Category: Random, But Interesting

From a release emailed to me:

News Corporation and NBC Universal have appointed Jason Kilar, a key executive at Amazon.com for nearly a decade, to Chief Executive Officer of the online video joint venture the companies formed in March, 2007, it was announced today by Peter Chernin, President and Chief Operating Officer of News Corporation and Jeff Zucker, President and Chief Executive Officer of NBC Universal. Mr. Kilar will join the new company on July 9 and will report to its Board of Directors, which include Mr. Chernin and Mr. Zucker.

The company’s video-rich site will debut later this year with thousands of hours of full-length programming, movies and clips from myriad networks and two major film studios and with an unparalleled reach. With distribution partners AOL, CNET, Comcast, MSN, MySpace, and Yahoo!, the new venture will have access to 98 percent of the monthly U.S. unique users on the Internet.

……

Mr. Kilar, 36, spent nearly a decade (1997 – 2006) at Amazon.com, where he quickly rose to help expand the company’s core business beyond bookselling. Mr. Kilar originally wrote the business plan for Amazon’s entry into the video and DVD businesses and ultimately led that unit as General Manager and Vice President. The video and DVD business grew to several hundred million in revenue under Mr. Kilar’s leadership. Mr. Kilar went on to become Vice President and General Manager of Amazon’s North American media businesses, which included the company’s books, music, video, and DVD categories.

Read More

Never hurts to put cash in the system, eh?

From an email from Google PR:

Today, Google announced a new pilot initiative called Google Gadget Ventures aimed at bootstrapping an economic ecosystem around gadgets. Since the launch of Google Gadgets more than a year ago, we’ve seen an increasing opportunity for individuals and companies to build successful businesses around this technology and are piloting this program to help support additional growth.

Read More

Larry Page made a splash at Foo this past weekend by arriving in his personal helicopter. The folks at Make, via Laughing Squid, show the landing and then have some fun with it.

I was in a session at Foo inside the O’Reilly building when Larry landed not 100 yards away. The amazing thing was none of us heard anything. The copter must be super quiet. And fast, I bet.

At Foo this weekend and with folks I’ve been talking to over the past few weeks, FaceBook is often topic #1. The speed with which FaceBook became the presumptive Next Big Thing is awesome. Now, the questions begin. This piece, from Mark Evans, outlines Five Things That Could Kill Facebook.

(previously)

I’ll admit that my first measure of the place was unfavorable. Coming from a land where building costs can top $1000 a square foot, the Zebra Ranch seemed to my eyes a mistake of sorts – a tar-paper and tin-roof sugar shack wrapped in chain link and topped by razor wire – not promising as a refuge for creativity, to say the least. The second story was set up on mortar blocks, and it was …. shit, was it really a single wide? Yes, I do believe it was.

But that isn’t accounting for the setting. As I described in my last Memphis post, just about everything resting on that North Mississippi farmland felt as it belonged there – somehow it made sense that this building – as improbable as it looked – would be there as well. Kudzu, wasps, and grasshoppers multiplied in the glory of a rusting sun. Why not this impossible building?

Read More

From the Compete blog:

There is certainly something magical about reaching 20 million. Web 2.0 darlings, also prime acquisition targets – Digg and Facebook both crossed this milestone last month.

* Digg edged out Facebook, with 2.3 million additional unique visitors

* Facebook is growing 3x faster than MySpace (on a percentage basis)



For what it’s worth, Quantcast says Digg has 6.9mm in the US…

Is Yahoo for sale? GigaOm wonders who might buy it, from AT&T to NewsCorp. My money’s on private equity.