Koo’s Corner

Been pretty sick the past couple of days, but thought I would get back to blogging with a much missed Commercial of the week.

Southwest has always been known as the low cost, no frills airline. While this commercial is nothing special, it once again differientates what they are doing from their competitors.

Tags: Commercial of the Week, southwest

This week a trio of interesting upcoming movies came to my attention.

Leading off is biopic of Notorious B.I.G , set to come out in early 2009. Directed by George Tillman Jr of Barbershop, Roll Bounce, and Soul Food fame, Notorious looks to chronicle the rise and premature demise of Notorious B.I.G.

Below is a trailer.

Next up is a new Seth Rogan film coming out in Ocotber entitled “Zack and Miri Make a Porno”. This one isn’t directed by Judd Apatow, but has many familiar Apatow faces and is directed by Kevin Smith. Elizabeth Banks looks pretty amazing as well.

Last up is news, that Sacha Baron Cohen is out creating trouble during the filming of “Bruno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Male”. Cohen infiltrated a fashion show in Milan, and stayed overextended his welcome when crashing the runway. Below is a great picture of the incident.

Tags: bruno, kevin smith, notorious, sasha baron cohen, seth rogen

By now I am sure you have seen highlights of the USC’s shocking loss at the hands of the Beavers last night. Oregon State has 2 really emberassing losses at the hands of Stanford and Penn State and were thought the be a pushover for the Trojans.

You can usually turn off a game like sometime in the second quarter, but it was around then you knew this one was going to be a dog fight. USC’s offense came out flat while their defense was getting pushed around. Give a lot of credit to the Beavers and head coach Mike Reilly who didn’t shy away from agressively attacking on offense rather than trying to hold on to their lead for dear life.

The 4th quarter was great as you were just waiting for the other shoe to trop on USC’s comeback. It never came, and the result was the first unbelievable upset of the year.

The question to ponder now is what looks better on a BCS bowl resume at the end of the year? USC has a great win agaisnt Ohio State, but now an emberassing loss to Oregon State. Meanwhile a program like Ohio State might knotch a couple of mildy impressive wins (Penn State, Wisky, Illinois being candidates), but lack a staple win.

Jim Rome touched on this briefly this morning. Ohio State gets crushed in their biggest games, yet avoid disaster in small games, while also logging solid conference wins. USC is the best big game team in the country but lays eggs to the likes of UCLA, Stanford, and Oregon State.

While Ohio State is now notoriously known for falling in their biggest games, they avoid these huge upsets as their 6 losses have come at the hands of a team who has gone to a BCS bowl game (assuming USC makes on this year).

Moving onto this weekend, its a pretty solid slate of games

Purdue takes on Notre Dame in a game that can put some added heat back on to Charlie Weiss. This game is a pick em, and I think the Boilermakers should come out victorious.

Wisconsin travels to Michigan as a 6 point favorite. Michigan has not looked good at all thus far and will have a very tough time hanging with a much more balanced and experienced Badger team.

Couple of interesting games in the South during the day as Florida State hosts Colorado, who are coming off their big win agaisnt West Virginia. Auburn has to deal with a downtrodden Tennessee team in what should be a low scoring defensive game.

The night slate of games is pretty sexy. Virginia Tech takes on Nebraska in the remember when we were good bowl. Oklahoma looks to flew their muscle agaisnt a ranked TCU team. But the real showstoppers are the night games on ABC and ESPN.

Georgia hosts Alabama in the game of the day and are favored by a TD. If Saban can log a win in Athens, Alabama will officially be back on the national scene. Georgia is looking to move up in the rankings after USC’s debacle as they have a showdown with Florida looming in the coming weeks.

In the Big TEN Illinois is a whopping 15 point underdog to Penn State. A line that is a raising a lot of eyebrows in a game that I believe will be a bit closer than that spread. Whomever wins this game puts themselves in great position to win the Big Ten.

All in all it should be a great weekend.

Tags: BEAVERS, illinois, Michigan, Ohio State, OKLAHOMA, OREGON STATE, PENN STATE, PURDUE, USC, WISCONSIN

The economy has a lot of people worried, including Silicon Valley who has seemingly avoided any catastrophes thus far. Despite the fact that nothing dire has happened, there has been an ominous feeling that looming over the valley and in particular a lot of startups.

Sure there are some moderate success stories out there like Yelp, Facebook, SugarCRM, and SlingBox, but the jury is still out on a lot of startups that have made a lot of noise but future’s are very debatable.

This week two of the more prominent valley startups made some noise by announcing major fund raising rounds.

First up is Ooma who brought in am impressive $16 dollars, bringing their total to $42 million raised. Their have been rumblings about the company’s sustainability but $16 mill should keep them going as they get traction via retail providers like Best Buy.

The more intruiging story is Digg, who just 2 months ago was rumored to be close being purchased for $200 million by Google. Google walked away from the deal, and now Digg is selling the story that they would rather stay independent anyways. Kind of sounds like me me spinning that I would rather be single. Digg brought in a whopping $28 million which should give them enough time to figure out how the hell are they going to make any money?

I am also privvy to knowledge of 2 other startups raising some capital which have not been formally announced. These are moderate series A rounds in 2 seperate sectors  which serve as another encouraging sign that the VC’s aren’t gun shy in this down economy.

Hopefully we will begin to see some healthy exits instead of scenes like this…

Tags: DIGG.COM, OOMA

I am still getting myself back to speed after the Vegas trip, but thought I would plug two recent Bucknuts articles/interviews I did.

The first one is with Ronnie Lott who discusses a variety of things.

Ronnie is an investor to Yardbarker, a NFL legend, as well as personal hero to me growing up. I had the pleasure of telling him after the interview the story of when I bombarded his mother’s day dinner at a restaurant and recited a post game speech verbatim including some expletives.His mom was not pleased, nor was mine although Ronnie seemed to enjoy the story looking back.

My second piece is with Mike Conley Jr, about the last 2+ years of his life. From Indianapolis as a top rated Senior in High school to Columbus as a all world freshmen and then on to the Memphis as a top pick. Conley recaps all of this in my interview with him. Really Cool dude.

Finally I wanted to share this photo. Two of our engineers below pledged they would shave their heads if a certain milestone was reached that was deemed somewhat unobtainable. Fortunately for us, but unfortanutely for their girlfriends, that milestone was reached today. Below is my first photoshop ever…..Took me half an hour.  We are now on the clock, as our CEO Pete is next on the list if we reach another lofty milestone in the next 2 weeks.

Tags: bucknuts, MEMPHIS GRIZZLIES, mike conley, ronnie lott

A lot of people have already documented some of the highlights of my trip to BlogWorld, so I’ll keep this one fresh by focusing on things other than my many adventures outside of the Convention Center.

It was about 2 months ago, when I was told that we were going to be sponsors of this event. I expressed my interest to go which was received somewhat skeptically as who wouldn’t want to go to Vegas on the company’s dime.

Although that was partially true, I genuinely would want to attend this convention if it was in Montana, West Virginia, or Narnia. After all I seeked out this job because of its focus on USG, Web 2.0, etc. Despite dabbling in blogging, twitter, and other web 2.0 staples, I had yet to really get in the trenches with those who embrace new media as much as I do.

Below are some the takeaways from a convention I absolutely had a blast at.

- I got to spend a lot of time with Jack Bechta and Joe Fortenbaugh from the football blog National Football Post. While a football blog is nothing new, having a staff of current and former agents, players, and front office guys blogging is. These guys are in the know, and are leveraging their expereince, network, and reputations to remove the dilution of info that typically occurs between NFL sources, the media, and blogosphere.

These guys have great things in front of them, and have not turned off their NFL contacts by starting a blog. In fact a lot of their long time friends and contacts would rather go to them with information rather than the. mainstream media

- While Silicon Valley was definitely in full force, there was very strong presence from North of the Border.

I spent a good deal of time chatting with people from B5 Media (Toronto), who told me they brought a whopping 50 people to the convention. B5 media is similar to YBN Media, and is one of the few networks that publisher’s seem to be very happy with (I hear a lot of horror stories elsewhere).

I also was spend some time with Keith McSpurren, from CoveritLive.com (also Toronto) and was thoroughly impressed with his company and product in addition to how cool he was. A lot of YBN sites use Cover It Live to liveblog and it was great to learn more about the company and their story.

- The other geographic region which had a large presence was Boulder, Colorado. One of our engineers recently made the move to out there and I have been since hearing lots of rumblings of their growing tech sector. Despite this, I was really surprised by how many contacts at the conference told me that they resided or worked in Boulder.

In particular the lovely Jacqueline from Lijit (right), spoke to me at length about how booming tech is out there and how much she loved living there.  Jacqueline seemed like such a cool person and was so persuasive, I think she sold me although I am tethered to the Bay Area for now.

- One of my personal highlights was meeting/gambling/drinking/ chasing girls/ staying up way too late with some of the best sports bloggers out there. Elle Seckbach is hilarious and wildly successful, Ryan Corazza was a great hire for upstart Mouthpiece Sports, and his partner in crime, Eamonn Brennan, is a really cool dude as well.

The hilight of meeting all these guys may have Will Brinson at a 2 AM black jack game at the Hilton. We were being a little too loud/drunk/obnoxious when the floor pit manager warned the table to be more clear in our instructions to our Black Jack dealer. At the time, all the black Jack dealers were wearing NFL jersey’s promoting the Hilton Sportsbook and Sunday’s slate of action.

To the entertainment of the whole table Will replies with “I can’t bend the cards, but she (pointing to another dealer) can wear a effing Alex Smith jersey”.  Classic.

- On the exhibitors side, two companies really stood out. Believe it or not, Cart-Away Concrete Cement System may have been the biggest hit. They made fun of themselves with a booth and shirts that poked fun of the fact they had no business being an exhibitor at BlogWorld, which was surprisingly effective as they garnered a lot of attention with the comical yet honest admission that they had no idea what they were doing.

The fact that these guys towed a cement mixer over 1100 miles to the conference made them all that more entertaining. However from the look of their blog, it seems they’re pretty excited about what they got out of the convention.

- I saw a dozen or so demos, but nothing came close to what I saw from Apture. Recently launched, Apture takes normal websites and blogs and puts them on steroids. I encourage you to go their site to watch their demo or play with it yourself in their demo environment. All the media you see on this post is actually powered by Apture.

- For a great recap of all the other exhibitors at BlogWorld be sure to check out this great writeup from David Berkowitz (not the serial killer).

- One exhibitor who got on my bad side was Wordpress.com (like seeing your EX girlfriend). I asked them if they had any plans to open up the platform to allow for their great bloggers to earn money off of ad revenue. They gave some very well rehearsed answer about keeping it pure and it wasn’t  a concern for the community. That’s pretty much BS as Yardbarker gets quite a bit of applicants to be in our network from their customers.

- Finally a shout out to Buzzlogic who put me in a limo with vodka and champagne and took me to a great mixer event at the pool at the Hard Rock. It was somewhere around here I realized that this business trip was going to be my best ever.

Can’t wait for next year!

Tags: blogworld, buzzlogic, cover it live, las vegas, lijit, national football post

The Governator fought hard to ensure California would be the state where Tesla Motors would produce their 5 seat luxury sedan slated to come out in 2010. Today we found out that San Jose won the local battle for the facility with the facility opening up sometime in 2008 right off 237 and Zanker Road.

Below are some details on what incentives Tesla is receiving from the city per the Chronicle.

“Tesla Motors said Wednesday that it will build a $250 million factory in San Jose to make its new electric car, a luxury sedan.

– The factory is scheduled to open in 2010, and will employ about 1,000 workers once fully operational.

– It will be located near a wastewater treatment plant on Zanker Road at Highway 237.

– The company will pay no rent for the first 10 years and $1.5 million annually in years 11 through 20. After that, the rent will be adjusted for inflation each year.”

I have a lot of thoughts on Blogworld which I will share in the coming days. However some more proactive bloggers have beaten me to the punch (probably because they actually got some sleep in Vegas and aren’t dragging butt like me today).

You should check out Dewey’s post on his blog which is awesome and does a tremendous job painting me as way more awesome than I really am. For those of you who don’t know Dewey, he  is a beer drinking legend.

Also I had the great pleasure of meeting Elie Seckbach, who is pretty much one of the coolest web 2.0 dudes I know. Elie is cool enough to have his own Wikipedia entry which is actually harder to have than you would imagine. Below is his recap of Blogworld, which actually features me a couple of times. I actually was his cameraman for a couple of scenes. Not sure if I am proud or disappointed that I had to be bleeped out in the video.

Being new to Elie’s work I was really impressed with what he brings to the table in terms of content, editing, and of course his great sense of humor. You should check out his yo mama battle with Shaq.

Tags: benkoo.com, blogworld, chinese jew, ellie seckback, SHAQ

One of the best youtube’s I have ever seen. Not sure what the context is for this video, and why George is miced up but its freaking awesome.

Update 9/24

….So I got an email from Jeffrey M. Zimmerman of Time Warner (loves that middle initial) with a formal ceast and desist letter about this video. Actually Jeff, didn’t send me this email someone named Alexis Schweitzer sent it because Jeff is too busy at the top of ladder running one biggest corporate coglomerates into the ground. Legal lemming Alexis unfortunately sent it to my spam box, which I should have never checked.

So the video is no longer here….but guess what? You can find right here for now. And for a limited time only, you can still go to that link and find the embed code so you too can get your own personal memo from the legal and administrative tag team of Jeff and Alexis.

Tags: george brett

So I am in Vegas for BlogWorld, more to report later…….. I am living the dream.

Its been a good weekend at the sportsbook but I would like to repot that the Hilton Sportsbook has royally screwed me. I woke up early to place a bet on Alabama this morning (they covered by a huge amount).

All was well until I realized, that the retarded dispshit did not place my bet for Alabama, but rather………New Mexico. I know an awful lot about college football but cannot tell you one player on New Mexico. I can’t tell you anything about the team they are playing in Tulsa.

So now I have to root for a New Mexico +6. F*ck the Hilton Sportsbook……To be continued.