Castro's Blog

Atom Entertainment Acquired by Viacom for $200m

Last week, Atom Entertainment was acquired by Viacom fro $200m. Atom has become a succesful digital media company after enduring several difficult early years. This is a great story of persistence and determination.

Atom Entertainment began it's life as Atom Films in 1998 up here in Seattle. Originally, the company was focused on creating original short films for the Internet. They signed expensive deals with famous directors like Tim Burton. The company was having a difficult time due to the expenses associated with many of these deals. Around this time, Matt Hulet (currently CEO of mpire and advisor to Pluggd), who was an early employee at Real Networks became the President at Atom Films. Also around this time the company moved down to California and merged with Shockwave, a site distributing animated shorts produced with Flash/Shockwave, to become Atom Shockwave.

Slowly the company found its footing and began to thrive, Matt eventually left to become President of Expedia Corporate Travel, and Mika (founder and current CEO) continued to lead the company forward. Eventually, broadband penetration reached critical mass and consumers began to consume larger amounts of video content online. Then, this one time bust, became a hot company again. My sources tell me that Atom was on path to bring in $30m in revenue this year (not a bad business), before agreeing to Viacom's overtures.

Just goes to show you that as an entreprenuer you have to maintain a belief in your vision. Not every start-up is going to be a YouTube, but over the last 10 years Atom went from hype, to has been, to a great business. It also shows why listening to the "doubters" is something any entreprenuer needs to avoid. It's so easy for people to sit on the sidelines and play Monday morning quarterback. Most of the folks who do this, have never really put themselves out on a limb to start something from scratch on their own.

So congrats to Mika, Matt, and all ther folks at Atom who stuck it out, ignored the skeptics, and make this an inspiring story.

AOL User 927 - "It puts the lotion in the basket..."

The AOL fall out continues. This morning the NYT reported on a sweet 62 year-old woman whose been outed by her AOL search data.

We've also learned of AOL User 927. Definately not the sweet old gramma type. Here are some searched by AOL User 927 as reported by Consumerist.com:

"Then he investigates human mold. Perhaps staying at home after an accident? Then he peeks into a little dog sex, but the leash isn't very long...

Later that day he looks up flowers. flowers aster. butterfly orchid. The next day, more flowers, followed by a little forced rape porn, testicle festivals and slow-dancing steps. Must be planning a big night.

Fast-forward to May...

Queries include: beauty and the beast disney porn, holocaust rape, japanese child slave, molestation and rape porn, virtual children, 3d molestation and rape porn"

Can you hear the lambs? Damn...this dude is scary.

UPDATE (Aug 13th) - Here are more search by AOL User 927 from Jasonblog:

testicle festivals
hentai child rape
hentai pedofilia
dirty gay sex
rough gay sex
bdsm electricity
sex torture
tranny sex
tranny bondage
tranny trouble
farm boys bestility
hermaphrodite
intersexed genitals
child incest hentai
pee fetish
sexual torture
chlamydia
incest rape hentai
hentai child rape
3d molestation and rape porn

UPDATE #2 - Here is the list to AOL User 927's actual search logs

Leaving Microsoft

So Niall Kennedy posted that he is leaving Microsoft after only 4 months. When Niall joined Microsoft to worked on Live, it was heralded as Microsoft's ability to attract top Web 2.0 talent to the sprawling Redmond campus. "We're cool...we have innovative and creative people...we're going to do great stuff."

My reaction to his original hiring was one of surprise. Why would someone who has tasted the sweet elixer of start-up creativity and freedom willingly place the shackles of Microsoft on? I know this from my own experiences, having spent 6 years (damn that was a long time) at Microsoft. For a moment, I even thought, "Gee...maybe I should respond to those emails from MS recruiters...if they got Niall Kennedy they must be doing cool stuff."

Well, today is one of those days that restored some order to my conception of the world. Niall gave a good explanation of his reasons, but here was a snippet that got my attention:

"Windows Live is under some heavy change, reorganization, pullback, and general paralysis and unfortunately my ability to perform, hire, and execute was completely frozen as well."

No that is the Microsoft I know (and once loved). The thing is, this isn't some temporary transitionary period. This is kinda how Microsoft is all the time. One big gigantic initiative after another, lots of marketing fluff, lot's of press events with Gates and Ballmer, lots of internal posters and shwag (and incredible amount actually), and initial burst of energy within the rank and file, then....well...nothing. This happened with .NET, this happened with the "Longhorn Wave," and I'm betting that it will happen with Live. Bragging about hiring 10,000 employees doesn't mean anything....other than....making people wonder what the heck those people are doing. Microsoft doesn't need to hire more, they need to get ride of people and get smaller...faster...quicker...unleash the talent within those walls. Until that happens folks like Scoble, Niall, and Gondotra will continue to leave.

But it won't happen. That's why start-ups like Pluggd have a chance to make a difference.

We Made A Few Tweaks to Pluggd

We rolled out a few simple tweaks the other day on Pluggd.com.

We've added an easy to discover RSS link on each podcast detail page that points to the podcaster's RSS feed. We've been so focused on making Pluggd a great web-based listening experience that we left this out. In retrospect this was a bit of a bone-headed move on our part. Some podcasters have pointed out that they don't appreciate it when a web-page references their podcast without a link back to the podcaster's web site (which we did do) and an RSS link for the podcast (which we messed up on). We always appreciate feedback from regular old users and podcasters alike. Thanks. We're in the process of rolling out some more tweaks based on the feedback we've received.

 
This is a classic example of something that is easy enough to add, but a big deal if left out.

We've also tweaked out tag cloud so it looks nicer. We were not scaling the font size correctly and most of the tags were the same size. This defeats the purpose of even having a tag cloud. Now it looks sweet. Check it out for yourself - http://www.pluggd.com/tag.

More tweaks coming soon. Stay tuned.

AOL Responds

So AOL has basically said, "we're sorry." Here is a quote from the CNET article:

"This was a screw-up, and we're angry and upset about it. It was an innocent enough attempt to reach out to the academic community with new research tools, but it was obviously not appropriately vetted, and if it had been, it would have been stopped in an instant," AOL, a unit of Time Warner, said in a statement. "Although there was no personally identifiable data linked to these accounts, we're absolutely not defending this. It was a mistake, and we apologize. We've launched an internal investigation into what happened, and we are taking steps to ensure that this type of thing never happens again."

I have to say, I give AOL credit for just taking responsibility and admitting that this was a mistake. That is the best thing to do when trying to manage a crisis - "don't." I remember back in circa 1992, there was a problem with Intel's CPU and they just kept trying to make excuses. The whole situation blew up in their face.

Jason Calcanis, who runs Netscape for AOL, has suggested that AOL not maintain any search logs. I'm all for privacy, but maintaining this type of data also helps improve search and make it more useful. The best way to ensure absolute privacy, unfortunately, is to not maintain any information. It would be a shame, because it limits the ability to conduct research and innovate. Perhaps a middle ground would be for a group of companies to create a library of search data and scrub it for any user names, SSNs, etc., and make that available for any University or company looking to conduct search research.

This is not much different than how large text and speech libraries are handled for research.

AOL Releases User Data

TechCrunch is reporting that AOL has made available the search histories of 650,000 of their users. The user account name is replaced with an ID number, but as Michael Arrington correctly points out, there is often enough information in search queries to determine the user's identity anyway.

This is a real blow to AOL as they are trying to revamp their service and become more relevant (dumping dial up and focusing on advertising) to a broader audience of consumers.

This is just BAD. As of 7:30 PST, TechCrumch has reported the file has been download 800+ times.

Ouch...

Update #1 - SiliconBeat also has a post on this story.

Update #2 - AOL has finally taken down the data file. The link points to a blank page.

YouTube Updates

YouTube's site is down for either new features or maintenance of some kinda. I browsed to the site this evening and saw the following page:

I'm hoping this is because of some cool new features. We'll have to wait and see.

Update #1 - After 2+ hours, still no YouTube. I got tired and went to bed.

Update #2- This morning YouTube was available. No new features that I could find. I guess they were just doing maintenance. Nothing exciting here. :-(

I find it interesting to see how many of the currently popular sites today are not able to maintain high availability. At MSN and Amazon, we had mechanisms in place to roll out changes/updates without taking the service down.

 

Web 2.0 Show Interviews Me About Pluggd

Josh and Chris from the Web 2.0 Show interviewed me about the launch of Pluggd.com. These guys are pretty cool, and they have some nice applications they are making available under the SteelPixel moniker.

Listen to the Podcast

AOL Increases Storage

AOL has just announced that they will provide 5 GB of free storage to AOL or AIM users via their XDrive service. AOL acquired XDrive last summer for an undisclosed amount.

• File sharing with permissions
• Scheduled automatic backups
• Automatic upload of e-mail attachments from AOL Mail or any external mail provider o

TechCrunch did a comparison of 13 storage services a while back that did a good job of outlining the offerings available at that time.

Google Search Continues To Roll

As much as Google's new initiatives continue to flounder, see my posts about the recent NYT and BusinessWeek articles on this subject, their core business continues to roll over the competition.

HitWise has just released a report that shows Google has increased their market share to 60% over Yahoo and MSN.