San Diego based, Divx, best known for the popular mpeg4 licensing business, today announced that they are shutting down their Stage6 video sharing website. This has rightly gotten a good bit of play in the blog technosphere (see Techcrunch, Gizmodo, GigaOM, Webware, Mashable, Etc), as Stage6 was a pretty popular service. I personally used Stage6 all the time as it was a good source of content (both original and piratted), and felt quite superior to your typical Youtube knockoff, both in terms quality and speed.

According to their official blog response the reason for the shutdown was "that the continued operation of Stage6 is a very expensive enterprise that requires an enormous amount of attention and resources that [they]are not in a position to continue to provide." Of course as Techcrunch and some of the other blogs have dug into, when they passingly mention that "there are a lot of other details involved" what they really mean is that a rediculously stupid power trip originating from the Divx board over how to properly spin off the new company was a huge problem.

As Arrington put it, "throwing the baby out with the bath water" was certainly the case here. Stage6 had impressive funding to branch off and a business model that was actually working. Throwing out the revenue that Stage6 was making, as well the positive consumer impact it had on the Divx brand because they didnt have the resources to devote to it or the stomach to pound through the internal politics is amazingly short cited on their own. Even just considering Stage6 as its own entity its pretty easy to see that they come out of the gates with great traction and a semi niche, both of which any one of the new video sharing sites we see pop up daily would kill to have.

Overall on the business end this whole thing just exemplifies bad leadership and decision making. Plus as a consumer, I have just got to say I'll be sad to see Stage6 go.

The hype and popularity of sports is something I may never understand but that being said I hear coworkers, friends, strangers, family, and the guy who sits next to me at the bar drone on and on about their favorite sports team. Moreover it seems that everyone of them can give me a detailed analysis why Shaq going to the Suns is a good/bad trade, comments on Joe Torrey's weight, and a strong opinion with reasons why Rodger Clemens should/should not be let into the hall of fame. So needless to say I realize this market is huge and there is a huge potential for growth with anything that allows sports nuts personalize, customize, and shout out their opinions to the world.

Jacked is taking a stab at this by making customizable widget pages so you can keep your eye on all of the sports games going on. The widgets vary from play by play to you tube videos of the teams playing. They are VC funded with at least $6.5 Million and are based in Santa Monica, CA.

The Good: There web site is about a slick as it gets and even better than that the whole site is very easy to use, navigate, and customize. Also to their credit they have a ton of money and make it apparent that they have more sports related offerings (besides the widget platform) on the way. Most importantly the widgets they offer are rich in information and gave me more than I ever wanted to know about the games I was widgeting in on.

The Bad: I understand that this is supposed to be something you look at in addition to watching TV but why does it have to be that way? I would find Jacked much more useful if they had a live stream of the game(s) you are receiving information on. My idea here is that when I am watching a game on TV I really do not want to be checking my computer for other information, however if I am on my computer watching sports (ie no TV) I would gladly watch the game on my computer surrounded with the loads of data that all of these widgets can give me. Bottom line is that I want to see the actually game live broadcast along with the widgets!

Also there should be some sort of communication with other fans that getting the same information so there is a meaningful interaction going on. Let everyone share their so called sports knowledge and see what unfolds. This seems natural to me, most people have strong opinions about every aspect of sports so let them let loose, I could see a very dedicated (and violent) community developing from connecting sports users.

Overall: There is certainly room for some money to be made in this arena and Jacked.com might just be the one to do it, but until they add more user interaction and live streaming videos I do not see their idea gaining significant traction.

is what I would call an enhanced social Q & A site, the idea is that you ask questions to the community and get answers back. They are based in Santa Monica, California and are part of parent company Demand Media. If Demand Media does not ring a bell their CEO Richard Rosenblatt has had a hand in some major internet acquisitions in the last 10 years including but not limited to Myspace and iMall.

Wouldn't it be nice if there was a site with an extremely active community dedicated to answering one another's questions? It is a great idea that answerbag is executing as well as I can imagine but that being said answerbag is far from perfect.

The Good: Well if you are an investor or just a speculator Answerbag has just about everything going for it, they have money from their parent corporation, strong management (see above), and a very strong growth pattern. As for the site the utility is high, they do a nice job of letting everyone rate both the questioners and the answerers so you get a sense of who you can trust on the site. More importantly they only archive unique questions with good answers which means that you do not have to sift through 15 similar posts to find the best answer. Finally the community responds to most questions rather efficiently (however I have been waiting over and hour with no answer to my question).

The Bad: To harness the power, energy, and utility of their many thousands of users there will be some evil and this evil takes the form of endless opinions. One thing I do not want on a site dedicated to answers are endless opinions about religion and politics. If there is factual information that one can contribute to a political or religious question that is great but there is a whole lot of annoying (and useless) opinions on the site about democrats, conservatives, immigration, and everything in between.

Summary: Although it can be a pain sorting through all of the opinions when I am looking for an answer they do a good job of having an easily searchable archive of questions and answers which can provide a high level of utility to just about anyone (I found out the best way to remove dog poop from a carpet in seconds!) so I will not be surprised if Answerbag's strong growth continues.

So everyone seems to have recognized how hot funding green tech companies were in the venture capital space last year (and it looks to be continuing this year).  So how does that trickle down in to the consumer facing web 2.0 space?  Well what you get is Evo.com, a Santa Monica based, aggregator site of all things environmentally friendly.

Last week Santa Monica based Wonderhowto.com announced that the received an undisclosed investment from General Catalyst Partners.  The site is basically an aggregation service for "how-to" type videos.  Apparently self-help 2.0 sites are all the rage right now, as TechCrunch just covered yesterday First30Days (not socal based) which similarly focuses on positive self help articles during "the first 30 days of a major life change".  And while the two companies don't exactly overlap, being funded at the same time, does imply that the venture community is recognizing the value in sites that focus on the self help niche.

We are not a big fan of Los Angeles based social network king, Myspace.  Sure they helped take the social network world to the mainstream and are now the incumbent player in the space, but in the fast paced tech world, they are (at least from an innovation perspective) constantly being surpassed by upstarts as well as their key competitor: Facebook. But yesterday, Myspace finally made some huge strides to regain some confidence, by releasing their developer API.  

San Diego based Goowy is a virtual desktop for office productivity as well as widgets. They were founded in 2004 so they've been at it a while and it shows. Originally funded by Mark Cuban in a seed round, today they announced that they have been purchased by and will become a wholly owned subsidirary of AOL.