Boxee’s Newest Adult Re...

Boxee has slowly but surely been building out the adult content offered through its streaming service, and now there is one more in the mix: Pornhub ( NSFW link ) — which informally calls itself the YouTube for porn, offering a mix of user-generated and more professional content — is now also coming to the service. But although adult material has long been one of the dead-certs in the world of paid content, it’s still a competitive business and therefore ripe for disruption. So unlike other recent adult additions to Boxee like Fyre , Pornhub is making its debut ad-free and free to watch. It claims that it is the first, official free adult app on Boxee to do so. This is also Pornhub’s first move to making its content available on TVs, Corey Price, VP of new business development, tells me. This is not to say that Pornhub’s content will remain free forever. Price says that its mobile web site also started in a similar vein; after it built up its audience, it began to incorporate ads. The Boxee service will likely follow a similar pattern. “The money always comes later,” Price says. The bulk of Pornhub’s viewing at the moment is on its own web site. That brings in 100 million page views per day, with around 25 million visitors and 3 billion page views per month. But Price says that they have started to see a gradual migration to watching Pornhub away from a computer. That comes partly from its mobile presence (60 million views per month) as well as the fact that you can already watch Pornhub on TVs via any console with a browser. The move to TV screens via a dedicated app will mean improved user experience for those watching on those bigger screens, plus more functionality: the remote and keyboard from the Boxee system, he says, “work perfectly” with this app — unlike the browsing experiences. Similar to other adult apps on Boxee, this content will be filtered and hidden behind a wall to ensure that children — and anyone else a Boxee owner chooses — will not be able to access it. And as for next steps, Price says that Pornhub is eyeing up Roku and Google TV as its next two TV platforms, as well as building dedicated apps for some of its other brands such as Youporn. In other words, a big move for Pornhub to the TV hub.

A Few New Bag Designs F...

I spent a good portion of my adult career as a graphic designer. I still look at the world through that lens, so I am always happy to stumble across some beautiful designs, no matter where they might be. Stumble I did, into the Golla booth at the Mobile World Congress today (2 hours of sleep and about 300 calories of food in the last 36 hours) to find a pretty killer lineup of beautifully designed bags for all your gadgets. Based in Finland, Golla’s mission is to create “fashionable bags for portable electronics by blending creative influences of fashion, lifestyle and technology.” They do a pretty nice job. This array of gadget bags looks to be functional and casual and should suit the needs of most gadget carrying geeks. The designs also make a statement without being over the top. Look for these new styles to be available in the coming months (I believe the woman there told me April, but I was pre-coffee, so…you know, don’t hold me to that).

And Now There’s A Kicks...

Well, Kickstarter , it looks like you’ve finally arrived. And I don’t just mean that you launched 27K projects, saw $99 million pledged, or attracted 30 million+ visitors last year — all of which equalled a sizable increase in activity on your compared to the year prior. No, I mean that your winning crowdfunding model has been adopted by the adult industry. Clearly. Indeed, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and Groupon certainly saw its fair share of flatterers after its launch, but it didn’t inspire a response from porn, at least not in the early days. (Though there are those that are trying .) Yes, according to Xbiz , “the adult entertainment industry’s leading source for business news and information,” a new startup introduced itself today, called Offbeatr , brought to you by the marketplace for adult digital products, Extra Lunch Money. Offbeatr claims to be “the first crowdfunding resource specifically designed for the adult industry,” and all chuckling aside, it’s attempting to be a serious business. In Kickstarter mold, Offbeatr essentially wants to build a platform where adult content creators can go to raise money for their projects, whether that be movies, books, photo albums … I’ll leave off there. Content creators get to keep the rights to their content and gain new fans in exchange for a dose of seed capital. While, on the flip side of the coin, Offbeatr offers everyday people a discovery platform for indie adult projects and gives them the opportunity to earn unique rewards in exchange for their support. It really seems as if it were created by “Now That’s What I Call Startups,” as Offbeatr allows project creators to receive their own dedicated page to describe their project, how much they hope to raise, and what rewards they will offer in exchange for monetary pledges from adult content enthusiasts. Just like Kickstarter, if the project reaches its proposed goal by the deadline, supporters’ credit cards are charged, and if it doesn’t meet the goal, users go on their merry way without paying a dime. I don’t know how Kickstarter’s lawyers will feel about this — it’s not as if they own the rights to crowdfunding — but Offbeatr’s model does seem a pretty aggressive copy-and-paste job. That being said, it seems that Extra Lunch Money’s CEO Ben Tao is aware of this fact, saying “I would love to say Offbeatr was a totally original idea, it’s not.” Not only that, but, the liberal in entrepreneurial spirit might even detect a whiff of market opportunity: “While there are hundreds of crowd funding websites online, there are exactly zero which allow projects of an adult or sexual nature,” the CEO continued. And certainly, for those whose interests or artistic muses fall outside of the mainstream, funding can be difficult to find. Offbeatr is just seizing a smart business opportunity and offering the supply to what has to be a fairly large demand among independent, amateur content creators. After all, it’s not like there isn’t a precedent here — just ask the bevy of “Pinterest for porn” clones. It’s actually kind of an ambitious project, going up against the mountain of free porn out there on the Internet, and if it’s actually serious about providing a viable alternative to BitTorrent. Connecting content creators directly with fans is a powerful thing, something one-hundred-and-one sites that don’t deal in adult content know very well. It’s also somewhat humorous to note that Offbeatr even provides a quote from Michael Masnik , the Editor of Techdirt on its site. (It’s not about adult content, however.) Debauched bacchanalia or Kickstarter acquisition bait? You decide .

Flurry: Largest Address...

Mobile analytics firm Flurry is closing out the year with a look into the forthcoming shift in mobile installed bases expected in 2012. Using data from the firm’s dataset of over 140,000 apps running worldwide, it was able to calculate smartphone penetration in established markets like U.S. and Europe. Then, using additional data from the IMF in combination with Flurry’s own data, the firm was able to then determine which countries represented the top market opportunities for mobile app developers. Not surprisingly, China and India made the list. But so did the U.S. To start, Flurry looked at a snapshot of apps running across its user base over the past 30 days in order to rank the current addressable market. The U.S. led the way, with an installed base of 109 million out of 264 million (41%). Flurry notes that 264 million is about half of what Apple and Google say they’ve activated – something that can be accounted for by old device replacement. China (#2) and South Korea (#4) appeared in the top five, ranking above Japan (#5), France (#6) and Germany (#7). The U.K. is #2. Next, Flurry wanted to determine which markets hold the most future promise. It used the adult population counts from the IMF, then adjusted the numbers based on the size of the middle class in each country using  a study by Miller-McCune . Flurry then estimated the size of the upper class for each country, as those folks could also afford a smartphone. This way, China, India and Brazil would not be over-represented in the estimations just because they have large populations. And yet, they did make a showing. China has 122 million users who could afford an iPhone or Android. The U.S. has 91 million, India 75 million, Japan 65 million and Brazil 34 million. In the final bit of analysis, Flurry wanted to determine the world’s largest addressable markets, regardless of penetration. For starters, it looked at current market maturity (the measure of how penetrated smartphone devices are among a country’s addressable audience.)  The U.S., with the largest light blue circle in the graph below, has the largest total addressable audience (TAM) at 200 million. Sweden is the most mature country with 3.2 million of 5 million (66%) addressable consumers already using iOS and Android devices.  France, 10 th  in maturity, has 9.6 million of 34 million (28%) consumers using iOS and Android devices. In looking at the future addressable markets, Flurry found that even though India’s total population is not far behind China’s, its total addressable market is. Meanwhile Japan, the world’s fourth largest market, has a lot of upside given light penetration of iOS and Android devices against its large, addressable market, says Flurry. Using this method, the top 10 addressable markets are the U.S., China, Japan, India, Germany, Brazil, Italy, France, the U.K. and Russia. More analysis can be found on Flurry’s blog post .

Motorola Mobility Acqui...

Today, SetJam , a company that describes itself as “building the future of TV,” has announced it has been acquired by Motorola Mobility. The company’s products currently include a customizable TV and movie widgets designed for embedding on websites, plus developer-friendly tools like a REST API and XML download of the SetJam database. The TV widgets are designed to be context-sensitive and offer full CSS-styling, so they blend in with the website where they’re placed, while also allowing the site’s owner to increase revenue through affiliate income that comes from clicks to third-party sources. The company’s widgets include links to iTunes, Amazon, Netflix, Hulu and others, which would be the source of this affilate income. A list of the supported content sources found on the company’s homepage also includes Cartoon Network, MTV, Disney, Nickelodeon, Adult Swim, Spike, TBS, CBS, WB, FX, South Park Studios, Crunchyroll, Fox, TNT and Crackle among those SetJam offers. For those with longer memories, you may recall SetJam was once a consumer-facing web service, similar to Clicker , which aggregated videos from around the web. It later shifted its focus, becoming the B2B service that Motorola Mobility acquired. The announcement of the acquisition arrived from Ryan Janseen, formerly SetJam CEO. It reads: I’m writing to let you know that today SetJam was acquired by Motorola Mobility.  We are all very excited about this transition here at SetJam.  Motorola and SetJam share the vision of making content delivery, discovery, and consumption seamless across any screen, and as a world leader in video technology, Motorola will provide us with unprecedented levels of reach and distribution. I want to take this moment to personally thank you for your continued encouragement and support over the past two years. None of this success would have been possible without your backing and belief in us.  While this acquisition was in process, we’ve had to be far less communicative than we normally would be.  We greatly look forward to reconnecting with all of you in the New Year.  In the mean time, we wish you a happy and healthy holiday season! Cordially, Ryan Ryan Janssen (Former) CEO, SetJam The announcement comes at a time when Motorola Mobility itself is being acquired by Google for $12.5 billion . Given Google’s own TV intentions with its Google TV service, one has to wonder if there’s a connection between the two moves.