The Tipping Point (E-Commerce Version) (Jeff Jordan/Adreesson/Horowitz)
NBC Entertainment chief talks Leno, NFL and Peter Pan (LA Times: Company Town)
Chet Kanojia and Aereo Seek to Shake Up Television Industry (New York Times)
The Tipping Point (E-Commerce Version) (Jeff Jordan/Adreesson/Horowitz)
NBC Entertainment chief talks Leno, NFL and Peter Pan (LA Times: Company Town)
Chet Kanojia and Aereo Seek to Shake Up Television Industry (New York Times)
Exclusive: Fox, CBS, ESPN bid for Thursday night NFL games (Reuters via Chicago Tribune)
NBC thought to have submitted bid last night.
5 Big Business Intelligence Trends For 2014 (Cindi Howson/Information Week)
Links 1/17/2014: Roberts seen as kingmaker in Time Warner Cable battle
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Comcast’s Roberts Seen as ‘Kingmaker’ in Time Warner Cable Chase (Bloomberg)
Comcast considers a deal for Time Warner Cable (Philadelphia Inquirer)
Comcast Dropping ‘AnyPlay’
MSO To Discontinue In-Home Streaming Device On March 31 as Other Video Options Rise Up (Multichannel News)
IBM Commits $1.2 Billion To Cloud, Adding 15 Global Data Centers (Data Center Knowledge)
Health IT moving to critical step (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
Dropbox Closes Roughly $250M Round At $10B Valuation, WSJ Says (TechCrunch)
Filing: IGM should be sold in Pa. (AP via Philly.com)
eMoney and Firefly Give Financial Advisors Remote Meeting Capabilities (PR Newswire)
Oracle builds a bridge to Salesforce.com with new adapter (PC World)
Thursday Night NFL bids reported to be due in tomorrow
Tom Paine
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John Ourand of Sports Business Daily reports that bids on the NFL's Thursday night package are due in tomorrow, and most of the major networks are expected to enter bids, including Comcast's NBC. Ourand says ABC is especially eager to get back in the NFL, as its the only major over-the-air network without an NFL package (although its owner Disney does have MNF on ESPN).
Ourand says the NFL would like the Thursday night package to be on a broadcast network. But Joe Flint of the LA Times thinks a cable network may be a more likely possibility, mentioning NBCSports Network, which has long been rumored to be interested in Thursday night to boost its ratings and recognition, as a candidate.
Another issue the NFL must determine is how many games to put in a Thursday night package. It does not want to leave its own NFL Network too bare.
Update: Flint wrote today (Sunday) that NBC Entertainment Chairman Bob Greenblatt declined to confirm that NBC had entered a bid on the Thursday night package, but said "we’d love to have more NFL games," and "Thursday night games might be really interesting to us." Greenblatt's comments came at the semiannual Television Critics Assn. press tour in Pasadena on Sunday.
First Round Capital’s Kopelman Challenges Conventional Thinking at NJ Tech Meetup
@Alan Skontra
 |
Josh Kopelman spoke to the NJ Tech Meetup in December. | Aaron Price |
College entrepreneur, Internet pioneer and award-winning investor Josh Kopelman schooled more than 100 attendees of the NJ Tech Meetup’s 43rd monthly meeting Dec. 16, 2013 at the Stevens Institute of Technology campus in Hoboken.
Kopelman shared success stories and offered contrarian opinions about entrepreneurship, which meetup organizer Aaron Price praised for highlighting many of the ideas the group has explored this year.
Kopelman started his first company, a homework helper called Infonautics, in 1992 while he was still a student at the Wharton School of Business. He listed Infonautics on the NASDAQ exchange in 1996, and three years later he founded Half.com, which created a resale market for books, movies and music.
Kopelman sold Half.com to eBay in 2000, and three years after that he founded TurnTide, an anti-spam company that Symantec bought after just six months.
In 2004 Kopelman turned to investing by founding seed firm First Round Capital, which Kopelman said explores more than 3,000 ideas annually out of offices in New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco. This year Forbes magazine ranked Kopelman 12th on its annual “Midas’ Touch” list.
Kopelman said he is from Philadelphia, a large city but no Silicon Valley or even Silicon Alley. He mentioned his background to show that the adage of “right place, right time” covers a much larger map these days.
“Great entrepreneurs can come up with great ideas anywhere in the country, just like great actors aren’t all born in Hollywood,” he said.
He then said he wanted to share some contrarian opinions.
First, he challenged a notion, taught by one of his Wharton professors, that successful entrepreneurs find an unmet market need.
“It took me about 10 years to realize that I disagree with that professor,” Kopelman said. “We’ve funded many companies that are not trying to find an unmet market, but are instead finding a solution to an existing market but doing it faster, better, cheaper,” he said.
For example, Kopelman’s company was one of the seed investors of Uber, the new taxi service similar to AirBnB, through which private individuals use their own cars to give rides to people. Riders can use an app to request a driver, follow that driver’s progress en route, pay for the trip via credit card, and rate drivers for performance. “Uber is about solving an existing need of getting from place A to B faster, better, cheaper,” he said.
From the Uber story Kopelman segued into another idea about shrinking markets. He mentioned how Microsoft toppled what was a $1.2 billion print encyclopedia market by adding the digital Encarta encyclopedia to its software suite. The market soon collapsed in half, but Microsoft took a larger share of it.
Kopelman further promoted his idea of shrinking markets by telling the story of Half.com. “Our whole business model was based on the fact that when people buy books or movies, they typically read or watch them only once,” he said. “We would send an email to people asking, would you like your $30 back?”
Half.com found that people are interested in reselling their entertainment. Kopelman said that a Harry Potter book would resell an average of four times, with Half.com taking $3 from every sale. The site challenged established and larger retailers that only sold new.
“That’s a really asymmetric way to compete,” Kopelman said. “We cost our competitors 10 dollars for every dollar we made but we were able to turn them in such velocity and such volume that we were shrinking the market by removing the inefficiencies.” The plan worked; a year later eBay bought Half.com for $350 million.
Kopelman dispelled one more myth, that seed investing and venture capital are the same. “The goal of venture investing is to take a business and to scale it, to pour fuel into the engine,” he said. “That’s not the goal of seed investing.”
Seed investing, Kopelman explained, is about validating or disproving an entrepreneur’s hypothesis. “Oftentimes people pitch venture capitalists without validating the hypothesis and when they need to be pitching growth, and they pitch seed investors on growth when they should be talking about the hypothesis they want to validate,” he said.
Kopelman told the story of how as a seed investor he supported TechForward, which enables buy-back programs for electronics. At the time, retailers were losing traditional revenue because customers stopped extending warranties for products, such as televisions and phones, that they would soon upgrade.
TechForward thought to replace the lost revenue by creating a buy-back program in which a customer would pay money upfront for a guarantee that a retailer would buy back a product later, when the customer wanted to replace it. By offering store credit, retailers could lock customers into a cycle of upgrades.
Kopelman said that as a seed investor he gave TechForward $300,000 and asked the company first to test its hypothesis by collecting data from eight used computer stores in Los Angeles. He said that research enabled TechForward to hone its idea, and that later it was able to earn exponentially larger investment amounts from venture firms.
“At the seed stage you’re trying to run a series of experiments,” Kopelman said.
He ended his talk by opening the floor to audience questions, such as on what he looks for in a successful pitch. He said that entrepreneurs should be able to tell a story and have strong marketing ideas.
He added that he always looks for a team with a diversity of member strengths. “We’ll turn down ideas if we don’t like the team, though we won’t tell them that,” Kopelman said.
Alan Skontra is a journalist and writer based in Hoboken, and a contributor to NJTechWeekly.
This article originally appeared in NJTechWeekly, and is republished here with its permission.
Links 1/16/2014: Hershey's to make 3D chocolate printer
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Merger To Create Leading Provider Of Specialty Outsourced Clinical Services
CCBR-SYNARC and BioClinica Announce Agreement to Merge; Jeffrey McMullen Appointed Chairman (PR Newswire)
BioClinica is based in Newtown.
Comcast sues onetime employee over TV-viewership tracking software
(Philadelphia Inquirer)
Netflix exposed as net neutrality rules gutted (USA Today)
Verizon's NYC FiOS drive becomes bigger threat to TWC, others (FierceTelecom)
Hershey's to make 3-D chocolate printer (CNN Money)
Seriously.
Amazon workers at Delaware facility reject unionization push in 21-6 vote (GeekWire)
9,000 heads to roll at Dell? Tosh. It'll all go down in Feb and it's THOUSANDS more - insiders (The Register)
Oracle's Quixotic Quest To Beat Amazon At The Commodity Game (ReadWrite)
Oracle Loses Bid to Have D&O Insurer Beazley Pay $20M in Claims Over Acquisition (Bloomberg via Insurance Journal)
Philly Fed manufacturing index improves in January (MarketWatch)
Clear Channel Launches Philly Airport Digital Signage Network (MediaPost News)
Saridakis resigns as head of eBay Enterprise "for personal reasons"
Tom Paine
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Chris Saridakis has resigned as the head of King of Prussia-based eBay Enterprise for personal reasons, according to an eBay press release.
The announcement and its timing are somewhat surprising, given that eBay Enterprise (formerly GSI Commerce) appeared to be playing an increasingly central role within eBay's overall strategy, with Saridakis having a very visible role as part of eBay's management team.
Saridakis had served as president of eBay Enterprise since June 2011, after eBay acquired GSI Commerce (renamed eBay Enterprise in 2013), where he was part of that company’s management team. Prior to GSI Commerce he had headed up PointRoll.
Tobias Hartmann, vice president, Omnichannel Operations and International, will serve as interim head of eBay Enterprise while an external search is conducted for a permanent successor, the company said in its statement.
More from USA Today , citing sources suggesting that slower than expected growth at the unit may have been a factor behind the departure.
Comcast to build Philly tower? CBS Philadelphia story pulled (Update: Story's Out)
Tom Paine
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A now dead link appeared on the web today from CBS Philly, datelined today from Philadelphia, reporting Comcast has announced plans to build a new $1.2 billion tower in Philadelphia. You can see a trace of the headline in the link:
http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2014/01/15/comcast-announces-plans-to-build-new-tower-in-philadelphia/
Also, from Google News:
CBS Local-1 hour ago
PHILADELPHIA (CBS)—Comcast has announced plans to build a new tower in Philadelphia with a hefty price tag: $1.2 billion. The “Comcast ...
I can find no other current reference to that story. I've asked Comcast for comment.
Update: A reliable source (not from within Comcast) confirms the story is accurate and
details should be coming soon.
Udpate: Its out via NBC Philadelphia .
Norman Foster to Design Comcast Tower in Philadelphia
(New York Times)
Comcast's press release
Links 1/15/2014: Charter makes new approach to Comcast on Time Warner (Reuters)
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Exclusive: Charter makes new approach to Comcast on Time Warner Cable bid - sources (Reuters)
New Jersey Says Internet Betting Generated $8.4 Million
(Bloomberg)
Artisan Unveils New Features and Capabilities for Mobile Experience Management in Winter ‘14 Release (Business Wire)
PC Helps Changes Name to Vitalyst and Expands Service Offering (Business Wire)
Plum Analytics Becomes Part of EBSCO Information Services (PR Web)
Blackboard makes another acquisition, says it will make good on past acquisitions (PandoDaily)
AOL Finds a Home – Off Its Books – for Patch (Re/code)
Links 1/14/2014: FCC’s Options Narrow After Court Blocks Net Neutrality Rules: SevOne receives patent award
Circuit Court Of Appeals Strikes Down FCC’s Open Internet Order, Net Neutrality Threatened (TechCrunch)
FCC’s Options Narrow After Court Blocks Net Neutrality Rules (Variety)
Big Offer for Time Warner Cable Unsettles the Cable Industry (New York Times)
Time Warner Cable shareholders seek sale at higher price (New York Post)
Charter COO John Bickham Rips Time Warner Cable on Conference Call (Hollywood Reporter)
Time Warner Cable Issues Statement on Charter Communications (Business Wire)
DirecTV no longer carrying Weather Channel after contract dispute (LA Times)
How A Curious VC Found Uber Before Anyone Else, Back When It Was Only Worth $4 Million (Business Insider)
SevOne Patent Award Defines Uniquely Scalable Approach to Performance Management (Business Wire)
Nutanix Joins the $1 Billion Valuation Club as It Takes On Tech Giants (Wall Street Journal: Venture Capital Dispatch)
SAP Ventures among investors.
Google Cloud Platform is growing up with a channel program and everything (Gigaom)
HP, SAP release new solutions for retailers (IT World Canada)
NRF14: Selling digital signage to the sellers (Digital Signage Today)
TicketLeap is Redesigned and Mobile-Optimized (Tech Cocktail Philadelphia)
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