Archive for the Startups Category
Published by Eric Litman on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 2:50pm
Every once in a while you come across people and ideas you like so much that you just can help but want to help them. And then of that broad group, there are the rare few who don't really need your help but it makes you want to help even more. I've recently met those very guys, and am so in like with them that I've decided to join
Trace Wax,
Lukman Ramsey and
Andy Breen on their advisory board.
Talk2Us is not yet ready to announce themselves, but here's a teaser: anyone out there remember Wildfire, the oh-so-sexy virtual assistant from the late-90's? This is Wildfire++, ...
Published by Eric Litman on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 7:44pm
Yield Software, one of WashingtonVC's portfolio companies, closed a $6m Series B round this week, led by
Draper Fisher Jurveston with participation by the team at ad giant
WPP.
Matt Malden, Yield's CEO, is a great guy with a world-class team behind him. Congrats, Yield!
Published by Eric Litman on Monday, June 11th, 2007 5:15pm
I've been watching the early progress of
Mahalo, the new “human powered” search engine launched by
Jason Calacanis last month, more than I normally would a search-related startup in no small part because I'm impressed with and fascinated by the type and intensity of buzz Jason's been able to create around it with so little cash outlay. As I spend more time considering the basic model of identifying and gathering the most interesting/relevant/current/popular/uniquely useful/etc. sites related to popular searches, I can't help but think of just how important context is to search, and that while Mahalo's broad-based approach to adoption may be ...
Published by Eric Litman on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 1:00pm
Pithy. Disconnected. Occasionally nothing more than a stream of consciousness. Ever feel the need to blog this way? Where prose and form are considerably less important than making a point or sharing a discovery?
Then
Tumblr may be for you. Loosely based on the esoteric blog
Anarchia, Tumblr lets you create a series of short posts in a format known as a "
tumblelog", where brevity and collection are your primary discourse with readers.
I've been posting to my own tumblelog,
Litmanisms, for the past couple of weeks and love its simplicity. My only, nominal complaint with the service is that I wish they had an ...
Published by Eric Litman on Wednesday, April 11th, 2007 3:51pm
Online backup servize
Mozy has a Mac client in beta. Ask them nicely and they'll send it to you.
It's $4.95/mo per computer backed up for unlimited data storage with no bandwidth charges. I don't have quite the faith in their stablity and longevity that I do with
Amazon's S3, but they are venture-backed and cheap enough to experiment with as an alternate backup source.
JungleDisk, which uses S3 as a data store, was a close contender, but I don't like that they don't currently allow you to restore individual files, just entire backup sets. I'll almost certainly look at them again as they rev their software.
Published by Eric Litman on Sunday, February 18th, 2007 8:07am
Here's a free tip to budding entrepreneurs looking to run an online media business: don't alienate your users before they've even joined your service.
I ran across
Zaziggy today, another ad-supported music downlod service today in a blog comment on CNET. First impressions: very light on content, all indy artists, looks like they just launched. Their model is to display banners during the download process and split revenues 50/50 with artists. Assuming they can attract quality advertisers and drive a high enough CPM rate, it might not be a bad deal for budding musicians.
Even though there's only a handful of tracks available, I thought I'd register and download a song or ...
Published by Eric Litman on Wednesday, January 24th, 2007 2:32pm
Ad-supported music download service
SpiralFrog fired its CEO, ex Universal McCann CEO Robin Kent, and possibly other management team members this week, according to a research note published by
Music Ally. In the memo sent to clients, Music Ally also noted that the originally planned December launch has been delayed until some time in the first half of 2007.
SpiralFrog made waves in the digital music space last August when it announced it would provide consumers with free downloads of tracks laden with heavy digital rights management restrictions from several major labels and publishers.
Greetings. I'm Eric Litman, I'm an Internet entrepreneur, investor and executive, and I run a mobile ad network called 
