TCTV: In the Studio, Ba...

Editor’s note:  TechCrunch  contributor  Semil Shah  currently works at  Votizen  and lives in Palo Alto; you can follow him on twitter  @semil “In the Studio” at TechCrunch TV this week welcomes a former California resident and current investor back to the west coast, where he and his partners have embarked on a new journey to build out a physical presence in Silicon Valley and San Francisco for one of the most dynamic business groups in the world. Ajay Agarwal , a managing director with Bain Capital Ventures (BCV), is leading the charge of building his firm’s west coast offices and unveiling a brand new $600m fund, announced a few weeks ago in The New York Times . That’s a whole lot of money to invest in new consumer, enterprise, and mobile opportunities. This is sort of a personal homecoming for Agarwal, who went to Stanford years ago as a undergraduate computer science student and founded a company while he was in school. Now, after nearly ten years with Bain Capital in Boston, he’s leading his team here in California, comprised of Sahil Gupta , Indy Guha , and Adam Marchick , as it it were a startup, too. In this short conversation, Agarwal discusses how BCV fits in within all of Bain’s diversified business units, and most importantly explains how founders can expect to leverage that very unique platform. He also discusses what the firm’s investment strategy will be, in terms of preferences for early vs. late stage opportunities, as well as why the firm chose the Valley over San Francisco, and downtown Palo Alto over Sand Hill Road. Like other top-tier firms, BCV has also invested financial and human resources in order to help portfolio companies recruit technical talent nationwide, specifically by creating Startup Academy  (led by Shannon Harrington) and going so far as to incubate companies. Even though Bain Capital Ventures has been around since 1984, both in Boston and New York, they have been investing in California and nationwide for years, so this move cements that long-term commitment to the west coast. With a group like Bain and their expansive, diverse portfolio , you’d have to expect when they make a concerted move out west, they mean business, and that will be a very good exciting development for a startup ecosystem that is constantly evolving.

Click And Mortar: Zynga...

Mobile app developer Rovio has famously turned its Angry Birds game  into a popular toy franchise, but most other new-fangled gaming companies haven’t spent much energy going this route. But now social gaming leader Zynga is, per a big licensing deal with  Hasbro . The long-time toy and board game maker is paying Zynga to turn games like FarmVille, CityVille, and its other hit titles into real world products. Details on what this will look like are scant in the press release, so I’m left guessing what this is going to mean. Fluffy pink FarmVille tractors? Lego-style CityVille buildings? Although actually, Zynga has already been selling plush toys for FarmVille characters at Best Buy and other locations, although it’s unclear who the manufacturer is. Apparently that effort has been going well. Here’s something else for the new partners to figure out: many of Zynga’s games are based off of existing physical games like poker (Zynga Poker) and scrabble (Words With Friends). What’s the point of playing the Zynga-branded version of poker in real life? A bit more, from the content-light press release: “It’s exciting to partner with Hasbro as we share a common vision for play and a mission to connect the world through games,” said Mark Pincus, founder, CEO and chief product officer of Zynga. “This partnership is so special because it represents an exciting leap forward in enabling people to connect their virtual and real worlds. Hasbro has inspired play through their famous toys, games and action figures and we look forward to working with a company that continually creates meaningful and fun brands.” Of course, this move will create a new revenue stream, which will make Zynga’s currently bullish investors happy. Look for other developers to go in the real-world direction too. Casual game developer Big Fish, for one, recently hired the guy who had led Rovio’s push into merchandise. [Headline courtesy of TechCrunch reader Martin Maslo .]

Music Labels’ Joint Ven...

Over the last decade the major music labels — and their trade organization, the Recording Industry Association of America — have established a repeated pattern of attacking consumers in the name of squelching illegal file-sharing. Piracy, they claim, has been the industry’s undoing, accounting for an over 50% drop in sales since 1999 (the industry likes to discount the impact of legal per-song music downloads via services like iTunes, and the myriad other changes facilitated by the rise of high-speed Internet connections). Their efforts to combat piracy are often draconian: threatening tens of thousands of people with lawsuits claiming obscenely high damages; attempting to coordinate their threats with consumers’ ISPs; and, most recently, supporting legislation like SOPA and PIPA that would undermine the fabric of the Internet. Hell, Universal once pulled down a 30 second YouTube video of a dancing baby because the baby had the audacity to dance to a Prince song. Which is why my jaw dropped when I saw that VEVO, a property jointly owned by some of the biggest record labels in the world, was showing a pirated stream of an ESPN football game at its Sundance PowerStation venue last month — on no fewer than two televisions, and a pair of laptops. First, some background. VEVO is a sort of ‘Hulu for music videos’ that’s owned by Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and the Abu Dhabi Media Group. EMI (which Universal and Sony are in the process of acquiring chunks of) has licensed its content to the site. Together, these labels comprise three of America’s ‘Big Four’ music labels — Warner Music being the lone holdout. And these Big Four make up the vast majority of the RIAA. So when you hear about the record labels suing people, or trying to get ISPs to clamp down on users, or trying to pass legislation that could destroy the web as we know it — a lot of these people are behind it. Back to the story. The scene at the VEVO PowerStation was fairly typical for a Sundance event. VEVO and a pair of other companies had taken over a local venue, emblazoning their logos on the wall in bright red and replacing the normal drink menu with an array of cleverly-named concoctions designed to help you forget you were sipping liquor at three in the afternoon. Celebrities strolled through at regular intervals, making rounds through the bar before they headed over to a room set aside to pick out their gift of furry Sorel boots. The event’s redeeming factors, at least as far as this reporter was concerned, were the tasty hamburger sliders and the Patriots v. Ravens playoff game on ESPN that was playing throughout the venue. That is, until the game was rudely interrupted — not by a commercial break, but by a bizarre buffering warning. In hindsight, I should have noticed it immediately. The shoddy video quality and jitters clearly didn’t belong to an HD feed, despite the ESPN America HD logo in the lower right hand corner. And then there’s the fact that ESPN America isn’t even available in US markets (it’s a UK-based station). But between the blaring music and having James Marsden ( Cyclops !) standing three feet in front of me, it wasn’t until the pirate flags were fully unfurled that I finally noticed them. First the buffering message appeared, then a mouse cursor — controlled by forces unseen — flew onto the TV to exit out of full-screen mode and refresh the page. I think it may have also closed a few popover ads. At this point I tried to figure out the origins of the feed. As far as I could tell, the stream itself was coming from a Spanish-language live-streaming site called TuTele.tv. But that feed had apparently been accessed via a site called Frontrow.tv, which is itself an aggregator of live sports streams. At first glance, neither site looked particularly trustworthy. But copyright on the web is a notoriously complex issue, so I went to the source to verify my suspicions: ESPN. Which confirmed that neither site has the rights to stream its content. In other words, yes — that game was indeed being pirated. In fact, Frontrow.tv has since apparently gone dark, likely as a result of a recent crackdown by federal authorities on sports sites with pirated content. Given that the venue probably had access to a cable subscription (or perhaps an antenna, given that this was broadcast over the air), I’m not sure why it would decide to go the piracy route. But I do have a strong suspicion that it was done primarily as a matter of convenience. The next day, when I made a return visit to the VEVO PowerStation, the football game obviously wasn’t on. This time the TV screens were playing VEVO music videos, which were being coordinated to match whatever celebrity was currently in the room — Tommy Lee walked in, and his music video serendipitously started playing, then the same thing happened when Deadmau5 made an appearance. My hunch is that the team hooked up a computer to the TVs throughout the venue so that they could accomplish this synchronized star-caressing — then, rather than rework their entire setup just to play the football game for a few hours, they opted for the easier route and looked for a stream on the web. Which perfectly underscores everything wrong with the media industry’s approach to piracy. They’ve long made out pirates to be lawless thieves who think they’re entitled to receive everything for free. But the reality is far less black-and-white. Sure, there are some people who will duck the bill when they can — but many of them were never going to buy the content they downloaded in the first place. And a huge swath of ‘pirates’ are driven to their ways because it’s easier to stream or download something via an illegal site, not because they’re averse to paying for content. Stick a bunch of DRM and ads in front of the media they’ve already paid for, and they may opt to go with the path of least resistance next time. Oh, and if the venue  had wanted to stream that football game online legally, they would have had a tough time doing it: the only NFL licensee that offers streaming games is DirectTV, which requires you to purchase an entire season of ‘NFL Sunday Ticket’ in order to stream a game from the web. For a mere $350. Reached for comment, VEVO unsurprisingly tried to shift any blame: it says that the event was produced by a creative agency called Continuum Entertainment, and that there were several other companies involved. However, the venue was broken into different sections, and the televisions in question were clearly those belonging to VEVO’s PowerStation — and VEVO confirms that the televisions were supposed to be used to showcase VEVO videos and “original content”. VEVO also claims it wasn’t aware the game was being streamed and that it turned it off once it realized that it was (though it was on the entire time I was there, a period of at least thirty minutes). As for who actually decided to play the stream, or why, VEVO says the public had access to the computer being used so they can’t say for sure who exactly was responsible. Which is dubious (and almost certainly spin) — there was clearly someone actively controlling the computer, because they refreshed it when the connection stalled, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a random attendee hoarding over the laptop. Must have been one of those nasty pirates. In any case, were it the music industry that was on the other side of this, you can be sure they’d dismiss all of the aforementioned explanations without a second thought. And then they’d probably assess damages in the realm of $20,000 per down. We’ve reached out to ESPN to ask if it will be pursuing legal action against VEVO, Continuum, or any of the other companies involved with the event.

You Can Buy Me Love, Bu...

Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, and the majority of us are likely scrambling to find that special gift. (The rest of us, meanwhile, are cursing couples.) A Valentine’s Day gift is usually more important than others because it’s a one-on-one situation, unlike Christmas or birthdays. Just one gift, to just one person — and it better be good. With that in mind, I’d like to address an article out of AllThingsD this morning that sourced information from PriceGrabber’s Valentine’s Day Dashboard Report. The report took information from February 4 through February 5, finding that various tablets, TVs and phones are hot items for gift-crazed Valentines. The information itself isn’t that intriguing, but it did get me thinking about handing out gadgetry as a gift. What makes gift-giving so special to us — and such a huge part of our culture — is the fact that it’s proof of one person’s thought for another person. We’re naturally very self-centered, all of us. But by going out and thinking of, finding, buying, and wrapping a gift, we give that special someone proof that we’ve been thinking about them — proof that they’re important to us. Of course, expensive gifts are often seen as better gifts, but that’s just a product of our consumer-driven lifestyles. To spend more on someone is nice, if thought is also a large part of the equation, but without thought the gift becomes empty. For example, last year I bought my girlfriend a pretty expensive necklace from her favorite jewelry store. I figured that since the store was her favorite, and that particular necklace was one of their most expensive, I’d be good to go. Wrong. She said the necklace wasn’t her style, which made a lot of sense after we went through her jewelry box and found that she only owned silver jewelry. The necklace I bought was gold. Unfortunately, most gadgetry falls into this category. Just because it’s expensive and flashy and has an Apple on it doesn’t mean that it’s the most meaningful gift. Especially considering the fact that our gadgetry is so very personal. The type of phone you own and enjoy using says a lot about you, and it is inevitably a part of your daily life for about two years. For some of us, it’s a more steadfast, stable relationship than the one we have with our Valentine. Why would anyone ever want someone else to pick it out for them? The same is true for tablets and PCs. Just think of how many configurations your laptop could have come in. But you thought about it, knew your needs, knew your price range, and configured your notebook accordingly. Chances are, no one else could’ve done that for you. Of course, there are exceptions to both of the points I’ve made — that expensive gifts are empty and that gadgets need to be chosen by the owner. Ever since I was 16, Christmas changed at my house. There were no longer a dozen small gifts under the tree. Instead, my dad asked me in October if there was anything that I really, really wanted, and that one gift is what I’d get on Christmas. This is how I got my first car, help with the down payment on my apartment, and almost every piece of gadgetry I’ve ever owned, including the iPhone 4S. So, according to my earlier logic, my dad would be an awful gift-giver. But that’s not necessarily the case. See, in the instance of my family Christmas, my dad always asked me what I wanted, and in turn I was as specific as possible. I was getting the end-all, be-all of potential Christmas gifts because it’s exactly what I had chosen. Plus, we’re talking about my dad and Christmas, not your lover and Valentine’s Day. So do your Valentine a favor this year: Unless he or she has asked very specifically for this or that gadget, take an extra minute to think what would truly make this person happy, and do your very best to make it happen for them. Tablets and phones are great, but knowing that someone has spent time thinking about you… that’s priceless. [Img credit: Lasse Kristensen, ShutterStock]

The Google+ Platform Ro...

It won’t stop with Google Search Plus Your World. When asked if we should expect more integrations of Google+ into Google products, G+ director of engineering David Glazer said at today’s Inside Social Apps 2012 conference , ”Yes, where it’s good for the user. I think there’s more places to make people happy by showing them content they care about.” At the first major speaking engagement about its social network, Glazer also discussed user acquisition, monetization, and support for brands. Regarding Google+ expanding into more Google properties, Glazer  said “I don’t think of it in the sense of cross-promotion or the importance of the product to the company. It’s the importance of users to users. People care about other people, and that should be baked in to what you do online. With Google+, we  don’t want another product, but we can make everything you do online better if we have some idea of your identity, your connections, and have some mechanism to have conversations. Glazer explained the slow roll out of the apps platform as a desire to “find the balance between people saying ‘I hope they never let anyone make a game on Google+’ and people saying ‘I can’t wait for games on Google+’. Google is taking this controlled approach to avoid the influx of spam that hit Facebook when it opened viral channels after its platform launched. Glazer said “If too many [developers] jump in, it could change the character of the platform.” Plans for helping developers gain users will for now center around organic discovery. Glazer noted that Google+ games can also be accessed from the Chrome Web Store, and when launched will open an experience in Google+. Google has also created a “Play Now” button that developers can embed on their own sites to promote their Google+ apps. Brands shouldn’t expect the equivalent of Facebook Page tab applications any time soon, unfortunately. During the Q&A I asked Glazer how brands will be able to drive their brand Page visitors to branded apps, for instance if Google will add the ability to feature links to apps on Pages. Glazer responded “We’re considering it. It’s a reasonable request but not one we’re prioritizing right now.” The most exciting thing to developers about Google in 2012 may be video. Glazer said “The  Hangouts API is under the radar in beta, [but it will offer] a lot of opportunities for people to do cool things.  The trend is that now you can, then you couldn’t. There no cognitive friction, no technical friction, and there’s huge scale. What could I build if I assume I have cheap, interactive, easy-to-embed video, that lets me do silly things where everyone who tries it smiles.”

AT&T, Google Among...

As part of its 2012 US Digital Future in Focus whitepaper , comScore looked at the online ad landscape and found a mix of old and new names. The report includes a list of the top 10 display advertisers in the United States (all of this data is US-only), as measured by impressions. AT&T topped the list, as it has in previous years, but there’s a newcomer — Google, which delivered 40.4 billion ads for products like Chrome, Google Offers, and Google+. Large brand advertising on the Internet is growing in general, comScore says. To quantify that, it measured the number of advertisers delivering at least 1 billion impressions per quarter. There were 145 advertisers in that league during the final quarter of 2011, up 38 percent from the same period in 2010. As for where these ads are actually running, Facebook remains the leader in display advertising, with 1.3 trillion impressions adding up to 27.9 percent market share. Following Facebook, in descending order, were Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google. (Remember that display advertising is a relatively new area for Google, which has traditionally focused on search ads.) The report also includes the results of a December study looking at ad measurement. comScore calls the results “eye-opening”, arguing that visibility, geographic validation, brand safety, and audience targeting are all going to be big issues in 2012. For example, comScore found that 31 percent of ads in the study were delivered but never seen by consumers, presumably because people scrolled past before the ad loaded, or because they never scrolled down to see the at in the first place. comScore also found that 72 percent of campaigns ran at least some ads next to content that the advertisers said was not “brand safe”. Advertising is just one area covered in the new whitepaper. We’ve also covered the findings related to online video .