Earlier this week, while in New York, BoomTown paid a visit to well-known media and Web exec Bob Pittman to hear about his newest venture.
And, as it turned out, it tasted pretty good.
That’s because the former MTV wunderkind, AOL top exec and currently, investor in a wide range of media and Web companies, is making tequila instead of Internet sites.
Thank God it’s Friday!
The Huffington Post, co-founded by Arianna Huffington, will announce this morning that it has raised $25 million, in a single investment from Oak Investment Partners.
The large round, which was led by Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture capitalist Fred Harman, will give the popular online news and blogging site a valuation of “just south of $100 million,” a source said.
The new funding, the Huffington Post’s third, will be used for expansion of its offerings and the hiring of editorial and business talent.
“I think the post-election perception of the Huffington Post has changed in the eyes of advertisers to being a key mainstream news site,” said Harman in an interview with BoomTown last night.
Former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta will take the CEO job at a music discovery site called Playlist, a move that had been speculated last week, after he did not end up taking another position as head of MySpace Music.
Van Natta’s arrival at Playlist was not the only news for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based start-up–former AOL exec Bob Pittman’s Pilot Investment Group is also investing an undisclosed amount of money in Playlist, and Pittman will join its board.
The site, which has been called Project Playlist, had previously raised several million dollars. The new round of funding super-sized that, sources said, hovering at about $18 million.
“Discovery around music is exploding on the Internet,” said Van Natta to BoomTown, in an interview this afternoon, giving it as his main reason for joining Playlist.
Oh, there had to be much, much gnashing of teeth in the corporate offices at the Time Warner Center in New York yesterday with news of the sale of DailyCandy to Comcast for $125 million.
Why?
Maybe because that tasty payment is going right into the hands of Bob Pittman’s Pilot Group Ventures, which bought the fashion and shopping newsletter business for $3 million in 2003.
This is certainly different from the situation almost exactly six years ago when Pittman–nicknamed “Pitchman” for his smooth business stylings–was driven out of then-AOL Time Warner on the proverbial rail.
If you want a taste of those once-grim times for Pittman, here is an excerpt from my book, “There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Future.”
Yesterday, in what feels to BoomTown to be a deeply petty move, Time Warner said that it had blocked former AOL head Jon Miller from being considered as a possible Yahoo board member.
The reason is a noncompete Miller signed, part of a severance agreement he reached with the media giant after it unceremoniously tossed him out in late 2006.
A Time Warner spokesman said Miller was barred from working “for a variety of competitors, including Yahoo, until March of 2009.”
Like it matters.
On one of my many trips to Los Angeles (what can I say? I like to hang where LoRo* hangs), I dropped in to see Nick Grouf of Spot Runner.
As many might know, Spot Runner is an online-offline ad agency play that has gotten big funding and even bigger hype of late.
Usually, BoomTown runs screaming from such Web 2.0 dandies, but there is definitely some there there at Spot Runner.
On my recent trip to Seattle, I visited the offices of iLike, in the Capitol Hill section of that lovely Pacific Northwest city, to take a video gander at one of the more interesting start ups to emerge from the social networking arena.
The music discovery site, unlike a lot of others in its sector, has been plugging away for several years with much less funding (about $16 million from the founding Partovi twin brothers, former AOL wunderkind Bob Pittman and a big slug from Ticket Master), but a lot more impact.
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 [...]
Yesterday, the powerful portfolio manager at Yahoo’s largest investor, Gordon Crawford of Capital Research Global Investors, a division of Capital Research & Management Co., made some very public and very harsh remarks directed at Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang for blowing the Microsoft deal.
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 [...]
Terry, baby: Has it actually been six years since I last shot you a memo offering some thoughts on getting the top-dog spot at Yahoo? Back then, I wanted to be among the first to congratulate you. Now, we have to talk turkey and I mean that in the nicest way. Sort of.
This BoomTown column was first published in The Wall Street Journal on April 18, 2001. All rights reserved.
From: Kara Swisher
To: Terry Semel
Re: Some unsolicited advice on becoming the Chairman and CEO of Yahoo! Inc.
Terry, sweetheart, let me be the first to congratulate you on getting the green light on one of Silicon Valley’s most boffo [...]
Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
D is unlike any other executive conference. Since its debut in 2003, D has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way. Read more »
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