Boxee Raises $4 Million

quick intro to boxee from boxee on Vimeo.

One of the most talked about startups in NYC has proven that VC money is available even in a tough economy. Featured in Forbes.com several weeks ago (thanks to the efforts of Bruni PR), Boxee is an amazing media sharing platform that allows viewers to share and rate videos, music and photos. Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures, one of the investors, calls it the "Firefox" of media browsing. This young startup first presented at NY Video Meetup and NY Tech Meetup just a few months back, and are now poised to partner with the media giants. Congrats to Avner Ronen and his team of young Israeli geeks.

Motrin Moms Campaign Implodes

Here's a great textbook example of how companies can misuse Social Media: the Motrin Moms campaign, which has raised a furor today on major blogs, including TechCrunch, Mashable and others. The "viral" ad pokes fun at mom who carry their babies, implying that they will need Motrin for the pain endured. The number of hateful parodies of this ad are cropping up faster than Obama friends on Facebook. The ad agency involved will likely kill the ad later today. Moreover, it's the number one topic on Twitter today, but not the kind of Twitter coverage any company would want.

Will Wall Street Crash burn Silicon Alley?

How will Silicon Alley (and Silicon Valley) fare in this new era of Fear and Loathing on Wall Street? Today, TechCrunch chimes in with a positive report:
So far the downward spiral of credit and financial markets seems to have left venture capital firms and startups relatively unharmed. Even though the IPO market closed completely in the second quarter (and opened again only slightly in the third), venture capital firms continue to raise money and invest in startups at a healthy pace. During the first half of the year, venture capital firms raised about $16 billion in 141 funds and invested about $15 billion in nearly 2,000 deals.

But, there are different views on the subject. Case in point: The Calacanis Nation enewsletter, put out by my old friend Jason, a real expert on crash and burn. (When his Silicon Alley Reporter featured the Alley Meltdown some years ago, he put a photo of the Hindenburg on the cover of his magazine, something I'll never forget as I watched my roster of Alley PR clients disappear virtually overnight).

Jason predicts that 80% of all startups (East and West Coast) will be out of business within the next year or so, as VC $ dries up. He cites three factors that kill startups: 1) bad idea, 2) bad execution 3) other outside reasons. Well, clearly, No. 3 is the big one to watch right now. A great startup can have the right idea, the right execution and still get ****** in today's business environment. Let's hope Arrington is right, and Jason is wrong. But, my bet is on my old Alley buddy, who saw boom and bust and boom again over the past years.

Reuters: It's Official, We are in a Bear Market

A News Alert just in from Reuters: The Bear Market is officially here.
What does it mean for Net startups? Time will tell.

New York City rules in Tech Jobs

According to a report released today from a tech industry trade group, New York and its surrounding metropolitan area leads the nation when it comes to the number of high-tech jobs. Rounding out the top five in order were Washington, D.C.; San Jose/Silicon Valley, Boston, and Dallas-Fort Worth.

New York had 316,500 high-tech jobs, while Silicon Valley had 225,300.

Trendrr: Obama beats McCain in Media Coverage

Who is winning the battle for media coverage?

Obama, without question. Check out this cool new graph from Trendrr, a service of hot NY startup Wiredset. This graph says it all. The media loves Obama.

TechSet Party NYC

The TechSet Party NYC at the Gansevoort Hotel was, without question, the highlight of Internet Week. Brian Solis, CEO of Future-Works, and Stephanie Agresta organized a fine party that was well attended by NY digerati, including Sarah Austin (Pop17), David Karp (Tumblr), the Mashable team (Pete Cashmore, Alana Taylor, Brett Petersel), Esther Dyson (angel investor), Caroline McCarthy (CNET), and others. Looking forward to more TechSet events here in NYC. These guys throw parties that remind me of the Josh Harris/Pseudo parties and Courtney Pulitizer get togethers in the Nineties Silicon Alley.

Internet Week: A Non-Event?

Ok, I guess it's obligatory to salute Internet Week. Kudos to Mayor Bloomberg for launching a "seed fund" for NY Internet companies this morning. Tomorrow nite, we're at the NY Tech Meetup, which showcases "the Top Internet Companies", and later, at the Web2NewYork/Center Networks "drinks4charity" (a good cause) party at Gallery Bar. On Friday,it's the Mashable Exhibit Hall party. I get to rub elbows with Cashmore and other luminaries. In between, there are a slew of events, ranging from the I Media panel, Net film shows, music performances and everything you can think of, some totally unrelated to the Internet or Silicon Alley. Go figure.

MashBash NYC Party

The MashBash NYC party at Webster Hall last Friday nite was one of the best Silicon Alley parties I've been to since the '90s. GrandMaster Flash performed for a VIP audience of several hundred. I hadn't seen Flash since '81 in the same venue, when it was called "The Ritz". Everybody was at this party, including Tumblr, Magnify, Kluster (which sponsored an open bar), DrawnbyPain (jeskid), Silicon Alley Reporter, Center Networks, Alley Insider, Diggnation, etc. (and Bruni PR, that's me in the Roma soccer cap).
Kudos to Adam Hirsch and his Mashable team.

Livestreaming the Italian Soccer Championship

The Italian soccer championship will be decided next Sunday. Inter and Roma are neck in neck for the "scudetto", with Inter having only a one point advantage in the Serie A ranking. What is certain is how livestreaming has changed the way Italians view and experience these games. There are approximately 20+ livestreaming tv channels on Mogulus that feature Italian soccer. If you miss the game or don't have a TV nearby, you can watch on your computer. Forza Roma!

Drawn By Pain/Webby Award

Drawn By Pain is one of the hottest web TV series to come out of Silicon Alley. We're all praying that Jesse Cowell and his jeskid production team wins the Webby Award for animation on Tuesday. Go for it Jes.

Crunchgear Party: Empressr Impressed

Empressr wowed the Crunchgear party in NYC on May 1st at Red Sky bar with the "first visual story and presentation Internet application". (I'm the guy in the beige cap) Here's how the folks at Empressr describe it --

"Empressr was developed by Fusebox, an award winning creative and technology firm that creates rich Internet applications (RIAs), and advertising and marketing programs for global 1000 companies. Empressr was developed in response to what we saw as the limitations of existing presentation applications. If streaming video and Flash are more dynamic ways to present important information, then why shouldn't everyone have access to this medium? So our creative and technology experts teamed up to develop a way for anyone to create rich media presentations, easily. The result is the first-of-its-kind visual story telling and presentation application that is revolutionizing the industry"

$ Pour into NY startups/PWC study

Good news from Price Waterhouse. The US economy might be in the toilet, but the bucks keep rolling into NY.

Sixty-six area companies received $526 million in venture funding during the quarter, according to a report released by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. Funding was up 12% from the previous quarter and 35% from the same quarter a year ago.

Nationwide, venture capitalists invested $7.1 billion in 922 companies. Funding was down 8.5% from the fourth quarter and 5% from the same period a year ago.

Trendrr

Trendrr was the highlight of last week's NY Tech Meetup. It's Graphing meets Social Media. Read/Write/Web has a fine post/endorsement this week:

"Trendrr currently offers up data from 17 different data sets -- and the site is always adding more. These are things like: stock charts, YouTube video plays, MySpace friends, comments, or profile views, Amazon sales rank, Google News mentions, etc. Users can also input custom data via the site's RESTful API or by hand. Users are allowed to track up to 20 data sets at a time.

Once Trendrr is tracking your data, it can then be mashed up into comparison graph. Data can be left absolute or scaled relatively, and the site supports line, area, bar, and scatter graphs. These charts can then be embedded, linked to, or exported via excel, xml, or json. Trendrr can also export data via its new simple graph syndication API."

Does the PR industry have a future/Vizu poll

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Slikstr

Can you start a "fake" startup, raise VC money, hire employees and fool the business world. You bet. Matt Feldman, founder/CEO of neovids, wowed the NY Video 2.0 meetup last week with his Slikstr prank/gag. neovids has successfully produced a webisode series on Slikstr, a fake startup. Feldman "founded" the startup a few wks back with a blog, a business plan and an intro video on YouTube and Mogulus. Believe it or not, he has received requests from VCs offering investments, resumes from interested job applicants and even, real press coverage from blogs that were all hoodwinked by this young Net video company. I first saw the Slikstr gag at a recent Web2NY meetup and didn't realize it was fake until half way through his pitch. Even Edelman PR, the inventors of the infamous Walmart "flog" would blush at Slikstr's success.

Mashable NYC event

The Mashable NYC event on Friday at the Anchor Bar in Tribeca was jammed pack with Net moguls and for a change, lots of female geeks. You can count on Pete Cashmore and Adam Hirsch for bringing in the web gals, and they did. They also showcased some sexxy new startups: Kluster, Utterz, and Oovoo. Kluster, the star of the recent TED conference, unveiled their new crowdsourcing "idea generation" site where Kluster members can win "watts" and money for submitting great business advice and solutions. Utterz, a new mobile microblogging service enables you to post video, photos and chat from your mobile device. It was impressive. Check out the "utterz" they set up for the event, and you will see me. Oovoo, a videoconferencing site, also impressed.

Vizu: Beyond Clicks

How do you test online ads and go beyond just counting "clicks"?

A huge question that the ad industry and ad research biz are grappling with right now.

In just the past month, Nielsen, comScore (Mediametrix) and Compete have launched new online ad testing services that are supposed to solve the problem. Perhaps, they are reacting to a hot (and well financed) new entry into this market called Vizu.

Vizu, (www.vizu.com) a San Francisco-based online polling company, recently introduced
Ad Catalyst, an online ad testing service that goes beyond their competitors' static approach.
Ad Catalyst measures your online ads in real-time and breaks down your campaign's effectiveness by frequency of exposure, time period, creative unit, etc. and puts the info at your fingertips 24/7 (on a real "dashboard").

UpNext

Imagine a Virtual 3-D New York City where you can fly through like SuperMan and drop into any building and view its contents.

UpNext is a tiny 4-person NY startup developing extremely detailed 3D maps for the internet browser. UpNext (www.upnext.com) only maps Manhattan right now (they aim to map Boston and San Francisco by mid 2008), but it is "a powerful demonstration of how 3-D experiences could soon become more mainstream". (from TechCrunch). BRUNI PR is currently pitching UpNext.

Aviary strips Hillary Clinton

Aviary was the highlight of this week's New York Tech Meetup. This Flash-based artist tool is amazing and won rave reviews from a tough technologist audience. We'll be hearing more about Aviary in the future, no doubt

Business Week: CEOs lose Billions

The top five CEOs lost over $1 billion during the past several wks, thx to the stock market drop, according to a major Business Week story released today. David Leach, of Strategic Apex Group, a Bruni PR client, is quoted. Who pitched BW on the idea? The answer is Bruni PR. Reporter Ben Steverman does an outstanding job in analyzing the damage done.

Check out :
businessweek.com

Yes.com: Radio 2.0 and RSS

Yes.com, a radio playlist social media site, is racking up some nice traffic numbers these days. You can find the playlists of over 3,000 radio stations and chat about the songs as they are playing in realtime with other fans of that particular station. I've been testdriving Yes.com and find it impressive. Founder Daniel Goldscheider has big plans for Yes.com, and has been quietly adding RSS feeds to the site. You can chat about breaking news stories coming out of TechCrunch, GigaOM and other sites in real time.

NYers at the Crunchies

No one was surprised that Facebook, Digg, the iPhone, zoho, meebo and others won top awards at the Crunchies last nite. What surprised me was the presence of NY startups that competed for the awards. Tumblr, the multimedia micro-blog, and UpNext, the 3d search/social media site, Etsy, Viewdle and others were in the house and won praise/ attention. Kudos also to Mogulus, which powered the Crunchies TV livestreaming show.

Acid Jazz from Soundclick

Soundclick clicks w/ Web2NewYork Meetup

They've been around for over ten years, but don't get the attention that AmieStreet and other NY-based indy music downloads sites get these days. Soundclick was the highlight of a lively Web2NewYork Meetup last Tuesday nite at the Gallery Bar in the LES of NYC.
From their site:
"You will find well-known artists such as Janet Jackson, Sarah McLachlan, Moby, Gravediggaz, PM Dawn, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Letters To Cleo. But the driving force are hundreds of thousands of great unsigned bands looking for their big break."
Soundclick has
more than 50,000 new songs approved each month. They are seeking more advertisers, and will surely find them. VCs and investors need not apply. Soundclick is fully funded and has been around long enough not to worry about burn rates.

Macworld draws record livestreaming audience

Macworld was a historic livestreaming milestone.

Sure, it wasn't "Super Bowl" network TV ratings, but about 6,000 people watched the Jobs speech live on five separate Mogulus TV channels.

The coverage of The Digital Lifestyle channel (http://www.mogulus.com/tdl), which had experts reporting live from a studio and getting real-time information from reporters on the ground, was a great success and received very positive feedback from viewers.
Mogulus is a Bruni PR client.

NY Startups To Watch in 2008

Which NY startups are worth watching in 2008?

Here's the Bruni PR list:




Kaltura -- innovative collaborative video editing

AmieStreet -- indy music site with unique pricing formula

GroundReport --- hot new citizen journalism TV website

Urbis.com -- literary/social media site eyed by major publishing houses

Blip.TV -- the hottest video on demand site around

Mogulus -- livestreaming on the Web (a Bruni PR client)

Clickable -- run your online ad campaign in a box

StreetEasy.com -- still the hottest Real Estate site in town (former client)

Wixi --- personal/social media search engine

Tumblr -- like Twitter but with video/music/media diaries

The Ladders -- leading job search startup

Animoto --- do it yourself music video creation

Etsy --- your place to buy/sell "all things handmade"

Future Scanners --- Digg with a predictions on the future

Snooth -- wine lovers' social media site

Unype --- 3d Virtual World

Electric Sheep --- the guys who build stuff for Second Life

Yuxt -- online video bookmarking

Motionbox -- online video bookmarking

KickApps --- user generated video

IMEEM --- what's on your playlist

BlockSavvy --- urban culture social media site funded by Damon Dash

AdItAll -- do it yourself tv ads

Magnify --- video community

Raketu --- VoIP service cheaper than Skype

MyBlueZebra --- click to call

Yes.com --- radio lovers' social media /rating site

RecordMyCall --- phone call recording Web service

LinkExperts -- organic search links consultants

JobThread --- job classifieds in a box