The online universe is filled with blogs a totally acceptable form of blatant self-promotion made possible by the Internet.
Most of these online diaries are generally hosted on two types of platforms.
There are blogging sites, such as Blogger.com, which offers a straightforward online diary form that can host text, photos and video uploads for each user. Besides comments that visitors can leave, there’s little social networking here.
Then there are primarily social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace, which feature blogs but function more as communication tools with uniform templates and less as artistic forms of expression.
Uber.com seeks to combine the merits of both types of platforms. It’s a social networking site that allows users to store and share media, including video. They can also build multiple pages of text and photos, and create a network of friends.
The templates are artistic and easy to use, and page layouts resemble a magazine spread.
“It’s something only an award-winning artist and engineers could have built together,” said Scott Sassa, founder and chief executive of Uber.com.
Sassa, previously chief executive of Friendster and NBC’s president of entertainment, has teamed up with his cousin Glenn Kaino, an artist whose work has been featured at the prestigious Whitney Biennial. Kaino is also a tech executive and was most recently Napster’s chief creative officer.
A year old and backed by Universal Music Group, Uber.com has attracted 2 million users, some of them authorities on style: fashion journalists Susan Kirschbaum of the New York Times; Elizabeth Stewart of the New York Times Magazine; and Rose Apodaca, freelancer for Harper’s Bazaar and Elle.
Instead of trying to sell billions of advertisements at less than 10 cents per thousand views a day which is what MySpace does Uber.com sells ads at a higher rate, promising to reach more targeted users.
Based in L.A., the company has 24 employees half are engineers and the rest are artists, producers and management. Uber.com has raised $6 million in private equity to date.
Buyback Bonus
L.A. software company WebMessenger Inc. was acquired in May by a Virginia public company for the paltry sum of $7 million. Less than a year later, the management got the company back with a bonus.
“The parent company was headed in a new direction, which meant a part of our operation could have been shut down,” said Joe Naylor, president of WebMessenger. “They offered to sell back the company plus $2 million.”
WebMessenger had been purchased by Apptix, a $21 million public company that produces on-demand communication tools for small- and medium-size businesses. Apptix had planned to roll out WebMessenger’s proprietary technology for its clients. It connects instant-messaging products, such as MSN, Yahoo, Skype and Google Talk, across desktop and mobile devices.
But then, Apptix decided to focus more on its e-mail service and less on the new technology.
Now, WebMessenger is back to providing communication tools to national enterprises. At the time of the acquisition, the company’s clients included IBM, Lehman Bros., MetLife, Verizon and Sprint. It continued to serve these clients while it was owned by Apptix, but mostly worked to bolster its technology for the parent company’s client base.
As a result, Naylor said, the company’s engineering team has become stronger. The number of employees has grown to 63, up from 46 when it was acquired.
Val Babajov, the company’s chief executive, founded WebMessenger from the garage in his Los Angeles home 15 years ago.
Habla Video?
Why use a textbook to learn a foreign language when you can play a video game?
That’s the premise of West L.A.-based Alelo, a virtual reality video game developer solely for foreign-language instruction.
It works like this: On downloadable software, which launches a video game on a computer, the user can role-play with virtual humans on the screen through a microphone.
For Arabic, in one scene, a man is standing outside a Sikh house. The user is required to speak the proper Arabic greeting into the microphone and, using a keyboard command, produce a customary gesture of putting the right hand over the heart and bowing slightly.
The company produces a similar type of simulation for the Pashto language from the Pashtun regions of Afghanistan, and French as spoken in Africa.
Since September 2006, the video game has been used to train 25,000 members of the Marines, Navy, Army and Air Force.
Alelo is rolling out civilian products such as a Chinese-language video game for a university publishing company.
Staff reporter Booyeon Lee can be reached at (323) 549-5225, ext. 230, or at
[email protected]
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