Deal Radar 2009: The Rubicon Project

The Rubicon Project was born as a solution to one of the largest problems publishers face today: monetizing ad space. Approximately 80% of this space goes unsold across a fast-growing number of global ad networks. The company’s mission is to automate the $65 billion global online advertising industry with the goal of making advertising an effortless

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Forbes Column 08: Bootstrapping, Montana Style

We have just started publishing The Montana Mogul, an interview with RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte, who has bootstrapped an over $100-million-a-year public company headquartered in Bozeman, Montana.

Deal Radar 2008: Blurb

Blurb gives individuals and groups the ability to create, publish and market professional quality photo books. Unlike offset printing, they can publish just one copy or thousands, bringing book publishing to the masses. The self-publishing and print-on-demand industry is starting to become a meaningful alternative to the older, slower, more traditional publishing model.

Book Business

The Economist echoes what I wrote in Forbes recently: The book business is going to change in favor of authors. “Publishing has only two indispensable participants: authors and readers. As with music, any technology that brings these two groups closer makes the whole industry more efficient—but hurts those who benefit from the distance between them.”

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Deal Radar 2008: VideoEgg

VideoEgg is a web based publishing service that allows users to format and publish video content from any device onto the web. Three Yale students?Matt Sanchez, Kevin Sladek and David Lerman? started VideoEgg in 2005 to build an easier way to edit, post and share videos online. The three had won a Yale sponsored contest

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Forbes Column 08: How Amazon Could Change Publishing

Amazon is the 800-pound gorilla in book retail. What if they also became the publisher, and cut out all the middle-men? Read my new Forbes column, How Amazon Could Change Publishing.

Amazon Toying with Vertical Integration

Amazon.com (AMZN) has been pursuing growth at all costs. Their recently announced Q1 2008 results are witness to that drive. They reported the quarter’s revenue at $4.13 billion, meeting analyst expectations and reporting a 37% increase over the previous year. Their earnings for the quarter at $0.34 were marginally higher than the market’s expectation of

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Shutterfly’s Strategy: A Conversation with CEO Jeff Housenbold (Part 10)

SM: Zazzle and CafePress are not going after personal memories or families. JH: Not in the same sense. It is personal publishing. They use different backend technology, being heat transfer method versus digital print technology. From a ecommerce standpoint, there area lot of similarities. We advertise online, run a ecommerce company, own our manufacturing and

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