I was in Santa Monica last month so I decided to stop by new startup called Tsavo Media. Tsavo Media was founded by former AOL colleague and Userplane founder and CEO, Mike Jones. He assembled a super team including Mike Macadaan (Twiistup founder and former AOL colleague), Sean Percival, Ryan Sit and Steve Schepke, among others. Tsavo Media has been funded by American Capital and has been gobbling up a number of niche content sites including NibbleDish along with creating niche sites like KidGlue, Manolith and Twirlit. With the launch of Daymix, a search
experience which creates the "perfect page" for any given search term, we may be seeing the beginning of a relevancy engine. So what are they trying to do? According to Tsavo:
"These are blogs that get to know you. Entertain, inform and serve you. They’re good for consumers, and great for advertisers."
Curious to find out more details about these blog that appear to learn from your actions to better entertain you, I recently talked to Mike Jones and Mike Macadaan as I toured the Tsavo Media office space in Santa Monica, California. Check out SOMEWHAT FRANK video episode 68 (above) as go behind the scenes at Tsavo Media.
With the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic games ready getting underway you might be looking to stay up to speed with the action. Filtrbox, a Boulder, Colorado based TechStars startup and previous TECH cocktail demoer, is looking to help you keep track of all the USA Teams' news by launching a new widget offering. The widget is not just your normal feed widget as it showcases the power of persistent search and noise control to offer up everything it can find about the USA Olympic team. There is lots of stuff from lots of sources ranging from NBC to bloggers point of view and everything in between.
The new widget launched is a desktop widget that runs under Adobe AIR, and a Flash widget
for your blog. Both are totally free and easy to install. Check out the Team USA widget as you cheer Team USA on to gold or create your own custom widget based off your filtrs.
Clearspring, a Virginia-based startup, offers a number of widget solutions for publishers and advertisers. I got to catchup with Clearspring Community Manager and genunine good guy, Justin Thorp as he "tells all" about the widget making startup. Is Clearspring soon to be acquired? Watch the video and maybe you will find out.
There is so much news content being produced by both mainstream and social media outlets these days that it harder than ever to get through all of it. Taking an academic approach to productivity and literacy Spreed News recently launched to try and help you read through your news faster, thus saving you time.
There is something nice about being able to flip through and feel the pages of a good magazine. I subscribe to such titles as Wired, GOOD and a few others but I often see them piling up on my coffee table. Mygazines might offer a solution to help me get to read magazines while I am online with its community approach to magazine sharing. Mygazines enables its users to upload and share magazines with the rest of the community like the YouTube for magazine publishing.
Do you want to publish your own magazine? MagCloud a byproduct of HP Labs is currently in private beta and allows anyone to create a magazine by simply uploading a hi-resolution PDF file. MagCloud does the rest from printing, mailing, subscription management, and more.
Do you have a particular home video showing off a skill that you think you might be better than anyone at? Strutta, a Vancouver-based startup, has launched into beta to allow you to prove you are the best. Whether your skill is break dancing, playing the harmonica or doing fast food rapping - Strutta creates an avenue for competing on the Web via online video contests.
Childhood obesity is a serious medical condition that affects children above the normal weight
for his or her age and height. Most computer games, mobile devices and other online activities these days contribute to a sedentary lifestyle. How can kids keep on top of the obesity? GoTrybe, a Tennessee based startup, offers a interactive online approach aimed at attacking the problem. GoTrybe is an interactive community for kids based on health and wellness.
If content is truly king then Voxant is in the right business. Voxant Newsroom looks to help distribute and promote content from licensed content sources for free. Voxant offers publishers a place to find and embed licensed video, text, and
photos from over two hundred news sources from a variety of providers. Voxant places advertising in the its embeddable content to monetize the content making it possible to keep the content available for free to publishers.
Photo of the Week: It is March Madness and, like this crowd, I was swept into the excitement this past weekend as one of my alma maters, Purdue University, took on Xavier in Washington, DC.
If you are a motorcycle or political enthusiast than listen up because you are going to like this. LOUD3R, a network for niche enthusiast offerings, has launched a couple of different aggregation sites. FAST3R the motorcycle site and VOT3R the political site are pulled together by leveraging a semantic publishing engine used in combination with natural language processing and human intelligence the engine selects and publishes the best and most interesting content to the network. Users can also contribute content and comments to the site.
BricaBox, the NY-based structured content platform I previously reviewed, publicly launched today to enable anyone to create access and create these rich content experiences with ease. Funded sole by its founders BricaBox has been refered to a "wiki" on steroids (don't tell MLB or Congress) or "WordPress for structured content" as it offers a way for publishers tools to better display listings and such. It should also be noted that BricaBox offers social capabilities to enable community and sharing features which are sometimes confused with those of Ning or other social networking platform options.
AOL has announced a strategic content and advertising partnership with CitySearch an IAC owned company. The agreement enables AOL CityGuide, AOL Local Search and MapQuest to leverage CitySearch's local content and in return CitySearch gains access to AOL's distribution. CitySearch CEO, Jay Herratti had this to say:
"This partnership is a classic ‘win-win’ for both companies; Citysearch’s content is great for AOL’s audience, AOL’s reach is great for Citysearch’s advertisers who will gain access to qualified local customers and the ability to deliver a consistent message across the web, and both companies will benefit from incremental revenue."
Sounds like a simple enough deal to me. AOL will help get more ad units in front of Citysearch users and CitySearch will provide its local city reviews and information to AOL - makes sense.
Map mashups have become almost a dime a dozen these days as the release of open APIs by just about every major online mapping site and and development tools has lowered the barriers of entry. That was not always the case though and as recently as 2005 trailblazing mashup like HousingMaps.com (a cross between Google Maps and Craigslist housing listings) and ChicagoCrime.org (used Google Maps and Chicago Crime data to display crimes on a map) developers actually had to reverse engineer JavaScript code to create mashup. This all changed with the release of Google Maps API and most of the major mapping sites on the Web have since followed suit.
It was recently announced that due to
some server issues and overlaps with another new mashup the 2005 Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism award winning early mashup ChicagoCrime.org will be redirect to - EveryBlock. EveryBlock, launched recently, is also mashup of sorts created by Chicago-based Adrian Holovaty the developer that produced ChicagoCrime.org. EveryBlock is a news aggregator site for Chicago, New York and San Francisco that looks to help you answer the question:
“What’s happening in my neighborhood?”
The site compiles all the openly available public records and then slices and dices them so that they are easily accessible by zip code, address or neighborhood.
I am pleased to mention that my recent Somewhat Frank health 2.0 roundup article has made its way onto the Read/Write Web Network by appearing today on the fabulous Alt Search Engine blog. In case you are new to the blogosphere, Read/Write Web, Read/Write Talk, last100 and Alt Search Engines make-up the RWW Network and have been contributing compelling content to the Web everyday for years. I am a big fan of the RWW Network and I am honored to be a special guest contributor. Thanks to Charles Knight & Richard MacManus for showcasing some Somewhat Frank content.
