It’s the quintessential case of drawing the short stick.
“YouTube goes for $1.6 billion and Revver for $5 million,” said Rick Munarriz, analyst for Motley Fool. “It’s sad.”
After burning through $13 million in venture funding and two executive shake-ups in six months, L.A.-based Revver Inc. was sold to LiveUniverse last week, going for a smidgen of how much Google paid for its competitor in 2006.
Traffic on the two-year-old video-sharing site had languished in the shadow of user-generated video powerhouse YouTube Inc. Setting up a video-sharing site might be easy, but generating and monetizing traffic proved to be more difficult for Revver than YouTube.
For one, users can pull videos from the sites and share them on their own blogs or social networking sites, which makes it difficult for the host site to generate ad revenue. Plus, the sites need exclusive content hot viral videos such as Lonelygirl15, an online diary of a teenager and the most subscribed to channel on YouTube.
“At the end of the day, Revver was just like many upstarts out there, like Metacafe.com or Break.com,” Munarriz said. “Just getting by, doing the same thing.”
LiveUniverse, led by Brad Greenspan, former chief executive of MySpace, will likely rev up the site with better advertising technology and strategies for generating more traffic.
After a year in business, Revver co-founder Oliver Luckett left in 2006. So did David Tenzer, a veteran Hollywood agent hired to help find licensing deals. Six months later, founder Steven Starr stepped down as chief executive to chairman of the board.
Layoff Time
News from last month that Yahoo Inc. would be cutting 1,000 jobs is beginning to hit home.
Pink slips will go to 111 people at the company’s Burbank offices, which include corporate and search marketing employees. At the Santa Monica office that runs media content, such as finance and entertainment, 52 people are losing their jobs.
Yahoo will lay off a total of 492 employees in California, including those based in Sunnyvale and Santa Clara, according to a notice the company was legally mandated to file with the Employment Development Department.
In contrast with the need to cut costs is Yahoo’s insistence that it’s worth more than $44.6 billion a bid amount it rejected from Microsoft this month.
Never Forgetting
Ever wonder what will happen to all those digital photos and electronic contracts if your computer crashes?
Michael Fisher, chief executive of Elephant Drive, says your best bet is taking the data and “putting it in the cloud.” That’s tech talk for storing it online.
The Westwood-based company has come up with software that automatically rips copies of all the files on a computer system, organizes them and makes them available on its Web site.
The files can then be shared in a secure environment. For example, a file folder can always be programmed to be routed to a company Web site.
Fisher said about 6 percent of all computer data gets lost due to hardware failure, and his company can eliminate that problem.
So what does Elephant Drive do for backup?
Elephant Drive’s data is stored at highly secure facilities that require biometric hand scans for entrance. The cage filled with racks for its servers are next to those rented by MySpace and Sony, Fisher said.
The data is stored in multiple copies at the data center and then copied again and stored at an off-site storage service.
The founders, Fisher and Ben Widhelm, are veterans in the online gaming business. They left Vivendi Universal to start their own company in 2005. The 11-person Elephant Drive has 100 subscribers paying up to $35 a month for the service.
Sun Buy
Vaau Inc., a Torrance startup that develops information management software, got scooped up by Sun Microsystems in San Jose for an undisclosed amount.
Vaau, which launched in 2002, contracts with financial and airline companies. It does not provide names of its clients.
The software provides corporate security for IT and streamlines access to information.
“Most of the security breaches happen within the company,” said Sachin Nayyar, chief executive of Vaau. “And yet most companies are so busy protecting themselves from the outside world, they haven’t built in enough control in the maze of applications and authorization within the company’s IT infrastructure.”
Except for a handful of workers in New York and Dallas, most of Vaau’s 70 employees are in Torrance. They will move into Sun Microsystems’ El Segundo office.
Staff reporter Booyeon Lee can be reached at (323) 549-5225, ext. 230, or at [email protected].
