TechCrunch
Keen On… Uproot Wine: How One New York VC Is Tipsy On Californian Sauvignon Blanc
One the one hand, Jay Levy , as a partner in Zelkova Ventures, is a conventional New York City tech VC with investments in promising start-ups like Fab, Klout and Crimson Hexagon. But Levy, as the founder of the Napa based Uproot Wine, is also an entrepreneur himself, using his knowledge of online technology, particularly social media, to develop a northern Californian direct sales wine company that focuses on the consumer experience.
Levy – who is now commuting between his New York City office and the Uproot Wine headquarters in Napa – sees Uproot Wine as primarily a marketing company which is able to provide what he calls “transparency” for the production and selling of wine. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Levy sees social media as critical to Uproot’s business, acknowledging that a third of all his business comes from social media, saying “it’s all about Facebook” when it comes to building lasting relationships with wine drinkers.
Full Disclosure: Jay did give me a bottle of his Sauvignon Blanc and, while the jury may still be out on the scalability of his business model, I don’t think anyone will be disappointed with the excellent quality of Uproot’s vintage or the design of its labels with their very cool infographic describing the taste of the wine.
In Its First Acquisition, StumbleUpon Buys Video Recommendation Startup 5by
Content discovery service StumbleUpon is announcing that it has acquired 5by, a video startup based in Montreal.
The financial terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed, but the companies say the entire six-person 5by team will be moving to San Francisco to work out of StumbleUpon’s headquarters, where it will continue to develop 5by as a standalone product — so this isn’t just a talent acquisition.
“Initially, it’s about getting 5by out there and introducing it to the community,” StumbleUpon CEO Mark Bartels said.
So for purposes of introduction, I should mention that 5by describes itself as “your video concierge” and recommends online videos that you’ll probably enjoy, based on the category you’ve selected (such as “Geeking Out” and “Music Lovers”) and on your actions while using the service.
Bartels described the deal as “a directional bet on mobile and video” — that’s where advertising is moving, and he said StumbleUpon believes video will account for the majority of online content consumed by 2016. This is an area where the company faced a “build versus buy” decision: “We saw how fast video was growing, and we wanted to move faster.” Ultimately, he’s hoping to link 5by’s “corpus” categorizing different types of video content with StumbleUpon, so that the core StumbleUpon product gets smarter about video, too.
“Video and mobile and mobile video is its own beast,” added 5by founder Greg Isenberg.
This is StumbleUpon’s first acquisition, which is a bit surprising since the company was founded back in 2001. Bartels said StumbleUpon now has the freedom to look at these kinds of deals because revenue is doing well (it was $30 million last year and projected to be $35 million to $40 million this year) and the company is profitable, which is what it was aiming for when it laid off 30 percent of staff and restructured the team earlier this year.
NoWait, A Mobile Replacement For The Restaurant Buzzer, Launches Its Consumer App
The Pittsburgh-based mobile waitlisting service for restaurants, NoWait, which raised $2 million in Series A funding just over a year ago, is now rolling out its first consumer-facing product with the launch of its iOS app for restaurant goers. The new app shows a list of nearby restaurants, wait times and distances, and lets you join the waiting list from your phone.
The ability to virtually “get in line” ahead of your arrival works also for some restaurants that don’t offer online reservations, such as through OpenTable, for example. The NoWait consumer app lets you browse through its supported restaurants, see how busy they are, and enter in your party size to grab your spot.
Initially, the app will only work around Pittsburgh as the company scales its operations, but the plan is to have the consumer version working nationwide by January 2014 – just a few months away.
NoWait operates in a competitive space, where others including OpenTable, NoshList, Livebookings, Timeview, DinerConnection, WaitList Manager, TurnStar, Table’s Ready, BuzzTable and more are also attacking restaurant customer management from various angles. But NoWait’s value proposition goes beyond just replacing the “hockey puck” buzzer system restaurants favor today. Instead, it’s about not only bringing seating management to mobile, but also providing business owners with more analytics and data about how the restaurant is running, even when they’re not able to be physically present in each location.
At the time of the company’s Series A round, it had begun to service some big-name customers including Texas Roadhouse, Red Robin and TGI Friday’s. Though Red Robin seems to no longer be involved, Texas Roadhouse is expanding with NoWait, as are some TGI Friday’s franchises, and the company has since signed up other larger customers including Chili’s, Buffalo Wild Wings (franchises again), and Hal Smith Restaurant Group (includes Red Rock Canyon, Mama Roja, Charleston’s Restaurant, Mahogany Prime Steakhouse, Toby Keith’s I Love this Bar and Grill).
Today, NoWait has 3,500 restaurants using its Floor Map application to manage their tables and waitlists, including also Iron Chef Jose Garces’ Village Whiskey and Hubert Keller’s Burger Bar in Las Vegas. In total, the company has over 12 national restaurant chains on board.
To date, NoWait has sat over 19 million diners, up from 4 million last August. The company also says it’s currently seating over 2 million diners per month, and is on track to seat 3 million monthly by year-end. For comparison purposes, in January 2013, the company was seating 700,000 diners monthly. And to position against a reservations giant: OpenTable is now seating over 12 million diners per month across 28,000 restaurants worldwide.
Restaurants under 200 waitlist parties can use the app for free, while those with more have to step into NoWait’s premium pricing plans, which start at $59/month, and include features like text-based marketing, message customization, and other core features like the floor maps, multiple device sync, daily analytics emails, and more.
The new consumer-facing app was in private beta testing over the past week, but is now available to all Pittsburgh locals, and others soon.
YouTube Announces A New Commenting System, Powered By Google+, With Threaded, Ranked And Private Conversations
YouTube today announced a new commenting system that will be powered by Google+. The system, which is launching on channel discussion tabs this week before rolling out to all videos over the next few weeks and months, will automatically rank comments and feature threaded and private conversations.
Right now, YouTube comments are a hotbed for spam and idiocy, something Google is painfully aware of. The new system aims to fix this by personalizing and ranking comments for each individual user.
Last year, YouTube started asking its users to connect their YouTube and Google+ accounts so more users would use their real names on the site. Today’s integration goes quite a bit deeper. The new system will switch away from the current, recency-based system and instead rank comments according to a wide range of factors.
As Nundu Janakiram, a YouTube product manager who worked on this project, told me earlier this week, comments from the video creator will be ranked very highly and surfaced more regularly, for example. The system will also push comments from popular personalities on YouTube and people in your Google+ circles higher up the comment chain, as well as highly engaged discussion about the video. Just like before, you will be able to vote comments up or down, too, and those votes will also influence the ranking.
Users who want to go back to the old experience can always switch back to the recency-based view (though unless you are a troll, I’m not sure why you would want to do that). The new system also allows you to just see comments from people in your Google+ circle.
As Janakiram told me, the team realized that the current system is flawed. At the same time, though, YouTube also realized that the comments are a vibrant part of the YouTube experience. Despite its flaws, the team remained positive about the general concept of comments – just not in its current form.
As part of the Google+ integration, YouTube will now also aggregate public comments about a video from Google+ and display them on YouTube. Private messages, of course, will remain private. Thanks to the Google+ integration, users on YouTube itself will now also be able to have private conversations on the site by leaving comments that can only be seen by people in their Google+ circles or individual users.
Once YouTube switches to the new system, all of the old comments will still be in the system and intermixed with the new ranked and threaded comments.
Given that the new system further integrated Google+, users are almost obliged to disclose their real identities when they comment, which should lift the quality of the discussion on YouTube. It’s worth noting, however, that they can still create a Google+ page for any name, pseudonym or existing YouTube channel and use that as they identity on YouTube.
New Tools For Managing Comments
For channel owners, YouTube is also introducing a number of new tools for managing comments on their videos.
Just like before, they will still be able to open their videos up for all comments, hold them in moderation and manually approve them or disallow them completely. Now, however, they will also be able to create a list of approved users who can always comment on a video based on their Google+ circles. These users will be able to comment even when other YouTube users have to go through the moderation process. If you are a celebrity, for example, you could use this to always allow comments from your “greatest fans” circle on Google+, as Janakiram told me.
In addition, YouTube is also allowing video owners to create a blacklist with words that automatically push comments into review and just like before, they can also block users. As for blocking users, YouTube is making a small but significant change now: it will stop telling users they’ve been blocked and will continue to show them their own comments when they are logged in. This, the team hopes, will fool them into believing that their comments were posted and stop them from creating new accounts after they’ve been blocked.
No comments:
Post a Comment