An Update on Microsoft's Razorfish

I had written in November about the layoffs at Razorfish, and early rumors of a sale.

Seems this sale is happening soon. According to the Financial Times, Microsoft has appointed Morgan Stanley to look for a buyer for Razorfish, with French firm Publicis emerging as an early front-runner.

Omnicom and WPP, which are trying to put more focus on digital advertising, are also potential suitors.

Publicis has recently made some financial moves aimed at enabling an acquisition, and have also gotten cozier with Microsoft - on Friday, Publicis announced an agreement with Microsoft Advertising to use Microsoft technology to place Publicis ads on television set-top boxes.

NBC and ABC Suck Lemons

I would like NBC and ABC to lose enough money that they have to shut down. Or at least fire their entire sports-related teams. Let me explain why:

NBC:

NBC has the rights to show the French Open Men's Semifinals this morning. The matches started at 5 am PST today, Friday, June 5th.
You have the opportunity to watch arguably the greatest to ever play the game, Roger Federer. In the other match, you have the cinderalla, who has already dispatched the world's greatest Clay Court player (and a possible arguable greatest ever to play the game, Rafael Nadal).

So when you switch on NBC, what do you see? Why, Dave Matthew's Band, Tom Brokaw, and the rest of the idiots from their morning show. Interspersed with ads from our local carpet dealer. They've decided we can wait until 10 am PST (on a workday!) to watch the matches. That made me develop my first symptoms of high blood pressure.

I am pissed off at NBC. Very pissed off. This is exactly what they did during the Olympics - while also lying about having the broadcasts live.

So what am I going to do about it? I am going to stop watching NBC. Anything on NBC. And I'm going to bad-mouth NBC whenever I can. I like Conan O'Brien. So I'm going to watch him free on YouTube. Hah!

ABC:

ABC won the rights to show the NBA Finals. I know, I know, the NBA season is unreasonably long. But after all that time, we've gotten to the point where we can see Superman and Skip-to-my-Lou go up against the Black Mamba and 9-time winner Phil Jeannie Buss. Kobe, at this point, is in the "best ever" discussions. And had a game to prove it last night. What I would have loved to have seen after the game would be some great analysis, interspersed with humor, etc. etc.... ok, I would have loved to have the TNT Inside The NBA crew (EJ, Barkley, Kenny) take us through the game.

Do you know what I saw instead? A local Oakland crew. Three guys - at least I know/ like Nate Thurmond. The other expert they brought in was the Warriors assistant coach for shooting for big men, or something. No disrespect, but.... And they kept trying to work the Warriors into everything. Kept talking about Michael Pietrus, and showing clips of him as a Warrior. WTF!?!?!?

Ok, so ABC wasn't as bad as NBC. I'm not going to bad-mouth them as much as I will NBC. But I'm quite unhappy.

NBC and ABC suck lemons. I want NBC to fail.

The Layoff Spectrum - No One Spared

Layoffs are here, and they're here to stay. The surprising thing is how many supposedly (at least to me) well-performing companies are also having to lay off staff.



Nike - Nike is doing very well, thank you, with their stable of highly paid stars selling the socks off the competition. Really, how many other shoe ads do you see nowadays? And Nike is better positioned than most, since it is highly diversified throughout the sports arena - shoes, clothes, sports equipment (rackets, balls, bats), related gear.
It doesn't matter. Nike is laying off 5% of their global staff. And surprisingly, the jobs are not just mostly in the higher-wage countries - China is coming in for a high proportion of manufacturing job losses.



Miami Heat - The Heat were not expected to compete this year... or get any audience worth mentioning. But an MVP-caliber year by the NBA's scoring leader (Dwayne Wade), two highly touted rookies, and a surprise 5th seed in the playoffs capped by a 7-game first round series boosted the Heat's revenues well beyond any reasonable projections.
No matter - the Heat are also going through a round of layoffs.

The End Of Valleywag

Valleywag, Silicon Valley's gossip site (and sort of pretend tech and startups related site) was always a fun read.  After the staff was trimmed, it became a little less so.  Ok, maybe a lot less so.

But today sounds the death bell.  Owen Thomas is leaving Gawker Media (Valleywag's parent), and moving to NBC.   There's no one left.

Rest in peace, Valleywag.

Crossing 95K Visits

I just crossed the 95K visits mark on my blogs:

• The serious blog - all about Tech, Startups, Revenue
• The all-purpose, main blog
• Blog on cars - one of my passions
• Blog about Travel topics, including not just destinations, but also food, wine, etc.
• The older, retired Autos blog

Looking forward to 100K.

And on a smaller scale, my profile on blogger has now been viewed over 1,400 times.

New York Times Article On Kosmix

Our little startup, Kosmix, was just covered in the New York times 

The article was titled Just Don’t Compare Kosmix to Google

Published: March 14, 2009

KOSMIX, a well-financed Silicon Valley start-up, is often described on blogs and news sites as a search engine that may someday rival Google.

As flattering as that notion may sound, it rankles Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, the co-founders of Kosmix. And that’s not because other start-ups making similar assertions have fallen laughably short of the mark. It’s because Kosmix is trying to do something that is quite different from traditional Web search.

“Search does what it does well, very well,” Mr. Harinarayan said. “I don’t think we can ever compete with that.” Kosmix, he said, is not about finding the best set of documents for a specific keyword or phrase. Instead, its goal is to “tell me more about something,” he said.

For a key word or topic that a user enters, Kosmix gathers content from across the Web to build a sort of multimedia encyclopedia entry on the fly. For many queries, the results are pretty satisfying and look as if they have been compiled by a human editor, not a computer.

If Kosmix succeeds in attracting a large following, it may well be the latest challenge, not to Google, but to a long string of old and new media companies struggling to hold on to their audiences and make a living on the Web.

Kosmix’s home page offers a mix of news, entertainment and other content from around the Web. But it is on searches that Kosmix becomes really interesting.

Type in “Kauai,” for example, and Kosmix will return a fairly rich page that includes an entry from WikiTravel, a user-created travel site; restaurant recommendations from The New York Times; photographs and videos from services like Flickr and YouTube; audio clips of local music; reviews of guidebooks, bed-and-breakfasts and other services; blog posts and more. It also has top results from Google, and suggests a list of related topics.

(Read the rest of the article on the New York Times website)

Meehive Launched, Nice Press Coverage

Kosmix' personalized newspaper, Meehive, launched today.  We've had some good coverage, including:

• Techcrunch
• Venture Beat
• Louis Gray

Kosmix Introduces Meehive to Deliver Personalized News Pages

“As much as you might think I'm overloaded with information from the Web, I'm not, honestly. I find that often my first tendency after reading through my Google Reader items is to want to go back to the site and start again, only to find them empty. It's possible, with MeeHive up and running, that when I've hit zero on Google Reader, and tapped out my FriendFeed and Twitter, I can have a destination to find out what the rest of the world is doing outside my little bubble.”

• Portfolio, Tech Observer

“Now there's a company that will make you your very own personalized newspaper made up of traditional media posts and blogs, kind of like a cyber-news Frankenstein delivered right to your inbox.”

• Killer Startups

MeeHive.com Your Personalized Newspaper

“When all is said and done, this is yet another legitimate way to keep abreast of any development that could appertain to you, and access that information as part of a personalized website. An account can be created in no time at all, so that if you want to see if this solution is right for you or not just wend your way to www.meehive.com.”

• Fone Arena

MeeHive Personalized News on iPhone/iPod Touch App Review

“I have been playing with the MeeHive iPhone App for over a week now and…it’s a simple app which makes news consumption on your iphone very easy.”

• Resource Shelf

Kosmix Launches MeeHive Personalized News