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The format at the Under the Radar conference is four startups present their products and then three judges comprised of analysts, venture capitalists or corporate executives evaluate the companies' promise. The more candid the judges, the livelier the discussion.
At today's event, fireworks went off after the Castpost presentation. The company is an online search and sharing service for legitemate, professionally produced videos centered on sports and television. Unfortunately for Castpost, two of the judges worked at Ask.com and Google. Paul Wehrley, Ask.com's vice president of strategy and operations, let the presenter off the hook with a question about what differentiates Castpost from others in this segment.
Chris Sacca, Google's head of special initiatives, did not. His comments, as scribbled down quickly in my notebook, were:
I don't think of you as a search company. I think of you as a pointer company.
It's not that hard to do what you're doing.
I don't see any barrier to entry to Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft or Ask doing this. Not even iTunes.
I also don't think the broadcasters are going to want to share a piece of the advertising revenue with you.
To be fair, Sacca was evenhanded toward the search startups he judged. Some he liked (Dabble), others he didn't (Castpost). Looking down from the Googleplex, they all must look pretty sad. For Castpost, the presenters ran out of time before having a chance to address all of Sacca's points. Sacca kindly said at the end that he would seek them out afterward to hear their side of things.
In general, though, Sacca said he's interested in search startups that are able to inject more intelligence into search, create better user interfaces for searching and that are more contextually and device aware.
In the immortal words of Jim Carrey: "So, you're saying there's a chance."
For more on the Under the Radar conference, see:
ZDNet
Tags: google, castpost, vc, venture capital
This is Chris Sacca, the guy referenced above. I don't think either the post or the comment from Edwin really do justice to the point I was making. (Of course, these are my personal opinions and not necessarily those of Google)
Search, for me, is a complex process by which technology acquires a rich understanding of a broad corpus of content in order to find nuggets that would otherwise be hard to come across manually.
What Castpost is doing doest not strike me as search per se. It strikes me as an active ajax directory of video.
This is a perfectly fine service, and so, I did not "slam" Castpost. Instead, I agreed that it was very cool and useful.
That said, my other point was that Castpost should be careful about building a business model that is predicated upon the major networks continuing to freely offer shows on their web sites. To say that I believe that "Hollywood's content is not coming online" is misconstruing my position.
I certainly believe that content owners will increasingly bring their content to the web. However, the distinction is that I do not believe that anyone has settled on how such content will be available in the future. The one thing I think we all have learned is that Hollywood is unpredictable.
As such, my suggestion to anyone in this space is that they work hard on developing core technology and create added value that matters to consumers irrespective of whether the networks continue to host free shows on their sites.
In the case of Castpost, I think they have some very intriguing technology and they are clearly talented folks and I wish them the best.
I am one of Castpost's founders and talked to Chris afterwards. Castpost's goal is to be the best place to find and interact with legal, mainstream entertainment content. Chris's main issue with Castpost is that he personally doesn't believe that Hollywood's TV content is coming online in the near future and as such, questions Castpost's usefulness. We strongly disagree with Chris on this point and believe that as more and more legal videos are available, there is a need for a service that helps users find and navigate to the videos they are looking for. Regarding our technology, we have developed several patent-pending video search techniques that consistently return better results for legal video search than any publicly available products from the major search companies. If it is "not that hard to do", we look forward to comparisons with the other products when we launch.