Former Fox Interactive Media honcho Ross Levinsohn and former AOL president Jon Miller were on stage together today at the Conversational Marketing Summit in San Francisco's Presidio dishing dirt on their old companies and talking a little about the new venture capital firm they've formed.

Called Velocity Investment Group and backed with capital from General Atlantic Partners, the firm will invest in digital media companies. Most of the conversation today was spent talking about the retrenchment going on at their old firms along with others such a Yahoo and CBS Radio. Miller criticized the decisions of those companies to return to their comfort zones and bring in new managers that either previously managed those companies or have little experience on the Internet.

After suggesting that Facebook was not a direct threat to MySpace, Levinsohn, who sits on the board of Napster, talked about two problems the music industry is facing. Presumably, some of his time at Velocity will be spent considering new music investments.

Miller noted that vertical search results are more satisfying than general search results in specialized areas like health. He expects vertical search to continue to grow in popularity. Aside from search, Miller talked about his interested in new advertising technologies. He thinks that Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL are all trying to create the operating system of advertising online but that more advertising technology startups can grow before one of those four companies succeeds in its goal.

For more on the Conversational Marketing Summit, see:
Peter Brondmo
LaSandra Brill
NotCot

Tags: conversational marketing, conversational marketing summit, cmsummit, aol, vc, venture+capital