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STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: Cmypitch

20-word Description: Cmypitch is an online community for entrepreneurs. Using video, it connects businesses to sources of funding, information, advice, and opportunities.

CEO’s Pitch: Using video, Cmypitch connects businesses to sources of funding, information, advice, opportunities and services.

It has three main groups of users: business owners; investors; and business service providers. Through video, businesses can present their ideas and companies with real impact. Investors can get an instant feel for the people behind an idea or company. Service providers can differentiate their services to a targeted group.

The community focuses on different stages of the business life cycle. Within each, business people can network, build contacts, share ideas and interact with like-minded individuals.

Mashable’s Take: Based in London and headed by ex-Credit Suisse VP Emmett Kilduff, Cmypitch can be used, as the company suggests in its introductions above, for business development and unending search for growth opportunities. Things like funding, advice, and general resource information are all tools in the tool chest, so to speak. But the site, quite a young venture in and of itself, seems to offer some nice added value in the way of featured content. How so? Something called Entrepreneur TV.

If you’re considering starting up an operation all your own, opening a franchise, wish to sell a brand/place already in existence, or simply shuffle through a digital rolodex of companies listed in the Cmypitch business directory, this website is really a quality place to go for guidance. Again, it’s fairly new, so you won’t find reams and reams of data. But for starters it carries considerable weight. Well-tailored from the get-go, I think.

Alternatively, if you just happen to follow the business world closely, reading the Wall Street Journal and/or Financial Times every day, keeping your cable or satellite box tuned to CNBC, the segment of Cmypitch labeled Entrepreneur TV alone is actually very entertaining. There aren’t too many profiles of people and the businesses they run. There are about 16 in all of varying subject and length. But if you enjoy those featured so far on the page, and new items emerge with regularity, I can foresee them driving ample traffic to the site relatively quickly. They are that well done.

As with other sites recently launched with an exclusively business-driven focus, Cmypitch isn’t quite competitive with LinkedIn, the darling of the social business world. Instead it sits off to one side as a kind of independent annex. Somewhere to go to get even further involved in entrepreneurial knowledge and conversation. And I think it’s fair to say that this one will soon be garnering a good bit of attention from all parts of the corporate world.

Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials

div class=”tradevibes_linkdiv”>cmypitch company profile provided by TradeVibes

Source:Mashable!

IAC, the holding company of major online properties like Ask.com, Match.com, and Ticketmaster, announced today that it has completed the much-anticipated spin-off of HSN, Inc., Interval Leisure Group, Inc., Ticketmaster and Tree.com to IAC shareholders and retained the litany of more profitable companies.  According to IAC, the move will be best for all parties involved and let the newly-formed companies blaze their own, independent, paths.

The very fact that IAC was required to even engage in a spin-off underlies the issues many companies are facing after acquiring popular online properties and holding them in the hope that they will grow in popularity and yield a positive ROI.  And although the companies IAC was forced to spin-off were seemingly fine acquisitions, when one consults the company’s latest quarterly filing, it becomes blatantly clear that this move was best.

According to IAC’s second quarter financial statements, the company incurred a staggering $421 million loss, representing a $500 million swing since last year when it made a $94 million profit.  But after the spin-off, the new company is doing much better and according to its financial statements, would have grown by 49 percent and incurred a loss of just $18 million.  More importantly, Tree.com and HSN, the two biggest culprits in the decline in IAC’s value, are left to smolder on their own without impacting the company’s bottom line.

But along with cutting its losses, IAC is becoming a more agile company instead of a media conglomerate that’s trying desperately to stay relevant in a constantly changing Web environment.  Now, IAC has a slew of great properties, headlined by Ask, Bloglines, Collegehumor.com, and Match.com, that more adequately adapt to the changing Web landscape and solve a specific need.

In a Web environment where CPM is down and more sites than ever are battling for your time, services like Tree.com and the entire HSN network are becoming far less necessary.  And in the process, these sites are losing money at an astounding rate and pulling all of IAC down with them.

The new IAC is much stronger without the companies it spun-off.  And although Ticketmaster was still profitable, that too has been losing ground over the past few years and could easily be supplanted by a service that streamlines ticket purchases in a new way.

Kudos to IAC.  For the first time in the past year, it looks like it is on to something with its new strategy.

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Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg may be getting all the money and media attention lately, but News Corp.’s MySpace still dominates when it comes to traffic. The site commands more than 70 percent of visits to social networks, according to this latest chart from Hitwise. Still, its share declined 8 percent in the last year. Which might explain why News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch was rumored to be poking around runner-up social network Bebo recently. Oh, and by the looks of things, maybe Barry Diller should have acquired MyYearbook for IAC back when he reportedly expressed interest.

Word now comes that Liberty, former cable baron John Malone’s company, has opportunistically paid $340 million for 14 million shares in Barry Diller’s IAC, raising its stake to 30 percent. IAC, too, repurchased 6 million shares at the same time. That means that Diller must have begrudgingly consented to the sale; at the same time, he reached an agreement that prevented Malone from taking a bigger stake in the online conglomerate. But who was the seller?

An obvious guess: Bill Miller, Legg Mason’s chief investment officer, is a famed tech investor, most noted for making an early bet on Amazon.com. But as a stock pick, IAC, has been a stinker, dropping 38 percent over the past year. And Legg Mason is one of only two institutional investors who could have easily parted with 20 million shares. (Lord Abbett, another mutual-fund company, is the only other.)

Miller has been unwinding his stake since March, so a sale would not be surprising. But it’s a blow to Diller nonetheless. The media mogul has sought to boost his company’s shares by splitting it into five more focused parts, targeting specific sectors of e-commerce. Shareholders would then choose which ones they want to invest in. Whoever sold that large stake to Liberty, whether Miller or anyone else, has signalled an obvious choice: none of the above.

Working for Barry Diller is a harrowing experience. Just take a look at Jim Lanzone, the former CEO of Amazon.com, before he joined IAC, and after. Even so, we’re reconsidering our sympathetic view of Lanzone. We hear that one big reason he was fired was the slipping schedule on an Ask.com news site. Despite putting 20 people nearly full-time on the project, and getting help from Digg, Lanzone missed a December deadline for the site, now slated for a February launch.

NY-based IAC is shaking up management across some of their divisions today. Let’s see if I can give you the nitty gritty on the changes.

• Jim Safka has been named CEO of Ask.com. He will also continue in his role as CEO of Primal Ventures, a new-venture entity that identifies seeds and incubates business opportunities for IAC.
• Jim Lanzone??is out??as CEO of Ask.com to serve as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Venture Capital firm, Redpoint Ventures.
• Scott Garell has been named President of Ask.com, where he will report to Mr. Safka noted above.
• John Park will replace Mr. Garell and is named President of IAC Consumer Applications and Portals, which includes Smiley Central, Webfetti, Zwinky, My Fun Cards, CursorMania, Popular Screensavers, Excite.com, iWon, and My Way. Can you imagine telling people you are the President of Zwinky?
• Peter Horan, CEO of IAC Media and Advertising since January 2007, will continue to oversee IAC Advertising Solutions as well as Evite, Pronto, IAC Mobile and Ask Sponsored Listings.

Most of the changes revolve around search engine Ask. Yesterday at the Citibank conference, IAC head Barry Diller said, "We certainly have not bitten an inch out of the hide of Google…I’ve been daunted by the progress of that."??

I said this as part of my review of the Wikia Search engine and have said it before regarding Mahalo. The switching costs for search engines are very high currently. Google is the Kleenex of search and so there’s really no reason to switch. And advertisements like the ones Ask ran earlier this year don’t help matters. Barry/Jim, I’ve got plenty of ideas on how to turn things around. Give me a call sometime. In addition, I wrote a lengthy piece in April with ways to fix Ask.