Gawker: valleywag, incubators

MySpace incubator succeeds at reeling in wayward employee

Owen Thomas — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:40:00 EDT

Little has been heard from Slingshot Labs, the startup "incubator" News Corp. formed in February, in the months since its creation. The $15 million fund for spinoff ventures did succeed in keeping MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe in place: We hear that he made it a quid pro quo before signing a new, lucrative contract with Rupert Murdoch. He's not the only MySpace employee Slingshot played a part in keeping down in Los Angeles. We hear Nick Granado, a top engineer behind MySpace's iPhone version, first flirted with a job at Facebook, then worked briefly at Imeem, before getting lured back with a gig at Slingshot.

Will Slingshot actually produce anything besides cushier jobs for restless talent at MySpace? Yahoo's Brickhouse is a cautionary tale. The San Francisco office was meant to house creative new projects — like Flickr, but built in-house. In practice, however, it's nearly impossible to pay employees as richly as the startup stock-option lottery does. A sinecure at a big company is less risky, and less rewarding. Will the likes of Granado produce a big payoff for MySpace? Unlikely. But it must be worth something to put studs out to pasture, rather than see them running with the herd at Facebook.

Why Steve Perlman is into "Women of Action"

Owen Thomas — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 13:40:00 EDT

Buried in Dean Takahashi's seemingly endless interview with WebTV founder Steve Perlman for VentureBeat is this glistening nugget: Among the startups his Rearden incubator has launched is a website called Women of Action TV. Perlman has an elaborate explanation for why he started it:

[It's a] community service site with videos of athletic women like Jackie Joyner-Kersee or Florence Griffith Joyner. But it is also a technology site. It was one of the very first sites with high-definition video being distributed on the Internet. As people used that site, we saw how well it ran on different machines. We looked at the algorithms. WOA TV was a complete test bed for us and a cool site for something that wasn't covered enough, like women in sports.

Pay attention, folks: This is what makes Steve Perlman a true entrepreneur.

Most heterosexual men would just troll YouTube for clips of sporty women. Perlman? He started an entire company around the concept of female bodies in motion, and developed an elaborate creation myth for it. If he can persuade the likes of Takahashi that his collection of videos of women running in spandex is a massive technological step forward as well as a politically correct celebration of female athleticism, he can sell anything to anyone.

Secret Web 2.0 company-birther

ndouglas — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 20:31:06 EST

Mercury News blog SiliconBeat found a secret dot-com incubator — secret in that coy, Googly way of promising everything and nothing. Next Internet has all the Web 2.0 trappings — pale blue color scheme, check; big sans-serif text, check; takeaway points in orange, check. And it's got big plans — maybe.

The meta-flipmeat wants to launch 15 dot-coms in the next three years. If Next Internet really plans to be "profitable and constantly growing," those five dot-coms a year can't be some re-microwaved social bookmarking sites or high-risk Webvan clones.

And they're based down in Mountain View, a two-minute drive from Google. That should make a quick afternoon move-in for freshly bought flipmeat.

Next Internet [NextInternet.com]
Next Internet: a new, local Net incubator [SiliconBeat]