Today, the business is known as Geeknet. Much of the old OSDN has gone, yet a few of the key assets remain. Animation Factory was sold several years ago to Mecklermedia. What remains today is the e-commerce business Thinkgeek and a scaled down media operation consisting of the sites: Slashdot, Sourceforge and freshmeat.

Geeknet made many major changes in 2010, including:

1. Thinkgeek revenues grew 55% to $76M
2. Media revenues grew 11% to $18M
3. Kenneth Langone and the Geeknet board eliminated the entire media management team
4. Sold media sites: Ohloh and Geek.com
5. Moved it’s headquarters from California to Fairfax, VA, home of Thinkgeek

The growth of Thinkgeek is amazing and the team should be congratulated. The e-commerce business and the media business are two different businesses with widely different business models. With a 55% annual growth perhaps Geeknet should concentrate on this business and phase out and sell off the media business. I don’t know if this is Geeknet’s current strategy – if it is then keep an eye out for sales of Slashdot, freshmeat and Sourceforge. If it’s not, then perhaps it should be. AOL, Google, IDG and Ziff Davis would be a good fit for Geeknet’s media sites.

From a Nick of Time.

Dear Friend,
It is that time of year again to share with you our adventures in this journey we call life. 2000 has been another year of magic and wonder…

Lori almost 3, is quite a talker. She continues to amaze the professors at the University with her intuition in foreign languages. It was fun for her to serve as Official Translator for Warren Christopher at the Bosnian-Serbian Peace Talks. She intends to spend this Holiday transcribing War and Peace into Arabic and Cantonese.

Chris, now 5, is growing in leaps and bounds. When he got his first set of building blocks he seemed quite interested in large buildings. This year he designed his first skyscraper and ground was broken in Hong Kong for the new “Little Man” Towers. It is great to have a budding architect at home as he made a new addition to the house and a wonderful gazebo for our garden. Martha Stewart will be filming her next show here in April.

Betsy had a very busy year. In between her work as President of the American Cancer Society and Senior Partner of Goldman Sachs, she introduced a line of children’s novels and hand made active-wear. She remains occupied with the children and has introduced them to Yoga and power walking this year. We are particularly proud of Mom as a starting forward representing the United States in the World Cup.

Dave was immersed with his Graduate School studies, and managed to co-author a paper on Multidimensional Customer Attribute Analysis by Conjoint Survey and accept a Nobel Prize for his discoveries in Quantum Physics. Along the way Dave took three startups through their IPO. We are proud of his work serving on the Board of Directors of IBM, Coca-Cola, and Walt Disney. Dad was also active with the kids teaching Lauren Ballet and helping to lower Chris’ handicap to 5. We were able to squeeze a little traveling in this year. We started in Aspen, went to Belarus, the Congo, Denmark, Ethiopia, the Falklands, Greenland, Holland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Venezuela, and Zaire. Our trip sailing our new boat around the world was a great experience for the kids, we learned to communicate with Dolphins and discovered a new region of deep water volcanoes.

And Sergeant, our German shepherd, learned to speak. Latin. Other than that, it was a very quiet year. So from our household to yours, all the Blessings of the Season and may your New Year be prosperous. We found out yesterday that we won the $150 Million Powerball Lottery.

The Wannabes,
Betsy, Dave, Chris & Lori

Stein says the rot set in the music industry 60 years ago. “We blew it,” he says on the phone from his office in New York. “The first major music labels were all phonograph manufacturers, but by the time the Beatles came along, most companies were no longer involved in the hardware.

“Had we remained in control of the hardware,” he adds. “We wouldn’t be hurting as much as we are now. And the iPod would be ours.”

The panel split into two groups, the lawyers and the entrepreneurs. We had very different perspectives on how to solve the difficulties, complexities and time involved in negotiating content licensing, especially for new tech enabled entertainment startups.

Technology now enables us to push the edge of the envelope with new entertainment business models. Consumers and artists are ready to try new approaches. In fact, one audience member suggested that Creative Commons offers a solid alternative to the current approach.

This panel, reinforced my opinion that the greatest obstacle to new entertainment business models may be outdated copyright laws and not content pirates or fear of technology.

According to one comment, it’s at least 30 months since Google has updated their neighbourhood in Google Earth. On the Google Earth website questions and answers section it states: “Google Earth acquires the best imagery available, most of which is approximately one to three years old.”

Since Google’s search and other products and services seem to be real time, why wouldn’t we expect Google Earth results in real time? Are we expecting too much — I believe so. I’m just happy for services like Google Earth and look forward to the day when the entire planet is covered. Obviously, the first information to be real time for Google Earth and similar services will be related to traffic in urban communities in Asia, Western Europe and North America, where GPS and personal navigation markets are growing fastest.

While Google, is one of the top aggregators for text based news, it is hardly a top source for visual news. CNET should be careful for what it’s wishing for.

In the last week, Nielson//NetRatings and comScore Media Metrix, two competing Internet measurement companies, both released their search engine results — with contradictory findings and implications for GYM. Tables 1 & 2 show Nielson//NetRatings results while Table 3 shows comScore Media Metrix results. Here is a link to the Nielson//NetRatings press release in pdf or in html at Tekrati and a link to comScore press release in pdf.

What’s interesting is the degree of the difference and the implications that can be derived.

According to Nielson//Netratings, searches grew by 1.6 billion or 39%, January 2006 over January 2005. It looks like the growth is very good, not quiet as high as the same period in earlier years — but trending well. According to comScore Media Metrix, search grew by half a billion or 11%, January 2006 over January 2005. Now the alarm bells are ringing and I’m wondering whether search engines and media sites that derive significant revenue from partnering with these search engines (like Google Adsense), are a worthwhile investment.

What’s even more confusing is share percentage increase. Looking at one set of numbers Google & Yahoo only slightly increased. Looking at the other set of numbers Google had a good increase while Yahoo lost 3 points.

It seems the only thing that both agree upon is the fact that Google is still the leader and still pulling away from its competitors.

Table 1. Total Online Searches, Jan 2005 vs. Jan 2006 (U.S.), According to Nielson//NetRatings

Source: Nielsen//NetRatings, February 2006

Table 2: Search Share Rankings (U.S.), According to Nielson//NetRatings

Source: Nielsen//NetRatings, February 2006

Table 3: Total Internet Searches and Share of Online Searches by Engine, January 2006 vs. January 2005 — Total U.S. Home, Work and University Internet Users, According to comScore Media Metrix

Source: comScore qSearch

Technorati Tag: Media

… a 30% increase over the previous revenue record of $9.6 billion in 2004. The 2005 Q4 revenues totaled a record $3.6 billion; making it the second consecutive quarter to surpass the $3 billion mark and the highest quarter reported. Fourth quarter revenues represent a 35 percent increase over the same period in 2004 and a 17 percent increase over Q3 of 2005.

I wonder what the split is between search based advertising and banner advertising — perhaps the IAB can tell us when their report is made available in April.

But it seems to me that any media company aiming to go deep into the modern world of user-generated media might want to think about buying this gem. Investment bankers, take heed.

Not only that, but whomever bought VA Software would be buying critical DNA — knowledge about what software the world is using. Sourceforge.net has essentially no competition, so effectively it has created a marketplace of producers and consumers.

Perhaps, my suggestion on January 3, 2006 in VA Software sells Animation Factory. Is there more to come? that VA Software divest of its media assets has been taken to heart and articles such as this are great ways to drum up interest. Or maybe VA Software itself is for sale and pushing its hottest media properties Slashdot and Sourceforge along with its affinity with Open Source, as the reason to buy the entire package.

1. Quickly grow the equity by selling off the rest of the e-commerce business (Thinkgeek).
2. Divest of the media business (Slashdot, freshmeat, Newsforge, ITMJ and Linux.com), but keep Sourceforge.net.
3. Change the name of the company to Sourceforge Corp, — there is far more brand equity in Sourceforge than VA Software.
4. Change the stock ticker symbol from LNUX to SFRG.

Steps 1 & 2 should yield at least another $50M to $100M cash. Maybe Novell or Red Hat would be interested in the Linux.com url. If done correctly it would free up a significant server farm that could be used for the new Sourceforge on Demand ASP solution. By keeping one or two of the media ad sales team, revenue from ads on sourceforge.net would be easily accomplished. The cash on hand might very well be used to purchase companies that fit with the sourceforge business and result in faster company growth.

Of course this is wishful thinking. As the former executive who turned around OSTG, I would like to see VA Software succeed at last, and see OSTG become a part of a larger media business where it can take advantage of media synergies.

Technorati Tag: Open Source, Software, Slashdot, Sourceforge, Media