Glam Media Cooks Up New...

Glam Media , one of the largest publishing and advertising networks on the Web, is debuting its newest branded vertical— Foodie.com . As its name indicates, Glam’s newest vertical is aimed at covering all things food, and features a combination of content from food critics, bloggers, chefs, restaurateurs and other “food influentials.” For background, Glam’s various publishing verticals have a reach of 200 million unique monthly visitors globally, and is particularly popular amongst female audiences. Glam Media has more than 2,500 publishers organized across multiple vertical categories online including Glam.com for Women, Glam Entertainment for Adults, Brash.com for Men and Bliss.com for health and wellness. Glam also announced the acquisition of Ning in September. As Glam CEO Samir Arora explains, there’s a large opportunity in providing quality content on recipes, restaurant reviews and tends in one place. And food has been one of the fastest growing ad verticals on Glam’s network of sites (Betty Crocker is an advertiser on Foodie.com). Foodie features content from 100 food authors such as Inspired Taste, Kitchen Confidante and The Bakery Spot and includes more than 1,000 recipes at launch. Foodie also offers a recipe finder app that allows consumers to find and follow top food editors and chefs, and includes vertical recipe search, along with social integrations with Facebook and Twitter. Additionally, Foodie aims to be a social network for food-lovers to post recipes, photos, review other recipes and more. As a part of the launch, Foodie is also creating a panel of culinary experts, including acclaimed food critics and celebrity chefs to help drive an authoritative perspective on recipes, restaurants, ingredients and cooking techniques. Among the culinary experts who will be a part of the Foodie community include newest Iron Chef winner, top chef Geoffrey Zakarian and the former New York Times and International Herald Tribune food critic and leading food author, Patricia Wells. Food seems like a logical next play for Glam considering its focus on lifestyle media and content. There are a plethora of food-focused recipe verticals, such as AllRecipes, Food52, Gojee and many others. Glam hopes to differentiate itself by becoming a one-stop-shop for recipes, reviews, quality content and more. Foodie actually resembles more of an online food magazine, but with more social and interactive features.

RockYou Cofounder Lance...

Lance Tokuda was one of the masterminds behind viral apps on Facebook back at the end of last decade. He cofounded and led RockYou as its chief executive through the evolution of the Facebook platform, all the while inundating users with hugs , horoscopes , birthday cards and other lightweight social app communications (which some may refer to as “spam”). RockYou ended up finding its business in social advertising and social gaming, and in late 2010 Tokuda stepped down from his CEO role. Now he’s back with a new company on Facebook today, called schoolFeed , that’s trying to connect older users with long-lost high school classmates. Designed as a Facebook canvas app and a standalone site that you use via logging in with your Facebook identity, schoolFeed basically creates a new layer that looks not dissimilar to myYearbook, Tagged and other entertainment-focused social networks that have survived Facebook’s world domination. But It’s going after Classmates.com, which charges a fee, by providing its service for free, and by mining Facebook data to discover missing connections. At this point you might be thinking, “hey wait, isn’t this what people already use Facebook for?” Tokuda’s response is that Facebook has not offered class-based high school search for years. There’s no way within Facebook, currently, to specifically search for class year. Instead, you just see everyone who ever went to the school (albeit you can piece together quite a bit of your old class by seeing who you have friends in common with). Tokuda also says that most older users have relatively few classmate connections on Facebook, based on the research he’s seen. Take a closer look at the app and you can see that there’s a lot more going on than anything Facebook is trying to do. First off, the app has its own news feed, that shows you activity from people that it already knows you went to high school with. And yes there’s a feature to help users plan real-life reunions. It also has a virtual currency system built in, that it uses to reward users for creating engagement — posting status updates, inviting friends and the usual types of incentives like that. The earnings can then be spent on games like Bingo, or on accessing real-life yearbooks. Via a recently introduced feature, one user from each high school can have their yearbook professionally scanned and uploaded in exchange for a bunch of virtual currency. Then, every other user who went to the same school pays using their currency to access each page in the book. From my understanding, one page is free each day but you pay if you want to flip through faster than that. The app does work fairly hard to strike a balance between virality and a quality user experience. For example, you can’t pile up the points by repeating the same actions over and over again. But if you become a serious user you’ll still find yourself blasting out a lot of messages. The site and app launched seven months ago, and so far it has been booming. It has more than 7 million registered users and nearly half a million daily active users, according to Tokuda; AppData meanwhile shows it hitting DAU numbers far higher than that on some days. When I asked Tokuda if he was interested in building a fuller-featured social network, he did say that he’d like to build out more features for young users as well, but that the focus is going to stay around classmates not anything else. The company has also convinced some RockYou investors to go in on it, too. It’s announcing what it calls a “seed” round of $1.75 million led by First Round Capital , with CrossLink Capital , Interwest Partners  and SK Telecom participating.

Verizon And Redbox Taki...

Ladies and gentlemen, it looks like the mysterious Project Zoetrope will soon be seeing the light of day. Verizon and Redbox owner Coinstar have just taken to the wires today to announce their new joint venture in video entertainment, with their subscription services poised to launch in the second half of this year. Details are still light at the moment (though a 9:30 AM conference call should shed some light on things) but the new service certainly has Netflix in its sights. What we do know so far is that Verizon looks to combine a “video on demand streaming and download service” with Redbox’s physical media rentals from their 35,000+ kiosks nationwide. If the information given to us from an inside source holds true though, expect to see the yet-unnamed video service hit a host of platforms — think iOS, Android, Xbox, and the like. I probably don’t need to remind you that Verizon is a major player in both the home entertainment and mobile space, and it’s exactly that breadth that they and Redbox want to built off of for their new service. The two companies are apparently in pursuit of what they call the “borderless lifestyle,” where the entertainment content consumers want will be available on the device (or media format) of their choosing. It has the potential to be a far more attractive option than Netflix for some customers, if only because using Netflix’s mail order service requires a little bit of forethought. Spur-of-the-moment types will likely appreciate the ability to swing by the local drugstore and pick up a few DVDs for the night when their new movie of choice hasn’t yet appeared in their Verizon/Redbox streaming account yet. That question of content is what will ultimately make or break this new service, and hopefully they have some aces up their collective sleeves, as the new joint venture and Netflix will likely compete head-to-head on new DVD and Blu-ray releases. In all likelihood, Netflix will have Verizon/Redbox beat when it comes to the size of their physical media catalog, so Verizon/Redbox may look to play up their “borderless” streaming side of things. Even that could be a risky move, as Netflix’s anemic margins on streaming video content show that it’s a tough model to run with. Update: Well shucks, the conference call lasted all of four minutes and didn’t shed any new light on the situation.

Keen On… Dane Jasper: W...

There are few more articulate supporters of high speed broadband access than Sonic.net CEO Dane Jasper . Not only does he think Americans should have the right to high quality broadband, but he also thinks that it is the key to innovation in the broader economy. Home video is, of course, increasingly dependent on broadband and so, Japser told me when he came into our San Francisco studio earlier this week, is innovation in our  healthcare and education sectors. Jasper doesn’t see the actual cost of broadband as the problem. Internet access isn’t finite, like coal or water, he insists – and the cost of bandwidth is actually plummeting to zero. Indeed, a stunning 98% of his costs, he confessed to me, go on things outside the product. It’s staffing, he acknowledged, which suck up most of his costs – with investment in customer service being 20 times higher than his investment in product. For Jasper, innovation can solve all our problems. Even the seemingly endless issue of piracy, he told me, can be solved by rights-holders becoming more innovative in making their product readily available on the Internet. It’s that kind of innovation, Jaspers insists, rather than legislation such as SOPA, that will save the entertainment industry. This is the second of two interviews with the straight-talking Jasper. Yesterday, he told me why fiber is the future of wired connectivity.

After Leo DiCaprio Inve...

Mobli , the startup behind the eponymous, much-hyped realtime photo and video sharing service, has struck a partnership with road racing cyclist and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong . Armstrong, a seven-time Tour de France champion, will be making use of a private Mobli channel to keep his fans and followers up-to-date on his life through videos, photos and whatnot. The man is also joining the startup’s boards of advisors, not too long after another major celebrity, actor Leonardo DiDCaprio , participated in a $4 million funding round for the company. Said Armstrong: “When I was first introduced to Mobli, I immediately thought it was an extraordinary platform and an innovative yet accessible way for different audiences to share their stories. I’m excited to use Mobli as a direct channel for my social media followers to get a personal look at my experiences day to day.” The former pro cycler says he will use Mobli to share moments from his training sessions as well as his work with the Lance Armstrong Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on cancer research and support. Armstrong is no stranger to social media. At the time of writing, he had about 3.2 million followers on Twitter , while his Facebook page has garnered over 2 million ‘likes’. Bill Stapleton , founder of Capital Sports & Entertainment and Lance Armstrong’s long-time agent, will also work together with Mobli and has also joined the startup’s advisory board along with Armstrong and Andrew Razeghi , an author and professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. History teaches us that celebrity backers and endorsers can only contribute so much to the chances of success for a startup, but this kind of exposure can certainly help this type of service get some early traction more rapidly than usually. If you’re an early user, tell us what you think.