Web X.0

HopStop.com

This morning HopStop.com announced an angel investment by a group that I am part of. I am joining HopStop's board of directors. Allen Stern over at CenterNetworks broke the news here.

A couple of months ago, waaay before the investment opportunity even came up, I was interviewed by Eze over at VC Cafe. His last question was "What are 5 sites you can't do without?", and HopStop was on my short list. HopStop is my car replacement in the past couple of years. I use it on average 3-4 times per day and cannot imagine how I got around the city without it. If you live in NY, or plan to come for a visit, you should absolutely head over to HopStop and start planning your public commutes from place to place. (BTW - if you're even considering using Google Transit, take my word on this one - HopStop is 10x better and much more accurate and useful).

HopStop has done a great job of building a wonderful service on a shoestring. It has been integrated on sites like TimeOut, Corcoran, and Halstead. Now were looking to add many more partners to use HopStop for powering their "How to get here?" directions/mapping pages. HopStop's free API is available here for any site to embed. If you are a local site in one of these metro areas - NY/NJ, San Francisco, Washington DC, Boston or Chicago - HopStop is the *best* directions service for your users, and it is absolutely free for you.

I can go on and on about how much I like the site, but I'm not objective... head over to NBC's local NY channel to watch a great item about HopStop from a couple of days ago.

Looking for the best product person in NYC

We're looking for a great product person to head product management over at outbrain. The timing for joining us couldn't be any better - We have a huge and growing distribution network, we've recently closed a $5M A-round with top-tier VC's, and we have a great little team in which each person has a huge impact.

I'm looking for someone for our NY office who can be hands-on in spec'ing a web product and can work with our engineers in Israel to create the best blog ratings & recommendations service out there. In the long term, I'd like this person to be able to hire and manage our PM team. The title would be Director or VP of PM. Any experience with online advertising products is more than welcome.

If you're a *great* product person at any of the following companies, the timing now is PERFECT to switch over to a well-funded startup with lots of upside... (note: the folks that joined us at a similar stage at my previous company - Quigo - did fairly well... ;-)

• Are you at Google watching the value of your stock dropping ~40% in the past few months?
• Are you (or - were you...) with DoubleClick pissed at how Google is treating you?
• Are you at Microsoft fed up with all the committees you need to get through to launch every small feature? 
• Are you at Yahoo? (enough said... ;-)

If you're at any of these companies, now is the time to jump ship. Drop me a note to: galai [at] outbrain [dot] com

Aniboom & Radiohead

Aniboom (disclosure: I'm a board member) has recently partnered with Radiohead for an animated music video contest. If you're an animator, you can (and should!) submit a storyboard for an animated video clip of a song of your choice from Radiohead's newest album - inRainbows. The deadline for submissions is April 27th.

The Aniboom community will vote and choose the 10 best storyboards (you can watch the storyboards and vote here). Radiohead will pick its favorite clip which will then be produced to a full music video clip (full T&C's here).

The music industry is made up of a bunch of dinosaurs that will soon be extinct. Radiohead are pioneering the future of music both in pricing/formats and now in embracing the animator community (or - UGC) to develop video clips. Cool!

New outbrain functionality released

We've finished a major product release earlier today, mostly around the website. Bloggers can now register with us (registration is optional), or claim their blog to get access to reporting, etc. We'll be covering some of the new features released in our company blog over the next few days.

CenterNetworks and Mashable have coverage of this release.