How Jagmohan Dalmiya Commercialized Cricket (Part 1)

These days, sports like football, baseball, basketball, and soccer are huge commercial ecosystems. In 2006, Nimbus Communications bought digital media rights for Indian cricket for $612 million in a four-year global deal, underscoring cricket’s status gain in the big-money world of sports marketing. Cricket, however, owes its commercial maturity to Jagmohan Dalmiya. Read ‘Cricket Reaches

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Deal Radar 2008: Groople, Interesting Use of Context

Groople is an online group travel site, which helps with searching, planning and booking group travel. (Read my Interview with Groople CEO Mike Stacy) Groople is different from Expedia and Kayak in that it serves only group travelers, no individuals, and is thus a great focus on a specific “Context“.

Deal Radar 2008: Takkle Tackling Socially

Takkle is a social network for high school sports, where students, athletes, coaches, and fans share their passion. Takkle has a strategic alliance with Sports Illustrated. Takkle allows students to create their profiles and upload their stats, photos and videos for college recruiters. In November 2007 Takkle raised $7 million in venture funding led by

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Deal Radar 2008: Piczo Picture Perfect

Piczo allows teenagers worldwide to creatively express themselves, build personal communities, and share ideas and experiences with their friends in a safe online environment. Piczo recently introduced Piczo Zone. It allows users to decorate their profile pages in much the same way as teenagers decorate their rooms – with posters, music, etc. Piczo Zone has

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Venky Harinarayan on Kosmix and Vertical Search (Part 4, final)

SM: How did you finance the different phases of the company? VH: Our company is funded by VCs, Accel and Lightspeed, and private individuals such as Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com and Bill Miller of Legg Mason. SM: What financing stage are you at right now? VH: We feel like we are fully funded, so we

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IPTV, Next-Gen Television: The Operators

By Mitch Berman, Guest Author Previous Post: IPTV: Next-Gen Television? There are 3 flavors of IPTV. This blog deals with the first and most prevalent definition… telco operators. AT&T U-Verse. Verizon FiOS. Second and third tier telcos like Surewest. We will not discuss “technology.” Technology to do video over IP is prevalent, growing and indisputable,

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Web 3.0 & Gannett (Part 1)

Introduction Gannett (GCI) publishes 85 daily newspapers, nearly 1,000 non-daily publications and 23 television stations in the US. In the UK, Gannett publishes 17 daily newspapers and around 300 non-daily publications. Gannett’s popular newspaper USA TODAY with a circulation of 7.3 million is the US’s largest-selling newspaper. USA WEEKEND is a weekly newspaper with a

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Web 3.0 & Online Sports (Part 4)

Web 3.0 formula discussion Context Most of the sports sites that I went through have very good contextual nuances. These sites have something for every sports fan. I liked the way sites like NBA.com, MLB.com and NFL.com have covered the respective sports. If you love Basketball and want to check out on some stat or

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