Ben Huh is the CEO of the Cheezburger Network, the company behind the blogs that include I Can Has Cheezburger?, FAIL Blog, and There, I Fixed It. For all our lives, one device has dominated and shaped our cultural understanding of the world. The television has consumed years of our…

Matt Heist is CEO of High Gear Media, a vertical publishing company that focuses on automotive content from professional writers and enthusiasts. Prior to joining High Gear Media, Heist worked at Sidestep.com, and before that, at Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO). Yahoo moved a significant piece on the online-content chessboard with its…

Simeon Simeonov is co-founder and CTO of Better Advertising, a provider of online advertising compliance and assurance solutions. Sim is also founder of FastIgnite. Previously, he was a VC at Polaris Venture Partners and chief architect at Allaire/Macromedia (now Adobe). Sim blogs at blog.simeonov.com, tweets as @simeons. “Notwithstanding anything else…

Ben Elowitz (@elowitz) is co-founder and CEO of Wetpaint, a platform for social web sites, and author of the Digital Quarters blog. Prior to Wetpaint, Elowitz co-founded Blue Nile, the online retailer of luxury goods. He is also an angel investor in various media and e-commerce companies. Last week, I…

Ben Elowitz (@elowitz) is co-founder and CEO of Wetpaint, a platform for social web sites, and author of the Digital Quarters blog. Prior to Wetpaint, Elowitz co-founded Blue Nile, the online retailer of luxury goods. He is also an angel investor in various media and e-commerce companies. If old-media traditionalists…

Ty Ahmad-Taylor is the founder and CEO of FanFeedr, a real-time personalized sports feed. Previously, he was SVP of Strategy and Product Development at Viacom (NYSE: VIA) and, before that, Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA). He tweets at @tyahma One of the things big and small media companies grapple with is identity,…

Arnon Mishkin is a consultant focused on media and internet companies. The easiest way to clear a room of internet-savvy media executives is to suggest that maybe they should close their sites to crawling and prevent Google (NSDQ: GOOG) from carrying excerpts of their content. “Look, our ability to sell…

John Yemma is Editor of The Christian Science Monitor. Let’s agree that Rupert Murdoch is right: Content is king. You’ll get nothing but applause from a journalist of four decades like me. Saying it and believing it, however, doesn’t solve the problem of content racing to zero value on the…

Khris Loux is the founder and CEO of Echo, a commenting platform. He tweets at @Khrisloux. With leadership from its founders and a significant infusion of cash from investors, Twitter has created an innovative no-charge service for users and industry-standard APIs for developers. But more recently, access to its data…

Jim Spanfeller is the former president and CEO of Forbes.com. He is also treasurer of the Online Publishers Association and chairman emeritus of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. The conventional wisdom in digital has been that content in and of itself is a no-win business model, at least recently. The idea…

Ty Ahmad-Taylor is the founder and CEO of FanFeedr, a real-time personalized sports feed. Previously, he was SVP of Strategy and Product Development at Viacom (NYSE: VIA) and, before that, Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA). He tweets at @tyahma If you are a consumer-facing startup pitching to VCs, the conversation is very…

Victor Wong is CEO of PaperG, an ad-tech company that provides online advertising platforms for local/hyperlocal publishers. He blogs at I am victorious Most companies working on solving “local” have so far focused on ways to provide more and better-targeted local news. But by defining “news” in such a narrow…

Ben Elowitz is co-founder and CEO of Wetpaint, a platform for building out web sites, and author of the Digital Quarters blog. Prior to Wetpaint, Elowitz co-founded Blue Nile, the largest online retailer of luxury goods. He is also an angel investor in media and e-commerce companies. It’s now abundantly…

Geoff Cook is the CEO of myYearbook, a social network built around meeting new people. He also founded EssayEdge and ResumeEdge and sold them to The Thomson Corporation. You can’t go an entire day without encountering Facebook and Twitter – even if you don’t have an account. Whether you ride…

Ken Sonenclar is a Managing Director at DeSilva + Phillips, LLC, a New York investment bank specializing in media. After decades with less disruption than a German train schedule, Hollywood media is rocking from a tumultuous year of deals and reinvention.  Nothing less than the future of B2B publishing is…

Arnon Mishkin is a partner with Mitchell Madison Group, where he consults for media companies on improving legacy businesses as well as making the internet profitable. Prior to MMG, he was a partner at the Boston Consulting Group, where he did some of the firm’s earliest work on the web.…

Charles Pelton, a former journalist, served as General Manager of Conferences and Events at The Washington Post (NYSE: WPO) last spring. He was in charge of developing a variety of events, including “salon dinners,” a series of sponsored policy discussions involving news personnel. The salon-dinner concept was controversial, and Post…

Ty Ahmad-Taylor is the founder and CEO of FanFeedr, a real-time personalized sports feed. Previously, he was SVP of Strategy and Product Development at Viacom (NYSE: VIA) and, before that, Comcast. I worked at two large cable television networks, and both believed—and continue to believe—that they are in the television…

Upendra Shardanand is the Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Daylife, which helps publishers add content and inventory without additional staff or engineering. He also co-founded Firefly Network, a spinoff from his work at the MIT Media Lab, that he sold to Microsoft. Plenty of holiday shoppers spent hours puzzling…