When I thinking of online gaming, I think of 15-24 year olds battling away until the early hours of the night, loaded with Red Bull. According to a recent Comscore Gaming report, the average gamer is 41 years old and 52% of the gamers are women. I know that some of our gaming properties have suffered in formal traffic metrics since the younger gamers blow away their cookies and tracking programs and so tend to be under represented in the counts. Would be interested in getting feedback from a couple of the Comscore readers to this blog about this. This report would indicate that there are a large number of mid-aged women gaming. Not certain if there classes of games that I am not thinking about here that would target this group.

Comscore just released its Top 10 Video Ratings. According to Comscore in July:
Property              Unique U.S.          Streams Initiated               Streams per            
                           Streamers (000)      by U.S. Users (MM)      Streamer
——–                   —————              ——————                  ———–

Total Internet     106,534                      7,182                           67.4
Yahoo! Sites       37,934                        812                            21.4
MySpace            37,422                       1,459                           39.0
YouTube            30,538                        649                             21.2
Time Warner Network  25,675                258                             10.1
Microsoft Sites    16,227                       156                              9.6
Viacom Digital     14,077                       322                             22.9
Google Sites       7,520                           60                              7.9
Ebaums World       7,143                        67                              9.4
MLB                        6,442                      30                             4.6
ROO Group Inc.     5,841                        186                          31.9

This puts YouTube in third place with 649m streams and less than 10% share. However, in June, YouTube claimed it did 2.5B streams and had a 43% share. Hitwise reported that it was actually a 29% share. You would assume that the June numbers would be less than the July ones reported by Comscore. Nielsen claims YouTube has 20m uniques a month and Comscore says 30m.

What amazes me is the wide divergence and rank between all of these. Granted, tracking streaming is a relatively new "science" compared to straight page views, but you would think, in this day and age, that things would be +/- 10%. Also, companies are always promoting and bending reality a bit but a 400% differential between Comscore and YouTube’s claims is a bit much.

That said, I am a Yahoo fan and was glad to see that they are in the hunt though it is obvious from trends that YouTube and MySpace will be racing by them (if not already). Maybe Yahoo’s challenge is that they need to capitalize a letter in the middel…YaHoo!

A couple of readers pinged me about Xdrive versus S3 (Amazon) and Googlebase. S3 is competitive at $0.15/GB and $0.20/GB transferred. Googlebase is free but Google crawls your info. I still haven’t gotten over the creapy experience of reading an email in Gmail (say a friends Caribbean trip) and seeing Caribbean ads served up by Google. Sign me up for a paid model. I don’t necessarily trust that S3, at the end of the day, will maintain privacy as much as I would like. AOL’s privacy policy (minus the bone-headed search fiasco) is straight forward regarding user content like email and this applies to Xdrive as well. Lastly, there are services like Box.net and Streamload (now MediaMax) that also have compelling offers but I have more faith (fingers crossed) that AOL will be around in the long run with my data versus some of the independents.

Lot of interesting posts on S3 and EC2 which are Amazon’s Online Storage and On-demand computing offerings. They have been so well covered in the Blogosphere that you don’t need to hear my two cents on them. However, EC2 offers a new chapter in web development and a number of start-ups are taking advantage of it. Feel free to Google them…

AOL has launched an online file storage service called Xdrive which is offering 5GB of storage for free and 50GB for about $100/year. I love digital photography and my collection continues to grow. I have backup hard drives, burned DVD’s, etc as I am absolutely paranoid that all of the family memories are going to go up in flames some day in a fire or worse. Online is the obvious answer, but the costs have been outrageous until now.

AOL acquired Xdrive last year as it struggled to make its 5GB for $100/year model work. Not enough storage to fully back-up my collection so I was not willing to fork out $100. However, I am willing to do it this year since with 50GB ($2/GB), I can get all of my photos and then some backed up and I figure that this cost/GB is only going to go down.

They are working on a Mac client, but we Mac users can still use a browser to upload files. Windows users can do things from the desktop client like schedule multiple backups, manage & share folders, drag and drop folders/files and such.

Ironically, I came across the reborn Xdrive by seeing the ad underneath my posts. Talk about a backwards situation. The blog world never ceases to surprise me… Feel free to click on the ad link to sign up if interested. However, this is not a promotional post on Xdrive because of that. I’m just happy to have finally found a place to upload my extremely large photo files…

After a very successful first event, TeckCocktail, an informal and stripped-down quarterly networking event for technology professionals, will hold its second gathering Oct. 12 at the Gramercy in Lincoln Park. TechCocktail is run by Eric Olson of Feedburner and Frank Gruber, a local tech blogger and product manager with America Online. What I like about this event is that there is high percentage of developers & entrepreneurs there which leads to a productive set of interactions between people (versus some of the more generic social events). You can register at their site at this TechCocktail link.

Nice piece in the Chicago Sun Times "Feedburner’s investors have its technology at their fingertips." It is not a common experience when investors can actually approach an investment as a customer. If this happened more often, I am certain that surprises and failure rates would go down in the business…

Participate Media’s "Feedburner" post also followed-up nicely on the piece.

Sorry for the broken link on the Pipeline Spreadsheet. I relinked it on the post below.

I came across this 1997 interview with John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins fame from Fast Company. A good read for entrepreneurs about startup teams…John Doerr’s Startup Manual

Also, timely piece in VentureBeat about Doerr’s daughter’s comments on Global Warning "Dad, I’m scared and angry.  Your generation created this problem." What are we going to do about it?

While I could never see raising my kids anywhere but in Chicago (actually Winnetka), I do dread the period of time in Oct-Nov when the days shorten, the temperature begins to drop and the famed Chicago Winter begins to rear its head.

I grew up in La Jolla, CA and find nothing more soothing that listening to the ocean roar from the beach. Two of my favorite spots are Half Moon Bay and Manhattan Beach. I have portfolio companies in LA and SF which afford me the opportunity a couple of times a year to sneak over and walk down the miles of beach at both places.

In fact, I am typing this post using Typepad’s beta Blackberry client from the beach at Half Moon watching the sun set. For me, this is a bit of a religious experience (the sunset, not the post writing).

There is something about the wind, beach and sea that strips away the modern fascade and plugs one directly into nature. If only my mind didn’t suffer from ADD, I might someday actually be able to fully enjoy this setting versus worrying about one of the “kids” in the investment portfolio….

The amazing thing (and the concern) about all of the wireless technology coming down the pike is that it unchains you and allows you to work from such amazing places. Unfortunately, it always make it that much harder to unplug from the Matrix and cycle down. All in all, this is a challenge I am willing to take on…:)

"Dogster: where every dog has a webpage"

I kid you not. Dogster has launched which is MySpace/Friendster for dogs and their owners. Dogs have always suffered from isolation and limited avenues to social networking. Now, they have a chance to unite and move up the food chain. Here is Wolfjohn’s profile a giant Schnauzer. He is an intelligent, playful dog with over 10 doggie friends. Expect big things from this guy.

For a modest fee, they can probably pick the sock puppet mascot from the last time around…