X SEO

It looks like Amazon is on its way to producing some original video content, not unlike Netflix and Hulu.

Well, actually, it’s a little unlike Netflix and Hulu. Rather than outsourcing production of original programming, Amazon is looking to create it in-house, as is indicated in Amazon’s job listings (via Ryan Lawler at GigaOm).

Recent listings include: Creative Executive, Kids, Creative Executive, Comedy, and Production Assistant.

The Job Description/Responsibilities section for Creative Executive, Comedy, says:

People’s Production Company is a movie and series production company. We are seeking a Creative Executive, Comedy to help develop half hour comedies for online and traditional distribution. Projects will primarily come from Amazon Studios. This position will report to the VP, Series Development.

Assess pilot proposals
Work with writers and artists to develop series ideas
Staff, cast and produce pilots in a cost-efficient way
Supervise series production when series are greenlit
People’s Production Company, part of the Amazon.com, Inc. group of companies, is an equal opportunity employer. This job will be located in Sherman Oaks, CA.

It looks like at the very least, Amazon is looking to offer comedies and children’s programming. My guess is that it won’t stop there. So far, Netflix is going the drama route. Hulu has gone with comedy and reality.

We may be poised to see some interesting new directions for Amazon between this and a rumored retail store.

Gumroad, the buzzy one-man startup launched by Pinterest and Turntable app designer (and 19-year-old college dropout) Sahil Lavingia, officially launches today with over $1.1 million in seed funding from investors Accel Partners, Chris Sacca, Max Levchin, SV Angel, Josh Kopelman, Seth Goldstein, Naval Ravikrant, Collaborative Fund and Danny Rimer.

To use the Gumroad, sign in with Facebook or Twitter Auth and submit any link in the entry form, whether it be to a blogpost, Spotify playlist, Instagram, invite for an iPhone app, research paper or whatever you can come up with you crazy character!

The service asks you to set a price and gives you the option of whether or not you want to require an email for purchase and/or upload a photo.

Like a Bit.ly with payments built in, Gumroad makes it very very easy to share your payment engine/link on Facebook and Twitter, as well as track views and purchases with its Bit.ly-like analytics and a simple interface.

wordpress.com/2012/02/screen-shot-2012-02-08-at-2-31-19-pm.png" rel="lightbox[494646]">

Lavingia thinks that Facebook and Twitter can become the new marketplace/store-front and thus, in his view, Gumroad has the potential to be a huge sustainable (even billion dollar) company. Gumroad obviously disrupts the traditional and current online distribution systems, allowing artists with massive Twitter followings like Kanye and Gaga to sell directly to their followers, for example.

“The store model is kind of broken,” he told me in an interview for TCTV, “Every one talks to their fans and followers on Twitter and Facebook. But there’s a disconnect in the way people talk to their fans and the way people sell to their fans.”

In the same space as Kout, the startup protects its transactions through strict PCI compliance, to the point where Lavingia has physical auditors come in to make sure security is up to snuff. Of course, as a payments company, preventing fraud is his biggest challenge.

Gumroad monetizes by taking a 5% cut and 30 cents out of every transaction and Lavingia’s eventual goal is to have it “become a thing” i.e. when people see a Gumroad link on a social network, to know what it is and click on it.

“I don’t think five years ago this could have existed,” he says, “Just like Twitter has granted anyone the ability to talk to people, Gumroad could potentially grant everyone the ability to sell stuff, online or offline.”

What happens when the BBC tracks down an Internet troll? Pure hilarity.

Now trolling is never nice, but to film the tracking of an Internet troll like it was “To Catch a Predator” is just odd. It’s obvious that trolls use the anonymity of the Internet to attack people they don’t know to make themselves feel superior. It’s the bullying of the Internet era. Does it make it right? No. Does it make entertaining television? It sure does.

Check out the clip from the episode below where they confront the confirmed troll in public as he is getting onto a bus. The reporter tries to convince the man that what he is doing is hurtful to others and the troll just responds, “It ain’t illegal.” That’s pure comic gold, dear readers.

We don’t condone trolling at WebProNews, but for it to be taken so seriously just boggles the mind. Enjoy.

My own views about SOPA and the need to protect online intellectual property are well-known. But even I acknowledge that SOPA was a flawed bill that didn’t represent a viable solution to policing the Internet against intellectual property theft. So is there life after SOPA? How can the technology and content communities carve out a compromise which will simultaneously protect innovation and the rights of the creative community?

In the spirit of compromise, I invited Larry Downes, one of SOPA’s most articulate critics, into our San Francisco studio to talk about what comes next. Downes acknowledged that direct democracy on the Internet can sometimes degenerate into mob rule. He also agreed that there is a need for a new kind of dialogue, not only between the technology and entertainment industries, but also involving Internet users – members of communities like Twitter, Reddit and Tumblr – who, he said, needed to be much intimately involved in the political conversation.  This third force, Downes told me, fundamentally alters the power equation and may well also change the legislative process in Washington DC.

But Downes’ main point is a little depressing. Politics changes very slowly and technology changes really quickly, he reminded me. So in 18 months time, he predicted, nothing much will have changed in Washington DC. There still won’t be any legislative solution to the problem of online piracy and that promised dialogue between the two (or three) communities will not have materialized.

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — trembled in the face of Facebook’s IPO and all-out war on the open Web, also known as Google. Me, I go back to Bill Gates during the DOJ deposition when he basically said we don’t need no steenkin’ breakup when Google will come along and be invented.

@kevinmarks makes a good college (fitting) try of defending the open schmopen set, while none of us seem to notice Social Spring just keeps on rolling over conventional wisdom. Me, I’m pretty jacked up waiting for what this means for Twitter. Go Giants!

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Adweek Video Exclusive: That HuffPost SN Sizzle Reel

A year after it was acquired by AOL, The Huffington Post is set to shake up the Web video world, and possibly even the TV news businesses, by launching the Huffington Post Streaming Network, which will stream 12 hours of live programming five days a week starting sometime this summer.

When AOL acquired HuffPo last February, CEO Tim Armstrong said he promised founder Arianna Huffington that AOL brought with it “guns, money and steel.” Huffington Post Streaming Network will require all three. The network will employee 100 people in HuffPo’s New York and Los Angeles offices, and the plan is to produce 30 million clips this year, according to HuffPo founding editor Roy Sekoff, “as much as AOL has produced over the last decade." By 2013 the plan is to stream 16 hours of live content each day. Armstrong for one called the venture a “game-changing-type idea.”

“We think this is new, different and bold,” said Armstrong.

It’s hard to argue with the bold part. In a demo presented to reporters on Thursday (Feb. 2), Sekoff, along with co-founder Arianna Huffington, showed just how different the Huffington Post Streaming Network aims to be. While there will be regularly occurring segments, the network will not have a strict schedule. Hosts will interrupt segments for breaking news, and viewer commentary will frequently be weaved into the content. Some commenters will make appearances, or even defend their comments in debates conducted via Skype.

Users will be able to stream the network via their PCs, tablets and phones—and eventually via TVs through over-the-top devices like PlayStations and Rokus. Viewers will also be able to click on headlines featured during the network's broadcasts, bringing up the relevant pages of Huffingtonpost.com alongside their video player. Besides the live broadcasts, viewers can watch archived clips on demand, in some cases minutes after they air.

“This has never been done before,” said Sekoff. But when asked about other Web publishers that have taken to streaming live news content, like The Wall Street Journal, Sekoff cited HuffPo’s audience engagement as a major differentiator. “We probably get more comments in a month than the Journal gets in one year,” he said. “We’re not really worried from a competitive standpoint.”

The numbers would seem to back him up. According to Huffington herself, the site generated 54 million comments in 2011, and more than 6 million in January alone. “It’s about engagement, engagement, engagement,” she said.

Advertising wise, officials said that the Huffington Post Streaming Network concept has only just been presented to marketers. The hope is to land five or six core sponsors, who will run classic pre-roll ads and also some form of brand integration. Sekoff compared this strategy to that of ESPN, which got off the ground in 1979 with a key sponsorship deal with Budweiser.

But there’s where the analogy ends. HuffPo wants to be on TV, but it wants its network to be off the Internet. “We’re not going to be a cable network," said Sekoff.

The Gillmor Gang — Doc Searls, Danny Sullivan, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — debut the latest Google catchphrase to replace Do No Evil: We Really Don’t Care!

@stevegillmor, @dsearls, @dannysullivan, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

The Gillmor Gang — Dennis Crowley, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — visit with the ghosts of Foursquare Past, Present, and Future. @dens is semi-bicoastal these days, trying to stay ahead of his growing business. He just moved in to a new office in NY, and the one in SF is expanding as rapidly as he can hire.

We try to get him to say bad things about Google +, but he demurs. But he never escapes the Gang without leaving a bit more of his roadmap than he anticipates. Of course, you’ll need gamification chops to uncover it.

@stevegillmor, @dens, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Here at the World Economic Forum in Davos, among the banking, shipping, steel and transport magnates of the global economy, there are a number of technology entrepreneurs floating around. As they rub shoulders with the likes of Eric Schmidt, Sean Parker, Loic Le Meur and Robert Scoble, it’s possible to peel them off from the crowd. I managed to catch Jose Ferreira, CEO and Founder of Knewton a startup which is aiming a silver bullet at the education problem with something that one might even call an audacious platform.

How so? Well, Knewton, a technology company based in NYC, currently has an application being tested with 10,000 college student in the US and is described as an “adaptive learning platform”. What does that mean in English? Well, the idea is that it customises your average educational content to meet the unique needs of each student. This is personalised education on steroids. Using thousands of data points — concepts, structure, difficulty level, media format — and data on how the person uses it, it’s like having a super smart teacher analyse everything you try to learn and suggest ways to make the process easier.

Ferreira has raised $54M to achieve this, which is quite a sum. Despite that, he is openly critical of VCs who do not think in such word changing arenas as education.

Writing for the WEF blog, he says “The venture capital industry in the United States is the envy of the world.. But it’s been getting a bit stale of late. As VC ranks have swelled with recently-minted MBAs over the last 10-20 years, venture capital has become more financial and less inspirational. These new VCs are obsessed with de-risking venture investing.”

Check out the video above for more thoughts on this.