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Last summer the Jobster team started working on what we call "powered-by Jobster," which enables publishers to build their own branded versions of Jobster on their own sites.
Today, Variety launched the first such Powered-by-Jobster site, The Biz, an online career networking site for the Entertainment Industry. http://thebiz.variety.com/
The is a big step forward towards the verticalization and specialization of social networks. It makes total sense. The entertainment industry is all about networking. Now there is a networking site for entertainment professionals, tightly integrated with jobs and career advice, powered by the leader in entertainment industry news and views, Variety.
Variety's homepage features this ad promoting the new site today -- the ad is also appearing in print in the offline Variety magazine.
A quick search of the site finds that nearly 1000 people in the Los Angeles area have already created profiles before 9am pacific today. Not a bad start!
Variety magazine has launched a social networking site called "the Biz" which will be focused on the entertainment business.
The site focuses on three main areas. Connect: Find colleagues, peers and mentors in the entertainment industry. Networking made easy. Careers: Meet professionals directly inside entertainment. Recruit new talent. Search for jobs, promotions or projects.
Community: Exchange ideas. Projects or test your latest big pitch among peers. Industry experts are here to bounce ideas. Your big break starts here.
The site allows users of Facebook or Linkedin to import their existing profile information. Users can upload photos, videos or resumes to their profile. The Biz is powered by Jobster and allows users to search for jobs and for recruiters to post job openings.
"The Biz will give our readers a unique new way to interact and forge relationships with their peers in the community," Variety president and publisher Neil Stiles told the magazine.
Mashable writes:
Variety Launches a Branded Jobster Network
February 19, 2008 -- 05:30 AM PST -- by --
Printed publications have been doing a lot to get additional brand recognition and ad support in the online world, and lately, a lot of this has been in the way of integrated networking solutions, with existing networks and with networks of their own. One area that's been melding with social networks on a larger scale is the job sector, as we've seen with Monster, and entertainment news publication Variety is launching a social network for this purpose.
In conjunction with Jobster, this new network, called "The Biz," is actually a white-labeled version of the popular job-finding service. This network isn't just for Variety to reach out to potential employees, but its a self-contained network where employers can post jobs and seek out potential new hires. As Jobster is known for its take on social networking for the purpose of enabling users to build relationships and leverage those relationships in the job-hunting and hiring process, "The Biz" allows Variety to offer both ends of this spectrum for entertainment jobs, under a brand that people recognize.
A new news site from IAC has been rumored for a while and it now looks like an initial version is live at news.ask.com.
The new site, which is also linked to from the www.ask.com homepage is basically Ask's answer to Google News. The site features an aggregated view of news from a variety of sources. The key new innovation is something they're calling the "Big Factor" --
The "Big Factor" identifies the importance of a news topic based on an assessment as to whether the story is breaking news, the "impact" of the story, media coverage of the story, and web discussion on the story. The site doesn't describe how exactly the algorithm works so we're just guessing for now.
A rumored partnership with Digg seems to be understated. At the very bottom of every page there are some related articles from Digg. Digg style voting is not integrated into the ask.com areas of the site, rather the Digg content is just a related news widget. The Digg ratings may figure into the "web discussion" factor above, but it's not clear if and how.
So far, I'd say that the site offers a viable alternative to Google news for Ask.com users. Not much beyond that.
If you use Ask.com, you might want to use news.ask.com, but I can't see many reasons (yet) why this would drive new users to check out ask or to use news.ask.com on its own.
1. Create a feeling of technological openness. Top-notch developers love to know the ins and outs early - seeing the early bugs, unfinished features, etc. Visiting and engaging the CTOs of pre-launch partner companies will create instant camaraderie between the platform development team and the developer community.
2. Treat developers equally, but leverage the best ones by letting them closer in. After launch, quickly giving the technically superior developers direct access to members of the platform team (via a special email address and IM), will allow them to report and help debug real-time performance problems, and further cement the teams' respect for each other.
3. Plan and manage a community, and introduce a community manager early - ideally, these are pretty technical people that gain fast credibility with hard-core developers. Introduce a few colorful personalities to make developers feel welcome, pre-launch. These people should organize meet-ups, participate in chats, IRC channels, mailing lists, visit companies in person. The key impression to create is that someone from the platform team is on your side, ready to plead your case to powers that be.
4. Shift the support/documentation load onto the early developers. Smaller developer groups will naturally seek to help each other, they will gladly participate in joint-effort projects to document the platform APIs, support each other technically, etc.
5. Respond very quickly to platform issues, and take the early scaling problems seriously. The feeling of "this must be really important to them" will carry a lot of weight with the developer community in the early days. Developers will stay up day and night to build great applications if they know the platform team is doing the same to support them.
6. Emphasize the money-making nature of the platform. The larger developer groups are going to be at least somewhat skeptical of the platform, since they are already working hard and have many real challenges. Bible-thumping the "you will make money" point will help keep developers focused during the early platform days.
7. Make your campus a place that developers very much want to visit. The invitation to visit should be a prize, a chance to hang out with the platform team and meet your heroes. Organize hackathons and coding parties welcoming all, but invite the key developers to visit the platform group separately. Having an inner-circle developer group will help handle future PR crises.
8. Pre- and over-communicate policy changes and make major changes with at least the perception of open debate. Nothing takes away from the credibility of the platform like a sudden negative change. The greatest impact is venture investors' fear of instability, reducing its value as a legitimate investment opportunity. No matter how much money you have to throw at this initiative, having a few billion dollars of venture money will make a difference.
9. Make the #1 measurable goal of your PR team the amount of coverage that successful (or just interesting) developers get. People will jump through all kinds of hoops to be in the papers. Double so if the article lists them next to a [your] big brand.
10. Hold frequent developer events and invite leading developers to speak at those. Elevating developers (especially the smaller ones) to a pseudo-celebrity status can create a great deal of good will.
Blackberry is a great example. iPod is another.
Recent "things that work" find: LeaseTrader.com.
Talk about a normally hard transaction to manage. I'm moving to NYC and don't really to have a car anymore. Problem is that I just took out a lease on my car less than a year ago. What to do? Well, I posted it on Leasetrader and it took less than 72 hours for someone to apply for me to transfer my lease to them. 2 weeks later and the transfer is just about complete. Painless.
Vpod.tv enables anyone to create their own tv shows. Target is corporate groups -- e.g. marketing, hr, etc. for communication regularly with employees and partners, or a government group using to communicate with constituents..
Easy publishing tools to create short form videos then share them on websites.
As an example, the MMF video was created using Vpod.tv.
Company is also making all content avail on multi platforms and devices. iphone launching soon.
Announcing today 3 partners for in-stream video advertisements within tv shorts.
I'm going to try this one.
This is the 3rd time I've seen Wixi -- first at TC 40 this fall, 2nd on the panel I hosted yesterday on social media, now he public demo this morning. I still don't get it.
Wixi is designed to enable group sharing of media. People create their own "wixi" page by dragging and dropping files onto a windows vista-like web page, and then their friends/colleagues in their circle can basically access their media online.
My take is that it's sort of like a digital locker with some social elements. I guess it makes some sense for folks who want to have anywhere access to their media from multiple devices and locations, and to then be able to share that with their friends. But, can't you just share your files with your friends on Facebook?
Concerns are obvious: facilitates music / video stealing. Also, does this just become an easier way for like people to share porn?
I also don't understand how they are going to make money from this. Not sure why anyone would pay for their premium offering which just offers more online storage.
Company is now focused on P2P media delivery for media companies via its livestation development platform. "the equiv of a sat networking over IP." Company is ambitiously trying to send live video signals over peer networks.
We got to view a "pre-alpha" (another great term).
From Skinkers:
Based on peer-to-peer technology originally developed at Microsoft Laboratories in Cambridge in the UK, Livestation delivers remarkable quality audio and video using a simple software application.
With conventional streaming services, each stream is typically delivered from central servers or using a special content distribution network. Every additional user receives their own stream, which places enormous demands on the distribution infrastructure and ultimately limits the number of users that can be simultaneously supported.
In some cases it is possible to use multicasting to deliver a single stream to multiple addresses. Unfortunately, many networks do not currently support multicasting.
A peer network approach offers many of the benefits of multicasting, without requiring a multicast network. Effectively, it enables an overlay network to be created using the combined intelligence and network capacity of the computers of its active users.
In a peer network, each node functions as both a client and a server, sharing its data with other users. This helps spread the load to the edge of the network, so that capacity grows with demand.
Livestation works by splitting a stream into multiple stripes, each of which can be shared with other users. This allows users to share some of a stream with other users, without having to relay the whole stream. This dramatically reduces the central serving capacity required to deliver live audio and video to very large numbers of users.
The net result is actually more robust than receiving a single stream from a single source. A level of resilience is built into the system making it more resistant to general network traffic congestion.
As with any broadband service, the quality is ultimately limited by the speed of the connection of each end user. With faster networks, even high definition television could be delivered in this way.
Livestation delivers a range of live radio and television channels to your computer over a broadband network.
There is no need to install a tuner, aerial, or any additional hardware. Livestation works anywhere with a basic broadband network connection. Simply download the free Livestation player to watch television wherever you are, whenever you want.
You can watch television on your desktop, or on your laptop, at home, at work, on the move, or in a hotel room, provided you have a broadband internet connection or wireless access.
Unlike video-on-demand or download services, Livestation delivers live broadcast channels, so you can watch news, sports or live events as they happen.
Livestation offers an integrated player that allows you to choose from a number of channels and continue listening and viewing while using other applications. You can watch in a window while you work or play, or view full screen.
While you are listening or watching, Livestation shares some of the stream with other users. This allows Livestation to serve a very large number of simultaneous users.
Livestation is designed to be able to serve millions of users without many of the limitations associated with traditional online streaming services.
Hugely ambitious project. Uncertain if it will work in production.
Beyond the technical challenge, major business challenges with cable operators.
Your Truman Show (currently in beta) is a video blogging service that seems to have evolved into a widget provider. Demo was of VideoMap social graph of videos (e.g. who on my Facebook is in which videos, across my FOF network.).
Most interesting part is video search based on common interests across networks, relying on preferences and social graph rather than metadata. Ask the community to add the metadata vs. other video search services which are trying to use technology to extract metadata from video.
Spotzer out of Amsterdam offfers a library of ready-to-air commercials produced by professionals around the world.
People can easily search from more than 200 available video ads and then tailor them to their local market needs, and instantly have read-to-air commercials for their own use. Select an ad, then add your own logo, voice, etc.
Company also offers some awesome media planning tools for running online video ads.
See more here. -- their site, pressdisplay enables you to read hundreds of papers offline formats online as they are published.
Big question is if people will want to read the paper format online.
