Monday, June 27, 2011

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Tasty! Meredith Launches Recipe.com, Acquires EatingWell Media Group Top
Publisher Meredith is expanding its food media business with the launch of Recipe.com , a site that pairs – you guessed it – recipes with digital coupons and the acquisition of EatingWell , a multichannel brand focused on – you guessed it – healthy eating. Terms of the EatingWell purchase were not disclosed. To learn why launching Recipe.com and buying EatingWell Media Group makes sense for Meredith, look no further than this statement from chairman and CEO Steve Lacy: “Meredith already produces great food content across our brands, and food is our top advertising category. In acquiring EatingWell and launching Recipe.com, we’ve added two anchor brands to serve the 75 million American women we engage every month, and the marketers that want to reach them.” In other words, more eyeballs to sell to their top advertisers, across multiple channels. The company’s portfolio includes a bi-monthly magazine, a mobile app and website featuring healthy recipes, food and shopping tips, articles, blogs and nutrition advice, a series of cook books and a content licensing and custom marketing program providing diet and nutrition articles, how-to cook information, recipes and meal plans to over 75 clients. Currently, more than 60 percent of EatingWell’s revenues are said to come from digital sources, licensing and custom marketing. EatingWell CEO Thomas Witschi is joining the Meredith National Media Group as EVP and President, Women’s Lifestyle, with responsibility for Meredith’s More, Fitness, EatingWell and Diabetic Living brands. As for Recipe.com: the website and associated mobile apps will feature more than 20,000 trusted recipes, digital coupons, how-to videos, recipes from cook books and partners as well as an online shopping list. There’s also going to be a quarterly magazine. Brands like Betty Crocker, Campbell’s and Kellogg’s are among the marketing content partners participating in the launch of Recipe.com. CrunchBase Information Meredith Information provided by CrunchBase
 
LivingSocial Expands Daily Deals Empire; Buys Ensogo, GoNabit And DealKeren Top
Looks like LivingSocial is employing the same strategy for international expansion as its rival Groupon : by acquiring local daily deal sites to serve as a foundation for discount distribution on a global scale. According to DailySocial , the company has moved to purchase DealKeren (operational in Indonesia), its parent company Ensogo (which offers daily deals in Thailand and the Philippines) as well as GoNabit (which operates in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Lebanon, Jordan and Kuwait). LivingSocial hasn’t (yet) formally announced the acquisitions, but the report is corroborated by news site CPI Financial (although the article, which you can find using Google News , is unavailable at this moment). Clearly, the fresh logos confirm the purchases of Ensogo and DealKeren (but not GoNabit). We have no knowledge of the terms of the deals, but we’ll update as soon as we learn more. Also read: LivingSocial Financials Exposed: $2.9B Valuation, $50M In Revenue Per Month LivingSocial Pulls A Groupon … And $200 Million Off The Table LivingSocial Acquires SocialMedia For $3 Million CrunchBase Information LivingSocial Ensogo GoNabit Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Write for TechCrunch Europe @TCEurope Top
TechCrunch Europe is an interesting gig. There are 27 members of the “European Union”, 48 geographical European countries and territories, and… 51 participating countries in the Eurovision Song Contest (surely, the ultimate gold standard of a chaotic definition of Europe). But we love them all. Whether you are working on startup in Romania, or a VC in Mayfair, London, or a teenager in a Berlin bedroom in building the next Google, TechCrunch Europe is interested. Plus, we are also looking for a news writer. So we’d like to hear from:
 
The Celebrity Moment Top
Earlier this week Turntable.fm crossed a milestone. No, it wasn't hitting a reported 140K users one month after launching, nor was it being added to the list of portfolio companies for First Round Capita l (granted it was just a logo refresh from the company’s previous product incarnation, StickyBits ). In fact, the ultimate sign that the crowdsourced music service had arrived was more subtle than a milestone metric and ran under the radar for anyone who isn't finely attuned to these things; On Tuesday the artist Sir Mix A Lot (of "Baby's Got Back" fame) DJ'd a set on Turntable replete with a custom hacked avatar that differentiated him from the available cookie cutter options. Paying tribute to celebrity may seem like a superficial and pointless endeavor in the tech realm, where most of the real work happens behind the scenes. But as anyone who's built a startup knows, the narrative of how web services get and retain users is serious business, and is punctuated and proliferated by "celebrity moments" like Mix A Lot on Turntable, JJ Abrams on Quora or Ashton Kutcher's race to a million followers with CNN. There are countless examples. Like any other community milestone, these "celebrity moments" define certain web services. This Quora thread does a pretty good job of outlining some of the more notable ones like Ben Folds playing Chatroulette, Larry Summers asking questions about economics on Quora, Conan O'Brien hopping on Twitter (and only following one person), John Mayer abandoning Twitter for Tumblr, Snoop Dog on Instagram, Barack Obama setting up a LinkedIn profile and Ashton Kutcher on, um, everything . Any startup founder with half a brain realizes that a celebrity user signifies mainstream acceptance. But as silly as they sound these milestones should be viewed almost as monumentally as anything hitting one million users — after all they both make headlines. A celebrity arrival signifies that your service can be used for self-promotion, or for democratizing communication, or both. In the most basic sense it's like having the cool kids show up at your party. And it's no joke; Celebrity usage was so critical to Twitter's eventual scale that the company used to  blog  about celebrities joining back in the day. Now, in a post @CharlieSheen world, it's news if a celebrity hasn't joined Twitter. Bre.ad founder Alan Chan , who boasts both Britney Spears and Lady Gaga as users (and Lady Gaga's manager Troy Carter as an investor), explains, "Celebrities using your product is the ultimate testimonial for your product.  It proves that there is demand and need for what you’ve built and that your product is a level higher then other companies in your space." And yes it shouldn't be surprising that celebrities, some of whom make careers out of endorsing products, would be first to hop on the bandwagon of innovative products. But the interesting factor in this equation is that they're doing it for free. So what's in it for Ashton? Well first of all these tools are definitely vehicles for self-promotion. In an age where so much media coverage originates on Facebook, and Quora and Twitter, it seems like celebs increasingly need to have a strong online presence in order to stay relevant. @-mentions and mutual follows have become a new sort of fame replicator, so basically it's a symbiotic relationship; The celebrity gets the same publicity as the startup. And the mass distribution aided by technology has redefined the concept of celebrity — Being attractive is no longer enough, and you actually have to be intellectually engaging via text on these platforms. Ashton Kutcher talking about what it's like to kiss Natalie Portman on Quora is exemplary of this. Former Twitter engineer and newly minted Foursquare employee  Benjy Weinberger puts it best, "People now expect more from celebrities than just passively reading about them in magazines. Cultivating a direct relationship with your fans over the web is fast becoming the way not just to maintain fame but to create it in the first place."
 

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