Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital was supposed to be my guest on “Ask A VC” this week, but called me this morning to cancel because his attorneys pointed out that doing press interviews while raising a new fund ran afoul of Securities & Exchange Commission rules. Oops. Filling in is Mike Hirshland- or “VC Mike” as he’s called.
Regular readers know the drill by now: Email your questions to AskaVC(at)techcrunch(dot)com. You can leave them in the comments, too, but I’ll prioritize the ones emailed, because they don’t give the guest time to prepare an answer. I purposely invite guests who are leaders in the field and are blunt. So don’t be shy. With a lot of developments in the world of venture capital this week, there should be plenty of questions out there.
If you don’t know Hirshland here are some facts, that may prompt more questions:
1. He is a partner at Polaris Ventures in Boston, but spends almost all his time in the Valley because he says that’s where the best consumer Web companies are.
2. He founded Dogpatch Labs– a bicoastal hang-out spot in San Francisco and New York to help give him a leg up on deal flow in this ultra-competitive world.
3. His investments include Automatic (aka WordPress), ThingLabs (aka Brizzly) and Quantcast.
4. Before Polaris he worked for the Senate Judiciary Committee that investigated Microsoft’s antitrust issues.
5. He’s sort of an over-grown frat boy. I say that with love. You’ll see what I mean Friday when the show runs.
Send your questions now! We’re taping early this week.
Microsoft has had its time in the sun, kicking things off here at the 2010 Tokyo Game Show. Now it's Sony's turn with its press conference. This is a somewhat smaller affair and, unlike Microsoft's, is being conducted entirely in Japanese -- with no translation provided. We're relying heavily on Ittousai, our international man of mystery, to tell us what's going on, and then we'll do our best to tell you what's going on. Sound like fun? It sure does, so come along and click on through.
Continue reading Live from Sony's TGS 2010 press conference
Live from Sony's TGS 2010 press conference originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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comScore has released its July video metrix stats today, with the number of U.S. users watching online video content rising slightly to 178 million viewers compared to 177 million total viewers in June. In July, each viewer watched an an average of 14.7 hours of online video. And 84.9 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
Unsurprisingly, Google Sites, whose viewership is driven primarily by video viewing at YouTube ranked as the top online video content property with 143.2 million unique viewers (compared to 144.5 million in June, followed by Yahoo Sites with 55.1 million viewers (compared to 44.9 million viewers in June). But the real news in the release is in Facebook’s growth as a video destination. Facebook.com jumped one position to capture the third spot with 46.6 million viewers, compared to 43 million viewers in June.
Google Sites had the highest number of overall viewing sessions with 1.9 billion and average time spent per viewer at 283 minutes, or 4.7 hours. Hulu also had high viewer engagement with an average of 158 minutes (or 2.6 hours) per viewer.
comScore also reported video ad metrics, a feature the company launched last month. Americans viewed nearly 3.6 billion video ads in July, with Hulu generating the highest number of video ad impressions at 783 million. Tremor Media Video Network ranked second overall (and highest among video ad networks) with 452 million ad views, followed by BrightRoll Video Network (248 million) and Microsoft Sites (232 million).
Google sites came in behind Microsoft with 219 million impressions but it’s important to note that this metric does not include banner ads, and other types of advertising used on YouTube. Video ads reached 27 percent of the total U.S. population an average of 44.5 times during the month.
The top video ad networks in terms of their potential reach of the total U.S. population were: ScanScout Network at 40.5 percent, BrightRoll Video Network at 39.4 percent, and Break Media Network at 38.7 percent. Video ads accounted for 9.8 percent of all videos viewed.
Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital was supposed to be my guest on “Ask A VC” this week, but called me this morning to cancel because his attorneys pointed out that doing press interviews while raising a new fund ran afoul of Securities & Exchange Commission rules. Oops. Filling in is Mike Hirshland- or “VC Mike” as he’s called.
