Black Web 2.0

Was surfing the web yesterday and found an interesting post on GigaOm about the creation of a “Grammy” Awards for web start ups called The Crunchies. The effort is collaborative between GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat, and TechCrunch. Here is a summary of what The Crunchies will be straight from Om Malik:

“In order to recognize the start-ups and their achievements, we are teaming up with TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb and VentureBeat to collaborate on the Crunchies. They are like the Grammies and the Webbys with a People’s Choice flavor, only for start-ups! The idea is to get the respective communities of various blogs to collaborate and vote and help pick the top start-ups of the year. Details to follow…”

Naturally I headed straight over to TechCrunch’s site to see if I could get anymore info, there wasn’t much more to be found over there then this:

“The 2007 Crunchies is our first annual competition and award ceremony for the most compelling startups of the year.”

TechCrunch will be updating their website with details, http://crunchies.techcrunch.com/. This should be interesting to see which startups will be nominated and what categories they will have.

For those that have not heard yet yesterday news broke that Richard Parsons, who up until yesterday was CEO of Time Warner, was stepping down.  Jeff Bewkes will be replacing him however Parsons will remain Chariman of the company.  Parsons did release this statement:

“Jeff is a well-respected business executive both inside and outside the company. His results-oriented management style and deep industry knowledge will be invaluable as he drives growth at Time Warner,” Parsons said of his replacement. “Throughout his career, Jeff has demonstrated the capacity to generate industry-leading performances at our businesses, whether measured in terms of financial, operational or creative successes. We have had a terrific working partnership, and I am proud of what we accomplished together.” 

 There are some nice and quick reads on Portfolio and CNET News.  ON another note earlier this year Portfolio had an interesting 4 part video interview with Parsons.

Tom Foremski of the Silicon Valley Watcher reports that Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley’s leading venture capital firms, has stopped investing in Web 2.0 startups. “We have absolutely no interest in funding Web 2.0 companies,” says Randy Komisar, a partner at KPCB. He mentioned this during an after dinner conversation last week. He said he had recently told John Battelle, one of the organizers of the rapidly growing Web 2.0 Summit conference, that the term no longer had the same positive cachet it once had. In the VC community it clearly has a negative one.

Tom goes on to say:

It won’t be just Kleiner Perkins that has lost interest in Web 2.0 companies. The firm is one of the trend setters in Silicon Valley, with a long string of massively successful investments over several decades. And Silicon Valley VC firms always invest in trends, rather than companies.

So, is this the end of Web 2.0? Though the buzz word may have lost some of its luster, I can’t imagine VC’s, not believing that “Web 2.0’s” core principle’s aren’t worth the investment. Socially driven applications, or as Tim O’Reilly puts it “the network as platform, and applications that leverage the true strength of that platform”, still has plenty of legs.

What say you?

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Natasha over at black celebrity gossip site Young, Black & Fabulous has a giveaway for American Gangster that ends November 7th.  I am not into contests much but what I did see when I visited the site was the slick embedded interactive ad.  Advertising sure has come along way and this type of ad format is exactly where the future of advertising lie.  There is no stopping the viral capabilities of this ad either; it can be embedded into your MySpace, Facebook, WindowsLive, Netvibes, iGoogle, and Friendster profiles or even your blog or website.

You can also view trailers, video, and photos from the movie. You can listen to music from the soundtrack in a seamlessly intergrated player and get track listings as well, and you can listen to “Jay-z’s” Blue Magic track and pre-order his CD from iTunes.  Lets not forget all of this is in an advertisement.  You can thank Special Ops Media based out of NY for it.

I recently read an article about where advertising is going especially on social networks.  The theory of the article was that users will eventually be able to control their own ads.  It also stated that we all seem to understand that most websites are monitiezed by ads more or less so there is an understanding with web users that their pressence is necessary.  The interesting part of the article though was the theory of allowing web users to select which ads are on their profile pages or websites.  So if we must have ads we would much rather have it be an ad that we liked ourselves.  Interesting concept, and with ads like this promotion for American Gangsta I am sure it would work.  I would put an ad like this on my site would you?

This video features Jay Smooth of illdoctrine explaining what record labels could learn from the way Radiohead handled the release of their latest album, inrainbows. Basically the group made the set available on their website in a manner where the user could decide how much they wanted to pay, even if it was nothing. This generated great buzz for Radiohead and their album, and this is exactly the point that Jay Smooth makes about Jay-Z’s American Gangster in this video. All of the hype about the album is taking place on the Internets because someone leaked the album. Jay (not Z) feels that labels could learn a lesson about this and learn to leak their albums instead of having it happen without being part of their own marketing strategy.

Why the majors don’t get it, I’ll never know, but independents have started to understand this a lot better. For instance, that image above this text is for the release of Saul Williams’ latest release, Saul Williams Presents The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust. Williams took a page out of Radiohead’s book and released the album today on his site with the option to pay a $5 donation or to download it for free. In this instance Williams is in control of the event of selling and distributing his record, and therefore the hype about the album will be about the actual release date and not an unofficial leak.

I’m starting to think that Jay Smooth is on to something with his theory. I just hope the labels and its execs are listening.

Technorati Tags: hiphop2.0, jaysmooth, illdoctrine, records, music, labels, leak, leaks, label, video, saulwilliams, radiohead, jay-z

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