Jessica Simpson: Online Money Making Opportunities

Amid a shrinking home entertainment market, many in Hollywood have questioned whether any investment in a film library these days is a wise one. However, people close to Colony said the firm is convinced that Miramax was a largely ignored asset that will generate enough cash to repay the debt portion of the purchase within four years.

The library comes with about $300 million in revenue committed from existing deals, along with approximately $100 million in projected revenue for movies released in the last 10 years, people close to the acquisition said.

Under Lang, the new Miramax is expected to explore making a digital distribution deal with Google’s YouTube, building miramax.com as a destination site to view movies online, and launching a new cable channel devoted to its library, which includes titles such as "Shakespeare In Love" and "Chicago." The new owners will also seek a new distributor for Miramax's DVDs, a service that will continue to be handled by Disney for the next several months.

The new Miramax will have between 60 and 80 employees and about $15 million in annual overhead spending, said people with knowledge of the plans. Though executives will explore rights deals and partnerships for sequels and spinoffs based on its library, Miramax won’t finance the production of new films for at least a year, those people said.

A key figure in the Miramax negotiations was Nanula, a longtime senior executive at Disney who served as chief financial officer when the company acquired the specialty studio in 1993 from the Weinsteins.

When his boss, Barrack, gave him a green light to pursue entertainment acquisitions in late June, Nanula suggested they look at Miramax. Barrack contacted Tutor, who was already in talks with Disney to buy Miramax after a previous deal with Burkle and the Weinstein brothers collapsed.

As he had longstanding relationships with several Disney executives, including its lead negotiator, Executive Vice President of Corporate Strategy Kevin Mayer, Nanula spearheaded the talks beginning in early July. He and fellow Colony principal Justin Chang helped to shape the deal that Colony, Tutor and Disney agreed to in principle on July 23.

In the ensuing four months, many details of the purchase were reshaped, as investors originally brought in by Tutor, including Morgan Creek Productions Chief Executive James Robinson, were replaced by parties associated with Colony, most notably the Qatar fund.

Colony and Tutor plan to begin assembling their executive team in the coming weeks. Along with Lang, who has extensive experience in digital media, they are expected to hire a senior television distribution executive to sell Miramax movies to cable and broadcast networks around the world. At one point, talks were underway with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer TV executive Jim Packer, but the two sides didn't reach an agreement.

-- Ben Fritz

Related:

Ron Tutor-led group closes Miramax deal

New Miramax closing in on CEO, other executives

Disney agrees to sell Miramax to investor group led by Ron Tutor

Top photo: Thomas J. Barrack. Bottom photo: Richard Nanula. Credit: Colony Capital.

Funding

In May of this year, Tomio Geron at the Wall Street Journal summed up the funding story thusly:

Etacts, which completed the Y Combinator incubator program in March, has just closed a $700,000 seed round from prominent angels including Ron Conway's SV Angel; Eric Hahn, former chief technology officer at Netscape; Joshua Schachter, founder of Delicious; Jim Young, co-founder of HotOrNot; Barney Pell and Lorenzo Thione, co-founders of Powerset; Jawed Karim, co-founder of Youtube; Ashton Kutcher, actor and now angel investor; Robby Walker and Wayne Crosby, former Y Combinator participants; and Irene Pedrazza, founder of CheetahMail.

Etacts raised the funding quickly - in just over a month - and had intended to raise $500,000 but decided to let in more investors because of the strong interest, said Liu, who co-founded the company with classmate Evan Beard after the two graduated from Duke University last year.

You don't take Ron Conway money and then just give up in six months.

Rapportive raised a small round from other impressive funders 3 months later. Gist raised $4 million in between those two announcements, in July.

Etacts hasn't replied to our request for comment, but an acquisition certainly seems the most likely explanation for the service's decision to shut down.

Email as a Platform

We wrote about email as a platform for application development most recently in August. Yahoo's Eran Hammer-Lahav, then working on developer relations for Yahoo Mail, explained why so many companies are interested in this space.

"It's pretty clear that email provides a huge potential for extensibility, given the wide range of ways people use it. The inbox is much more than just a place for incoming mail, it is the primary dashboard for many web users - it is how they manage their lives. So when looking at email as a platform, the opportunity of making it more useful and productive reaches most areas of online activities.

So far the focus has been on taking social information to help better manage email overflow, but the platform has much more potential beyond that."

What will its likely acquirer do with Etacts? Presumably displaying the social networking profiles and past conversations we've had with the people who sent us emails is just the beginning. How will other email providers respond, lest they fall behind in richness of user experience? That's where things will get really interesting.

Personal Data as a Platform

Perhaps even more interesting is the way that all of these services use data about the people who have sent you email that they have acquired through services like Rapleaf. Services that scoop up and wholesale personal profile data ("the person attached to this email uses this LinkedIn profile, this Twitter profile, owns a home, has kids and loves short videos about kittens") are wildly controversial but also very useful. Nowhere is that usefulness more clearly demonstrated than in the email CRM services like Etacts, Rapportive and Gist.

Perhaps if Etacts' feature-set goes mainstream in some big email program, the story of value built for everyday people (not just marketers) from aggregate online personal data as a development platform would become easier to tell.

That would be very good news.

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Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Online Money Making Opportunities

Funding

Email as a Platform

Personal Data as a Platform

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