Mr.
Matt
Spangler

Great lean vs fat debate at TechCrunch Disrupt between Ben Horowitz and Fred Wilson.

Impressive presentation by anyclip.com at TechCrunch50 and the conversations and thoughts with the panelists after the presentation is great.

Greg nails it as well - as YouTube sends smarter Google executives over to their offices, hones their model and increases the deals they do with content providers…will there be room in the market for this upstart?

via gbattle:

AnyClip presents at TechCrunch 50 and wins the Audience Award (and Scoble’s Scotch award).  I was fortunate enough to consult for them on strategy, diligence and restructuring earlier this year both in NYC and Jerusalem.  Great team: Aaron Cohen is a veteran leader, Nate Westheimer’s product development star is rising quickly, and we won’t even get into the secret weapons on the Israeli side and their Intern Army.

However esteemed the panel was yesterday, they ignored the obvious 800lbs. gorilla in the room: YouTube.  Can high quality on-demand clips with superior metadata enabled discovery combat the massive brute force clipping available on YouTube?  Remember, 75 billion clips will be played this year on YouTube, 23 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and those numbers will only increase in years to come.  If nearly every iconic movie moment can be found on YouTube today - illegally and of dubious quality - will people trade that for a legal version with deeper discovery capabilities and higher quality?

Given the market opportunity, I believe that is a bet worth making, but it will take a warchest, rock solid partnerships, and, as Sean Parker stated, tenacity to fight against both deep-rooted studio fear/greed and YouTube’s inertia.  If Apple were using AnyClip within the iTunes Store, Amazon integrated AnyClip into IMDB, YouTube brings AnyClip’s legal rights and tech to their library or even ThumbPlay scooped up AnyClip to drive video ringtones on smartphones, this strategy would be a no-brainer 360-degree under-the-leg behind-the-back while blindfolded from the foul line slam dunk.  Aaron and Nate could be the Shaq and Lebron for movie clips, and like that Cleveland duo, we’ll see if they deliver on the potential.  I wish them only the best.

As an aside, it was great to see a business model that did not focus on Twitter or Facebook or the iPhone as the value driver.  Hopefully, that trend will continue.

Interview with Michael Arrington on Charlie Rose.  Interesting to hear his thoughts on the recent Twittergate incident.  He talks Crunchpad for a moment.  We’ll have to wait and see if that move outside the Techcrunch comfort zone makes sense for them in the long run.