Remember when MySpace lost three key execs before the whole chaotic reorganization? They announced their departure in March. And we’ve now confirmed that they are closing a substantial round of funding, even before they’ve picked a final name for the company.
The company, whatever it will be called, was founded by Amit Kapur (MySpace COO), Steve Pearman (MySpace SVP Product Strategy) and Jim Benedetto (MySpace VP Technology). The company is now backed by August Capital and Redpoint Ventures, who jointly funded a roughly $10 million venture round. David Hornik from August and Geoff Yang from Redpoint have joined the board of directors.
What do we know so far about the company? Not a whole lot except that Redpoint and August are rumored to be “very excited” about it. The company is supposedly targeting the message board/Internet forum space with technology that aggregates content and serves advertising against it. Real time search (bingo! fundable!) may be part of the business plan as well.
Whatever this thing is called, and whatever it does, I know one thing – I like the team. These were three of the most respected and creative execs at MySpace. Keep an eye on them.
facebook should make forum messages and comments in its groups and pages real time searcheable.
Aand remind you, another India TC feature works on this group message board search. http://www.tech...0month-revenue/
When did the details leak?
When the guy picked up the phone to tell you about it?
Reason #25,467 why blogger sites suck and cannot be relied upon.
Bravo! MySpace was the best company.
Then why’d they leave?
I’d assume they were “very excited about it”. I’ve never seen a story on TechCrunch where someone was quote, “really down about the idea” or “kinda ready for an exit strategy already”
How would the team feel if redpoint was quoted as saying, “meh it’s an ok idea”
LOL
True – if they wouldn’t be excited, why do it?
I met Amit on Monday and he wouldn’t tell me anything so congrats on getting this news. Amit did say it’d be a consumer-focused Internet play that isn’t being done well by the existing players. Forums certainly could be done better. I tried inviting Amit out for a drinking fest but he turned me down.
He didn’t want you to get him drunk and get the story out of him.
Smart guy.
Someone wants something; what kind of thing ; some funding in wire transfer in my bank account.
Want some growing around my business.
Some papers from this researcher at Sandia (Dr. Evrim Acar), who co-authored the following might be applicable to these ex-MySpace new startups :
1) Collective Sampling and Analysis of High-order Tensors for Chatroom Communications
2) Modeling and Multiway Analysis of Chatroom Tensors
The nature of chatroom or similar online forum is the evolving nature of topical concepts, ie, concepts come and go within a time-window and this type of multi-dimensional analysis (tensor calculus) fits really well. Note that the algorithms describe in the papers include time-stamp as an add-on extra dimension to the typical search engine of today which is only 2D or 2-way tensors (users x keywords) to make it 3D or 3-way tensors (users x keywords x time). The addition of time-stamp to make it 3D makes the analysis real-time (not computation-wise), in the sense that it can retrieve relevant message according to recency, etc,…. Note that Google PageRank is 2D only (inbound x outbound), but there is no doubt that Google must be working on a tensorized PageRank (3D or higher dimension, etc,…) that includes time-stamp.
The papers describe even higher dimension than 3D, such as a 4-way tensor (4D).
I noted that Dr. Evrim Acar is presenting (her research work) at the upcoming Seminar on Linear Algebra and Optimization , Stanford University, May 27, 2009 (it says on her website), which perhaps that Amit Kapur, Jim Benedetto or Steve Pearman can arrange to meet up with her when she is at Stanford to pick her brain. You got nothing to lose but you have everything to gain.
This is really interesting Falafulu, thanks.
whatever they are doing im sure it is already being done or could be executed in days by an established media player.
choosing the rigt domain name may be the most important decision they will make. we all know the power of “My”. personalized natural language location.
http://seesmic.com/tTL9aEUkGR
maybe i take myspac for granite but i dont see alot of creativity from the site. the creative ad financing payments from Googl was all i noticed.
it is very late in the game to launch a startup period. the market is bear and flooded. the end of digital media innovation is here. the best thing these guys could do is merge or acquire a natural language location engine that has exponential growth potential and a good domain name. the opportunity is in strategic natural language social location and discovery. those 3 guys and the right media platform and the skys the limit.
VentureLocator.com – capital domain
“the end of digital media innovation is here”
Yeah right.
Sounds like a web 2.0 version of Topica.
Nobody has made money off of groups and chat yet – so there is definitely opportunity there!
We wait with bated breath..
Kidding right…$10m in this market for message boards. LP’s should take their money back from August and Redpoint.
These three, while decent guys, wouldn’t be manager level employees at Google. They did such a great job at My Space it’s about to go under.
Whoopie
ok I hate to leak it to everyone, but it seems they have interest in doing a deal with http://www.worstpizza.com, but I am playing hardball and demanding like 10 million up front
expect at least a couple of myspace employees to jump over.
They have set a precedence for face book executives .
well FB exec went to MS. So when it doesnt work out, and the FB exec that went to MS start their own company, does that count as following precedence? hehe
I hope for their sake that you’re wrong about their idea because it sounds like a bonafide loser.
very interested to know what the new venture is
FInally, someone from the establishment recognizes what a huge opportunity the forum space is. While my company has less capital, my hope is that this attention will benefit us since we are already in this space and unlike Amit and his team…we come from forums.
Sanjay Sabnani
CEO, CrowdGather, Inc.
(OTCBB:CRWG)
“Real time search (bingo! fundable!)…”
looooooool
Funniest line in a long time – sad part that this is how VC works. Whatever.
great idea. i was working on something like this i guess the old saying is true if you have an idea there are probably others that do as well.
these 3 did such a great job before leaving myspace…. they only lost a huge lead to facebook, reduced innovation to nothing, releasing fine products that should lead the way for next gen web such as myspace email, and a branded citysearch and on top of all that got, the founders of the company fired.
I personally look forward to seeing what they do next.
Are they going to build it again based on ColdFusion!!
So… they are starting a scraper site? Sounds like another boardtracker. They steal our content, get indexed in the search engines for it, and then sell ads against it.
Hopefully it’s easy to block
Billbo, BoardTracker doesn’t steal anyones content – we are a forum search engine and we index posts/threads. We show snippets of the posts in search results and link directly to the original post. We don’t even show a cached version on our site, unlike Google for example.
We constantly strive to bring more traffic to the boards in various ways and raise awareness of the boardscape as a whole.
I was talking about sites that track boards/forums and used a general term “board tracker” without thinking of your company. I did not mean to insinuate that your company “steals” content and I’m sorry if it came out that way. If I could edit the post of my error I would do so. You guys allow people to block your service which is great. Thanks.
That being said I’d suggest that real “search engines” don’t get indexed by other search engines with content from the sites they index. They are a tool that people to go to find data. What percentage of people ENTER your site via the homepage and do a search for a topic verses entering via a keyword search from Google or other search engine hitting on content you’ve indexed?
If you these forum/ board tracking services (not a specific company) were not indexed by search engines then I don’t think many of us would have an issue with it. However when they are we are forced to compete with someone who is using our own content to compete with us.
Once again, I know you guys provide a way to opt out and I appreciate it. I just wish it was an opt in system to being with.
Thanks.
That’s a nice chunk of change for an un-named company with a secret business plan! Can’t wait to hear what they’ve got up their sleeves.
There’s a ton of value in forum content. Terabytes of real niche information and highly engaged users generating more every day. For a start-up like this though – if the info is correct – one has to wait and see. I don’t like to count out anyone with a great new idea, though this is one crowded space. So they’d better have something great.
If they’re doing some search, there are several key players out there doing search in forums. BoardReader.com, Omgili.com and sort of Boardtracker. (That last one hasn’t updated much the past several years.) Sadly, a really great new way to get at this stuff folded last year. Twing.com was part of ill-fated parent company Accoona. All that’s left of it is some screen shots on my blog now. (Yes, I worked there so I know from our own research what kind of value continues to grow in forums; though a lot of it is migrating to newer social media tools.)
http://worldpoi...l-screen-shots/
What these guys might not know is that there’s others who see value in forums as well and there’s likely a couple of other start-ups trying to do more in that space. Moreover, as some major and alternative engines start to use more dis-disambiguation tools, (either by topic or info category), forum content is surfaced in these existing products as well. (Exalead.com for example, even Google has a “Show Options” link in web results that let’s you scope to forums.)
If they’re doing a forum specific ad network, well… Good luck guys! If you can help these forum owners make some $$$, that would be a good thing.
Scott