GigaOM » Narendra Rocherolle

Photo site Webshots comes under new ownership again, will re-launch as Smile

Eliza Kern — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 15:00:52 +0000

Believe it or not, Webshots, the photo company founded in the mid 1990s, is still hanging around, but soon its service will go by a slightly different name after another change in company ownership. Threefold Photos plans to announce Tuesday that it has purchased Webshots and will re-launch the product this fall, transitioning it to become a more modern photo experience called Smile by Webshots.

Threefold Photos (see disclosure below) has purchased Webshots from American Greetings for an undisclosed sum, and has taken investments from groups and individuals including Freestyle Capital, True Ventures, Chris Sacca, Biz Stone, Mike Hirshland, and others.

Smile will roll out a variety of features this fall, but core to the experience will be a photo stream aggregating user photos that are easily searchable and shareable, targeting a user demographic that might not always upload to Facebook or iCloud. However, it’s hard to say how a photo-sharing site can compete in the age of Facebook and Instagram, which dominate the photo upload and sharing experiences. Older photo sites like Photobucket and Flickr have certainly struggled to find new footing.

Webshots was founded in 1995, and by 1999 had moved the product into photo-sharing as well as the original screensavers and wallpaper. In 1999, the founders sold Webshots to Excite@Home for $82.5 million in stock. In 2001 Excite@Home declared bankrupcy, and the founders purchased Webshots back for $2.5 million. In 2004, CNET bought Webshots for $71 million, which sold it to American Greetings for $45 million in 2007. Former Webshots executives Julie Davidson, Narendra Rocherolle and Nick Wilder are now on the Board of Directors for Threefold Photos.

Beginning Tuesday, existing Webshots users will start receiving notices that their photos will be migrated to Smile, which currently has iPhone and desktop apps, with Android coming within a month. Rocherolle and CEO Mike Sitrin explained in an interview that they want Smile to be the easiest way to search and share photos, although they were light on specifics as they focus on transitioning existing users to the new service.

Disclosure: Threefold Photos is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Super Bowl XLIV Stats: Game Day Rocks Twitter, Ad Sites

Janko Roettgers — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:00:10 +0000

UPDATED with new data from Trendrr, TiVo and GoDaddy. Who would have thought that passing the ball to the wrong guy can not only cost your team the Super Bowl, but also break Twitter? Yesterday’s surprise victory of the New Orleans Saints over the Indianapolis Colts caused a nine minute Twitter outage, according to Pingdom.com, as countless viewers tweeted like crazy when the Saints sealed the deal with a stunning interception by cornerback Tracy Porter.

The Saints weren’t the only winners on game day. Traffic to the web sites of Super Bowl advertisers surged, according to data from Akamai. The CDN reported that sites from advertisers that are also Akamai customers saw close to three times as much traffic right after the game than during the week leading up to the Super Bowl.

Super Bowl advertisers saw a peak of 1,178,888 visitors per minute on their sites at the end of the game, according to Akamai. During the pre-game week, these sites were viewed by around 450,000 visitors per minute at their peak.

Advertisers that mentioned their sites in their commercials received the lion’s share of immediate game day traffic. One example specifically singled out by Akamai is the HomeAway.com ad, which caused an aggregate traffic spike of 460,000 viewers during the third quarter, compared to an average of 275,000 visitors per minute during most of the game. GoDaddy’s ad even caused a spike of 538,380 visitors during the first quarter.

One should note that Akamai only has business relationships with around three quarter of the companies that ran ads during Super Bowl. Akamai’s stats include visits to sites from companies like Budweiser, GoDaddy, Audi, Monster, eTrade, and GM, but not Google, which advertised during the game for the first time ever.

Update: GoDaddy has informed us that its ads helped to sign up more new customers than during any of the previous Super Bowl Sundays.

New data from Trendrr shines a little more light on what exactly caused Twitter to go fail whale on us yesterday. Apparently, you can blame it on the Saints, which caused 351,544 tweets on Sunday, with a total of 454,780 tweets coming in throughout the week. The Colts saw 249,472 Twitter posts throughout the week, with a spike of 179,360 posts on Sunday.

TiVo is reporting that ads aired during the first half of the game got more attention than those that could be seen towards the end. The DVR maker tracked the most engaging ads and game moments throughout the Super Bowl by comparing their viewership with the surrounding 15 minutes of programming. The result: People actually did care more about the game than about the ads. Nevertheless, here’s the list of the 10 most-engaging ads, as ranked by TiVo:

1. Doritos “House Rules”
2. Snickers “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry”
3. Focus on the Family “The Tebows Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life”
4. Doritos “Underdog”
5. 2010 Intel Core Processors “Jeoffrey the Robot Gets Hurt”
6. E*Trade Financial “Baby Love Triangle”
7. Bud Light “Observatory”
8. CareerBuilder “Casual Fridays”
9. TruTV’s NFL Full Contact “Punxsutawney Polamalu”
10. Hyundai Sonata “Brett Favre MVP and Still Playing at 50″

We will update this post with Super Bowl-relevant statistics throughout the day. In the mean time, check out the rest of NewTeeVee’s Super Bowl coverage:

Where to Watch Super Bowl 2010 Commercials Online

Super Bowl 2010 Highlights For the Web Video World

Related content on GigaOm Pro: Connected Consumer Winners and Losers of 2009 (subscription required)

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The Start Project: Return of the Incubator?

Om Malik — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 18:20:53 +0000

I view Narendra Rocherolle, co-founder of Webshots, a photo service, and 30 Boxes, an online calendar, as someone who can read the Internet’s proverbial tea leaves and accurately predict the direction of the web. For instance, he was first to recognize the need for aggregation of web services around social contacts and introduced such a feature in 30 Boxes.

Rocherolle and his two co-founders, Julie Davidson and Nick Wilder, previously started a small web application lab called 83 Degrees. The idea behind the lab was that they would build many small products. And they did, such as fbExchange and PowerTwitter. Now, along with Polaris Ventures and Josh Felser, a well-known Bay Area angel, they’re taking the next step forward and launching The Start Project.

“In this model, we can be less conservative and continue to experiment with new stuff,” Rocherolle said in an interview. Instead of letting their ideas muddle along, he and his co-founders want to spin the best ones into independent companies. Think of this as a plain old incubator, the kind Bill Gross popularized with Idealab back in the go-go 1990s. It led to many copy-cat incubators including some truly horrible ones. Having lived through the first Internet bubble, I remain skeptical of incubators.

Rocherolle tried to explain to me why they were different. At Idealab, many of the ideas came from Gross’ overstimulated mind. At The Start Project, Rocherolle is going to be drumming up ideas. And unlike incubators in the past, the company isn’t going to be taking in outside ideas to incubate.

Instead, the Mill Valley, Calif.-based company plans to drum up a half-dozen new ideas every year, of which two or more will be spun out as independent companies and raise venture capital, Rocherolle said. Polaris Ventures will have first dibs on these independent companies for investment.

Having known Rocherolle for about six years, he does come up with tons of new ideas (Power Twitter and fbExchange, for instance), but they aren’t all big enough to become standalone companies. Traffic Marketplace acquired fbExchange for an undisclosed amount of money earlier this year. That’s eventually going to be the key challenge for The Start Project. It’s hard enough to come up with a big, venture-backed idea every three years — coming up with two or more such companies each year is going to be as challenging as repeating back-to-back Super Bowls.

The Start Project is the latest in a string of attempts to create a brand-new startup ecosystem that leverages the technology trends that have enabled web upstarts to cheaply develop ideas and products. From YCombinator to TechStars to James Currier’s Ooga Labs to New York-based Betaworks, there are others that have enjoyed early success with their efforts. For Rocherolle and his co-founders, that should be enough encouragement.

Photo of Team 83 Degrees by Esther Dyson via Flickr. Photo of Narendra Rocherolle by Thomas Hawk via Flickr.

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Traffic Marketplace Buys Social Ad Network, fbExchange

Om Malik — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:45:16 +0000

Traffic Marketplace, a Los Angeles-based ad network, has acquired fbExchange, an ad network focusing on Facebook and social media applications, for an undisclosed amount of money. TMP is going to use fbExchange to diversify its online advertising business to social networks. I first wrote about fbExchange back in 2007. It’s the brainchild of 83Degrees, a San Francisco-based idea factory started by Narendra Rocherolle, Julie Davidson and Nick Wilder. The trio are also co-founders of Webshots and 30Boxes.

“For us, our business is about exploring new ideas and growing them until they find a good home,” said Rocherolle when I reached him for a comment. Another Facebook-oriented advertising network, Lookery, which launched during the early days of the Facebook App Mania, sold off its advertising network and has refocused its business, too.

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