alarm:clock

News & Updates - Friday, April 27, 2007

Mojo Watch: Gawker Media, Widgetbox, Big Media, Optisolar

Mojo Found
+ Widgetbox may have landed funding from Sequoia Capital. Former Wired.com lead man Ed Anuff's launched the company and raised $1.5M in seed funding from Hummer Winblad.

+ The blogosphere welcomed two new sites launched by Big Media companies: Conde Nast's Portfolio held a lavish launch parties in both New York and San Francisco this week. Meanwhile, Wall Street Journal reports Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg launched their site AllThingsD.

+ Joost buzz is deafening. We got a friendly email from Joost's PR arm asking us to remove the email address for the company's GM. He had invited Adtech attendees to email him to get a free pass. He got so much email he can't get any work done.

+ Optisolar is building out the world's biggest solar farm.

Bad Mojo
+ Anti-video game advocate Jack Thompson has sued Gawker Media, the parent company of gaming blog Kotaku. Thompson asked Gawker to remove 'threatening' comments on Kotaku and Gawker declined. This isn't just bad mojo for Gawker, TechCrunch and other sites have been getting cease and desist letters with lawyers making the claim that sites are responsible to police their comments.

+ Guba management had a blow out with some of its management late last year. The displaced crew returned with a new video business called SideReel that launched this week. It's amazing that they were able to get the site launched so quickly. We may be buying the propaganda but it doesn't seem to say good things about Guba that they lost several key staffers and that those people banded together to launch a new business in the same market.