Congrats to Jed Alpert, Chris Muscarella, Ben Stein and the Mobile Commons team! Congrats to Steve Brotman, JB Lockhart and Greenhill SAVP on a terrific investment in a Tipping Point Partners portfolio company.
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Cookstr.com garnered two nominations and was named an honoree for the 13th Annual Webby Awards. Hailed as the "Internet's highest honor" by the New York Times, The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet.
Please vote for Cookstr in the People's Choice Awards at http://pv.webbyawards.com!
Cookstr is a nominee in the Best Practices category, alongside the NYTimes.com, Digg, WebMD Health, and The Daily Beast. Past nominees in the Best Practices category have included Facebook, Flickr, and Google (who was the first winner of this award). The Webbys define Best Practices as the following:
“Best Practices sites serve as an industry benchmark for the most current, innovative, and advanced practices in Web development. Sites demonstrating unparalleled excellence across The Academy's six criteria: content, structure & navigation, visual design, interactivity, functionality, and overall experience.”
Cookstr is the only content site to receive a nomination in the Food and
Beverage category, joining Red Bull Flugtag Flight Lab, Music in a bottle,
Hotel 626, and Hello Sour Sally.
Cookstr also won an Honorary Mention in the Lifestyle Category.
This recognition would not have been possible without the amazing work of The
Barbarian Group (design) and Pivotal Labs (software development).
I'm listening to Mark Penn, global head of Burson-Marstellar at McGraw-Hill's Media Summit.
Some key themes:
1. 20-25% are "info shoppers". Thee consumers don't trust messages pushed at them but require independent research to validate buying decisions.
2. People get 2 hours less sleep a night. Some wake up early, but a lot of this time is spent using the Internet.
3. Green is important as a reflection of "value shopping". A growing group of consumers view shopping as an extension of their values. Marketers need to recognize this.
4. Early tech adopters used to be anti-social; today early tech adopters are the most social people. Tech tools are no longer serving the isolated tech geek; instead, these tools enhance social connections.
It is really gratifying that Cookstr continues to get attention and favorable reviews. See A Guide to New Food Sites - WSJ.com. User comments and other social features are in the works!
I'm really pleased to share the news of Cookstr's partnership with Bravo and Oxygen, as reported today in BroadcastandCable.com. Bravo, Oxygen Team With Cookstr: Challenge Food Network With Recipe Site Partnership.
As a business, Cookstr’s strategy is similar to that of a television channel, but taking advantage of the flexibility and scalability of digital distribution. We are focused on providing ways for people to access Cookstr without making a special trip to the Cookstr website. We license great content created by others, which we syndicate – always as an complete “channel” – through the Internet and mobile devices. Where significant numbers of food fans congregate, Cookstr intends to be there: as a recipe search widget, as a co-branded website embedded within major online properties or something in-between; on blogs; and on supermarket, brand advertiser, or e-commerce sites.
We think this strategy could enable Cookstr to become the Internet food “channel” of choice. Great traditional content needs a robust web presence and Cookstr’s focus on quality makes Cookstr a logical partner. And the relative strength of food advertising is forcing media companies to emphasize food content that can attract quality food advertising. A small slice of those revenues will create a sustainable, cash-flowing business with strong growth prospects. In mid-2009, after only a few months in business, Cookstr’s brand will appear in tens of millions of U.S. households via PBS and to millions of U.S. Internet visitors as co-branded websites embedded in properties such as Bravo.com and Oxygen.com.
The top venture firms don't want, don't need, and are never going to take government money. The same is true of the top entrepreneurs.
The worst firms, on the other hand, will gladly accept government money. And that is what is going to happen with all of these government efforts to pour more money into the "innovation sector". That money will go to bad investors and weak entrepreneurs and management teams for the most part. It's a problem of adverse selection.
If the prospect of a single company mounting a Guns n’ Madonna tour worries you, it also concerns some in the business. Via e-mail, Tom Morello, the guitarist in Rage Against the Machine, told me that a Ticketmaster-Live Nation merger could have huge consequences. “Fewer and fewer gatekeepers mean fewer choices and higher prices for fans,” he wrote. “One huge monolith means no choice at all. Fans and artists must develop some organized counterweight quickly or resign themselves to their fate.”
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