Peter Chun

I’m extremely excited to announce that I’m officially a chef. Well, not a chef you’d find in a typical kitchen, but more like a chef that you’d find over at The Media Kitchen. MediaWeek and PaidContent have released the news and I guess I can go public with my new role.

For those of you who know me well, I’m infatuated with the white space that exists between marketing, technology, and media. In my past entrepreneurial endeavors, I have innovated within this white space almost exclusively. Whether it was working with some of the original architects for the DART advertising server, executing a campaign across one of the top student websites in the 90s, helped land one of the largest online-only accounts in ‘96 to an interactive agency in Silicon Alley, or co-founding a world leading in-game advertising company with several other amazing co-founders, my experience has always been around brands and how they should interact with digital media.

Corporate entrepreneurship is what is next for me. I’m tasked with joining the senior ranks of The Media Kitchen to build out their entire digital media practice, from start to finish. I’ve got some incredibly talented and gifted individuals who have paved the path so far and they’ll be teaching me the ins/outs of the agency. As Mike Shields worte in the MediaWeek piece, I wanted to have the ability to help mold digital media when the opportunity is still around. By participating in the multiple conversations occuring now between the tech giants and the emerging startups, I can gain invaluable insight into the space and help The Media Kitchen position themselves as one of the most agile and forward thinking agencies.

I do bring an entirely different perspective than most agencies would staff in my rank. The perspective I am bringing to TMK is my entire thesis going forward: you cannot accurately and adequately plan digital media without understanding technology and emerging companies at the lowest level. Innovation creates new technologies and touchpoints where marketing can intersect, but unless you know how to harness these technologies and what they can do for your clients and the greater community, it’s a mute point. I am going to attempt to lead the charge at The Media Kitchen to understand this and build an entire group that believes in this at it’s core.

With this all said, I encourage ANY startup or emerging company to contact me through this site and I’d love to hear from you. My team is always on the lookout for new opportunities to join the marketing conversation and if your startup or emerging company has opportunities, we’d love to chat. If you’re passing through New York or wanted to know how an ad agency works, I encourage you to reach out.

To an amazing future and much more to come in the coming weeks,

Darren Herman

Snooth announced $1 million in angel funding from the company’s initial backers as well as a new group of international investors. The New York-based wine review site plans to spend the money on international expansion.

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NY-based Snooth has announced a $1 million angel round of financing today. This is in addition to their previous $300k funding round raised in December 2006.

Snooth is a data aggregator - they pull in content from thousands of sources. Snooth claims to be a "social shopping site" and their recommendation engine also provides customized selections based on stated preferences and user feedback. The more information a user gives on wines they enjoy, the more personalized and detailed the recommendations become. Snooth also maintains a wine database with over 1.9 million reviews for over 300,000 wines.

The new funds will be used to scale the development team, integrate the current backlog of merchants that have already partnered with Snooth, and add new retailers worldwide.

Check out our write-up of Snooth from the NY Social Networking Meetup from earlier this month.

Tomorrow (11/28), I will be at New York???s first MatchupCamp, an event I am helping to organize. MatchupCamp is matchmaking for startups. It is a unique networking events for those with an itch to join or start a tech startup in the New York area. Organized by nextNY, MatchupCamp is all about sharing ideas and skills in hopes to make some useful connections. There are many networking events in NY, but none focused on those ready to get their hands dirty and build something new. If you are in town, come and check it out. If you want to talk about Nouncer and the positions available, please find me there (or drop me a line).

I will be at Internet Identity Workshop next week in Mountain View, CA (12/3-5). It will OAuth???s primetime among many other great ideas and technologies. We plan to make OAuth Core 1.0 final and release it to the world. If you haven???t been keeping up, we???ve recently published OAuth Core 1.0 Draft 7 which is very stable and has a growing developer community and code libraries. Nouncer???s OAuth endpoint are due this week in the new alpha environment.