| Tue, Jun 16, 2009 |
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Former MySpace Exec’s Lifestyle Startup Cocodot Gets Funding
Former MySpace head of marketing (back from a different era, when MySpace ruled the roost) Shawn Gold has formed a new startup called Cocodot, and has raised a million dollars in funding. The seed investors in the Los Angeles-based venture include Anthem Venture Partners, The Mail Room Fund, and other investors. The SEC filing shows that about $500K was raised from a total of six investors, but that’s from April. Not many details about the company, but from what Techcrunch has on it, and what Gold told me, rather cryptically—“we have been developing cocodot in consultation with top brass at several fortune 500 companies in retail, technology and beauty”—it may have something to do with a high-end Evite of sorts, with fashion and offline connections. A beta launch is expected sometime this summer. The company was co-founded, among others, by Gold and his wife Amy Neunsinger, a well-known fashion photog. Couple of the other execs are ex-Target employees (as their LinkedIn profiles show), so that means likely some retail tie-in are to be expected.
Gold left MySpace in Oct 2007, and started his own social media consulting firm SocialApproach after. Prior to MySpace he was the president of Weblogs Inc that sold to AOL (NYSE: TWX) in 2005.
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Updated: MySpace Cuts U.S. Staff By Nearly 30 Percent; CEO: Staffing Level Was Bloated
The shoe has dropped at MySpace and it’s a big one: the News Corp social network is cutting nearly 30 percent of its staff, reducing the domestic staff size to 1,000 from 1,420 as it tries to dial back to a start-up culture—and to make money.
With no mention of staff beyond the U.S., the official announcement and a memo from CEO Owen Van Natta carefully sidestep whether more layoffs are on the way in MySpace’s global operations. Questions to MySpace on the subject were not answered, with a spokeswoman saying MySpace would not go beyond the release.
One of Jon Miller’s mandates as News Corp (NYSE: NWS). CEO of Digital Media and chief digital officer is to set MySpace right. Moving faster than anticipated, Miller replaced CEO Chris DeWolfe with former Facebook exec Van Natta and added Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn. . At Facebook, Van Natta was at a phenom on the rise but Jones, who spent time at AOL (NYSE: TWX), and Hirschhorn, who went through waves of reorgs at MTV Networks (NYSE: VIA), are no strangers to once-hot companies that need a serious reheating. Less than six weeks later, the team is backing its promise for change with a dramatic staff cut. Now they have to deliver on doing more with less. Van Natta, who said in a memo that the staffing he inherited was “unsustainable,” promises to communicate “the foundation for our company strategy” this week in meetings across the company, starting Wednesday.
The full release is below:
“As part of a plan to restructure itself into a more innovative, efficient, and entrepreneurial business, MySpace announced today that it will reduce its staff by nearly 30%. This restructuring plan crosses all U.S. divisions of the company and lowers the total number of domestic staff at MySpace to 1,000 employees.
Simply put, our staffing levels were bloated and hindered our ability to be an efficient and nimble team-oriented company,” said MySpace Chief Executive Officer Owen Van Natta. “I understand that these changes are painful for many. They are also necessary for the long-term health and culture of MySpace. Our intent is to return to an environment of innovation that is centered on our user and our product.”
“MySpace grew too big considering the realities of today’s marketplace,” said Jonathan Miller, News Corporation’s CEO of Digital Media and Chief Digital Officer. “I believe this restructuring will help MySpace operate much more effectively both structurally and financially moving forward. I am confident in MySpace’s next phase under the leadership of Owen and his team.”
Update: From Van Natta’s staff memo via BusinessInsider: “I believe this is the first difficult step toward a major turnaround – a step that will not only shore us up in the short term, but position us for long term success. We need to become a more innovative company. Becoming more innovative is an ongoing responsibility for all of us, not a one-time effort.”
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CBSNews.com Relaunches; Still Needs the Traffic Hose
After pruning CBS’s online news efforts two years ago, the company is now trying to build it back up as CNET’s tech and edit/management integration permeates across the company, and as part of that, it has relaunched CBSNews.com tonight.
The new site takes cues from CBS (NYSE: CBS) Evening News’ own design overhaul which rolled out a month ago on TV, and from the previous predominantly white background, has moved to a blended white and grey, with a premium on visuals. It starts with the main rotating visual carousel of stories, which as a feature is now becoming standard on a lot of general news sites. The site has also added lot more original content from CBSNews reports and columnists and content partners (Politico, CBS MoneyWatch, *Washington Post*and WebMD), more robust destinations for each of its news programs, and access to live coverage of breaking news and special events, it says.
It has made Washington Unplugged, a weekly online video series hosted by Bob Schieffer, into a daily segment. Also being added late summer, a new show by comedian Mo Rocca, called “The Tomorrow Show”, as a “fun, interactive discussion about what the future has in store, and the possibilities on the horizon,” as the company describes it. More interestingly, it has added a new site/blog Crimesider as an adjunct to its 48 Hours show. Written by executive producer Susan Zirinsky, the new site is positioned as the one-stop destination for true-crime news. Sean McManus, president of CBS News & Sports described this new site first at our EconAffinity conference last month in NYC. (Video here.)
The site is also launching a new Blackberry app (not live yet), and will launch an iPhone app this summer.
Despite all this, CBSNews.com has a big challenge ahead, as it is the smallest in terms of traffic, compared to other network news sites like CNN.com, MSNBC.con and FoxNews.com. While the company likes to tout its month-over-month unique users growth citing Nielsen NetRatings numbers in its press releases, numbers from Compete, Quantcast and Google Trends show otherwise. CBS has always lacked the big portal hose like CNN and MSNBC had in AOL (NYSE: TWX) and MSN respectively over the years, but the CNET acquisition was supposed to solve some part of that.
So far it hasn’t happened except for the spikes last year because of elections. CBS Interactive’s slate of sites—including the collective of CNET, CBS.com, CBSSports.com, GameSpot, TV.com, Last.fm and others—have now broken into the top 10 global properties online, according to NetRatings. Shouldn’t it start seeing some more traffic growth on the online side? Any more ideas on how CBSNews.com could go up the ranks of news site, besides organic growth?
A short video about the new redesign, from Katie Couric, embedded below:
Watch CBS Videos Online
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Online and VOD Video Provider Ripe Digital Closes Down; Still Trying To Sell
Ripe Digital Entertainment, the LA-based digital entertainment company backed by Hearst-Argyle (NYSE: HTV) and Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) investments, has closed down, we have confirmed from sources, and the remaining management is trying to sell the company’s assets. The news was first reported on DHD. Ripe was founded in 2004, and lived for a long time as a male-focused VOD shorts provider, targeting guys ages 18-34. It raised at least $45 million in its lifetime, with Hearst-Argyle putting up the majority of the money: as of Q1 this year, Hearst-Argyle owned about 23.4 percent of RDE on a fully diluted basis, according to its SEC filings. Other investors included Time Warner Investments, Columbia Capital, and Rho Ventures. The founders included Ryan Magnussen, Patrick Bradley and Steven Voci, all three of whom were founding partners for interactive agency Zentropy, which sold to Interpublic 1999.
Ripe had VOD distribution on Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) and Time Warner, and over the years started three main brands—RipeTV (men’s entertainment), OctaneTV (auto), and FlowTV (urban)—but was bleeding money, as evidenced from brief statements in Heart-Argyle’s SEC filings.
This continues the mini-bloodbath in the online original video entertainment space, with others such as ManiaTV and 60Frames shutting down earlier this year as well. Maybe someone ought to do a rollup of the remaining assets, for whatever that’s worth. See our earlier story today, “Studios-Backed Web Video Efforts Stalled For Now; Who’s Left?”.
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CBSNews.com Relaunches; Still Needs the Traffic Hose
After pruning CBS’s online news efforts two years ago, the company is now trying to build it back up as CNET’s tech and edit/management integration permeates across the company, and as part of that, it has relaunched CBSNews.com tonight. The new site takes cues from CBS (NYSE: CBS) Evening News’ own design overhaul which rolled out a month ago on TV, and from the previous predominatly white background, has moved to a blended white and grey, with a premium on visuals. It starts with the main rotating visual carousel of stories, which as a feature is now becoming standard on a lot of general news sites. The site has also added lot more original content from CBSNews reports and columnists and content partners )Politico, CBS MoneyWatch, Washington Post (NYSE: WPO) and WebMD), more robust destinations for each of its news programs, and access to live coverage of breaking news and special events, it says.
It has made Washington Unplugged, a weekly online video series hosted by Bob Schieffer, into a daily segment. Also being added late summer, a new show by comedian Mo Rocca, called “The Tomorrow Show”, as a “fun, interactive discussion about what the future has in store, and the possibilities on the horizon,” as the company describes it. More interestingly, it has added a new site/blog Crimesider as an adjunct to its 48 Hours show. Written by executive producer Susan Zirinsky, the new site is positioned as the one-stop destination for true-crime news. Sean McManus, president of CBS News & Sports described this new site first at our EconAffnity conference last month in NYC.
The site is also launching a new Blackberry app (not live yet), and will launch an iPhone app this summer.
Despite all this, CBSNews.com has a big challenge ahead, as it is the smallest in terms of traffic, compared to other network news sites like CNN.com, MSNBC.con and FoxNews.com. While the company likes to tout its month-over-month unique users growth citing Nielsen NetRatings numbers in its press releases, numbers from Compete, Quantcast and Google Trends show otherwise. CBS has always lacked the big portal hose like CNN and MSNBC had in AOL (NYSE: TWX) and MSN respectively over the years, but the CNET acquisition was supposed to solve some part of that. So far it hasn’t happened except for the spikes last year because of elections. CBS Interactive’s slate of sites—including the collective of CNET, CBS.com, CBSSports.com, GameSpot, TV.com, Last.fm and others—have now broken into the top 10 global properties online, according to NetRatings. Shouldn’t it start seeing some more traffic growth on the online side? Any more ideas on how CBSNews.com could go up the ranks of news site, besides organic growth?
A short video about the new redesign, from Katie Couric, embedded below:
Watch CBS Videos Online
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