Comments on: TapeItOffTheInternet wins Series A from Pond Ventures

By: Richard

Richard — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 07:00:46 +0000

Jon, sometimes you need people (or ext developers) to run a business (not to say Marketing). If you are pre-revenue, you need funding.

By: Andreas

Andreas — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 02:42:02 +0000

I am quite amazed that this site got funded. The poor concept mixed with the antiquated name — I was sure this site was headed for the .com deadpool.

I checked this site out in the beta – just another aggregator as far as I can tell. I read a description that said the site uses “advanced screen scraping technology” to get the listings. Who “screen scrapes”? Is this thing run off of a 1950’s mainframe?

TIOTI stands for “TAPE It Off The Internet” — way to speak to the TiVo generation. These guys need some serious branding help. Who seriously talks like that?

By: Sachin Jain

Sachin Jain — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 01:55:55 +0000

Jeremy and Moham are right, but its a good way of SEO.

By: moham polik

moham polik — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 01:51:48 +0000

lets look at the links on this post:

1 – logo linked to actual company site
1 – link to crunchbase directory
4 – links to uk techcrunch
1 – link to google

out of 7 total links within story – 5 are to tc property

now i sees what you mean Jeremy

By: Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 01:42:35 +0000

@Jon, you’re right, it’s not required.

They just want a “job” with a decent salary for a couple years, and use a half-baked idea to leverage cash. After selling their souls to the VC (who are using the paintball method of funding), the founders end up owning a whopping 2% of some pretty worthless common stock (read: “toilet paper”).

By: Jon

Jon — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 01:31:39 +0000

Interesting… but I would like to see for once, a net company that is able to launch and sustain itself without Series (pick a letter from the alphabet) funding by a VC firm. I don’t yet understand why millions of dollars are needed to launch a site anymore, this stuff isn’t as complicated before, bandwidth and hosting is cheap in addition to many other cost savings.

Jon

By: Steve Ballmer

Steve Ballmer — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 01:24:13 +0000

Means nothing to nobody!~

http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com

By: Axel

Axel — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 23:10:32 +0000

Boing Boing does it too, Jeremy. Apparently, splitting a site into niches means less content on any one of the resultant sites, so best be duplicating all content (or at least links to all content) on all of the sub-sites. Brings all the pesky maintenance of link farms in-house.

For example…
http://www.boin...r-debunkag.html

When does techfacebookcrunch get launched, and can we have all the posts there cross-linked to techcrunch? We don’t want to miss anything, of course.

By: Jeremy Wright

Jeremy Wright — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 22:07:23 +0000

These posts linking to another TC site to read the content are starting to really piss me off.

I’m jus sayin’.

By: Lost

Lost — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 21:54:40 +0000

After the recent news of tvlinks being shut down ( http://blogs.gu...r_linking_.html )

looking at TIOTI it seems to be doing the same thing by linking to blogs with the likes of lost series embedded. unless I am missing something this sounds like the same thing, effectively thepiratebay with a nice front end.

with NBC pulling out of youtube and putting the likes of heroes on hulu will they be happy with TIOTI linking to third party sources?

Looking at the earlier interview they said “At TIOTI we have made the decision not to link to websites that don’t have a DMCA or similar request and removal process”.

so if a blog embeds copyrighted content but has a link to a DMCA request it makes it ok to be listed? don’t get me wrong this site has great potential and I like the sound of it but if it won’t last it doesn’t seem like being part of the community.

By: Rick Ellis

Rick Ellis — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 21:38:21 +0000

While some of the social networking aspects are nice, I’m stunned this thing is getting a “seven-figure” funding round.

Their content is very spotty, and the only real attraction I can see is that it aggregates links to torrents in a way that might get past the initial round of DMCA requests.

Congratulations, but….wow.