Deal Note: Scribd

from BGSL by umair So Scribd is hot - really hot. If we accept the rumour, at the A-round, Scribd achieved a valuation of >20m. Not bad, given the fact that it hasn't exactly seen exponential growth in terms of attention share. The hypothesis behind investing in Scribd is easy - a global repository of documents will garner an incredible attention share at any reasonable scale. Even at a measly Digg-scale, the revenue potential of a Scribd begins to be significant. And then there's the fact that Scribd ads can be hypertargeted... Now, that's all well and good. In fact, what's really interesting about Scribd isn't the yawner of an investment thesis - but the fact that it's one of the few startups around that really pushes the definition of what media is. Can other people's documents really be a medium? What are the economic of that medium? Very interesting and thought-provoking questions. But back to the IRR. I'm just not so sure of the key assumption behind the investment: that Scribd solves a problem that actually exists. Is there a supply of prosumers with "documents" leaping at the chance to share them? Initial attention share tells us very clearly - not yet. And even if there are, why wouldn't they just start a blog? YouTube had a clear monopoly on online video (at least usable online video). Scribd doesn't have the same clarity of market power. Would I have taken a bet on Scribd anyways? Probably. Good ideas are (very) few and far between these days. And the potential upside of a Scribd is well worth the risk. Let's discuss the sideline of a Scribd as host (essentially) for ripped-off books, magazines, etc. YouTube was in a legal grey area (ie, microchunks). Scribd isn't (which it acknowledges). Can Scribd exert pressure on publishers? Not unless it's in the grey area. But the larger point ist that there are lots of other positionings to be explored - Scribd as Office meets community (which is what a lot of the buzz is about), Scribd as Digg-feeder, etc - which is what offsets the risk of the key and somewhat shaky assumption, and makes Scribd a fairly cool play which will be a lot of fun, if not an obvious game-changer.

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All Steamed Up

Thursday, Apr. 05, 2007 By BRYAN WALSH

The blue lagoon near Reykjavik, Iceland.

Paco Cruz / Digital Press Photos / Newscom

Xianyang, China, was once a great place to live--during the Qin dynasty, anyway, more than 2,000 years ago. Since then, it has gone pretty much downhill. Today Xianyang is one of the most polluted cities in a very polluted country, partly as a result of the air-fouling coal that's burned to generate much of its power. The air in Reykjavík, by contrast, is crystal clear, because nothing is burned there. Iceland's capital gets 100% of its heat and 40% of its electricity from geothermal power. (The rest comes from hydropower.) The same forces that have scattered no fewer than 130 volcanoes across the tiny country bring molten rock relatively close to the surface everywhere. When this encounters underground water, it generates steam, which is tapped to produce clean, renewable electricity.

All of which explains why a group of engineers from the Icelandic power company Enex have left the pure air of Reykjavík behind to work in smoggy Xianyang. The ancient Chinese city might just have the geothermal resources to become the Reykjavík of the East. In December engineers from both countries completed the first stage of a joint venture that could eventually provide geothermal-powered heating to millions of people in Xianyang. If the project is successful, the city will eventually have the biggest such system in the world.

That would be good for everyone. Last year alone, China added 102 gigawatts to its electrical grid--roughly twice the total capacity of California's--and about 90% of that came from carbon-belching coal plants. Geothermal energy can at least make a start on cleaning up this mess. The China Energy Research Society expects 110 gigawatt hours (GWh) to be produced through geothermal power nationally by 2010, out of 2.7 million GWh in total. That's a tiny slice, but energy experts believe China has the potential to do much more. "There are geothermal resources in almost every province in China," says Ingvar Fridleifsson, director of the United Nations University Geothermal Training Program in Reykjavík. Geothermal pumps will even be used to heat and cool some of the venues at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.

It's the Chinese government that has committed the country to tapping its geothermal potential. But as is often the case, it's newly entrepreneurial citizens who are making things happen. One Chinese student who studied geothermal technology in Reykjavík went home to transform what had been a peasant village into a model geothermal development, with housing, pools and a recreation park all heated geothermally. "People can say a lot of things about the Chinese government," says Hans Bragi Bernhardsson, head of China operations for Enex. "But if they decide to do something, they achieve it." In this case, let's hope so.

with reporting by Krista Mahr/Reykjavik

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Participation on Web 2.0 sites remains weak

A tiny 0.16 percent of visits to Google's top video-sharing site, YouTube, are by users seeking to upload video for others to watch

Similarly, only two-tenths of one percent of visits to Flickr, a popular photo-editing site owned by Yahoo Inc., are to upload new photos.

The vast majority of visitors are the Internet equivalent of the television generation's couch potatoes -- voyeurs who like to watch rather than create.

Tue Apr 17, 2007 10:55PM EDT By Eric Auchard (Reuters) SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Web 2.0, a catchphrase for the latest generation of Web sites where users contribute their own text, pictures and video content, is far less participatory than commonly assumed, a study showed on Tuesday. A tiny 0.16 percent of visits to Google's top video-sharing site, YouTube, are by users seeking to upload video for others to watch, according to a study of online surfing data by Bill Tancer, an analyst with Web audience measurement firm Hitwise. Similarly, only two-tenths of one percent of visits to Flickr, a popular photo-editing site owned by Yahoo Inc., are to upload new photos, the Hitwise study found. The vast majority of visitors are the Internet equivalent of the television generation's couch potatoes -- voyeurs who like to watch rather than create, Tancer's statistics show. Wikipedia, the anyone-can-edit online encyclopedia, is the one exception cited in the Hitwise study: 4.6 percent of all visits to Wikipedia pages are to edit entries on the site. But despite relatively low-user involvement, visits to Web 2.0-style sites have spiked 668 percent in two years, Tancer said. "Web 2.0 and participatory sites (are) really gaining traction," he told an audience of roughly 3,000 Internet entrepreneurs, developers and financiers attending the Web 2.0 Expo industry conference in San Francisco this week. Web 2.0, a phrase popularized by conference organizer Tim O'Reilly, refers to the current generation of Web sites that seek to turn viewers into contributors by giving them tools to write, post, comment and upload their own creative work. Besides Wikipedia, other well-known Web 2.0 destinations are social network sites like News Corp.'s MySpace and Facebook and photo-sharing site Photobucket. Visits by Web users to the category of participatory Web 2.0 sites account for 12 percent of U.S. Web activity, up from only 2 percent two years ago, the study showed. Web 2.0 photo-sharing sites now account for 56 percent of visits to all online photo sites. Of that, Photobucket alone accounts for 41 percent of the traffic, Hitwise data shows. An older, first generation of sites, now in the minority, are photo-finishing sites that give users the ability to store, share and print photos.

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Ad Industry Still Virtually Dumb

from PSFK Trend: PSFK by Piers Fawkes

Ok, ok - we all took the mickey out of all those brands that rushed into SecondLife to an audience of no-one but at least we can get the rationale behind what they did there. Those brands built experiences for consumers to interact with. Pretty sensible thinking, no?

So, What does the ad industry do next? Takes a step backwards and introduces spam to SL in the form of video billboards. Adverlab shows us some demo shots of brands like Dove appearing in the virtual world (Yeah, because SL is full of fat birds).

And just another point the developers AMPP might want to consider. Up until now, for residents to watch video they have to click the Play button that appears at the bottom of the screen whenever video content is in the immediate vicinity.

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Art Hijacks Internet Ads

from PSFK Trend: PSFK by Joel Horowitz

Artist Steve Lambert and the non-profit “R&D For The Public Domain” Eyebeam OpenLab, coded a Firefox add-on that replaces ads on a website with contemporary art. While a prototype is up and running, they’re working to build a fully curetted art database.

The project will be supported by a small website providing information on the current artists and curator, along with a schedule of past and upcoming AddArt shows. Each 2 weeks will include 5-8 artists selected by emerging and established curators. Images will have to be cropped to standard banner sizes or can be custom made for the project. Artists can target sites (such as every ad on FoxNews.com) and/or default to any page on the internet with ads. One artist will be shown per page. The curatorial duty will be passed among curators through recommendations, word of mouth, and solicitations to the AddArt site.

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