InterActive Corporation
Zeitgeist, Up! Tina's 'Beast' Celebrates Launch at Meatpacking District Burger Joint
"We're having a lot more fun than we did on Liberty Island!" said Tina Brown, the czarina of The Daily Beast, at her Web site's launch party last night in the Meatpacking District.
No, it didn't quite have the extravagance, say, of that 1999 Talk launch party on Liberty Island, where more than 800 movie stars and celebrities—invites went out to everyone from Henry Kissinger to Madonna—mingled and got drunk in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty.
Well, those were different times.
Ms. Brown's launch party last night was at... Pop Burger on Ninth Avenue. Maybe this is the New Media reality.
At this party, Harvey Weinstein didn't make the guest list, but "Fast Eddie" Felsenthal, the executive editor of The Daily Beast, sure did (and that was his nickname at The Wall Street Journal, we're told!). And instead of nearly a thousand arriving by ferry, this one had a few dozen people who had to take the ACE or the L. Everyone went home by a quarter to nine.
There were free sliders. read more »
Big Shake-Up at New York Tech Meetup
On Nov. 11, Scott Heiferman looked small standing in front of the glowing, 11-foot-high video walls in the lobby of Barry Diller’s glittering, $100 million InterActiveCorp building on West 18th Street. “There’s a great President-elect Barack Obama line which is: We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for,” he said, microphone in hand, buttoned-down shirt unbuttoned.
Mr. Heiferman, the charasmatic co-founder and chief executive of social networking site Meetup.com, was pacing on a stage in front of 400 Internet entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, developers and miscellaneous geeks. The at-capacity crowd shelled out $10 each to attend the New York Tech Meetup, the monthly must-do event for the city’s technology community, where budding start-ups have five minutes to pitch their new projects. read more »
Barry Diller Announces $14.8 Million in Losses at IAC/InterActive Corporation
IAC /InterActive Corporation Chairman Barry Diller took a gamble this summer by spinning off the HSN shopping channel, the Ticketmaster, LendingTree.com and time-share business Interval Leisure Group. In a conference call yesterday, he announced the consequences: $14.8 million in loss, or 11 cents per share, compared with a profit of $70.5 million or 47 cents per share this time last year, according to Bloomberg (via The New York Post). Yikes.
Mr. Diller spun it this way: "the last quarter when the costs of our spin-offs will distort the operating performance," he said during the call. IAC/InterActive Corporation posted a 10 percent increase in revenue for their third quarter, to $369. read more »
Writer Inveighs Against Lip Dub Videos; Makes Lip Dub Videos
Today on The Daily Beast, Tina Brown and Barry Diller's literally hundreds of hours old Web site, Randi Zuckerberg sallies forth a bold, truly shocking statement: It Must Be Stopped: Hipster Lip Dub Videos. (Insert your own exclamation points interspersed with number 1s here.)
This is perhaps the second most powerful statement by the site since last week when The Beast stood athwart tooth-whitening yelling Stop. But this critique, aimed at young people who film themselves and their friends lip-syncing pop songs and post the clips on YouTube and other sites, is somewhat confusing. read more »
Five-Way Split for Diller's IAC/InterActive Corp. Completed
According to the Associated Press, Barry Diller's redundantly-named IAC/InteractiveCorp is splitting into five publicly traded companies. Presumably, there will be 10 names between them.
According to AP:
With the split, home shopping network HSN Inc., time-share business Interval Leisure Group Inc., ticketing service Ticketmaster and lending and real estate business Tree.com Inc. are due to begin regular trading Thursday under their own ticker symbols. The symbols are "HSNI" for HSN, "IILG" for Interval, "TKTM" for Ticketmaster and "TREE" for Tree.com.
The company's remaining Internet properties, including search engine Ask.com, are staying under the IAC name and will trade for the next 20 days as "IACID," due to Nasdaq rules. read more »
Barry Diller to 'Change the Way the Black Community Drives the Web'
The Media Mob just received an invitation to an April 9 launch party for a new InterActive Corp. Web site called RushmoreDrive.com, hosted by IAC CEO Barry Diller and RushmoreDrive CEO Johnny Taylor. But just what is RushmoreDrive? The invite claims that it will be "the web destination that will change the way the Black community Drives the Web." (Drive! Oh, we get it.) Currently, its Web site just says, "Discover More Here Spring 2008," and when The Observer called up Mr. Taylor to find out more, he was tight-lipped.
"Right now we're telling people what it's not," he said by phone from RushmoreDrive's offices in Charlotte, N.C. "I'm telling them it's not a content site. Most of the products you see in the black space are celebrity, sports or entertainment sites, like BET.com or BlackVoices.com. Then you have social networking sites like BlackPlanet.com. We're none of those." read more »
It’s Diller Time!
On far West 18th Street—past the housing projects and the parking lots and the auto-body shops, where the High Line is home not to condos but homeless people—the new, $100 million international headquarters of Barry Diller’s company, InterActiveCorp, rises like an undulating, reflective space station. The lobby is home to the largest video wall in the world, and another video wall, behind the security desk, that shows statistics from various IAC Web sites. read more »
