Peter Chun

NY-based CafeMom has announced a new round of funding in the amount of $12 million. The round was co-led by the company's original investors Highland Capital Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Including this new round, the company has raised $20.3 million to-date.

CafeMom is working with some of the largest CPG companies and retailers in the U.S. including: Walmart, Playskool, Disney, HP, Kraft, General Mills, Nestle, Unilever, JCPenney, Johnson & Johnson and Best Buy. I spoke with head of design Matt Zarzecki who explained that custom campaigns average between $200,000 and $500,000. 

The site is currently running over 120 million pageviews per month with 6 million visitors. CafeMom is an interesting startup for me to watch given my history in the CPG online business and having been involved in a similar site from inside a CPG company. Moms are one of the "richest" segments online and CafeMom has done an excellent job capitalizing on this demographic. I put them on acquisition watch last week.

Check out my interview with two of the executives from CafeMom.

The March 2008 episode of BigScreen LittleScreen will be taking place in the real world on Monday, March 24th at 6:30pm in the For Your Imagination studio. Tilzy.TV featured this opportunity for web video content creators in New York City in a recent article as a great place to promote your work. BigScreen LittleScreen, hosted by Matt Semel from 10ton.tv and Paul Kontonis from For Your Imagination, is a unique forum for online video and interactive content creators and enthusiasts to show and share their work with their colleagues, potential customers and partners. Space is limited at this event so make sure you RSVP.

See Jeremiah’s coverage of the lunch here (his photo above)

One of my favorite things to is show off the best of Silicon Alley to people visiting Silicon Valley - especially influential folks.

Today, I did just that, by having folks converge on Shake Shack in Madison Square Park for lunch with Forrester Researcher Jeremiah Owyang who writes the influential Web-Strategist blog. I’ve known Jeremiah since Frank Gruber introduced us at Blog World Expo in November.

Anyway, those in attendance for lunch were (aside from Jeremiah and myself):

Kyle Bragger
James Gross - Federated Media
Matt Zarzecki - CafeMom
Dan Lurie
and Ryan Anderson from Fuel Industries

I was especially glad to introduce Jeremiah to Kyle, as he had been following BricaBox since back in November.

Also, it was great to have Matt there because their community stuff at CafeMom is of such interest to Jeremiah’s work. I hope they stay in touch going forward.

Overall, though, it was just a treat to show off Silicon Alley and show that with just a few Twitters you can have folks coming out of the woodwork to a nice lunch. Hopefully Jeremiah’s post finds it back through the Valley and they learn how great our community of tech people here are.

British startup Naked is fundamentally rethinking online communication. Email, IM, text messaging and social networking all fall short on points and don’t work together.

Naked proposes a cross-platform alternative they call Open Messaging. There’s already an international private beta. US mobile support will be added before the end of this month.

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Knowledge is power. We all thrive on knowing what’s going on, who did what, with who/where, the obligatory “was he/she drunk?” and ending it with the all too common “wow!”

Michael Robertson (domain fame mp3.com) has recently launched a new site dealipedia. Prying off anonymity and silicon valley/alley buried secrets (and of course legitimate info from the SEC) users can now take the wikipedia model and show who has a bigger napoleon complex house and higher cholesterol.

Favorite section of the site for me is “Who Made The Money?”  but probably not for Joitchi Ito who (made “0″ million) on the deal with “Quincy’s House of Pain” (also known as CBS Interactive.)  While it recently has taken off, given where the market has been and continued direction of compression, this list will likely continue to grow.

My goal in life is to make this list and be angry (secretly stoked) because i found out through someone else.

Last week, the City Council revealed its new website after months of delay. But while most agree that it is a good step, the site has received mixed reviews from people dealing with the intersection of technology and government.

The Councils’ new site is meant to be more stable than the old site, which was notorious for crashing. It offers more details on committee hearings, including direct links and briefings. An RSS subscription is now available for the committee’s calendars, and there are plans to add RSS features throughout the site in the future. Council members also have the ability to update their own pages as they see fit, and can add such features as voting records, calendars and press releases if they choose. The Council’s communications office is training staffers and even Council members on how to do so.

Cathilea Robinett, the executive director of the Center for Digital Government, said the new web site is very sophisticated for a council site. “This is an excellent use of technology with several innovative features. Congratulations to the New York City Council for a citizen-centric and citizen-friendly site.” The center publishes a yearly survey ranking American cities on their use of technology to reach out to constituents. (New York City has not been in the top ten large cities since 2002, when it ranked fourth.)

Councilmember Gale Brewer, chair of the Technology in Government Committee, was happy about the new site as well. She says that it is now much easier to find legislation, and finds the additional information available for committee hearings useful. But her enthusiasm was tempered by what the site didn’t have.
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NY-based KickApps is announcing this morning a new partnership with Advertising.com to monetize video content built on the KickApps social networking platform. Social networks using KickApps can select advertisements as either pre- or post-roll messages. I assume this means videos that use the KickApps video player.

Revenue share percentages were not disclosed. I like this deal because it helps small publishers to earn more and provide better ads than with smaller advertising networks. In fact, most of the smaller ad networks can't even support video ads.

Since their $11 million funding round in August, KickApps has continued to make press-worthy announcements.

Pat O’Gorman, an award winning television industry veteran, has joined New York City online media company For Your Imagination and will help develop their online web video programming and serve as a senior advisor.

Currently working as a media consultant for Beauchamp Communications, O’Gorman boasts an impressive resume with more than four decades of experience in the television industry.  Alongside Reese Schonfeld, she co-founded CNN in 1979 and served as an executive producer of both The Book Channel from 1984-86 and The Food Network from 1992-99.  Additionally, she received four Peabody awards for her work as a documentary film editor at CBS.

“We’re thrilled to add Pat to the For Your Imagination team,” said For Your Imagination’s CEO, Paul Kontonis.  “Her unrivaled experience in the television industry will be immeasurably helpful in allowing us to continue to create outstanding online television shows and branded content.”

Biography
Pat O’Gorman is an award winning television producer and director with over 40 years experience. Presently, she works as television network and media consultant for Beauchamp Communications. Pat was the executive producer for the Television Food Network (1992-99) and the Book Channel (1984-1986). She has worked as an editor on "60 Minutes," CBS’ "Who’s Who," "Crime Watch Tonight" and as an editor and producer for Woman’s Magazine. In 1979, Pat started CNN with Reese Schonfeld, and developed a program for "Video Journalists"   to teach all aspects of Journalism and TV News. In addition to her plentiful professional experience, Pat has received 4 Peabody Awards for her work as a documentary film editor at CBS. Pat has collaborated on many projects; "Cambodia", a documentary reported by Ed Bradley and "Assassination MLK", reported by Dan Rather, are two of her finest. 

A new project I’ve been working on with Darrell Silver, Erin Sparling, and Lee Semel launches today: CommandShift3.

It’s like Hot or Not, but for websites.

Started on a lark during a NYC Jelly session with Adam Varga, Darrell Silver, Dan Lurie, Erin Sparling, and Lee Semel, we’re really proud to open it up to the world today.

Much thanks to everyone who’s given us advice and support, including the celeb designers who recorded short videos we’ve hidden in the site for you to find. (Khoi Vinh, Matt Linderman, Taylor McKnight, Derek Powazek, Brad Smith, Ryan Sims, Dan Cederholm, Chris Messina, Ben Brown)

In an industry shaking move, four of the most influential new media organizations in New York - SobelMedia, NY:MIEG, The Producers Guild of America/New Media Council and For Your Imagination - are teaming up to bring you a Holiday Get-Together on Wednesday, December 12th starting at 7pm at For Your Imagination, 22 West 27th Street, 6th Floor. You can RSVP at the Facebook group or email bash@foryourimagination.com. For Your Imagination has been at the center of the most influential and industry shaping events in new media and online video events in New York City in 2007 ranging from Video 2.0, BigScreen LittleScreen, nextMadisonAve, CenterNetworks, nextNYers, Revver Content Creators and OneWebDay and this event is no exception.