Rustic Canyon

MC Hammer And Friends Unveil Dance-Themed Social Network



Dancejam DanceJam, the brainchild of MC Hammer and a venture capitalist partner, promises a new place for dancers and dance fans to upload footage of their best moves and learn new steps from experts including Hammer himself.

Hammer (the "MC" is optional now) impressed me with his explanation of how the site would work back in November.  People are already uploading videos, and several battles have broken out between dancers using the site vying to prove that their moves are superior to those of their opponent. 

For more on DanceJam, check out our exclusive preview of the service (let it never be said that I have not chilled with MC Hammer).

You Got Served… Digitally

We discussed DanceJam, MC Hammer’s new online dance community, in episode 30 of our podcast.

 Well, the beta version of DanceJam is officially open, and users can start publishing videos of their killer moves.

 DanceJam, which self-promotes as the “largest dance floor on the planet,” allows users to seek out and learn a specific dance, share their own videos and even engage in online dance battles. Now you can make a fool of yourself to a much wider audience than just your parakeet and life-sized cutout of John Wayne.

 While DanceJam is certainly aimed at the hip-hop dance crowd, this seems to be the first major dance community geared toward learning and sharing. This is another example of a site and concept to which arts organizations should be paying close attention.

 Yes, DanceJam cost millions of dollars to design and develop, but there are affordable ways for arts organizations to collaborate, share and educate. For instance, a dance organization could offer tap lessons as an online series through YouTube and link to the videos from their Web site. Or a literary organization could offer online poetry slams and ask visitors to pick the winners, who could then be featured artists in a spotlight section of the organization’s Web site. Just some thoughts…

 The point is that arts organizations should continually be reviewing the online practices of for-profit ventures and creatively copying whenever possible.

Can Touch This: DanceJam Opens To The Public

YouTube for dance videos DanceJam has launched into open beta today after several months of private testing.DanceJam offers dance battles where users dance off against each other, with viewers voting on the best video. DanceJam also offers general dance videos, including locally uploaded content and videos from external sites such YouTube.

DanceJam was founded by M.C. Hammer, and Geoffrey Arone and Anthony Young from Flock. The company has taken $4.5 million in funding over two rounds, with investors including Ron Conway, Alex Algard, Michael Tanne, Geoff Ralston, Alex Welch, Ariel Poler, Rustic Canyon Partners, Softbank Capital and Michael Arrington.

You can see an example of a “Dance Jam” here.

Disclosure: Michael (as noted in the post) is an investor, I’m not.

Duncan Riley

Wagner James Au, Wednesday, February 13, 2008 at 6:00 AM PT

Last year, Om wondered aloud what Lee Crawford at the Venrock and Rustic Canyon Partners-backed startup TwoFish was up to. Well now we finally know: Twofish Elements, billed as a “turnkey solution” for companies with online worlds and game networks that want someone to handle in-game currency, micro-transactions and other features that comprise a virtual economy.

 While potentially lucrative as a revenue stream, these systems are highly volatile and difficult to control, leading to strange gamer phenomena like gold farming or panicked runs on virtual banks. With that in mind, I asked Crawford, Twofish’s founder and CEO and a veteran of both game and financial software development, to provide some more background on how Elements will work.

How is your economics system created, and how do you protect against inflation, currency devaluation, etc?

Most of the policy decisions about how an economy is structured will be decided by our development partners. Twofish Elements gives them the tools they need to intelligently make those decisions…and we put it all in a format that is easy to understand and even simpler to administrate.

Think about our U.S. economy — there are many different schools of thought on the best way to manage its health, and we expect that game developers will also take different approaches to managing their worlds. However, by using Twofish Elements, our partners will know immediately if something is changing, and they’ll have real-time access to the dials that they can tune to bring things back into balance. And because this type of analysis is so new to many of our partners, we’ll be helping and advising along the way.

What online games is this system being used in?

The first full implementation of the platform is a first-party, proof-of-concept auto racing title. We are also in the early stages of integration with several third-party partners, from large publishers to independent developers. Twofish Elements is completely scalable to the differing needs of our different partners.

Does it have solutions to account for gold farming, RMT, and other emergent player behaviors?

These are issues we take very seriously. We actually believe that many emergent player behaviors arise as a result of poorly executed economies. When players can’t do something in-game that they can do in the real world, they find alternative solutions to work around the game. By making economies more realistic, we make games more engaging and flexible for a broader set of users to enjoy, and we expect that this will help curb many of those problems from the start. However, should an emergent behavior arise, our partners will know about it long before it becomes a problem, and will have the tools to be proactive about managing their reaction.

Read article at GigaOM

SAN JOSE, CA – January 28, 2008 – Capella Intelligent Subsystems, the leading provider of Wavelength Selective Switches (WSS) for use in reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADM) applications, today announced it closed $15 million in equity financing. The financing was led by the Lucas Venture Group, and existing investors Levensohn Venture Partners, Rustic Canyon Partners, and Formative Ventures participated fully.

 The $15 million in new capital will be used to expand and strengthen Capella’s presence in the ROADM market, which is expected to grow to $2.8 billion over the next 4 years, according to the most recent Needham investment analysis report. New product offerings and operational improvements are Capella’s key focus in the coming months, as the company expands to meet growing market demand.

 “We are in the midst of global network transformation driven by consumer services such as video, music and social networking. Capella is well-positioned as a key enabler in broadband IP content distribution. As companies upgrade their networks to support IP-based consumer services, Capella’s technology will be critical,” said Larry Schwerin, president and chief executive officer of Capella. “Networks need to deliver quality broadband services at a price consumers will pay, and Capella provides the industry-leading solution to enable their customers to build cost effective, flexible networks.”

 “We have been pleased with the progress of Capella, and this financing reflects the strength of its market position and technology platform. We have great confidence in the management team and technology, and look forward to seeing how Capella positively impacts this IP evolution,” remarked Michael Kim, partner at Rustic Canyon Partners.

 “Capella is also utilizing its strong intellectual property portfolio to expand its product line to meet growing market needs across a broader range of network applications. Our best-of-breed core product capabilities can be applied flexibly and cost-effectively to serve evolving IP network requirements”, said Kip Sheeline, Managing Partner of Levensohn Venture Partners.

 About Capella Intelligent Subsystems

Capella is the industry leader of wavelength selective switch (WSS) technology for use in reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADM) and optical cross connect (OXC) applications. Capella's patented WavePath® products provide the best performing WSS on the market offering dynamic, remote reconfigurability with fully integrated optical channel monitoring (OCM) for simplifying network operations and planning, while dramatically reducing costs. Capella's products are used in both metro and long haul applications. Founded in 2000, Capella is a privately-held company located in San Jose, California. For more information, go to www.capellainc.com.

 Contact:

 Capella Intelligent Subsystems

Kenneth J. Falta

VP of Sales and Marketing

Tel: +1-408-360-4241

kfalta@capellainc.com

www.capellainc.com


Stepping Out Communications

Lisa Copass

Tel: +1-925-253-8445

lisa@steppingoutcomm.com

Rap artist MC Hammer, who declared bankruptcy in 1996 with almost $14 million in debt, is looking to build a new fortune.

The rapper is known for bringing rap music to mainstream audiences in the 1980s and early '90s through his flamboyant dance moves. He's back in the public eye with a company he co-founded called A Large Corporation Inc. The Menlo Park, Calif., company is developing a Web site called DanceJam.com that soon will allow people to engage in virtual dance competitions by posting videos of themselves dancing. It also will offer instruction in the newest dance moves.

DanceJam plans to generate revenue from advertisements as well as merchandising. There is also the possibility of selling music or partnering to sell music on the site, says Mark Menell, partner at Rustic Canyon Partners, an investment firm that led a $1 million round of founding for DanceJam.

The lab inside Serious Materials' Sunnyvale headquarters resembles a kitchen. There's a mixer, a milkshake-making machine and a row of cake tins on a shelf filled with brown powders of various hues.
 

Lab technicians - mostly scientists with advanced degrees - measure and mix, pour and stir - all in search of a better recipe. But not for a cake. For drywall. Greener drywall. One that takes 90 percent less energy to produce and creates less greenhouse gas as a result. And one that could have a tremendous effect on the fight against global warming.

"The amount of CO we can impact is greater than any car company," says Kevin Surace, Serious Materials' chief executive officer. Making drywall is a hugely energy-intensive process, accounting for about 1 percent of U.S. energy consumption and 25 billion pounds of CO in the air each year. In contrast, his greener drywall, EcoRock, is a zero-emissions product. The company plans to begin selling it in summer and ramp up to full production by fall.

Three venture capital firms - New Enterprise Associates, Foundation Capital and Rustic Canyon Partners - recently put down a $50 million bet that Serious Materials will find a big market for this and other green building materials, such as ultra-energy-efficient windows. That's a huge investment, but they're betting on a big payoff in the $1.3 trillion-a-year U.S. construction industry.

"This is going to revolutionize the (building) materials business," said Ted van der Linden, director of sustainable construction for DPR Construction, a $1.6 billion contractor based in Redwood City. DPR hasn't agreed to buy EcoRock yet, van der Linden said, but his company will test it. DPR has seen green building projects - ones that use Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards - grow from less than 1 percent of its revenue in 2004 to 53 percent in 2007.

Those numbers don't surprise Tom Hicks, vice president of LEED at the U.S. Green Building Council. His organization has certified 1,184 green building projects nationwide, including five in San Jose. "The annual U.S. market in green building products and services was over $7 billion in 2005 and is now over $12 billion and is expected to continue to increase," he said. Five years ago, according to Hicks, consumers and contractors had trouble finding environmentally friendly paints and compact fluorescent light bulbs. Now even big-box home-improvement retailers offer them and similar products.

As Serious Materials' CEO, Surace brings a high-tech background (Perfect Commerce, General Magic) to the construction business. For a guy who builds and sells drywall and windows, Surace sounds an awful lot like Al Gore. Ask him about his company, and he'll launch into a 20-minute treatise on global warming that focuses on the construction industry, the materials and shipping used to build homes and offices, and the inefficient operation of those buildings, as huge contributors to carbon emissions. "The big kahuna is CO production in buildings," he said, filling a white board with the words "cement. glass. metal. drywall."

Drywall is made using a process invented in 1917. The gypsum, the main ingredient in drywall, must be calcined, or super-heated, using coal, oil or natural gas as the source of the energy. Depending on who does the math, anywhere from 25 percent to 45 percent of drywall cost is energy.

EcoRock doesn't need to be calcined. Its components - the specific formula is a company secret and a reporter was asked not to write down the name of the ingredients on various bins and buckets in the lab - are mixed. A foamer is added, the mix heats up, cools down and then is set into a usable block of drywall. Surace expects EcoRock to sell for about what it costs to buy premium drywall. In the United States, 40 billion to 50 billion square feet of drywall is made each year.

Serious Materials already has an existing business, the Quiet Solution line of noise-reducing wood, drywall, glue and other products that generates $20 million a year in revenues. So, as opposed to a start-up that must launch both a company and its initial product, Serious Materials already knows the people who buy and use building products. Its products are sold by 4,000 dealers.

Production of the Quiet Solution products was recently moved to Newark. EcoRock and other green products will be made in Sunnyvale as well as at a planned factory in Syracuse, N.Y. The company is about launch a new product with new financing at an opportune time. The building industry is facing "more and more pressure" to change its ways, to adopt more green practices and use more green materials, said Tristan Korthals Altes, managing editor of the Environmental Building News newsletter. That's because, according to the U.S. Green Building Council, buildings account for 65 percent of U.S. electricity use and produce 30 percent of the country's greenhouse-gas emissions and 30 percent of its waste.

Contact Matt Nauman at mnauman@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5701.

Neal Hansch
Rustic Canyon Partners
Office: (650) 654-8503
Mobile: (650) 346-0460
www.rusticcanyon.com