All Things Digital

Spot Runner, the online ad agency, delivered yet another Web 2.0 miracle today, raising another $51 million in funding from a diverse group of investors.

Among other services, Spot Runner makes and places low-cost television and radio ads for small businesses and is trying to bridge the gap between the traditional and online ad market.

In this round, those stepping up to invest in the Los Angeles-based start-up include international media giants Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT.L) and Grupo Televisa (TV), investment company Legg Mason Capital Management (LM) and, curiously, luxury conglomerate Groupe Arnault/LVMH (MC.PA).

This group, along with existing investors, forked over the $51 million to add to the $60 million already raised. This appears to give it a massive valuation of upward of $500 million.

Well, at least in the land of Web 2.0 it does. In the real world, it still remains to be seen. But that has not stopped the nonstop investment party of late for Web 2.0 start-ups.

Web-based instant messaging company Meebo recently raised another $25 million at a reported $250 million valuation, while widgeteer Slide got $50 million for a $550 million valuation.

Of course, the champ of them all has been the social-networking site Facebook, which now has a $15 billion valuation.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Or maybe not so much, but obviously no one in Silicon Valley is listening to BoomTown at this Kool-Aid carnival.

Spot Runner’s previous investors are: Allen & Company, Battery Ventures, Comerica Bank (CMA), Lachlan Murdoch, Vivi Nevo, Capital Research and Management, CBS (CBS), Index Ventures, Interpublic Group, Tudor Investment Corporation and WPP.

So far, this group has invested $60 million in Spot Runner. Its board includes Index’s Danny Rimer and former AOL exec Bob Pittman.

“We want to use the investment to make a real penetration in the market,” said Nick Grouf, chairman and CEO of Spot Runner. “We want to expand both organically and through acquisitions, as well as expand our staff, and these strategic investors will help us do that.”

Spot Runner has already been doing that. For example, it recently bought Weblistic, a local search listings creator, and hired former Microsoft exec Joanne Bradford.

The Daily Mail is a large media company based in the United Kingdom, with newspapers, online and radio assets, while Grupo Televisa is one of the largest media conglomerates in the Spanish-speaking world.

Groupe Arnault/LVMH owns some of the world’s toniest brands, including Moët & Chandon, Hennessy, Louis Vuitton and Givenchy.

Grouf, again along with partner David Waxman, also previously founded PeoplePC and Firefly Networks.

In the spirit of the funding, here’s one of my favorite Kool-Aid commercials:

Here is a clip from my favorite new television show, “Tracey Ullman’s State of the Union,” which recently debuted on Showtime.

The British comedian does spot-on impressions of average people and the errant celebrity too, including a pitch-perfect one (right down to yelling for her sister Agape) of blogger Arianna Huffington with the signature line: Blogs and Kisses!

And in this video, accepting an award at the Bloggies, the hysterical moment when Ullman/Huffington tells a competing right-wing blogger to have her “YouTubes tied.”

Here’s the video and also the promotional one for the show that is pretty funny too:

Here’s a snippet from Britney Spears’s upcoming cameo appearance on CBS’s (CBS) “How I Met Your Mother” sitcom next Monday, clips that are fast becoming among the most popular racing around the Web of late.

No longer a “popwreck,” as the TMZ (TWX) celebrity site calls her so lovingly, her first words on the show are: “Can we have sex and then go shopping?” BoomTown loves poetic irony.

Here’s another snippet:

BoomTown has decided to reinstate our practice of showcasing excellent online videos that we started posting during the writers’ strike.

Our premise has been simple: That online video in both short and long form is the future and its development is important to pay attention to.

As a huge fan of the now-defunct “The West Wing” television series, I noticed the freaky similarities between the out-of-nowhere Democratic presidential campaign of the fictional Congressman Matt Santos (played by Jimmy Smits) and the real-life Barack Obama.

That included a maverick Western senator, played by Alan Alda, who was Santos’s opponent and whom the right wing distrusted a la Sen. John McCain.

As it turns out from this great video from SlateV, the writers of the NBC hit used Obama as a template for their creation and now that template seems to be following their plot.

Here’s the video:

Bob Pittman, the longtime media exec who led AOL at its peak (and left the company after its merger with Time Warner turned sour), recently gave an interesting interview in which he takes a very counter view to the current craze around online video.

Of the explosion in the sector–every report and poll shows a giant leap in online video watching by consumers–Pittman (pictured here) is not so sanguine in a Q&A he did with VideoNuze that was published yesterday in advance of the National Association of Television Program Executives conference in Las Vegas next week.

(FYI, I will be there to appear at a panel on Wednesday with execs like former Disney head Michael Eisner, along with others, aptly called “Possibilities and Perils of Internet TV.”)

Of online video, Pittman focuses on those perils and notes that short-form Web fare is not really a big deal, however temporarily popular some of it can become.

“So we have to be careful not to talk about fringe uses as if they’re going to be major uses,” said Pittman. “But I don’t think broadband is competitive with TV, putting TV shows on the Internet is nice, but you’re talking about small audiences.”

Currently heading a New York-based investment firm called the Pilot Group, Pittman (who also co-founded and ran MTV Networks) is more disposed toward broadcast networks. Pilot has been buying broadcast, of course, in smaller markets.

Said Pittman (whose salesguy smoothness–his nickname was “Bob Pitchman”–I realized I really missed by reading the interview):

“Broadcast stations are greatly unappreciated. TV is America’s hobby. Look at any category, the biggest is always the most important. So we want to invest in a place where most people are. It is a fantastic advertising medium. There’s no substitute for TV advertising. It works like nothing else. It’s still wildly cheap–for the most part it’s a $7 to $8 CPM–compared with newspapers and magazines, which are $25 to $30, and it outperforms by every measurement–reach, time spent, effectiveness. It’s still wildly underpriced.”

I am not so sure I agree with Pittman, whom I got to know well when covering AOL and also writing two books on the company.

But he does have a point about how hard it is to watch quality online video and the need to get Web content to the television.

Said Pittman: “I think it’s going to be pretty hard to get something in the home that’s easier to use than pushing a button on my TV set that I already know how to do and I’m set up to do. To start connecting a box and moving stuff around, then my rule of thumb is about 10% of the population will adopt new technology because it’s cool and neat, but it will be hard to get past that threshold.”

More strongly than any TV exec I have talked to of late, who are mostly in a serious state of depression over declining viewership, Pittman insists that the Web is not hurting television.

“People keep talking about Internet as if it’s competing with TV. But what the Internet has really done is replace print–things like yellow pages, newspapers and traditional research books. It’s also replaced communications–phone calls, voice mail,” Pittman said. “So when you hear these stories about the Internet replacing TV, I think they’ve got it all wrong.”

Well, he’s got it all wrong, of course–it isn’t replacing it apples for apples. But it is replacing it in terms of time and attention of consumers, especially young people, which is exactly the same thing.

Nonetheless, it’s good to hear from the always pugnacious Pitchman.

Until the writers’ strike in Hollywood is over–who knew it would go on this long?–BoomTown has decided to offer periodic suggestions about cool new stuff to watch, focused on a more geeky audience.

We’ll start with TV–no, not the tiresome (sorry!) “American Idol,” but a new series on the same Fox network, which is “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.”

OK, it has some techish qualities–killer cyborgs, cool gadgetry, time travel–but the fact of the matter is the “Terminator” movie series is my secret favorite, except for the genius of “Planet of the Apes” and “Soylent Green.”

OK, I might have apocalyptic tastes. In any case, as a fan of the “Terminator” movies, I was expecting the worst.

But a nicely menacing tone and a great cast, headed by tough-chick mom Lena Headey (of course, I had to use this picture of the actress here), was a happy surprise.

It takes place right after the end of the second “Terminator” movie and includes another tough-teen girl “good” cyborg, who protects the boy who will be the leader of a rebellion in the future.

Best of all, you can completely ignore the television and watch it online, either by buying it on iTunes or streaming it on Fox.

Here’s a trailer:

Here’s a video I made, which is a pastiche of scenes from a very interesting conference I attended last week in Los Angeles at the Getty Center called EG or Entertainment Gathering.

Originally created by legendary conference impresario Richard Saul Wurman (who named our D conference, in fact), the first EG took place two years ago nearby. And for the second one last week, Wurman handed the baton over to MIT professor Michael Hawley, who offered up about 50 unusual presenters.

To give you an idea of the eclecticism, here’s a video of the lovely Getty; the brass band that opened the conference; shell art; a speech by Wurman; some piano playing by Hawley; former Microsoftie Nathan Myhrvold making VP Dick Cheney “cute” (no easy task!); Royal Calligrapher to Queen Elizabeth II Donald Jackson teaching the audience some moves; some amazing pictures of real snowflakes; “Heroes” creator Tim Kring talking about the intersection of television and the Internet; and a bracing violin piece.

Like I said, very interesting:

With the entertainment industry reeling from weakness brought on by changing viewers’ watching habits due to the Internet, the news of the talks to end the writers’ strike collapsing on Friday can’t be a good thing for Hollywood.

With the strike now in its sixth week, the studio reps–the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers–and the Writers Guild of America took aim at each other at a Los Angeles hotel, accusing the other side of negotiating in bad faith and being uncooperative.

The two sides still appear far apart on a lot of issues, including unionization of reality shows, but a lot of the issues center on how to split up revenues from new media.

Of course, most of those revenues from the Internet–via downloading and streaming, for example–are still tiny, so the two sides are essentially arguing over nothing, except that that nothing might be something someday.

Got it? (Kind of like Facebook being worth $15 billion!)

In honor of News Corp. officially getting ownership of Dow Jones this week, here’s a recent take from Headzup on the strike from the perspective of AllThingD.com’s new boss (Welcome, Rupe!):

So I paid another visit to the folks who run what I consider one of the more excellent sites on the Web: TMZ.com.

I had previously posted a piece about the site in May, because I consider it one of the really great content sites on the Internet–using a nice blend of text, video, audio and a laser focus on intense reporting on its topic to yield a whole new kind of media that is Web born and bred.

Here’s my tour of TMZ’s new studio on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, right across from the trendy Hyde club (of course!):

Sure, that topic is to chronicle All Things Britney, Lindsay and Paris, but who cares? What TMZ proves, with its ever-growing audience of millions and millions, is that the Internet requires much more than simply porting of offline content online to succeed.

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Here’s my interview with TMZ’s ebullient on-air and online star Harvey Levin, which goes with my tour of its new television studio and interview with TMZ Executive Producer Jim Paratore:

Here’s my interview with TMZ’s sharp Executive Producer Jim Paratore, which goes with my tour of its new television studio and interview with TMZ on-air and online star Harvey Levin:

Summer is officially over, kids, so back to school (including my own son Louie–pictured below as a sword-fighting Mexican wrestler and astronaut–who starts kindergarten this morning!).

And no more Burning Man, either (we completely ignored the annual techie Valhalla in this blog, because it evoked a very dusty and peyote feeling that we just have never felt the need to learn about close up and personal)!

In other words, time to get serious about the business at hand!

Namely, cranking the volume up to 11 on our ongoing efforts to figure out a few choice things about several different Internet companies.

Much as the television networks tout their crappy fall slate, here’s my September lineup:

1. Yahoo–natch! Could we possibly give up on this ongoing dramedy, when we are almost at the midway point of CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang’s 100-day Vision Quest to turn around the troubled Web icon? I think not! Like that new let’s-just-dispense-with-subtlety series on ABC called “Dirty Sexy Money,” it has everything: Money! Power! Sex! (Ok, not so much sex.) But: Money! Power! Search!

Tomorrow is officially Day 50 for Yang, and we’re going to spend the week asking smart people what they’d do to fix Yahoo.

Also, of course, we have requested interviews with everyone from Hilary Schneider to Sue Decker to Yang, and, curiously, the phone is not ringing with calls.

Nonetheless, we will not rest in our efforts to bring Yahoo to you–Garlinghouse! Ismail! Horowitz! Fake! Bhat! Boerries! Those not-Lloyd guys down in Santa Monica!

2. Facebook. Facebook. Facebook. Also Mark Zuckerberg, unavoidable, of course. And those other guys there, whose names escape you because only Zuckerberg says cheese for the magazine covers. Will they IPO or will they sell or will they stand pat? Kind of like “Deal or No Deal,” but without the suspense.

They will. One of those choices. Or not.

3. Hey, what about MySpace? Aren’t they No. 1? By far? I am itching to try to figure out what’s going on down there in Beverly Hills, what with all the attention and momentum Facebook seems to have of late.

So how is MySpace really faring? And what are its prospects for growth? What are its weaknesses (the chatter in the Valley, the Silicon one, is increasing technology challenges as it grows ever larger)? Is owner Rupert Murdoch angling to unload it? Or perhaps double-down with a play for Facebook, too? (I know, stupid, as it’s too costly now even for the master dealmaker.)

Television comparison: The return of “Grey’s Anatomy”–has it jumped the shark with that left-at-the-altar trick? Much in the same way, with its concerts and new offerings, can the hits keep on coming from MySpace?

4. AOL reminds me a little bit of “Desperate Housewives”–I stopped watching long ago, but I still really hope Felicity Huffman is doing OK (not so much Teri Hatcher).

I guess it was the two books I wrote on the online pioneer that hooked me, but I am truly interested in seeing what will happen to the service as it continues to stumble on.

Will CEO Randy Falco’s online entertainment plans work? (No, but they should!) Will AOL’s ad business take off? (No, but it should!). Will its cool side companies like Truveo and Userplane get the attention they deserve? (No, but they should, too!) Will it ever be spun off from the suffocating arms of its parent Time Warner? (You know the answer by now!)

5. Google. Microsoft. It’s going to be like a war between the 2007 one (Michelle Ryan) and the 1997 “Bionic Woman” (Lindsay Wagner). We don’t need to elaborate further, except to say pull up a chair and enjoy the show, as some cyborgs are going to really be kicking some you-know-what. And it’s going to be pretty!

6. Let’s not leave out the oldies like eBay, Amazon (Jeff, don’t think I have forgotten you!) and IAC, as well as newcomers like Joost, Hulu and the plethora of other interesting new companies now on the scene (with more to come).

With topics like copyright, privacy, innovation, growth and the continued Hollywood-Silicon Valley tussling, it’ll be a great time, as usual, to be watching the digital arena.

And even NBC Universal and Apple’s fighting over price, which now means I will not get to watch “Heroes” on my iPhone, will not deter me.

Although I beg and plead with the thickheaded pair: Save the cheerleader! Save the world! Save my $1.99 an episode!

Here is the entire interview Steve Jobs did with Walt Mossberg on May 30 at D5 in Carlsbad, Calif. For those who have not seen the Apple CEO in action, this is a good opportunity.

Among the wide range of topics: the iPhone, of course, and Jobs talked a lot about it; Apple growth since the Intel transition; the iPod; whether Apple should drop Computer from its corporate name, given all its popular noncomputer products; and a major dig at Microsoft, wherein Jobs called the Windows operating system “hell” and Apple’s popular iTunes software on Windows “a glass of ice water.”

There is also a demo of new AppleTV features, including the ability to access YouTube with expected goofy videos such as a human slingshot. Also, Jobs said he reads the Fake Steve Jobs blog, but–surprise–does not write it.

If you want to also read Walt’s recent review of the iPhone, here is the link, a picture gallery and also a more recent text Q&A with Jobs by Walt.

Here’s the video, which is 67 minutes long:

With all credit and kudos to the dedicated fans whose protests caused CBS today to reverse its decision to give the heave-ho to the series “Jericho,” we hope we added one tiny cashew last week to the pile of nuts that got a major media company to give in.

“You got our attention; your emails and collective voice have been heard,” wrote CBS Entertainment President Nina Tassler in a letter to fans that announced seven new episodes of the series about post-apocalyptic life in a Kansas town have been ordered for next season. The network had been inundated with calls and emails, we well as mounds of nuts after a line in the show, which was interestingly one of the most streamed online for the network.

During Walt’s interview with CBS CEO Les Moonves onstage at D5 last week, well-known photographer Rick Smolan asked about the series in the audience Q&A part, noting the digital nature of the protest. “It’s been impressive to hear how important the Internet has become to CBS…[but] if the Internet is as important to you as you say it is, would you consider responding to the audience? I understand it sets a precedent.”

Moonves joked that the fans had found a way around CBS email filters. “There has been an unbelievable number of emails to us and, unfortunately, because the audience of that show is very Internet savvy, they’ve learned to get around the blocking,” he said.

Walt followed up, asking about other options for the show. “Why not keep producing it and distribute it on the Internet, where maybe you don’t need that kind of huge amount of viewership?” he asked.

Moonves noted it was still a pricey proposition. “It’s well and good to say that, but when you spend the kind of money it would cost to do that, you would be losing a considerable amount of money,” he said.

Walt then asked the question that will become increasingly important as creative people find new and more economic ways to make and distribute content about the chances for such formats as Webisodes.

“It’s one of the things that is being talked about now because of the attention that it’s had,” answered Moonves.

One can hope, but for now, congratulations to the digitally-savvy emailing fans of “Jericho.”

OK, is it just me, or do media executives need a firm smack upside the head by consumers?

Yesterday, Walt Disney’s ABC broadcast network and ESPN cable sports channel announced a deal at the Cable Show in Las Vegas to provide free on-demand video of hit shows and other content to Cox Communications, one of the bigger cable companies. Except Cox was required to disable its fast-forward feature to stop viewers from skipping over ads. Thus, those with Cox’s on-demand service lose that functionality, although subscribers with their own digital video recorder can still do as they please, thanks be to the TiVo gods.

This move is a disappointment to me, because I think Disney under the leadership of CEO Bob Iger (pictured here) is one of the more–excuse me–fast forward of the television companies, making big strides in moving its programming all over the Net and onto other devices beyond the television. Its own ABC.com, for example, is one of my favorite places to watch “Ugly Betty” and other popular prime-time programming using its really exceptional player. And I don’t even mind its ads embedded in the program, though I do surf the Web as I listen to them, because it was part of the deal I understood when I clicked in, as opposed to on-demand viewers who usually get to fast-forward through programming.

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