon page and in the middle a box will appear for a code – enter the code above. It looks like most movies are $2.99 and there are a bunch of free holiday movies as well. It looks like the video on demand is about a month behind the rental business. For example, my Blockbuster Express machine notes that District 9 is available today to rent but Amazon shows it as available on January 19,2010.

If you download a movie or television show, leave it in the comments with a brief review.

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Check out the video below with John Nese. John is the proprietor of Galcos Soda Pop Stop based in Los Angeles. The video is from food site Chow although I found it via the Toddle blog. The video has nothing to do with Twitter or Facebook – nothing to do with so-called social media experts. It has to do with one thing…passion for your business. More importantly it has to do with knowing your business inside and out (watch how he can talk about nearly any of the soda bottles he has in the store). Lastly it shows how important knowledge of the industry that your startup is a part of (his talk about bottle redemption is quite interesting).
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Video hosting service Viddler has announced the availability of their new analytics tool today. The reporting engine is provided through a partnership between Viddler and TubeMogul.

From the announcement, “Comprehensive statistics about your videos are now only a click away. Of course, Viddler Analytics answers even more questions than those above. How much storage has my account used this month? How much video bandwidth have we used so far? Am I close to my account level threshold yet? These questions, and others, are very important to our Business level accounts.” The partner analytics provides more “social” stats around comments, total video views and individual video stats.

To use the Viddler analytics tool, you must be a business or partner customer. Business accounts start at $100/month. When I attempt to load the analytics tool I am redirected back to the Viddler home page. They should probably change that to redirect to a page describing the analytics option and how to get access to it.

I love seeing more stats and analytics around the content I create so I welcome a new set of video metrics. Now I guess I need to create more videos…anyone see the BloggerKing lately?

Here’s an overview video of how the analytics tool works:
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Last night, Adaptive Blue hosted the “The Changing Role of PR in Publishing and Tech” meetup in NYC. The panelists were (from left to right in the video): Chantelle K from Yelp, Kristin M from Attention PR, Ami G. from Macmillan and Russ M from RussCommunications.

The panel discussion lasted an hour and I’ve split the video into 20-minute segments – you can view the videos below. Some notes from the panelists:

• Chantelle loads Tweetdeck the moment she hits the office to check Twitter and spends 30 minutes to 1 hour each day going through what her friends sent her
• Kristen discussed using the bit.ly URL shortener as a way to track ROI
• At about the 18 minutes mark in the first video, Chantelle explains how they went to market for their iPhone app using an exclusive with Robert Scoble. She notes that they saw great results by using Robert to get the word out about the app and were even able to get an exciting trending topic on Twitter. They didn’t give the news to the NYT or Newsweek. They met with Robert several times beforehand to build a relationship with Robert. Later on Chantelle noted that depending on the type of story they are trying to push, they will use different sources to work with.

There was a discussion about analytics in the second video although I found the analysis weak. There was no mention about real-value stats – just simple discussion about how many followers or fans a brand has. My guess is that in late 2010 ”followers and fans” will be the hits of 1995.

In the third video there is a discussion about whether to hire a PR firm or if you should look at bringing a person on-board internally.
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At last night’s awesome (thanks Charlie!) nextNY meetup, I had the chance to meet Elena Bajic. Elena is the founder and CEO of Ivy Exec, self-described as “the most elite network of professionals”. Ivy Exec is a job board for people who have advanced degrees from the top universities (so I guess my Georgia State MBA is out). Each user is screened to make sure they fit the criteria of the service.

Ivy Exec notes regarding their membership: 95% have a graduate degree, 86% hold an MBA, 47% are diverse and 41% are women. About 4,300 jobs are currently posted on the service and Elena told me that they have partnerships with some of the top schools in the U.S.

Like popular NY-based job board TheLadders, IvyExec charges users a fee which they note is a subscription charge. Elena noted that without paying you are blocked from applying to all jobs and can only apply to a select few. Full membership ranges from $22 to $42 a month.

Inc Magazine has a good overview of Ivy Exec including feedback about the service from a variety of venture capitalists. Some stats about Ivy Exec:

• started in 2006
• estimated 2009 revenue: $315,000
• net profit margin: 25%
• 10 total team members including 5 contractors

There is a lot of startup activity in the career space. Each week I receive a handful of press releases about new startups trying to make the job application process easier for both the posting companies and the applicants.
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This morning I met with NY-based Producteev CEO Ilan Abehassera and our video interview is below. Last week Producteev launched a variety of new features around social group task management. What makes Producteev unique is that it allows you to send tasks from nearly any social app and receive notifications via the same social app. For example, if you need to setup a task, you can send a direct message from Twitter, a chat message from Gtalk or submit the task via email. Your colleagues are notified via Producteev on the services they are using.

Another interesting feature of Producteev is the ability to collect responses to a question using any of the social services. You post your question or need on Producteev and then push it out to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. and your followers/friends can click a link and leave a comment on your task or question. This feature is called “crowdsource your tasks”. The best part about this feature is that the responses are grouped together and removes the need to gather responses on each individual network.
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