Tag: Corporate

http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/just-manic-enough-seeking-perfect-entrepreneurs/?scp=10&sq=David%20Segal&st=cse

Imagine you are a venture capitalist, David Segal writes in The New York Times. One day a man comes to you and says, “I want to build the game layer on top of the world.”

You don’t know what “the game layer” is, let alone whether it should be built atop the world. But he has a passionate speech about a business plan, conceived when he was a college freshman, that he says will change the planet — making it more entertaining, more engaging, and giving humans a new way to interact with businesses and one another.

If you give him $750,000, he says, you can have a stake in what he believes will be a $1-billion-a-year company.

Interested? Before you answer, consider that the man displays many of the symptoms of a person having what psychologists call a hypomanic episode. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual — the occupation’s bible of mental disorders — these symptoms include grandiosity, an elevated and expansive mood, racing thoughts and little need for sleep.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/biz/2010/09/how-small-business-increased-traffic-by-300-percent-real-time-analytics.php

For any small business trying to thrive online, there are few questions more critical or often, confounding: How can we increase traffic to our business’s Website on a budget? And then, once they’re there, how can we convert them to paying customers?

There are lots of companies, SEO gurus and social media pundits offering up their solutions, some of them more legitimate than others. One company we spoke to recently took an approach that led to a 300% increase in organic search traffic in just three months.

Corensic, a two-year-old company that specializes in building tools for multi-core software developers, is using real-time marketing platform Optify to analyze their traffic and optimized their site based on their findings.

“We just pointed Optify at our site and it gave us a checklist of things to do,” said Prashant Sridharan, Corensic’s senior director of marketing. Many of the suggested changes, such as putting important headings in the proper HTML heading tags and including keywords in URLs, were easily implemented.

http://www.deadline.com/hollywood/

EXCLUSIVE: It has been a decade since Robert Zemeckis last directed a live action film, the classic Cast Away. It has been 25 years since he launched the time travel trilogy Back to the Future. I’m told that Zemeckis is plotting a return to both folds at Warner Bros, where he is at the center of a deal for the time travel pitch Timeless. It’s a big tent pole picture that will be written by Mike Thompson. Zemeckis and his ImageMovers will produce. Deal is mid six-figures.

http://www.deadline.com/2010/09/itv-to-start-charging-for-internet-extras/

Adam Crozier, CEO of UK broadcaster ITV, has suggested making viewers pay for extra content, such as alternative endings. At one point he talked about charging Brit TV viewers to watch hugely popular soap Coronation Street first online, but rowed back from that. Crozier was speaking at the Royal Television Society international conference in London this afternoon. Everything on ITV.com is free at present. Crozier said his top priority is to invest in ITV.com, which he said had been woefully underfunded. The ITV boss reiterated that 50% of revenue must come from pay-TV, online and selling formats overseas, compared with 26% today. He’s not interested in making shows available on content aggregators such as Hulu though. TV commissions will be influenced by how they translate online, he said. “The first thing we need to turn is turn ITV.com into a really robust site,” said Crozier, who joined ITV as CEO in April. Increasing the amount of programming produced in-house by production arm ITV Studios is another priority. In-house only accounts for 47% of programme commissions, he said – and drops to 16% if you strip long-running soaps Coronation Street and Emmerdale out. ITV is looking to acquire independent production companies to beef up ITV Studios. “We need to focus on more long-running renewable series,” he said. “Owning more rights is key to our future.” Crozier said that ITV’s historic problems haven’t stemmed from not knowing what to do but “a failure to execute”.

http://www.deadline.com/2010/09/abc-family-picks-up-four-pilots/

EXCLUSIVE: New ABC Family president Michael Riley is making his first development move a month after he took over the cable network following Paul Lee’s move to ABC. ABC Family has greenlighted 3 pilots, Strut, Nine Lives and Switched at Birth. I hear the pickup of a fourth pilot, The Lying Game, is imminent. Two of the pilots, Nine Lives and The Lying Game, hail from Alloy Entertainment, the company behind ABC Family’s freshman hit Pretty Little Liars.