I’m going to be moderating the Web 2.0: Viable Business Model or Bursting Bubble? panel at TiECON East 2008 later this week (May 30th).

The panelists I’ll be interviewing are:

• Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures
• Don Dodge, Director of Business Development for Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team
• Nabeel Hyatt, Founder of Conduit Labs.
• Brian Balfour, Founder of Viximo

Early this year Fred blogged about Twitter’s Business Model. Given Twitter’s downtime these days seems like a great time to follow-up on that post.

If you have any suggestions for what I should ask any of the panelists please post a comment.

Andy Payne has organized a Virtual/Hosting/EC2 Birds-of-a-feather meet-up for tomorrow morning (May 21st) in Waltham, MA.

We’ll be comparing notes and experiences on virtual hosting options (e.g. EC2). Thanks to Matrix Partners for hosting us at their offices.

I’ll be giving a short presentation on how we’ve been using EC2 at Lookery. I’ll post my presentation here after the meet-up tomorrow.

If you’re interested in attending let me know.

I’m on vacation in Austin, Texas this week with my family but I thought I’d check-in to share the great news.

Our small team at Lookery is growing quickly and I am very happy to announce that Jay Meattle will be joining us next week.

This is Jay’s last week at Compete where he and I worked together for over 3 years. While at Compete Jay was the Product Manager for Compete.com and part of the small team responsible for creating it. Jay and I also worked together creating Bzzster.com and Shareaholic as our weekend projects while at Compete.

At Lookery Jay will be heading up Product Development for us and helping us launch some of the very exciting products we’ve been heads-down working on.

Looking forward to “bringing the thunder” at Lookery with Jay.

Want to earn $1000s a week working from home? (Well sort of..)

Here’s two ways to earn money from home:

1. Have a high traffic site? Join the Lookery Ad Network and get paid for a 100% of your traffic. We have a good number of publishers earning $1000s a week just from Lookery Ads.

2. Join Team Lookery. Interested in building BIG ASS™ data services?

• We’re a small team making a large impact in the online advertising and marketing world.
• We wake up everyday focused on helping developers and small companies make money on every single one of their pages. Allowing them to focus on what they do best, building great sites and apps.
• We rather focus on finding the best people than on geographical convenience.
• We’re funded by a select group of angels all of whom we personally enjoy spending time with. Life’s too short to not have fun with those who back you.

• You are a super bright yet pragmatic engineer.
• You are already a Python star or willing to becoming one.
• You are passionate about engineering and want to push the limits of what is possible.

Interested? Learn more here.

Flickr Photo by noahwesley

Man it’s cold here in Boston, spending the week at the Demo conference in Palm Desert, CA would have been fun but there’s too much work to do at Lookery for any time in the sun.

Visible Measures (VMC), a company I’m an advisor to, launched their Video Audience Measurement product this week at Demo 08.

The Audience Measurement product works by having video publishers instrument their video players with a VMC measurement plugin, think Google Analytics for Video. VMC’s measurement plugin is then able to collect behavioral data such as how long users watch and how much attention is spent on every video played with thier player.

VMC also allows video publishers to combine third-party data sources such as demographic and geographic overlays with each video’s usage data. Tying in Lookery Demographic data here would be a natural fit and something I need to follow-up with Brian and Rishi on.

You can imagine that capturing every video event (fast-forward, play/pause, forward to a friend, rewind, etc) could lead to a huge scaling problem both from a capture and analysis standpoint. When Brian asked me if I knew anyone in Boston that really understood how to design BIG ASS™ data services I immediately thought of Chris Gillett. Chris G. was my Chief Software Architect at Compete for over 5 years where he designed a lot of our large-scale data processing systems. Chris G. joins a great technical team that includes Chris Paul, John Saitta and Peter Winer.

VMC also announced this week the closing of $13.5 million Series B round led by Mohr David Ventures and General Catalyst.