StartUp Beat

College Tonight Signs Conrad - College Tonight, the college-focused social networking service that was this week's featured pitch, today announced that Lauren Conrad, star of MTV's The Hills, will be the company's national spokesperson.  Here's a link to the announcement: Lauren Conrad Partners with College Tonight, Inc.

How Bad Will it Get for Tech Startups? - It has been well established that we are in the midst of a worldwide economic downturn, and know one really knows its ultimate duration and severity.  Founders of tech startups naturally have nervous flashbacks to 2000, when the tech sector, especially the dot coms, experienced a steady decline that put many startups out of business.  BUt this is a completely different climate from 2000, and most tech startups are built on a much more solid footing than eight years ago.  Verne Kopytoff of the San Francisco Chronicle addresses the issue today, doing a good job of finding some balance and highlighting the differences among tech startups then and now: Economic deja vu hitting tech startups

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Web Site: www.collegetonight.com
Headquarters: Los Angeles
Year Founded: 2005
Founders: Zach Suchin, President & CEO; Jason Schutzbank, Executive Vice President & CTO
Investors: Publicly held (result of a reverse merger with Simex Technologies)
Employees: 6 full-time; 40 part-time; hundreds of campus representatives
Company News: www.collegetonight.com/press

By Zach Suchin, Co-founder, President & CEO 

College Tonight, Inc. owns and operates the web site www.collegetonight.com, an interactive service and networking platform for the college market that targets both active students and alumni.  As the antidote to “anti-social” networking, College Tonight differs from other social networks by promoting active social interactivity in the "real world" rather than the sedentary lifestyle nearly all competing social networks relegate their users to behind a physical computer screen.  College Tonight fosters in-person communication and activities with an emphasis on nightlife and other social events both local to the user's college campus and beyond that area for more broadly-based communities.  The web site provides an online forum for students to exchange information on social activities happening offline, serving as a catalyst for real-life relationships and interaction among users.

Founders' Story:

During college, I provided marketing and branding for several different companies and organized high-profile nightlife events for college students and celebrities.  It was a very unique situation because the celebrities loved hanging out with the college students and obviously, the college students were thrilled to party with their favorite artists.  It was a rare melding of the two worlds. 

Toward the end of college, I started developing the College Tonight concept with my partner Jason after a microcosmic success story in a conference called “Emory Nightlife” on the school’s server.  While the server was meant for strict academic and school sponsored extra-curricular, what was started as a conduit of communication between me and my small group of friends, quickly turned into the most populated group on the school server, with hundreds of “add-me” requests being processed each day.  The conference eventually reached about 85 percent of the undergraduate populous at Emory University with a strictly opt-in population.  There was even a practical sub-module in the group called “Drunk Lost & Found” meant for those who lost items at various events around town, which ended up becoming more relevant than the official school’s lost and found conference.  Since November, 2005, my partner and I have been developing College Tonight.

College Tonight was started completely organically, through a natural need at one school in Atlanta.  Jason and I realized that this was by no means an isolated vacuum in the market and we both put all of our money from our previous businesses into creating version .5 of the service.  This beta version of the service was meant to test with the Emory community exactly what features were going to be utilized and would be worth expanding upon.  In September of 2006, we held a beta launch event that attracted many people, including the largest periodical in the South, the Atlanta Journal Constitution.  We started to get press that no one expected.  At this point Jason and I knew it was time to take our knowledge of what worked and what didn’t, and we started to raise funding for a more official version of the service.  We hustled and finally achieved enough funding to develop the current version of the site.

After securing an initial round of private financing, we started to analyze an opportunity that arose in the public arena.  Simex Technologies approached Jason and me with the opportunity for a reverse merger.  This is a fairly unique method of raising funds, as we became one of the only social networks that have decided to follow this path, but it’s extremely helpful for various reasons.  Reverse mergers have a certain level of liquidity, which really helps to attract talent that we otherwise may not have been able to secure.  The open market value is fairly obvious—there are no guessing games to play or $15 billion valuations to argue.  The market will naturally value the company at a fair worth.  The company’s vision and wide variety of unique revenue streams will soon begin to dictate the young company’s stock value.

Business Model:

Client Subscriptions: Local venues pay a monthly fee, or a per event fee, to run a virtual blog/group that updates their events, specials and deals for College Tonight users.  Front-end data and premium placement are also available with this monthly subscription.  

On Site Advertising: Untraditional "click-to-call" banner ads with the latest flash technology, with the ability to target/filter specific user demographics and behaviors are available.  Advertisers can place an ad, sponsor a group, or sponsor an event.

Nightlife Events:  College Tonight’s motto “Get On, Get Up, Get Out” has been the key message behind the site’s “Disorientation Tour,” a nine month roll out tour begun in late 2007 consisting of 52 promotional events targeting 116 campuses around the country.  These nightlife events mark the culmination of week-long promotions held locally at individual campuses, with neighboring student populations merging for the ultimate college party experience.  As College Tonight continues to introduce its services campus by campus, advertisers will create brand awareness with their participation.

Mobile Component: Mobile advertising is directed to a captive student audience with few distractions.

Nightlife TV Podcasts: With an eight-episode season, College Tonight’s monthly podcasts, focusing on college nightlife and lifestyle, provide advertisers with access to College Tonight’s substantial user base.

Freshmen Social Packets: Restaurant menus and social information disseminated to incoming freshman at universities across the United States through a soft-back published book.

Instant Messaging & Chat Services: Advertisements may be placed where users communicate most.

Photo Printing:  Users will be able to print photographs through the web site.

College Tonight Magazine: Traditional magazine advertising through uniquely innovative flash technology.

Online Store: Sale of products ranging from computers to energy drinks through College Tonight’s Online Store.

Power Hour/Music Mixes: Merchants can place an ad in between one of College Tonight’s power hour or music mixes available for download/streaming through the web site.

Sponsored Games: A game that incorporates an advertiser’s brand interactively.

Individual Venue Web Development: Bars, clubs, and restaurants will be able to hire us to custom design their web site, integrated with a software solution that allows events they post to automatically and seamlessly feed into College Tonight.

Food Delivery & Liaison Service: A national food delivery service will act as a liaison between restaurants and students.  This is another avenue to familiarize the student with College Tonight’s services.

Custom Ring-Tones & Wallpaper: Users will have the ability to upload their own photos or take photos from the site, and develop custom wallpapers for their cell phones.  Similarly, users will be able to upload .mp3 files and use snippets to create a custom ring-tone for their cellular device.

Various pending acquisitions will bring even further revenue opportunity to the company.

Current Needs:

College Tonight continues to seek support in the form of an investor base, as it is a publicly-traded entity.
 

What do you think about College Tonight?  Leave your comments below.  Feedback about StartUp Beat?—email us at editor@startupbeat.com

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Web Site: www.adooga.com
Headquarters: Santa Monica, California
Year Founded: 2007
Founders: Perrin Chiles and Chris Sherrill, Co-Founders
Investors: Privately funded
Employees: 6
Company News: www.adooga.com/media.html

By Perrin Chiles and Chris Sherrill, Founders

Offering more than 250 contests and over 19 million dollars in cash and prizes, ADOOGA is the powerful search engine that connects creative, Internet-savvy fans with content-seeking brands by aggregating online contests in one user-friendly site.

At ADOOGA, our mission is to simplify the discovery and entry process for anyone who wants to participate in online contests.  There are hundreds of photographers, filmmakers, musicians and writers out there waiting to be discovered and receive recognition (or cash and prizes) for their work.  Now, ADOOGA is here to help expedite the realization of those dreams.  Check it out; hone your skills to enter a contest or two, and win money to fund your next record, indie flick or photo exhibit.

Talent agencies are scouring sites like MySpace, Facebook and YouTube looking for the “next big thing”—ad agencies and corporations should be doing the same thing by viewing the growing list of contest winners, dubbed ADOOGA All-Stars.  The Internet is such a powerful way to connect creative people with bold brands.  We wanted to simplify the process of putting talent in touch with the brands looking for fresh ideas.

Along with the growing popularity of social networking sites where members can share music, videos and other content they’ve created, the web is seeing a surge in blue chip brands tapping the creativity of the Internet generation to create their next big campaign through contests on sites such as YouTube, MySpace and BrickFish.

We are really here to help the brands, the fans and the other sites that promote contests, such as BrickFish, and so far, the response from those communities has been overwhelmingly positive.  We are seeing some All-Star entries, getting submissions from other contest sites and are in discussions with some big brands to develop the kind of contests that our visitors want to see.

When visitors go to the site, they can choose from 12 categories to enter: travel, green, entertainment, academic, sport, home, style, eat, tech, creative, drink and random, or they can search contests by type, expiration date, posting date, prize value or name.  It’s comprehensive and intuitive.

Brands are able to submit contests for inclusion or featured placement at the top of the home page.  ADOOGA can even help them navigate the alternative advertising and marketing platform through creative support and execution on the site.

What do you think about ADOOGA?  Leave your comments below.  Feedback about StartUp Beat?—email us at editor@startupbeat.com

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Overlay.TV Featured in Wired – Overlay.TV, a StartUp Beat featured company, was recently featured in Wired’s Listening Post blog, where its advertising 3.0 technology is featured.  The post includes a demo using the Beastie Boys “Sabotage” music video:  Overlay.tv Adds Links and Easter Eggs to Music Videos

Miscellaneous…

Who doesn’t want to avoid traffic?  Bill Gates wants to help:  Microsoft introduces an enhanced tool for avoiding traffic jams

Speaking of MSFT... they’re involved in what may be the most interesting takeover battle of the decade.  TechCrunch’s take on the latest developments:  Yahoo Goes Scorched Earth

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Web Site: www.pluggd.com
Headquarters: Seattle, Washington
Year Founded: 2006
Founders: Alex Castro, CEO; Jonathan Thompson, Chief Architect
Investors: Intel Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson
Employees: 13
Total Capital Raised: $6 million
Company News: www.plugged.com/news

 
By Alex Castro, Founder and CEO

At Pluggd, we are bringing a new slate of products to market this year that we hope will mark significant advances in the way consumers experience web video and in the way that advertisers can monetize that video. 

For starters, we have invented technology that allows web users to “search inside” a web video (or audio) file, before consuming the entire file.  This allows the consumer to find the section they want, then “surf” directly to that part of the video.  In this way, we hope to make video browsing much more like web page browsing.

Our patent-pending “Heat Map” technology is an innovative user interface that guides users to the content topics they wish to see or hear in an audio or video file.  The goal is to make multimedia search as easy and intuitive as general web search.

When a user clicks “play” on an audio or video file, Pluggd processes the file through our Content Publishing system, which essentially generates a transcript of the words and associated topics that are present in the file.  When a user enters a keyword search term, the query flows through our Transcript and Concept databases, generating a color-coded heat-map.  The heat-map shows relevancy of sections of the file to the search term.  Red indicates a direct match, orange a near-match, and blue a non-match.  Intuitively, a user can advance the “scrubber bar” to the part of the file that he or she wishes to see (or hear).  The system works for files of any length, enabling a new kind of viewing experience that puts the navigation of the video or audio file directly into the hands of a user who can browse according to their interest in topics they choose.

Not so long ago, popular video was the exclusive province of movies and television.  These programs were characterized by the following:

*High cost of production

*Established channels of distribution

*Monetization through direct purchase or attached advertising

Let’s take the popular situation comedy, “Everybody Loves Raymond,” as an example of the realities of video production by Old Media.  Each episode cost over five million dollars to produce.  The network, CBS, ordered 26 episodes for a standard season.  The program ran for nine seasons.  The high cost of production reflected the considerable talent of the writers, actors and unionized production crew of a hit show, which could only have been brought to life under a mature television production system.

Every year, the networks sell “Upfronts” for their advertising inventory for their slate of shows, based on aggregated projections of total audience.  For an established show like “Raymond,” with a proven audience track record, the network could garner a sizeable up front commitment from sponsors who desired to associate their products with the popular sitcom.  However, with a production cost of over $100 million per year, CBS couldn’t recoup the annual cost of the show for any given season.  CBS was banking that the program would generate enough episodes—usually 100—to go into the syndication market, where the shows could be packaged to independent television stations and foreign television broadcasters.  With the birth of DVD collections, another revenue stream was born that proved to be a huge boon to the owners of television programming.

This system was characterized by high risk associated with high production costs and enabled by mature distribution channels which also had very high barriers to entry—after all, not many video producers can get programs distributed on broadcast television.  In such a universe, copy protection was essential, because piracy threatened the consumer market for shows that were distributed in relatively fixed distribution windows—such as Monday nights on one TV network.

Motion picture production parallels the TV industry with respect to very high production costs and monetization through traditional distribution channels, ranging from movie theatres, to TV, to home video rental, to DVD.

In the last five years, the explosion of web video has considerably changed the calculus of Old Media.  The following new realities characterize new video production:

*Low cost of production

*Very low barrier of entry to mass distribution

*Unclear and shifting methods of monetization

Pluggd is one of many companies participating in the New Video ecosystem.  At Pluggd, we recognize that there is a prominent place for Old Media in the new distribution channels, such as YouTube, MySpace, Atom Films, and other popular sites where people can sample video.  Traditional media companies have recently launched new sites for direct distribution of their prime time video to consumers, breaking the old taboos about “competing” with the old broadcast TV model.

We also see new forms of programming emerging on the horizon.  Much of the new video content will be user generated, but an increasing amount will be produced by independent film and TV makers, who employ low-cost digital production techniques to make very compelling shows. 

Digital formats distributed on the web don’t have to fit into 30 minute or 60 minute time slots, and as a consequence we predict that new program length productions will be invented to serve niche markets: The Lunch Break market; the Share with Friends on a Cell Phone Market; the Kill Time in an Airport Market, to name a few of the many possibilities.

But with these new types of programs, the old realities persist: Covering the cost of production and giving advertisers reliable ways to reach their audiences and measure the results.  Inventive companies will address and solve these problems over the coming years.  To be specific, we anticipate breakthroughs in the following areas:

* Allowing users to discover specific video and audio files they wish to find across the web

* Surf inside video and audio programs for the exact content they want

* Image recognition within video

* Serving ads that are contextual and inviting to consumers

* Reporting results to advertisers about consumption of their ads in meticulous detail

* Greatly reducing network latency and other hosting issues for video files

Pluggd will do our part to make progress in these areas and create a vibrant economy for web video.  In the United States, now ranked thirteenth in bandwidth per capita in the world, the federal government should make new investments for high speed Internet access for everyone, which would stimulate the creation of new products.

So, hold onto your hats as new kinds of programming—news, popular culture and user-generated—continue to rapidly evolve, spurred by the many inventive people working in the web industry and by the hundreds of millions of web users who want to experience video in new ways.
 

What do you think about Pluggd?  Leave your comments below.  Feedback about StartUp Beat?—email us at editor@startupbeat.com

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After a brief hiatus, we're back and ready to bring you more pitches from some of the world's most innovative and interesting technology startups.  Tomorrow, we're featuring Pluggd, an online video startup from Seattle, Washington, that is bringing an unprecedented level of control over viewing to users.  

Remember, if you have or know of a startup you think should be featured on StartUp Beat, drop me a line -- editor@startupbeat.com
 
-Brian

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