Christopher Craft is a speaker and the author of O.P.E.N. Routine: Four Components to Personal Branding Excellence.

With Google+, Google is forming productive partnerships and building relationships with content/media makers from a variety of verticals. Their biggest push is in sports and entertainment.

Why are they doing this?

I was fortunate to have a recent conversation with Google’s Iska Hain about their big “why” concerning Google+’s work with sports influencers and she explained:

“In order to effectively build a community, you need to have the voices from many different perspectives ­ the passionate fan, the informed expert, or the newly converted. We believe sports users want to connect in a deeper, more meaningful way ­ connected by way of their common interests.”

I have direct experience with the work the Google+ teams are doing with media entities and content creators. In late January of this year, my agency received an email from a Google+ team member who was interested in working with our client Bomani Jones on special content for the NFL Combine. It’s not everyday that you receive an email from Google. They’re not the spamming type so I knew that it was something official. We eventually partnered with them to produce a well­-received Hangout On Air discussing post­-combine topics. My eyes were opened to the amount of attention that Google is giving to building authority for its influential users.

Building community is their transparent goal, but it’s no secret of the impact all of this will have on personalized search and distributed media content. The possibilities are enormous.

My conversation with Hain went beyond Google’s goals, motives, and mission behind Google+’s influencer engagement activities. Here are some observations and items from my experience, research, and our discussion:

Google’s Advantage

Google+ has a clear advantage over other social networks: They “own” search.

This is why they don’t seem to be terribly concerned about growing their membership at a certain pace (though they’re doing fine in that department ranking 2nd of all social networks in monthly active users). They know what they’re doing by positioning themselves to be the center of online authority. Their motives were clear with Google Authorship being one of the early features of Google+.

Their other clear advantage is access to talent. For example, they can handpick YouTube stars for easy collaborations.

Partnerships galore

Google+ has partnered with top global leagues like the NBA, NFL, and MLB, premier professional teams, and global athletes like David Beckham and Virender Sehwag. They’ve also done more one­off partnerships recently with personalities, athletes, and media entities of all kinds.

Not only does this allow these brands to attract their fans to the platform but it also gives Google+ the opportunity to bring brands, media, and fans together for compelling mashups.

Just hanging out (on air)

Google+ is constantly deploying new features that allows influencers to use Hangouts as platforms for real show­like production and interaction. Check out the Hangout they conducted with 2013 NBA All­Star and 2012­2013 scoring champion, Carmelo Anthony.

They will be making announcements of new Hangout features at their upcoming Google I/O 2013 event.

Strategic locations

Google offices have been springing up in different cities for a while now. The interesting part is how they’re strategically positioning Google+ teams to have access to specific verticals.

This reach gives them access to a wide variety of sports influencers. Their teams move around quite a bit, especially for major events; but their influencer relation crews in certain cities have focuses that stick (i.e. Atlanta:Football and Austin:Music).

The company currently has stateside teams in Boston, New York, Austin, Atlanta, Chicago, Miami, Denver, and San Francisco and international teams in Europe, South America, and Asia.

Communities

When Google+ unveiled Communities, they gave influencers a means to engage with their stakeholders in a more interactive way. Conversation can now flow both directions. This is crucial for the rapid fire nature of sports. Hain summarized this in our conversation:

“Google+ communities are an online place to explore and engage in the topics that matter most to you. From SEC Football to Knitting, communities afford users a place for users to connect with others who share their interests, using Google+ Hangouts, Photos or YouTube videos, for example.”

What does this mean for you?

Google established Google+ for the people.

My interactions with their team for various projects has featured overflowing support and concern for the development and distribution of good content. This Google-­supported content was well received by the fans of our clients. These experiences excited me and inspired me to write this article.

Your voice is valuable and has the opportunity to reach the people who value your platform.

Christopher Craft is a speaker and the author of O.P.E.N. Routine: Four Components to Personal Branding Excellence. He’s also the Chief Visionary at Nao Media and Consulting, a digital agency for the sports and entertainment industries. You can follow Chris on Twitter, connect with him on LinkedIn, and circle him on Google+.

photo credit: Scott Ableman via photopin cc

One is the remote control for my TV, another for my surround-sound receiver. One is for my blue-ray player, another is for the PVR, and yet another one is for no discernible purpose.

But if I wasn’t half the lazy idiot I sadly am, I could replace them all with a simple app on my iPhone or iPad, like Roomie.

We’re getting fairly used to our mobile devices being remote controls for the various aspects of our digital and not-so-digital lives. Your LG fridge has an IP address, can text you when food is going bad, and can be controlled by your phone. Home security systems that come complete with an app, and can tell you what’s happening in your home, are almost the norm.

OnStar gives your car a remote control too, and if it’s not exactly a James Bond-style actually-drive-your-car-by-remote app, it at least tells you the condition of your battery, how much gas you have, and lets you remotely unlock your vehicle. (Oh, and by the way, if you do want to drive your car by remote control, just buy the Chinese BYD Su Rui, an ordinary 5-seater sedan that yes, can be driven by remote control — at 1.2 miles per hour.)

Next week at VentureBeat’s Mobile Summit 2013, we’re going to be talking about mobile as a remote control for life. Security systems, cars, homes, appliances: everything modern, seemingly, has a remote control.

Even you.

One of the things we’re increasingly using our mobile phones/remote control is to control ourselves. Sometimes with little devices like a Fitbit or an Up, but often also simply with our phones and apps like Digifit, which monitors and tracks our fitness and workouts. Others help us get better sleep, stop smoking, and walk more, simply by letting us set goals, and then holding us to them.

One, the Gain Fitness app, helps us to manage our fitness with one simple feature: the workout streak tracker. Although the app does other things, it tracks every day you do a workout, and every day you do not. Miss one, skip one, or avoid one, and your workout streak is broken, and you start back down at zero. Essentially, it’s a simple motivational trick to make yourself do what you know you really want to do, but sometimes don’t feel like.

In essence, a remote control.

More on devices, gadgets, the internet of things, and the mobile computers we call phones that are enabling this remote control trend at Mobile Summit 2013, April 1-2 in Sausalito, California.

photo credit: Stéfan via photopin cc

The Creative Artists Agency is raising a $20 million venture capital fund, according to an SEC filing.

This is interesting for a number of reasons. One, smaller venture capital funds, or ‘micro-VCs,’ have gained momentum in the past few years. A Kauffman report issued in 2012 found that the best-performing venture capital funds are under $250 million, and many institutional investors want to get in early with promising startups who are wary of taking money from big firms. Secondly, many corporations are forming venture arms to capitalize on the innovation happening in the tech world. Investing in startups not only yields potential returns, but can also help businesses stay ahead of the curve.

Add these forces to the increasingly hip perspective that mainstream America is taking of Silicon Valley, Los Angeles’ emerging startup scene, and the rise of celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Jessica Alba in the tech world, and you understand why a Hollywood talent agency might want to dabble in venture capital.

Back in 2007, CAA attempted to raise a $150 to $200 million venture capital fund to invest in startups in the digital/entertainment sector. The company worked with well-known venture firm Draper Fisher Jurveston on the project, but it never came to fruition. Around the same time, talent agency William Morris partnered with Accel Partners and Venrock on a similar endeavor, to no avail.

Now, CAA is back at it again. Its clients include a Who’s Who list of Hollywood celebrities, including Will Smith, Meryl Streep, and Steven Spielberg. CAA also negotiates deals for major corporations like Coca-Cola, Dell, and Mattel. Ultimately, talent agencies and venture firms have the same goal- to find and sign the Next Big Thing.

We will see whether intuition for stardom translates into a intuition for startup success.

This story was first reported by Fortune.

YouTube announced this morning that its app is now available on the Nintendo Wii U. This is obviously a big deal for Nintendo, which is trying to own the living room entertainment experience, as the app is not just available for free download — it’s featured right on the Wii U’s main menu.

Users can use the soft keyboard on the Wii U’s GamePad, which also doubles as a remote control for your standard TV content, to search for videos:

Videos will play on your big-screen TV in full high-definition at up to 1080P resolution, and while the video plays on your TV, the video details, description, and author data display on the GamePad. Naturally, since you’re signed in to your Google account, you’ll also have access to your channels, favorites, and history.

Whether this will help Nintendo in its attempt to make the Wii U the center of the living room entertainment experience is hard to say, but it is at least a statement that the company is here to play. With standard TV, online video, video conferencing, gaming, and more, the statement is getting bigger and bigger.

But the competition is fierce and has been there for a while.

Good luck!

photo credit: wiiu-spiele.com via photopin cc

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Hours before the screening of Bravo’s Start-Ups Silicon Valley, Ben and Hermione Way and the rest of the cast are a bundle of nerves. This is the first time they’ll watch an episode of the show that polarized Silicon Valley. It has been a year in the making. I join them at The Villa, the gilded San Francisco mansion that is prominently featured in show.

The show features mansions, abundant wealth, flashy cars, good-looking people. It has received criticism for its inaccurate depiction of geeks in Silicon Valley. Let’s be honest: watching five programmers awkwardly attempt to pick up girls isn’t exactly the stuff of reality TV.

Randi Zuckerberg, executive producer of the series, told me that she came on board after the protagonists had already been cast, deliberately chosen for their success, good looks, and willingness to strip on national television. In the first episode, every cast member is featured in their undies — it’s almost a rite of passage. She intimated at the possibility of a second series if this one proves to be a success.

In her opening address, Zuckerberg, sister of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, addressed her critics. “If you don’t like strong, beautiful women … if you don’t like watching hot people having fun in a nice house,” don’t bother tuning in.

Expect drama to unfold between Hermione Way and Sarah Austin. There can only be one leading blonde in Silicon Valley.

While Way is the lovable ditz (hungover, she passes out under angel investor Dave McClure’s conference table before a pitch), Austin has been cast as the show’s villainess. In the opening episode, she is living in the Four Seasons for free in exchange for running the hotel’s social media and building their brand. She claims to charge $10,000 per tweet, has an army of personal stylists, and orders room service for her dog.

Billed as an inside look at the local tech scene, the show is entertainment gold. It can best be described as “Silicon Valley for Middle America.” It’s on tonight — let us know what you think!

Hermione Way, one of the stars of the upcoming Bravo show Start-Ups: Silicon Valley, is probably just what network executives had in mind when they invented “reality TV.”

For that reason, she’s not at all the sort of person Silicon Valley wants to represent itself. And that makes her an extremely polarizing figure.

When she got cast in the show, she stopped being just another lovable, sexy, moderately-followed, and sometimes-outlandish blogger — and she started to become the butt of the real Silicon Valley’s jokes. “She’s not a geek!” show critics have screamed. “She’s participating in the dumbing down of Silicon Valley!” others have cried. “How dare she call herself an entrepreneur!”

But who is this woman at the center of Silicon Valley’s latest scandal?

Twenty-seven-year-old Way calls herself a crazy gal from Britain, says she has no regrets, and admits to having no qualms about openly talking about typically taboo topics such as sex on Facebook or Twitter, which she does frequently.

“I got here by the seat of my pants, ignoring the rules,” she told me.

I first met her about two years ago at a party hosted by a friend at an apartment in the Russian Hill neighborhood of San Francisco. The party was thrown in my honor, but she was the center of attention.

That wasn’t the only time she was at the heart of the action. At a technology conference in Palm Springs, Way rescued me from an endless cavalcade of drab entrepreneurs hoping to pick my brain (or worse). She paraded around a Facebook press conference last year like a woman who knew exactly where her next story was coming from. Later, at a post-event private party, she took a puff of Snoop Dog’s joint onstage, during the rapper’s set.

At Facebook’s f8 developer conference in September 2011. From right: Hermione Way, Ben Parr, Jennifer Van Grove, Robyn Peterson.

Her beauty, charm, and accent are mesmerizing, at least to me and to plenty of men I know.

“You will always notice her if she is in room. She is very charismatic — and very noticeable,” our mutual friend Ben Parr told me.

And the insults that have come her way since joining Bravo’s show? She’s taking those mostly in stride.

“For a place that’s supposed to be so open to change, and open to innovation, and open to new ideas, it’s incredible that the whole of Silicon Valley seems so against this TV show,” she told me when we caught up over an hour-long chat about the show. “I think the real question is, why wouldn’t any entrepreneur not want to be on a TV show … to get your idea in front of millions of Americans and worldwide? I think you’d be crazy not to do a TV show.”

From Britain, with love

Born in Exeter, U.K., Way spent of much of her childhood with her mother, while her brother Ben was reared by her father. (Ben is also on Bravo’s show now.) Her parents split when she was two, and she had little interaction with her brother until he moved to San Francisco in September, 2011.

Way’s tech journey started roughly five years ago in London, where she started blogging for TechCrunch Europe.

“I had a huge interest in the industry, and it was amazing to me, just the fast-paced nature of it … all my friends were getting ideas off the ground,” she said. “I kept writing about Silicon Valley and hearing about Silicon Valley, and one day I literally decided I had to be in Silicon Valley. I couldn’t be in the second most important place in technology in the world. I had to get to number one.”

Eventually, Way convinced the blog The Next Web to hire her to run its video operations out of San Francisco. She packed her bags and moved to the city of entrepreneurial ambitions in December 2010. She still serves as video director for The Next Web. (Note: VentureBeat competes with TechCrunch and The Next Web.)

Once stateside, Way said she noticed a convergence happening between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. She took an active interest in bringing the two regions together, bought the domain hollywoodmeetssiliconvalley.com, and started dreaming up ideas for a television show themed around life in the valley.

In fact, a year and a half ago, at that very same technology conference I mentioned earlier, I recall Way talking about her post-conference plans to meet with television executives. Her TV talk didn’t strike me as driven by an need to attach her name to something greater than her worth, though I did pick up a hint of Hollywood-itis.

She took the meetings, but nothing came of them. Instead, a few months later, she pitched Bravo representatives on producing a show about the pressure and intensity of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. The timing coincided with Bravo’s search for young, confident professionals with big personalities to cast in a reality show.

“I told them I wanted to produce [a show], and they said, ‘You’re quite a character. You’re pretty crazy. Why don’t you be in the show?’”

A pretty girl dressed up as an entrepreneur

Source: Hermione Way/Facebook

Hermione with brother Ben

Cast she was. The problem is that Silicon Valley, and the greater Bay Area, is defined by geniuses, inventors, builders, bold-thinkers, and people who generally look more like geeks. So when a pretty girl flaunting a social media background comes around and lands a television show about entrepreneurship in the area, people tend to get judgmental.

Revered entrepreneur-turned-investor Kevin Rose thumbed his nose at an early offer to join the show. His, “yuck, please stay in LA,” tweet could stand in for the opinions of many others in the industry.

oh boy, a new "silicon valley reality show" yuck, please stay in LA: twitpic.com/6vp80w/full—
Kevin Rose (@kevinrose) October 05, 2011

In an open letter to Start-Ups: Silicon Valley show producer Randi Zuckerberg, journalist Sarah Lacy chastised Mark Zuckerberg’s famous sister for selling out.

“She has sold her industry and her generation out, and there’s little any of the real entrepreneurs can say other than sit there, mouth agape, wondering why the hell she would do this,” Lacy wrote in April after a preview for the show hit the web. “I hope she made plenty of money off the deal, because as far as I’m concerned she’s sold her Silicon Valley soul for 15 minutes of fame on basic cable.”

The issue seems to be that Way and her castmates are mere wannabes, pretty people dressed up like entrepreneurs, frat boys and sorority girls on a giant, fame-seeking bender. They make Silicon Valley look like something it’s not, the argument goes. They stand for everything Silicon Valley is not.

Way, the budding entrepreneur, begs to differ.

On the show, she said, viewers will watch as she and Ben set about raising funds for their health-focused startup Ignite, a startup they co-founded in May of this year.

Spoiler alert: The two are successful in their fundraising endeavors, which gives some credibility to their hardware-software play that supposedly turns a person’s iPhone into a type of Wii Fit board. How much they managed to raise, I don’t know.

Too sexy for Silicon Valley

“I personally believe her intelligence is underestimated,” Parr told me. “She’s usually a step ahead of most everybody else … I think most people write her off because she’s more free-spirited [than others].”

Way’reputation may also be marred, at least in the eyes of hypercritical Valley insiders, by a carefree attitude so unencumbered that she doesn’t fret about sharing photos of her kissing girls or posting details about her sex life on Facebook or Twitter.

Debate on whether pre-cum can get you pregnant or not?—
  (@hermioneway) October 04, 2012

She doesn’t feel like she has to apologize for the candor.

“I like orgasms, and I don’t mind sharing that I like orgasms.

“I am who I am, and I don’t feel like I should change who I am because I’m worried about what other people think,” Way said. “Do I like sex? Yea, I’m a 27-year-old single girl who’s dating … I know I can be a little bit crass to some people, but at the end of the day that’s just who I am.”

Her dating life, to no surprise, will be a part of the show.

It’s the dating choices of bombshell Start-Ups: Silicon Valley cast member Sarah Austin, however, that are bound to cause the most drama on the show. Way and Austin, once friends, had a falling out at South by Southwest in March of this year. So when Austin starts dating Way’s brother Ben, the tension between the blonde starlets intensifies.

Way also seems to think of herself as more entrepreneurially-minded than Pop17 web personality Austin, who she helped recruit for the show after an original cast member dropped out. “People can think what they like about Sarah, but I do view myself differently than her. You have to watch the show to see that drama.”

As to her own Silicon Valley credentials, Way had this to say:

To anyone who says that I’m a nobody … I have to say that I’ve dedicated my entire working life to technology and startups, whether it’s writing about them or starting them. Silicon Valley is an ecosystem. There are the entrepreneurs, the investors, the bloggers, and just because you’re a blogger and you don’t start companies, it doesn’t mean you’re not apart of the ecosystem.

Must-watch TV?

Business. Drama. Parties. These are all plot elements Way said will be broadcast to Bravo viewers each Monday night. And nothing is scripted, she insisted.

“Everyone thinks [the show] is going to be all about partying, and there is that aspect, but people in Silicon Valley do party,” Way said. “There are four or five events on every night. But I think there’s going to be a lot more business than you’d expect.”

Say what you will about Way and the rest of the cast, I know I’ll be watching, if only because I happen to enjoy Housewives-caliber drama. And let’s be honest, to ignore the seedier side to Silicon Valley is to ignore reality.

Photo credits: Hermione Way/Facebook

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Nintendo entered the media battlefield today with the introduction of its Nintendo TVii service that will be included for free on its upcoming Wii U game console.

In a somewhat unexpected move, Nintendo showed off the Nintendo TVii service today in an attempt to catch up with its media-savvy console rivals, the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Nintendo also wants people to use the Wii U instead of media streamers like the Apple TV, Boxee, and Roku.

Nintendo TVii streams movies, TV, and sports from your cable box and from services like Netflix, Amazon Instant, and Hulu Plus. It also connects with your social networks so you can comment on content you’re watching.

The Wii U launches Nov. 18 with two different models — one is the “basic” white edition for $300, and the other is a “deluxe” black edition for $350. Nintendo TVii is an extra that could help someone decide to buy a Wii U or at least deter someone from choosing an Xbox or PS3 because the Wii U didn’t have media options.

Check out the Nintendo TVii service in the video below.

The first users of Minit, an iPhone app to record and screen short videos, may have found themselves revealing intimate life stories to Noa Tishby, a model, producer, actress, and in a recent development, a tech entrepreneur.

“Minit is a platform for personal stories,” Tishby explained. “It is in a way like having your own reality show.” The Israeli starlet recently joined the Tel Aviv-based startup to head up business development.

Got a minute and a story to share? The recently launched app is available for free on the App Store. Sign up, and you’ll be led through a wizard to help you get started. The app is integrated with Facebook and Twitter to help users quickly discover which friends are registered. (Unless you happen to be Israeli, you’ll probably be the first in your extended network.)

Like Twitter, you can follow users whether you know them or not — unsurprisingly, Tishby has the most followers.

Once you fill out a profile, a video stream will appear with 60-second clips. Minit users are chatting about relationships, style, and a variety of light-hearted topics — if you’re incentivized to do so, you can issue a video comment in response. Videos can be intimately shared between friends, or publicly broadcast to the world.

The team describes Minit as “100% video. No filters. No text. No photos. No bull.” Tishby prefers the snappy term, “voicemail for video”, and told me that she routinely uses the app to send messages to friends while boarding international flights.

It sounds promising, but the user interface is still a bit raw. I’m told its doable (it takes a long thumbnail tap) but I couldn’t find an easy way to delete clips once they’re posted. I had a few technical issues with the sound quality, and the videos are slow to load. To be fair, the app is still in the nascent stages of development.

The company may have landed a supermodel, but it faces strong competition from headline-grabbing social video startups, like Airtime and Socialcam. However, with all the recent press about celebrity investors, this may be one of the few cases where one has come on board as a cofounder.

When the three Israeli developers behind Minit approached her, Tishby told me she was intrigued by the nexus between entertainment and technology. “I have been approached by tech companies in the U.S. and Israel that wanted me to partner with them,” said Tishby, adding that she was “floored” by the concept for Minit.

The app is self-funded, but Tishby told me they are in the process of reaching out to potential investors to secure a first round.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Startup GetGlue is a two-year-old social network for entertainment lovers. Today, it’s using more than 500 million data points on TV viewers’ behaviors, attitudes, and preferences to launch a new application for the iPad to give people a better way to discover what to watch.

GetGlue HD, as the experience is called, is both a dynamic guide for television watching that pivots around each person’s tastes and a second-screen assistant for following favorite shows.

Until now, GetGlue has been largely focused on encouraging TV fanatics to check in to what they’re watching and share the experience with friends. The New York-based startup has struggled to find an audience interested its programming, despite attracting $12 million in support from top-notch investors at the start of the year. The service currently has just 3 million users.

The GetGlue HD application for iPad, five months in the making, seeks to make the experience far more compelling for the average person by tapping into the treasure trove of entertainment data the startup has collected in the past two years.

“At the beginning of this year, we sat down and said, ‘How can we return the value of all this data back to our community? What can we do now that we know so much about how people connect around TV?’,” GetGlue founder and CEO Alex Iskold told VentureBeat. “We realized that we were in a position to re-imagine how people discover things both on the second screen and on the first screen.”

The new HD application consists of two main parts — the guide and the feed — to address content discovery on television and iPad screens.

The guide

The guide is GetGlue’s way of rethinking the traditional TV guide. It highlights new episodes for shows that a person has expressed interest in and features the user’s favorite movies currently appearing on air; it also recommends new selections to watch and connects to Netflix, iTunes, and Amazon.

The guide is a right-now entity with a list of what to watch in the moment, though it also summarizes must-see upcoming content such as season premieres and finales, major television events, awards shows, and movies soon to arrive in theaters. It integrates with cable providers for accurate date, time, and channel listings, and ranks and prioritizes content by a person’s tastes. It even includes scores from sporting events.

The guide is also designed to highlight the best of GetGlue’s existing social features.

“This is the first social guide in TV … and it’s a very cool experience,” Iskold said. “For each show, you can see which of your friends are watching it right now, and you can see what’s trending overall with GetGlue’s community.”

The feed is a mix of friends’ relevant activities on GetGlue alongside the status updates, as sourced from official social channels, associated with a person’s favorite shows. Each show has its own feed, visible to users after they check in to a particular piece of content.

Perhaps most interesting is that check-ins have faded into the background of an experience that now pivots around discovery. Check-ins haven’t been deemphasized, Iskold insisted, but they’re clearly more like the plumbing that powers the app and less the reason to open and use GetGlue HD.

This seems like a smart move. Entertainment check-ins or fancy TV tags in the case of competitor IntoNow, owned by Yahoo, do little to add to a person’s enjoyment of content. Even Iskold admitted as much.

“We need to give people more utility, because check-ins are fun but they’re not a utility,” he said. “People want more content.”

If GetGlue has done its job right, the HD application should be what you instinctively pick up before, during, and after every TV viewing experience.

GetGlue will follow the iPad release with similar HD apps this fall for iPhone, Android, and the web.

Photo credit: kotofoto/Flickr

The streaming video company, which specializes in providing online access to network television content, brought in $420 million in revenue in 2011, Kilar said in a blog post on the company’s 2011 performance.

The revenue figure is up 60 percent from 2010, though it is less than the $500 million revenue estimate projected back in September. Hulu also grew Hulu Plus, its all-you-can-eat $8 per month offering, to a subscriber base of 1.5 million paying customers.

“Hulu Plus has reached 1.5 million paid subscribers faster than any video subscription service launch (online or offline) in U.S. history,” Kilar claimed. “We expect our subscription services to account for more than half of Hulu’s overall business later this year.”

Kilar is so confident in Hulu’s business, and its ability to turn a profit with a dual ad-subscription revenue stream, that he said the company will spend roughly $500 million — $80 million more than it made in 2011 — on acquiring new content for the service in 2012.

How much does $500 million buy exactly? In the realm of digital content rights, not so much. Competitor Netflix is said to be paying $30 million for each DreamWorks picture it gets. Sure, that’s likely a much higher premium than Hulu is paying for say something like the rights to Community or CW content, but you get the idea.

And without getting a look at Hulu’s books, it’s difficult to know just how well Hulu is really doing. Yes, the business is growing, subscribers are signing up to pay monthly fees and its content library is expanding at a healthy rate — content grew by 40 percent versus 2010, Kilar said — but Hulu is in a risky business, and the company knows it. Lest we forget, it wasn’t that long ago when Hulu was ready to throw the baby out with the bath water.

It’s not in the same league as Facebook or a Twitter, or even half the size of Instagram, but GetGlue’s highly-specialized social network for entertainment watchers could be on its way to superstardom.

On GetGlue, more than two million die-hard entertainment fans check-in to television shows and movies, over the web or from mobile devices, to share their enthusiasm and get rewards for their viewing behaviors. Seventy five major television networks have already taken notice, and now investors are doubling-down, placing a $12 million bet on the startup’s chances at mainstream fame.

“2011 was a year where we were doing a lot of innovation in the social TV space,” GetGlue founder and CEO Alex Iskold told VentureBeat. “With this financing, we can continue to play a market-defining role as social television goes mainstream.”

But what is social television, exactly? It’s a niche section of social networking dedicated entirely to (usually influential) entertainment enthusiasts, and the networks and brands that want to reach them.

The space started to take shape in late 2009 and early 2010 with the launch of GetGlue and several other similarly purposed services such as Philo (shutdown after being acquired by Local Response), Miso and Comcast’s Turnerfish, all of which proffer a second screen application experience for entertainment-sharing and chatter. Social television has since evolved to include network-branded applications around popular shows. And, perhaps the biggest sign of a genre-in-the-making, Yahoo acquired television-tagging application IntoNow just a few months after it launched.

Whether mainstream viewers want to take part in these back-channel behaviors is questionable. There’s more than enough evidence to support the idea. After all, a growing number of TV watchers are multitaskers who use their tablets or smartphones for additional stimulation. But it’s taken GetGlue, one of the leaders in the space, more than two years to get to two million members. We’re talking small potatoes compared to Facebook’s 800 million members or the 15 million users of photo-sharing sensation Instagram.

GetGlue’s small user base could be a bit misleading. Application users are an extremely active bunch. Altogether, they have engaged with GetGlue more than 350 million times by checking-in to content, or leaving a rating or review. And the startup saw hockey-sticky growth in check-ins in 2011 — with the exception of December — Iskold said. In November 2011 alone, GetGlue had almost 20 million check-ins.

It’s enough activity that major television networks have run upwards of 680 badge and sticker-style promotions around their shows on the service. And more than 30 networks have embedded GetGlue check-in functionality into their own second-screen applications. The startup made money in 2011 with show sponsorships, said Iskold. Big brands such as Pepsi, HTC, Coke and the Gap all sponsored GetGlue show rewards and content (usually involving the same shows that they were already sponsoring on television).

GetGlue, which released a new version of its flagship iPhone app and revamped its website Monday, will focus its 2012 road map on personalizing the entertainment guide for the user, introducing more supplemental show content and working to allow networks to better customize their experience, Iskold said.

So could this be the breakout year for social television and GetGlue? We’ll be watching (pun intended).

GetGlue’s $12 million round of financing was led by New York-based RHO Ventures. Investors in the startup’s previous $6 million Series C round — Time Warner, RE Ventures and Union Ventures — all re-upped in the new round.

Vivid for Google TV promises Vivid subscribers free access to porn 24 hours a day — in high definition, no less. Programming includes adult movies, celebrity sex tapes, XXX parodies of popular superheroes and educational videos (of the adult variety, presumably), according to the announcement.

The dedicated channel for porn is said to be the first of its kind and will up the sex appeal of Google’s modest entertainment platform.

“Vivid for Google TV gives our fans a new way to enjoy Vivid movies in high quality HD and with other benefits that provide a very appealing, highly enjoyable, and user friendly experience,” Steven Hirsch, co-founder and co-chairman of Vivid, said. “We spent more than a year developing a code base for a robust, standalone Internet-TV channel with a friendly interface for the consumer.”

Google TV has heretofore underwhelmed consumers, but it’s just been revamped with an improved interface and Android applications. Sounds enticing, right? Okay, maybe not. So perhaps porn will better help the Google TV cause. At the very least, splashy headlines announcing free porn will net Google TV some much-needed press and attention.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Television-tagging application IntoNow has launched for the iPad, and it now matches tagged content to real-time news and updates, parent company Yahoo announced today at a press event in Sunnyvale.

IntoNow is the iPhone and Android application that uses patented technology to listen to and identify millions of television and movie titles, in a similar fashion to how Shazam identifies music. The technology originated at Auditude, but the app was spun out as its own entity. Yahoo acquired IntoNow in April 2011, just 12 weeks after the then nascent startup launched its iPhone app in the App Store.

Available for free on the App Store, IntoNow for iPad is designed to engage the multitasking television viewer. It tags live and time-shifted broadcast television content, highlights related content, and recommends television shows and movies based on your tagging behaviors and preferences.

The app’s most compelling feature, however, is its ability to discover and feature real-time content — in the form of tweets, news headlines or play-by-play sports updates — related to what the user is watching.

IntoNow for iPad, explained product manager Adam Cahan in a demonstration of the application, is taking closed captioning data and analyzing it using Yahoo Core technology, the company’s personalization and optimization engine. It then works to understand show content and context, matches that information against current news items, and surfaces results in the right-hand sidebar of the application.

Cahan referred to the process as ambient-style computing, and said that IntoNow will focus on this technology to better answer the question of “what’s next?” in the second-screen entertainment environment.

IntoNow had close to 600,000 users and was averaging 25,000 to 35,000 tags per day prior to being acquired by Yahoo. Cahan disclosed that, to date, IntoNow has been downloaded more than 1.6 million times on Android phones and iOS devices.

The company announced a partnership with DirecTV Thursday that will allow its users to easily find and share what they’re watching via a DirecTV set-top box when checking in from the Miso iPhone app.

“We thought the cable and MSO (satellites) were the most natural paths because that’s where most people are watching TV”, Miso CEO Somrat Niyogi told VentureBeat. “This is a big step for us, but we have more to come for users.”

Miso’s service, which has about 200,000 users to date, works by allowing people to check-in, rate, comment, earn badges and complete quizzes while watching things on television. Right now, users have to search from a list of programs to find what they’re currently watching.

The new DirecTV integration, however, lets Miso users see the exact show they’re watching so they will no longer have to manually search from a list of programs — provided that the iPhone is connected to the same wi-fi network as the set-top box. The new functionality is available as of today.

One of the first questions I asked Niyogi, who I initially interviewed over a year ago, had to do with when Miso would add functionality that allowed its users to automate the check-in process when watching television — especially while viewing on streaming services like Netflix and Hulu.

“We haven’t gone that [automated check-in] route because we all have our guilty pleasures (Jersey Shore?) that we don’t want anyone to know we watch. Some people want that to remain private,” he told me.

But, that doesn’t mean the company won’t explore automated features in the future, he added.

Niyogi said the company plans to roll out support in the future for additional content service providers (like Comcast, AT&T Uverse and Dish Network) as well as many popular set-top boxes (such as Boxee, Roku and Apple TV).

Founded in March 2010, the San Francisco, California-based startup has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Google Ventures, Keith Rabois, YouTube cofounder Jawed Karim, and early Google employees Georges Harik, Richard Chen, Thomas Korte, and Kurt Abrahamson. It faces competition in the marketplace from similar services like GetGlue, SnappyTV and Foursquare.

For those of you who don’t have DirecTV service, we’ve embedded a demo video of Miso’s set-top box integration below.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

American Airlines on Monday announced it would start offering the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 as an in-flight entertainment device on select flights. It plans to deploy 6,000 Samsung tablets in premium-level cabins of some transcontinental and international flights.

This will be the first time a North American airline has offered a branded tablet for in-flight entertainment. It’s also a sign that tablet PCs are increasingly becoming the go-to entertainment device for the luxury class.

“We are working hard to revitalize our fleet and invest wisely in new products and services to modernize and enhance the travel experience,” said Virasb Vahidi, American’s Chief Commercial Officer, in a statement. “Working with Samsung to outfit our premium cabins with the innovative Galaxy Tab will give our premium customers a modern and innovative in-flight entertainment experience.”

The Galaxy Tab 10.1 is a larger and more powerful version of the original Galaxy Tab. Samsung is touting the device as the “world’s thinnest tablet” at just 8.6 millimeters. The Wi-Fi only tablet has a 10.1-inch screen, Android 3.1 preloaded, and an Nvidia Tegra 2 dual-core processor.

So what does “social entertainment” mean exactly? Instead of trying to compete with Facebook as a social network — a game Myspace has clearly lost since it’s been bleeding users steadily while Facebook has exploded in popularity over the last few years — the new Myspace will focus on sharing and finding music, television, games, moves, and photos. There’s also a new mobile version of the site in the works for mid-November that won’t require a Myspace account.

The News Corp.-owned website is also trying to reposition itself in other ways: It’s going by Myspace now, dropping the second capital letter as if it were some sort of vestigial appendage, and its new logo takes the word “space” literally with a gaping empty bracket — perhaps inadvertently revealing the void that remains in Myspace’s identity.

Judging from the screenshots, which inspire more hope than the previous redesign photos, Myspace is going for a cleaner and more elegant design with its pages — a far cry from the nightmarish page design that had become synonymous with the service. Users will be able to toggle between three different homepage views: The traditional list view, a magazine-like grid view, and a video-focused “play view.”

You won’t be trapped in the Myspace universe either. The new version of the site will let you share media from outside sources and broadcast yourself to Facebook and Twitter. There will also be loyalty mechanisms to promote profiles of users that contribute heavily to the community, including badges that users will be able to show off.

The reset is a big move for Myspace, and it’s probably the smartest move at this point. It’s still steadily losing users to Facebook, and it needs something, anything, to convince users it’s still relevant. The new Myspace can now easily coexist with Facebook, while potentially bringing something new to the table.

Myspace’s new beta version is available today to users in the U.S. and will roll out worldwide by the end of November.

GetGlue

While those may not seem like huge numbers, the whole area of social recommendation is still early, and it’s worth taking note when the first movers are showing traction.

GetGlue is a social network where users can check-in and rate movies, TV shows, music and books to earn points and stickers. The service can be accessed through either the web with browser add-ons or a newly launched iPhone application.

Once a user builds their network of likes (which can be shared on Facebook or Twitter), the service will begin to suggest items they may like based on other users. The most popular items can trend to the top of the suggested list, all in real time.

Earning stickers for checking in may sound familiar. Foursquare lets users earn badges for checking into specific locations. Also like Foursquare, GetGlue has sealed several branded sticker deals for users, including with big names like Showtime, Warner Bros, Random House, Universal Pictures and others (pictured above).

While Adaptive Blue was founded in 2006, GetGlue is relatively new. It will be interesting to see if GetGlue can sustain its momentum and even launch a new genre-focused era of location-based social networks in the future.