Political Polling: January 2011

Friday, January 28, 2011

Making Money Ebay

The latest to try is Ongo, a two-year-old start-up that will introduce its Web site today, with an iPad app to follow.

Ongo is backed by three major media companies: The Washington Post Company, The New York Times Company and Gannett, which publishes USA Today. Each has invested $4 million.

Ongo is for readers who peruse a variety of publications every day and want to read them all in one place. It shows articles from about 20 publications, and is in talks with dozens more.

The catch: Readers pay $6.99 a month for the service, while most of the Web sites whose articles it shows are free. In exchange, readers see no ads or cluttered pages, and can search for articles, save them and share them with friends — all from one site.

“The key thing is they don’t have to go to the other sites” to read the stories, said Kevin Skaggs, Ongo’s chief content officer and a former producer for The San Francisco Chronicle’s Web site.

Many publications generally flinch at that idea, because they want readers to visit their sites and see their ads. But in this case, they are sharing their content with Ongo because Ongo will share its revenue with them. And, Ongo said, it may attract new readers when its editors highlight stories that readers may not have otherwise seen.

Other apps, like Pulse and Flipboard, offer mobile news readers for free. And people turn to Web sites like The Huffington Post, Twitter and Facebook to see stories aggregated by editors or acquaintances.

Ongo is different because it gathers stories from a large number of publications, people can access it on the Web or on mobile devices, and professional editors choose the top stories, said Alex Kazim, Ongo’s founder and chief executive and a former eBay executive.

“I just don’t think my friends are as good as professional editors in finding stories for me to read,” he said.

For $6.99, readers get all articles from The Washington Post and USA Today and some from The New York Times, the Associated Press and The Financial Times, along with stories from one more publication of their choice. Adding other publications costs an additional fee, between 99 cents and $14 a month, which the publisher sets.

According to Ongo’s research, just 12 percent of people read enough publications online each day that they would want a service like Ongo, Mr. Kazim said. But if it is successful, he hopes to include blogs, magazines and video, making it a one-stop shop for the news.

Ongo looks like a newspaper, with headlines that a team of six editors chooses to highlight and sections like sports, business and opinion. Readers can search a topic in the news and see articles from a variety of publications.

Like other sites, Ongo lets people share articles with friends through e-mail, Facebook and Twitter. But it also lets people set up groups — family members or colleagues, for instance — for sharing, and facilitates chats about articles. If someone who is not an Ongo member signs up after reading a shared story, the sender gets a free month’s membership.

First-time Ongo users can get a free one-day trial pass, and if they register within a month, the first month is free.

We don't have enough public market acquirers to sustain the start-up ecosystem.
That was the real back story that explains why Google failed to close a deal to buy
Groupon. Groupon wanted to
sell to Google for $6 billion. Of course they did, that is a huge amount of money – real cold hard cash – for a 2 year old
venture. Do you really think they turned that down for the vague possibility of
making more from an IPO in the distant future? Yes we all hear the stories of
visionary entrepreneurs who are such bold risk-takers and some of that is true but
most entrepreneurs don’t love risk, they love eliminating risk on the way to
building a venture. The real story is that Groupon only backed off due to worries that the deal
would fall into AntiTrust
hurdles.

If we only have a handful of acquiring companies (basically today it is Google,
Amazon and Microsoft, now that eBay and Yahoo are wounded), the AntiTrust hurdle becomes more real. Even
if there is no AntiTrust
issue, Google, Amazon and Microsoft simply cannot buy all those venture-backed
companies.

So we need Groupon to go public and use their public
currency to buy other ventures working on local advertising/ecommerce. That will be
good news for lots of ventures. And a Groupon IPO success
will spur on other ventures that are getting ready for IPO.

I don’t know if Groupon really have the solid
financials to go public. We won’t know until they issue their prospectus to the
SEC. Until then we only have rumor and speculation. But if I were a betting man, I
would bet on Groupon being able to go public before
Twitter. And, this will be more controversial, before Facebook. But that as they say is another story. I am not trying here
to compile an actual list of ventures that could IPO in 2011. This is more about the
general environment for IPOs.

This has been what Steve Blank calls the “lost
decade” for tech IPOs. So why do I think that 2011 will be the year this
changes? There are 5 reasons:

Private
markets are under SEC scrutiny. This takes away the easy option of getting
liquidity without either selling or going public. If you have more than 500
shareholders you have to make your financials public, it is the law.

There is a
backlog of great companies that have the financial strength to IPO. The IPO market
has been pretty well closed for a couple of years (some notable exceptions prove the
rule). So the companies that have the potential to IPO have had more time to grow and
get their act together.

Investors
are hungry for growth outside emerging markets. GDP in America and Europe seems to
have a ceiling at 3% and the Chindia and BRIC stories of
emerging markets growing at 8-10% has created too much capital flowing to those
markets (generating fears of a bubble). So investors want companies in the developed
markets that can grow at really fast pace (at least 30%, ideally 60% plus) from a
base of at least $100m revenue for a long time to come. That has to come primarily
from tech/media ventures.

The
macroeconomic picture is improving. Yes, there are always worries and another
crash is always possible, but "markets always climb a wall of worry" and the general
trends seem positive. But cycles don't last forever, so the people making these
decisions (Boards and their Investment Bankers) will look at 2011 as a good window of
opportunity.

The bean
counters have figured out how to live with Sarbox. For a long time, Sarbanes Oxley ("Sarbox") regulatory overhead has been seen as a reason why you cannot
run a public company. Baloney, as they say in Brooklyn. It is a simple bit of
operational overhead, a rounding error for a great company.

IPO is still the golden ticket. Real entrepreneurs want to IPO. Getting acquired
is a great way to build capital, but it is not the dream of the really driven,
talented entrepreneurs. There are logical reasons for this. The valuation at IPO is
usually (not always, plenty of exceptions to this rule) higher than you can get from
an M&A exit. And more importantly for the
entrepreneur, it is actually often easier to manage public market investors than a
bunch of VC with different agendas. But logical reasons be damned, an IPO is simply
the big badge of honor for the entrepreneur and the investors who back him/her.

It is not clear what we will call the decade that starts in a few days time
– the “teens” maybe – but it will possibly be one where we
get a sustainable IPO market for tech ventures. By “sustainable” I mean
that it cannot be a return to the Dot Com bubble years. Only great companies with
really solid financials will get through the IPO gate. And the valuations will have
to remain grounded in reality (short sellers will ensure that is the case).

Here’s hoping. Happy New Year folks.

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Monday, January 24, 2011

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Being Right or Making Money

As we get ready for John Boehner to take the gavel from Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday, I find myself thinking back to the last time a Republican speaker took control of the House from a Democrat -- and reflecting on how far down the wrong road we have traveled since then.

It was January 1995, and Newt Gingrich, now considered a right-wing bomb thrower, was taking the gavel from Tom Foley. After taking the oath of office, he delivered a speech that praised FDR as "the greatest president of the 20th century" and presented concern for the least among us as a shared national objective. "The balanced budget is the right thing to do," he said. "But it does not in my mind have the moral urgency of coming to grips with what is happening to the poorest Americans."

For the incoming Republican speaker, reducing poverty and lifting the poor into the middle class was a moral imperative beyond the left vs. right battlefield -- not just the purview of lefties, socialists, and community organizers:

I say to those Republicans who believe in total privatization, you cannot believe in the Good Samaritan and explain that as long as business is making money we can walk by a fellow American who is hurt and not do something.... If you cannot afford to leave the public housing project, you are not free. If you do not know how to find a job and do not know how to create a job, you are not free. If you cannot find a place that will educate you, you are not free. If you are afraid to walk to the store because you could get killed, you are not free.

So now, with poverty higher than it was 16 years ago, with greater income inequality, and with the middle class struggling to hold on, what will Speaker Boehner make his number one priority? According to the Washington Post, it's "cutting spending," followed by repealing the healthcare law, and "helping get our economy moving" (no specifics on how he plans to do that).

Yet we saw on 60 Minutes that he's very aware of how fragile the American Dream has become, telling Lesley Stahl, "I can't go to a school anymore. I used to go to a lot of schools. And you see all these little kids running around. Can't talk about it." And he choked up when he did try to talk about "making sure these kids have a shot at the American Dream, like I did. It's important."

Interestingly, in his first speech as speaker, Gingrich also talked about being moved by the woes of school kids.

"I have seldom been more shaken," he said, "than I was after the election when I had breakfast with two members of the Black Caucus. One of them said to me, 'Can you imagine what it is like to visit a first-grade class and realize that every fourth or fifth young boy in that class may be dead or in jail within 15 years? And they are your constituents and you are helpless to change it?' For some reason, I do not know why, maybe because I visit a lot of schools, that got through. I mean, that personalized it. That made it real, not just statistics, but real people."

But the trajectory of our political discourse over the last decade and a half has meant that taking on poverty has gone from a moral imperative and shared national objective to an afterthought -- or no thought at all.

The question is, is there anything that can be done to help Boehner make the connection between the policies he supports and the effect those policies have on the kids who bring him to tears?

Newt Gingrich failed to follow through on the moral imperative he identified in his first speech as speaker, trading in his moral vision and replacing it 15 months later with an announcement that the Republican agenda could be reduced to six words: "Earn more, keep more, do more."

Will Boehner's take be "Earn more, keep more, cut more"? Or is there a chance he will surprise us? Maybe it's because it's close enough to Christmas that I still believe in miracles, but wouldn't it be great if the John Boehner who takes the gavel on Wednesday is the one who weeps at the thought of kids denied a shot at the American Dream?

Jennifer Lawrence cried when Winter’s Bone was accepted into the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. The picture, set in the Ozark Mountains, might have been tiny, but the actress had recognized that the part of Ree Dolly — a teen struggling to hold her family together and keep their home — was a gritty, uniquely tenacious role. So she pursued it with unabashed commitment, even taking a spontaneous red-eye flight to New York to press the producers for the part. At the time, her highest-profile role had been in Guillermo Arriaga’s stark low-budget drama The Burning Plain, which had just scored her the Marcello Mastroianni Award at the 2008 Venice Film Festival. Lawrence expected maybe a dozen people would see Bone, so its selection by Sundance was a splendid bonus for the cast, crew and co-writer/director Debra Granik. It was only a few days after its first screening that she realized that perhaps she had underestimated its impact.
“I got recognized on the street, and someone said, ‘I loved Winter’s Bone,’ ” the 20-year-old actress recalls. “And I was like, ‘You saw Winter’s Bone?’ ”
By now, Lawrence no longer is asking that question. The winner of the Dramatic Grand Jury prize at Sundance, Bone became a genuine indie hit after Roadside Attractions released it in June, grossing more than $6 million domestically. Lawrence herself was propelled into the awards melee: She was nominated for best female lead at February’s Spirit Awards, and was a Golden Globe nominee, which signals the likelihood that her name also will be among the Oscar noms announced Jan. 25 (right in the middle of Sundance, where her new film, Like Crazy, is set to debut).
Lawrence had been working the audition rounds for several years — failing to win roles like Bella Swan in Twilight while slowly building a résumé in indie film — but that all changed once she was hailed as the latest Sundance breakthrough. Money may be the blood that pumps through Hollywood’s veins, but it’s that sudden sense of discovery that nurtures its battered soul. Indie film history — and the Sundance Film Festival in particular — is rife with actors who “popped” out of nowhere with standout roles.
Lawrence’s name is now part of an impressive honor roll that Sundance has nurtured: Carey Mulligan in An Education in 2009 and Melissa Leo in Frozen River the year before; Amy Adams in Junebug in 2005; Ryan Gosling in The Believer in 2001 and again with Half Nelson in 2006; Aaron Eckhart in the 1997 drama In the Company of Men. The enthusiastic chatter in Park City propelled all the actors forward with sudden momentum and an irrefutable credibility.
But if suddenly finding oneself in that intense spotlight can be disorienting, Lawrence is adjusting to the exposure with real equanimity.
At a casual lunch at the Snug Harbor diner in Santa Monica on a January weekday, she sits at the counter unrecognized in a gray belted sweater, blue jeans and boots. Taller in person than she seems in Bone, Lawrence periodically twirls her straight blond hair as she works through scrambled eggs and bacon and talks about the past year with a straightforward, relaxed manner and the occasional husky laugh. Later that day, she’ll be heading off to an industry screening of the film hosted by Kathryn Bigelow. But for now, she’s focused on making sense of just who or what is responsible for her current trajectory.
“I’d love to take credit for it,” says Lawrence, a Louisville native who took off for New York with her mother at 14 before landing a regular role on TBS’ The Bill Engvall Show and the part of the young Charlize Theron in Burning Plain. “But I was just like every actress in L.A. that auditions for everything, and those were the roles that picked me. I could try to plan everything — and I have, of course, because I’m controlling — but I’ve watched my career take shape, and I love what it’s done. I never could have designed that in a million years. I did go further for Winter’s Bone than I probably would have for other things because I loved the script and because it was the best female role.”
(…) Variety seems to be what appeals to Lawrence, who cites Alec Baldwin, Cate Blanchett, James Franco and Michelle Williams as actors whose careers she admires. Even as she shines in the glow accorded the newest indie discovery, Lawrence has moved quickly to consolidate her new status. She recently completed filming Fox’s big-budget X-Men: First Class (which required eight hours a day in makeup to become the blue-tinted Mystique), and she has the horror film House at the End of the Street in the can. Her next film, offbeat family drama The Beaver, will have its world premiere in March at the SXSW film festival before a wide theatrical release. Beyond those, she’s considering roles that range from fringe to colossal.
“I’ve never cried over not getting a role,” Lawrence says. “I’m a big believer in what’s meant to be will happen. I’ve watched fate play out so wonderfully without me being in control of it. To be honest, I don’t know if I’m any better than anyone. I think I got really lucky with a really good movie.”
However things develop — every career has missteps — a celebrated Sundance debut can leave a lasting impression. Lawrence will always have Ree Dolly in her pocket. And future directors, producers, financiers and fans aren’t likely to forget it.

You can read the full article, which talks a lot about Sundance and the role of indies in establishing actors at the source. There’s also a short clip of Jennifer talking about the Festival.
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Phase One unveils IQ series digital backs: Digital Photography Review

Phase One unveils IQ series digital backs: Phase One has released the IQ180, IQ160 and IQ140 medium format digital camera backs with 80, 60.5 and 40 megapixel CCD sensors respectively. All three backs feature 3.2" multi-touch rear ...