Jim Lanzone: Vengeance in Video?
In January 2008, Ask CEO Jim Lanzone stepped down. He moved to Redpoint Ventures, a VC firm, to be their entrepreneur-in-residence. But his latest project brings him back to search: Clicker, an online TV video search engine. Kinda.
Lanzone is CEO of the video service, which launched yesterday at TechCrunch50 into private beta. Clicker aims to be a TV guide for online video—”the most comprehensive way to find the video content you’re looking for on the web.”
What makes Clicker different from the myriad other video search engines out there? TechCrunch reports:
[Clicker] creates a structured database of programming, organizing shows by things like network, genre, and show name. This type of data not only allows for better search results, but it allows you to browse content without having to do text-based searches, which you probably won’t be doing when television and future web-enabled tablets start to serve up this content. Clicker already has a deal with Boxee.
The goal is really to be the best search engine for video content. Clicker will point you in the direction of whatever you are looking for (and will do embeds if they’re available), but won’t serve up the videos themselves. They will also delve into surfacing content not explicitly produced for television, but is still high quality web video content. But they don’t want to be YouTube, which is cluttered with user-generated content. Clicker is going for a different market.
Clicker will also allow users to edit and submit information about shows wiki-style.
My question: what’s with all those vowels?! Are you sure you didn’t mean “clickr”? Way to shoot yourselves in the foot, guys. 
Naturally, the first real question is what’s their business model. And the answer is typical of search engines: advertising, both search and display. However, they also plan to offer premium accounts, “which the company envisions might be used for storing your favorite videos online, kind of like a DVR of sorts.”
We’re obviously still learning new things about how to do online video all the time, as Hulu has shown us. But is there room for another video search engine—and if so, will Clicker be it? What do you think?
Ask.com’s Ex-CEO Talks About His Departure & Company’s Chances Against Google
I’m going to say what most people will think when they read the news that former Ask.com CEO Jim Safka is back in the saddle again.
Did he really leave Ask.com for the stated reason that his brother had died?
Don’t get me wrong–losing a family member is crushing–but at the time, I couldn’t help but wonder if Ask.com was covering up Safka’s real reason for leaving.
It turns out that I don’t have to feel too guilty about my theory. In an interview–that appears to focus more on Ask.com than his new company Chegg–Safka reveals that his brother’s death was not indeed the only reason he left the company.
My reasons for wanting to leave were multifold. I always wanted to work for a company that was at an early stage and closer to my home. (Chegg is based in Santa Clara, Calif, and Ask is about 50 miles north, in Oakland.) It was a little earlier than I expected to leave Ask. But this in my mind was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Is it just me, or does that last sentence practically spell out that Safka left Ask.com to take the Chegg job?
When pressed if he left Ask.com because the company was dead in the water, Safka responded in a way that sounds like he signed a non-disparagement agreement on departure:
Absolutely not. We completely overhauled the technology at Ask. In addition to improving the core search results for customers, we reduced the monetization (by running) fewer ads. So it’s a better user experience. That’s a good long-term move for the franchise. A lot of the metrics at Ask are heading in the right direction.
Again, this is all my speculation, but reading between the lines, I suspect Safka left to focus on a company that had a chance of being #1 in its market. That will never happen with Ask.com.
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