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Palo Alto, AlwaysOn – There were a couple of companies that didn’t rate a mention in our narrative coverage of the AlwaysOn conference, that are too good to miss.

if you don’t already have a solution for self-service display advertising, look into AdReady. The company offers self-service display advertising from more than 700 templates, sorted by best performing, newest templates and most used. (And, why would any advertiser want to use ads that don’t work?) The New York Times has just launched its self-service platform using AdReady. Read the rest of this entry »

Given the array of truly novel and impressive mobile offerings in evidence at AlwaysOn, it seems almost counter intuitive that its advisors would have ranked the Israeli-based Modu as their mobile category winner. Clearly, they were captivated by the device itself, which was described as “sleek” with customizeable “jackets” and features.

What’s jarring about this is that everything seasoned observers said at the show seemed to indicate that phone makers will have to start looking a lot more like publishers if they’re to survive because the platform itself is becoming a commodity.

Take Nokia. Kamar Shah, Head of Industry Marketing, Services and Software, for Nokia, painted a picture of the future where Nokia sounds much more like a publisher than a device manufacturer. In Shah’s world, social networks become the crossroads of mobility and the Internet. “People, time, place all start to make sense… Equipped with GPS and a mobile camera, you can take a photo and share it in real time instantly with a network.” Advertising in such a space will bring new levels of relevance. Nokia maps will point to services users can find near them. Read the rest of this entry »

In case you think it’s possible that we could have missed something in the veritable smorgasbord of punditry and innovation piled high at AO’s Stanford Summit, here’s a short, and only mildly self-serving, summary of what Adobe’s Mark Randall, Chief Strategist, Dynamic Media Division, thinks it will take to make money from Web video. If you’re confused by the numbering, he worked backwards from six because he didn’t want to bury the lede. Read the rest of this entry »

AO’s “Big Media” panel line-up does more to explain the Valley’s definition of what qualifies, so here it is:

* Bill Gurley, General Partner, Benchmark Capital
* Albert Cheng, EVP Digital Media, Disney-ABC Television Group
* John Edwards, CEO, Move Networks
* Thomas Lesinski, President, Paramount Digital Entertainment
* Michael Montgomery, President, Montgomery & Co
* Todd Teresi, SVP, Publisher Channel, Yahoo!

In such close proximity to Hollywood, “big” + media = video, and it quickly became apparent that the star of the hour for this crowd was Albert Cheng, EVP of Digital Media at Disney’s ABC Television Group, who, it could be argued, just managed to convince his network to be just a bit more accommodating to its audience’s actual viewing habits.

Read the rest of this entry »

Palo Alto, CA – Tony Perkins has probably earned the right to crow. He famously predicted the “dot-bomb” right before it went off, for instance, and through the darkest aftermath, companies he and his AlwaysOn advisors picked as leading potential entrepreneurial investments have managed to stay ahead of the curve for profitable exits. In venture capital or VC-speak, an “exit” is that point at which early investors see a return on their investment, either through the company going public – as likely this year as a woman in the White House – or in today’s more common “merger.”

Being a member of past AO 100 companies gave you about a third of a chance to exit at three times the industry average, Perkins claims. A study from the 451 Group found that, among the previous AO 100 companies 23 companies have been acquired in just the last 12 months for a total of $5.5 billion. Microsoft
Deals are clearly down from a 2005-2006 high of 27, and – depending on who you ask – all were bought out by another company rather than through public offering. Microsoft is the largest “serial acquirer” of AO firms, having now bought six of them.

That said, the yearly listing is somewhat misleading – companies that have appeared on past lists may recur – among this year’s top 250 are many repeats such as Aggregate Knowledge, Digg, Facebook, Gaia – last year’s winner – Topix, Tremor, Trulia, Yelp and Zillow, being among those already familiar to newspaper companies in one way or another.

There’s a long list of “green tech” start-ups, which, while probably worth watching, don’t have a lot to do with publishing; and infrastructure plays – other than making the point repeatedly that selling software as a service is here to stay – don’t generally become competitive game-changers.

Four categories do: Mobile, Consumer & Community, Online Advertising Service Providers and Enablers, and we’ll cherry-pick each of these a bit to raise a flag or mark trend lines.

But we don’t want to miss the forest for the trees. A few key trends are worth highlighting without being tied to any single company.
Read the rest of this entry »

AlwaysOn, Palo Alto, CA – It took back-from-bankruptcy rap star MC Hammer to clue me in to Twitter.

Twitter, you see, topped this year’s list of the AlwaysOn Stanford Innovation Summit “pick” companies of those most likely to succeed financially. Past “best of show” picks – singled out for their innovation, market potential, commercialization capability, stakeholder value creation and media attention or “buzz” – have included Linden Labs, Quigo, Gaia, YouTube, Skype and Bebo. Yet, while even the teen-targeted virtual world Gaia looked like a winner to me when it topped Tony Perkins’ list of most likely to score a big one for venture capitalists last year, with Twitter it seemed like AO had reached the outward edge of e-indulgence. Read the rest of this entry »

Since the Australians live their whole lives a day ahead of us in the U.S., I suppose it stands to reason that a group of Australian entrepreneurial interactive companies would provide an informal tee-off to the AlwaysOn Stanford Innovation Summit. This was my third year at the show, and my fourth AlwaysOn conference, and I readily admit I can’t live without it.

There’s something about the honesty born of greed (er, I mean being in fundraising mode), that fosters true collaborative innovating. But now that I’ve said the word Foster’s I guess I have to return to the Aussies. Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, maybe behavioral targeting isn’t completely dead, but with Tacoda’s disappearance into the catch-all that is Platform A at AOL (along with search, video, and a cast of thousands), I’ve been wondering if the buzz is officially gone. At AlwaysOn’s Stanford Innovation Summit, I’d no more listened to Peer39 CEO Amiad Solomon’s preso than I heard that Hugh McGoran, former RealCities, former Tacoda ad sales VP had joined the company as SVP. He even offered this link to check it out. That’s how fast something can go from sounding impressive to being important.

It turns out that AlwaysOn’s “top 100″ picks, historically, on average exit at 3 times the market cap of their industry peers. According to investors surveyed by KPMG, the top three sectors they expect to fund in the near future are, in order: green technology, digital entertainment, and MOBILE! See the story/slides here. Presenter says it was difficult to pare this year’s list to 250 this year from more than 900 nominations. Here’s the full list. Criteria for picking these folks: innovation (how unique is the business plan), how unique is the market, how much traction have they achieved, are they increasing enterprise value, and finally how much media buzz are they getting. So, my mediopoly friends, YOU have a role in selecting the next round.

I’m told the Facebook application conference (f808) is also in SF this week… maybe it’s possible to sneak down. (No! Egads registration has closed… even after an additional 100 tickets were released!) But the Facebook “ap” is always open; witnesss the Facebook developer Wiki. In short, having a Facebook ap is to the Web what having a screenplay is to living in LA. With all this creative activity, one wonders when it will occur to FB that scads of creative entrepreneurs have learned how to virally enable sharing of their own sites, and their accompanying advertising messages, while FB itself is still fumbling on the ad front. Just think about it, compadres — does it really matter whether you “publish” your own social networking site, when FB or MySpace can do it for you? It’s like bandwidth from YouTube — it’s all you can eat, just make sure you eat what you take.