Ashish's Blog

Palm to show “Nova” OS at CES 2009

ashishmonsoon — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 14:40:19 +0000

Peter Burrows at BizWeek has some hot news about Palm’s new OS, Nova. The company hopes to fit their new system in the gap between the BlackBerry and the iPhone (good luck – Microsoft has been trying to do that all year) and they are looking to grab 2% of the middle-range market shere, the range that Google/Android is also gunning for.

“If they can’t show me a large, active audience, I’m not going to be interested,” says Jeff Holden, CEO of Web 2.0 company Pelago, maker of a social networking tool for the iPhone. “At this point in the game, you’re toast unless you have something completely unbelievable.”

Not a lot of specs available right now but it should be available by Q2 2009 and the company hired 150 engineers to work on the new system. Dales are down 50%, Palm has laid off 10% of their workforce. Analysts are bullish, though.

“Palm going to zero would be bad for me as an analyst, but it’s not going to hurt T. Rowe Price,” Eiswert says. “But if it works, the upside is tremendous.”

The key word in that sentence is, obviously, “if.”

Incidentally, Palm, “Nova?” Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Stickam API Lets You Build Your Own Live Video Site

ashishmonsoon — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 14:37:32 +0000

Stickam, a live video streaming service that competes with the likes of Justin.tv and Ustream.tv, is releasing a new API that effectively allows anyone to build their own streaming video startup with a minimal amount of effort. The service is normally pay-as-you-go, but the first 100 users to sign up will be able to try it out for free.

StickamAPI allows developers to leverage Stickam’s infrastructure – which handles handles everything from actually hosting videos to bandwidth and streaming – to integrate video streaming into their own sites. While most video services have allowed users to create their own ‘channels’ (typically videos associated with a group or theme) and embed their videos wherever they’d like, the Stickam API allows for much deeper integration of live video streaming.

CEO Steven Fruchter says that live video can be incredibly engaging – Stickam’s site is reporting an average 18 minute staytime for new users to the site, and 70 minutes for those that are logged in. He expects that the new API will appeal to businesses and social networking sites looking to increase their engagement without having to pay and wait to develop their own live video platforms.

It’s a smart move from Stickam, which is likely trying to find a way to differentiate itself from Justin.tv, which continues to lead in this space. Many sites with established communities (like forums or niche social networks) would probably love to offer a tightly integrated video service. That said, live video is very expensive (YouTube has apparently canned its own plans because of bandwidth costs), so the success of StickamAPI will likely come down to its rates and how effectively the live video streams can be monetized.

OpenX Shows Impressive Growth, Ramps Up Revenue Streams

ashishmonsoon — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 14:30:47 +0000

OpenX (which used to be called Openads), provider of an open-source ad serving solution for web publishers – we use it at TechCrunch -, is growing like weed under the leadership of former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller, who is the company’s chairman, and ex-Yahoo executive Tim Cadogan who is CEO. According to the company, they’re serving well over 300 billion ad impressions through its software as of this month, while its Hosted product line has achieved a more than 1 billion monthly ad impression run rate.

In August 2008, OpenX announced the launch of version 2.6, an update to its downloadable ad server and introduced a couple of features which spurred usage of the system, including a new API, dashboard and a speedier ad tagging system.

The ad serving solution is getting attention from around the world: its products are used in more than 100 countries and are translated into twenty-five languages by community contributors. The company says its community now counts over 35,000 total publishers that power more than 150,000 websites across the Internet.

OpenX, which is published under GPL, makes money by providing professional services to its publishers, something it started offering only two months ago. In addition, it sells premium support packages and enterprise-level Hosted accounts. A fourth revenue stream currently being tested is OpenX Market, a monetization platform that will essentially be something of an online market place where advertisers and publishers can partner up with each other.

OpenX raised around $20.5 million in funding from Accel Partners, Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. It was originally based in the UK, but has now moved its main headquarters to California with offices in London and Poland.