• Ross Fadner, Mar 31, 2009, 1:30 PM
  • Google Launches Venture Capital Unit CNet Google is following other Silicon Valley firms in launching its own venture capital arm. On Monday the search giant formally unveiled Google Ventures, which will be funded with $100 million in its first year.

    "But wait," says CNet's Stephen Shankland, "isn't there a recession?" Indeed, the National Venture Capital Association just reported that fourth quarter investments dropped 71% from $11.7 billion in 2007 to $3.4 billion in 2008. But that doesn't phase Google. The search giant has said it's confident of its cash position and ability to handle the recession. "Also," says Shankland, "a down economy is a good time to get better terms out of start-ups."

    In a blog post, Google Ventures' managing partners Rich Miner and Bill Maris said: "Economically, times are tough, but great ideas come when they will. If anything, we think the current downturn is an ideal time to invest in nascent companies that have the chance to be the 'next big thing,' and we'll be working hard to find them." Read the whole story...
  • Tinker Lets You Twitter About Events TechCrunch "As its popularity has skyrocketed, Twitter has quickly become an indispensable tool for nearly any event," says TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid. But thus far, Twitter has lacked a tool that could help users understand an event more comprehensively, something that would enable them to input a bucket of keywords to follow that event.

    Glam Media is launching just such a tool. Called Tinker, Kincaid describes the service as "a persistent search for multiple keywords" on Twitter. Each event is associated with terms that Tinker then searches for across all tweets, presenting the results in a single stream. Kincaid uses March Madness as an example of a Tinker Event. The resulting Twitter stream might include terms like "NCAA," "Basketball" and "Final Four."

    Currently, most people rely on Twitter search and hashtags to keep tabs on these events, "but these aren't particularly efficient or user friendly," Kincaid says. Thus far, there have been Twitter pages created for big events like The Oscars, but nothing to monitor smaller events or breaking news stories. Tinker aims to solve that problem, allowing users (and companies) to build their own pages in seconds. Read the whole story...
  • YouTube To Separate Professional And Amateur Content ClickZ YouTube is planning a redesign that would separate premium and long-form programming from the user-posted videos which make up the bulk of activity on the online video sharing site in an attempt to draw more advertisers. Sources tell ClickZ that the new design will eliminate the current navigation scheme, with its "videos," "channels," and "community" categories.

    These will be replaced with four tabs that clearly define sections for professional content: Movies, Music, Shows and Videos. The first three tabs showcase premium shows, clips and movies from Google's partners; all of these will be monetized with in-stream advertising. The last channel, of course, will house the amateur videos that major advertisers have shied away from. "They're putting up walls between all the UGC stuff, which will live within the video channel...and the brand safe content," said one of the sources, a senior agency exec.

    According to the sources, the planned launch date of the YouTube overhaul is April 16. Another agency executive said that unlike some content providers, Google will not sell whole episodes to a single advertiser or brand, but rather multiple sponsors. Read the whole story...
  • Hulu Faces Roadblocks, Including Lack Of Revenue BusinessWeek Hulu may have had the biggest surge in unique viewers of any online video site in February (according to comScore) but it's not getting the advertising revenue to match, according to BusinessWeek. The joint venture from News Corp. and NBC Universal also faces several other roadblocks, including limits placed on the service by its parent companies.

    Analysts are already revisiting their forecasts for ad spending on Hulu and other online video sites this year. BusinessWeek's Douglas MacMillan talks to Screen Digest analyst Arash Amel, who revises his 2009 revenue estimate for Hulu down from $180 million to $120 million. This is still double what Hulu made in 2008, but it's "disappointing" given the traffic surge. "What we've seen is rapid growth in consumption, but the advertising isn't keeping up," Amel says, adding that Hulu has only sold about 60% of its ad inventory. In response, Hulu spokeswoman Christina Lee said, "I don't think that anyone can say they are impervious to the macroeconomic environment, but we're still hugely optimistic about our ability to monetize the service." She added that rapid growth makes it "more challenging for us to project our future inventory accurately."

    Meanwhile, Jason Blackwell, an analyst at ABI Research, points out that advertisers are probably less likely to experiment with new forms of advertising in the current economic climate. "Right now, advertisers are trying to cut back anywhere they can," he says. "So unproven models like Hulu are usually the first things to go." Read the whole story...
  • Twitter Hires Former Google Design Lead BusinessWeek Twitter has hired ex-Google Visual Design lead Douglas Bowman as its new creative director. Bowman replaces co-founder Biz Stone. "The Twitter Web page looks pretty simple," Stone told BusinessWeek's Spencer Ante. "But from our perspective the design needs a lot of work."

    Bowman is a talented designer who used to work at Wired News before moving to Google. "This is a great hire for Twitter, and more proof that Twitter has replaced Facebook as the tech industry's hottest startup," says Ante, adding that Bowman "clearly sees a bigger opportunity at Twitter, not only from a design perspective but perhaps from a monetary one as well." Ante also points out that Bowman will become increasingly important as Twitter expands. It's an enormous design challenge to help users manage a site with an increasingly large amount of information flowing through it.

    Bowman left Google in a candid blog post earlier this month. In it, he complained about having a debate over whether a border should be three, four, or five pixels wide. "I can't operate in an environment like that. I've grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions," he said. "There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle." Read the whole story...
  • Google Axes AdSense For Video Search Engine Journal Read the whole story...
  • Google Launches Free Music Service In China AFP Read the whole story...