SingleView was an idea I had whilst I was living in San Francisco. It struck me that there was no easy way anyone could work out which was the best online dating site for him/her. Rather you'd really only find out if there were profiles you might be interested in once you've paid for a subscription. Increasingly we see aggregators or comparison sites making it easier to decide where to spend your money so why not the same for dating? That's why we created SingleView. The great thing about the internet is that it provides almost limitless choices and data - and now SingleView can help you identify which dating site is likley to work best for you. Need more persuasion? It's free to use as we get paid by the dating sites when we identify the best dating site for a user and they sign up.

Hulu continues to grow by leaps and bounds in the US and is looking to expand internationally. What I found particularly interesting is despite spending $millions on TV and superbowl ads they don't have a marketing team. Rather Jason Kilar/CEO suggests if the product isn't compelling enough in its own right - they have a bigger problem.

I haven't posted for a while but when I read this morning that Warner is launching a service that allows you to download or order films from it's back catalogue I just had to find a forum to vent. The first blunder is that the service is only available in the US - people watch and enjoy movies all over the world folks! The second is the pricing is just wrong at $19.95 and downloads at $14.95. Finally there are only 150 titles available!!!!

Making out of print or niche titles available on the internet is a great idea but this can only be characterised as a half baked attempt. The guys at Warner must have missed the fact that there are over a billion downloads a year on the popular file sharing network Mininova and of these 60% are films and TV shows....I wonder how transactions Warner is planning for it's 150 movies priced at $14.95 this year???

The film and music companies may still believe in the economies of scarcity - but what we've seen in the real world is that geographic restrictions or extortionate pricing pushes people to piracy. The way to make digital distribution viable on a commercial basis is to make content widely available, easy to use and ad supported. We're starting to see the future with comapnies like Hulu and iPlayer in the TV and film space and Spotify and desitouch in the music space. So i won't be using the new Warner Archive service....doh! I couldn't if I wanted to anyway 'cos I live in the UK.

I've recently heard that FON, the wifi community, after losing more key staff has retrenched and is hunkering down for a "nuclear winter". The slimmed down FON, has cut it's burn down from $1m/month to closer to $200k/month and will focus on key markets including Japan, France and the UK. Despite the gloom it's heartening to see the deal I did with Stephen Stokols who was at the time VP Business Development and has since gone on to online dating greatness with WooMe continue to succeed - and now includes over 150,000 hotspots which makes it by far the largest wifi network in the UK.

Skype 4.0 rocks! It feels like it's been a long time in coming and seems to want to take over the whole screen but the new functionality and particularly bringing video to the fore is great. Skype missed out on the social networking opportunity during the go-go times - leveraging the buddy list and building a more comprehensive profile might have created Facebook before anyone knew what social networking was. And whilst networking has now been done the opportunity to create great experiences and conversations around entertainment be that music, video, photos or other media and sharing that with your friends still is a prize worth striving for. I really was hoping that it would be an integral part of this release making Skype an entertainment destination rather than handy communications tool and as history shows if Skype doesn't do it somebody else will. Even so you can't argue with a company that has over 300 million registered users and $400 million in revenues that was launched less than 5 years ago...

Looking at what is happening at Yahoo reminds me a lot of what happened to Arthur Andersen post Enron. Even though I had left AA by then I had a lot of friends caught up in the ensuing confusion. Similarly over the years I've gotten to know a lot of really strong Yahoos and its sad to witness the meltdown of thsi internet pioneer but I think Henry Blodget has it down: it's time for Yang to give his troops the Robert De Niro are you with me speech (click here)and gather a tight commando unit around him and cut loose the maybes before he completely loses control of the company he helped to create.

Tomorrow is Super Tuesday or the US Presential pimary elections in a number of states in the US. It's an exciting time to be in the US - after so many years of bungling and imperialistic foreign policy there is a palpable sense of change in the air especially here in California.

This video by willi.i.am, who I've enjoyed seeing play live a few times, says it all: www.dipdive.com

I hope this gets seen both domestically in the US and internationally and helps demonstrate that change is coming and that new media is integral to it.