VentureBeat

YouTube’s head of monetization Shashi Seth has left YouTube-owner Google to become the chief revenue officer at a Menlo Park, Calif. startup called Cooliris. Seth is just the latest in a series of Google executives to join the startup world, a group that also includes former Google vice president and current Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.

Seth was appointed to his position at YouTube in January 2007. It probably wasn’t the easiest job in the world, since Google has been struggling to make money from the incredibly popular video site. He told GigaOM, which first broke the news of Seth’s departure, that the search giant has become “a little big” for him.

I spoke to Seth this afternoon to find out more about his move. He says he first heard about Cooliris from Randy Komisar, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, which funded Cooliris’ $3 million first round. The startup’s browser plugin PicLens allows users to browse YouTube videos and other media in a three-dimensional array of images, and Seth says its potential significance is much larger — it could create a new paradigm of web browsing.

Cooliris is already “headed in the right direction,” he says, and one of the most promising future applications would be a product search feature on sites like Nordstrom.com. A shopper could look up a particular type of shoe at the shopping site, and rather than clicking through page after page of search results, they could explore those results more fluidly with PicLens. From a revenue standpoint, there’s a lot of opportunity, Seth says, because a richer browsing experience also provides a platform for richer advertising. And that could tempt companies — like Gucci and Guess, for example — that haven’t found an online equivalent of multi-page magazine ads.

Seth will help Cooliris develop its business model, but he says one reason he was excited about the company is that its executives are considering these issues already, so that the revenue side and the product side are marching in “lockstep.”

“It’s good that they’re thinking about these kinds of things now, rather than getting a lot of users and then saying, ‘Now let’s figure out how to make money,’” Seth says.

Hmm, I wonder what company he could be referring to …

updated

Aggregate Knowledge, a Silicon Valley company that recommend products to visitors of Web sites based on what people like them have previously chosen, is offering its service across Web sites.

The service is called the Pique Discovery Network.

The San Mateo, Calif., company’s technology seeks to put products or content in front of you that pique your interest. So if you’re reading an article on WashingtonPost.com about your favorite sports player, says the Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez, the network will show other articles about A-Rod that other fans have chosen to read, and then also tickets to the next game A-Rod is playing in — all in the same window. Pique draws the tickets from a ticket site participating in its network.

Chief executive Paul Martino says several competitors doing what Aggregate Knowledge does to recommend products — for example, Germany’s Wunderloop — but that few sites offer the service across Web sites.

He said the product will work in email, too, for example offering you three products in your email related to what you most recently bought. It will work on mobile phones, things like affiliate programs, point of sale devices and set-top boxes, much of this to be offered next year. The project is in testing mode, and Martino said several customers are using it, he wasn’t allowed to name them.
He said click-through rates range from 18 to 22 percent consistently, and sometimes as high as 25 percent.

The company has already served technology to 60 million people checking more than 100 Web sites owned by 35 clients — including Overstock.com to Vinfolio, HealthCentral, SmartBargains and TicketsNow.

The company employs 50 people. Martino isn’t saying whether it’s profitable yet.

Aggregate Knowledge held a dinner with its backer, Kleiner Perkins‘ Randy Komisar (pictured left), with several media folks. We were unable to attend for time reasons, but Komisar again said his firm is not investing in “Web 2.0 companies.” Kleiner Perkins is a well regarded firm, and so Komisar’s comments got picked by Tom Foremski, who suggests Kleiner has somehow “halted Web 2.0″ investments, as though there was some sort of abrupt conscious decision. However, Komisar has expressed skepticism about Web 2.0 in this column he wrote for VentureBeat in January, and said back then that he wasn’t interested in the sector. He seems to be repeating what he did then, which is there’s a lot of hype around Web 2.0 and that companies seeking to make money simply from Google ads don’t have much of a chance. This is more of a comment about pure Web 2.0 companies and what that term has come to stand for.

Predictably, though, Komisar’s remarks elicited a quick response from Tim O’Reilly (scroll down), whose group helped come up with the term Web 2.0, and who has a lot at stake at this term not losing some of its luster, in part because he hangs an entire (lucrative) conference on the term. In our view, this is all just a game of semantics. Since Komisar made his remarks in January, plenty of Web 2.0-related companies have seen good outcomes, from StumbleUpon, to Zimbra and LastFM. All of these offer great services. Komisar wouldn’t deny that interactive features like the ones offered by Zimbra are powerful and worthy of investment. Indeed, his own investment, Aggregrate Knowledge, exhibits many Web 2.0-related elements. Rather, he’s beating the drum against endless line of copycat ad-dependent sites that aren’t offering anything unique.

Update: We’ve gotten a list of attendees (web20conference.pdf) to the recent Web 2.0 conference, which includes many venture capitalists, so there’s still some interest here. Notably, a source tells us Kleiner Perkins has been looking to hire a partner to focus on investing in web companies. We’re trying to confirm.

The excitement among green technology investors continues in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling earlier this month on climate change, and Rob Day has a good summary of the latest chatter.

“People are comparing it to the Internet boom of 1999,” said one green entrepreneur to the Washington Post, about the ruling, which gives finally gives Congress the right to regulate climate change.

In the majority opinion written by Justice John Paul Stevens, the court said that the EPA’s steadfast refusal to regulate greenhouse gas emissions presents a risk of harm to Massachusetts that is both “actual” and “imminent,” and that “The harms associated with climate change are serious and well recognized.”

Rob points to recent conversations, including comments by venture capitalist Randy Komisar (of big-name Silicon Valley venture firm Kleiner Perkins) that billion dollar IPOs are coming quickly. Indeed some are already filing for such IPOs, including former venture capitalist Martin Tobias’ Imperial Renewables. The Seattle biodiesel company plans an IPO that will value it at more than $1 billion.

Micah Charyn, of the Keiretsu Forum, also tells us about his group’s Angel Capital Expo on Wednesday at the Mission Bay Conference Center in SF, featuring green technology companies.

You’re familiar with Amazon.com’s recommendation feature: “People who bought this book, also bought these books.”

Aggregate Knowledge is a Menlo Park start-up offering such a recommendation service on a mass scale — to any Web site. But it does Amazon one-better by watching consumer reading patterns online, and giving recommendation feedback immediately. (Amazon updates its recommendations once a month)

By all accounts, AK is doing very well. It started in April, and is already making $2 million in annualized revenue, according to chief exec Paul Martino. Tomorrow, it will announce it has won $5 million from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. First Round Capital and others invested $500,000 in an earlier seed round. It employs 21 people, up from three in April. Recommendations are hotter than many people realize. Amazon says 35 percent of product sales result from recommendations. Martino, formerly at Tribe, said he noticed the power of recommendations while working at his previous company, Tribe — and thus his decision to launch AK.

We last wrote about AK here

Overstock.com is one of several sites that have implemented it. Shoppers of a gift basket (see image below), will see items that previous readers have gone on to view after viewing that item — saving users time, and helping them get to their likely destination quicker — since AK knows what previous readers ended up viewing.

In his earnings call last month, Overstock’s chief executive Patrick Byrne says integration with AK was easy, and that it’s providing a “nice, measurable lift” despite being up only a few weeks.

AK offers the service for news sites, too: It links to articles that previous readers of the same article went on to read. It also helps find more relevant ads, tracking which ads are popular based on the behavior of past viewers. This is where AK hopes to beat Google. Take, for example, a reader of Fox Sports, who learns their team going to the Super Bowl. Google might offer an ad for ticket merchant RazorGator. However, AK would skip RazorGator altogether and offer a way to buy Super Bowl tickets directly. In other words, it will offer an ad, a product, or a service - depending on what the reader is most likely to want, based on previous behavior. AK tracks click streams during sessions on a Web site; it does so anonymously, aggregating data so it knows what readers are most likely to do.

AK gets paid based on performance. If the customer is a news site, AK gets paid for increasing page views. If the customer is a product site, AK gets paid if it sells more products.

AK takes several days to customize its product for sites. By first quarter next year, Martino tells us, he wants to make it plug and play. VentureBeat, for example, could get a widget that allows its readers to see what other readers have also read. Sphere does something similar now. See the “Sphere it” button at the top of this article. If you click it, you’ll see mostly other blog related material. However, Sphere’s recommendations are based on related sites and content, not necessary on where people have actually gone.

AK’s competitors include Boston’s ChoiceStream. Its software reportedly takes longer to deploy. Loomia, of San Francisco, is another player.