Why does the tech world get a throwdown in Austin when the banks have had to cancel their bashes? The news out of South By Southwest shows that Web hipsters are every bit as bankrupt.
Of all the people corporate raider Carl Icahn nominated for Yahoo's board, Mark Cuban, the loudmouthed Internet entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner is the guy we wished had made it. If only for the boardroom theatrics with milquetoast Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang. Take Cuban's latest comments to Bloomberg: "Jerry's too nice a guy. He cares too much. They've got a lot of avenues they could take but all of them depend on being a lot meaner and a lot more aggressive and that's just not their style." Cuban should know: He took Yang for $6 billion during the dotcom bubble by selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo, then made sure to collar his shares so they kept their value while Yang's fortune plunged. Never heard of Broadcast.com? Exactly Cuban's point.
Mark Cuban, the boisterous fellow who sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in 1998 and later bought the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, now wants to own the Chicago Cubs. He's submitted a bid which the the Chicago Tribune reports has made it through a first round of eliminations. Don't get your hopes up, Mark: Former Deadspin editor Will Leitch wrote here in January that he'll never get the Cubs, or any other baseball team, because he's far too nuevo rico for the stuffy Major League Baseball owners' club.
Jason Calacanis started a company, Weblogs Inc., and sold it to AOL for $25 million. And he has some ideas on how to build a successful startup. But Mark Cuban started a company, Broadcast.com, and sold it to Yahoo for $5.7 billion. So you'd probably rather read Cuban's "Rules for Startups" post — though not all 707 words of it. Here's a version you have time for:
His ability to seduce Yahoo into paying almost $6 billion for Broadcast.com shows that entrepreneur Mark Cuban already knows how to dance his way around the negotiation table. Now the general public will be able to see the Dallas Mavericks owner attempt to do the cha-cha and Texas two-step. Mark Cuban will be on this fall's version of ABC reality series "Dancing with the Stars," competing against such luminaries as a Spice Girl and that chick from 90210. While we won't be tuning into the premiere — come on, who in Silicon Valley still watches regular TV? — we fully expect to see clips of Cuban twirling, lifting, and (we're hoping) falling on his fat ass, replayed over and over on your favorite video sites. Like Broadcast.com ... oh, wait.
Photo: Shoutfan.com
Mark Cuban, the billionaire founder of Broadcast.com, never learned to shut up. (That's why the Mavericks owner has been fined over $1.6 mil by the NBA for 13 incidents.) So instead of humbly accepting that he made his money by offloading his ridiculously overpriced video streaming company to Yahoo, he still tries to defend Broadcast.com's business potential. Eight years ago, writes Cuban, cwhen the company IPO'd, "We had full length audio books, full length CDs, full length movies, TV shows...We had preroll commercials. We had inserted commercials. We even inserted video commercials into audio files and streams [Whaaa?]. And user generated content ? Yep...Companies or individuals could upload full videos with synchronized slideshows and we even allows hot spots in the videos. And of course we gave you realitime statistics of how many people were watching your video..." We get the point — they had all that YouTube has and more. Tiny little difference: YouTube works.
On Geek Entertainment TV, the fun video blog hosted by faux-clueless Irina Slutsky (a master at cutting through buzzwords and making tech sound dirty), dot-com billionaire Mark Cuban recaps his talk to the Consumer Electronics Association. Topics include MySpace perverts, drunk e-mail checking, advanced TV tech, and how his startup Broadcast.com was different from YouTube (sure it was: YouTube is actually worth something).
