The Seattle area is an undeniable leader in the rapidly growing cloud-computing sector, from tech mega-companies like Microsoft and Amazon, to local branches like the expanding EMC Isilon division, and active investors.

We know it’s big. We know it’s important. We know it will change the way things are done. But if you’re not an insider, conversing with cloud experts can leave your head reeling with references to platforms-as-a-service, Hadoop, CouchDB, virtualization, spot instances, noSQL, and so on.

There’s apparently no shortage of bluster within the industry, either. As Scott Sanchez, who works for OpenStack, tweeted on his personal account:

So, for those non-experts out there who have been pretending to know more than you do, please take heart in this awesome video from the folks at tech consulting firm Avanade. During a recent kids-at-work day, they decided to have a little fun and ask the office youngsters what they thought of this critical new trend in business.

(For the record, I’m with Sophia, who breaks it down as simply “technology in the sky.”)

Oh, and talent recruiters should keep their eye on the last kid, in the (very) junior executive outfit. I see a CEO in the making.

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Hey Big Apple: Ready for some Cheezburger? Seattle-based Cheezburger Network, the holding pen for online humor sites like I Can Has Cheezburger and Fail Blog, has acquired the Internet-culture trackback site Know Your Meme. It’s the first big acquisition move that we’ve seen Cheezburger make since securing $30 million round of venture financing early this year.

Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh notes that the Know Your Meme acquisition represents not just a good fit in terms of content, but an opportunity for his profitable humor-website factory to expand into the biggest media market of them all—New York. The Know Your Meme team is now the “Cheezburger East” office, and the company plans to add staff there, Huh says.

“It’s a great place for Internet culture,” Huh tells Xconomy. “It seems there are a lot of people who are interested in this there—even more so than Seattle, which is kind of odd.” Huh says he might have thought the quirky viral humor behind Cheezburger’s success was a little more West Coast in flavor. But for whatever reason, he says it seems to translate across any major regional differences.

Know Your Meme, which says it reaches about 2.5 million people a month, is based around the idea of treating online pop culture as the subject of a fast-moving anthropology exercise. The site tracks the origins and evolution of all the flotsam, mashups and mini-celebrities churned out by our “Check this out!” online impulses. The appeal of this site is pretty obvious to me. When I wanted to tell my wife about Internet sensation Antoine Dodson’s unlikely path to becoming wildly popular, I directed her to the Know Your Meme page on that topic.

Although the video presentations tracing the lifespan of particular items are pretty tongue-in-cheek—fun background music paired with ironic white lab coats—the documentation process is logical and straightforward, even bordering on serious.

Huh says the deal was effective last Monday. Financial terms weren’t disclosed. Tubefilter, which appears to be the first to report the news, points out that Know Your Meme’s previous owner blogged that it was a “super seven figure deal,” whatever that means.

Know Your Meme was created by Rocketboom, which also feasts on Internet pop culture with TV news anchor-style video reports on a variety of topics. Meme, for those who don’t know, is a neologism that refers to the passed-around bits of content that underlie a lot of the mass-sourced time-waster entertainment online.

Cheezburger’s various sites basically operate as repositories of different types of memes—the prime example being bizarrely captioned cat photos that appear on the namesake site “I Can Has Cheezburger?”

Huh built his his online humor empire partly through shrewd acquisitions, and he says Know Your Meme is another good addition because it can pretty seamlessly provide context to the funny thing you’re looking at for the moment.

“You’ll see something and it has no context. It’s like, why’s this funny?” Huh says. “It’s an area that we’re missing, that can really benefit a lot of the users who want to know more about this stuff.” Huh adds that, in a weird way, this completes a circle. The humor culture of the Internet, he says, does a great job of taking things out of context and rearranging them into something new. Know Your Meme adds back some of the context behind that remixing exercise.

When Xconomy’s Luke Timmerman spoke to Huh in January after Cheezburger’s big Series A round, Huh said quite frankly that one pitfall of taking that much money could be getting “indigestion” from acquiring too many properties and losing focus. Huh says that’s still on his mind. “We don’t expect to do a lot of acquisitions. In fact, we’re not talking to anyone else right now,” he says. “This isn’t something like we have a war chest and we’re going to go spend it.”

Huh also says previously stated hiring plans for the Seattle office are progressing, even though he’s among those who say it’s becoming harder to find enough tech talent to fuel rapid growth. “We are actually hiring pretty actively,” he says. “We’re up to 58 people now.”

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King of the Web, the social gaming startup led by some big names in Seattle tech, is opening up the private beta I speculated about earlier this month. Passwords were doled out to Twitter and Facebook followers today, and I took a peek under the hood.

From what I can see so far, King of the Web is a humor-oriented social networking site that pits everyone against each other in a quest to amass votes for the best profiles. The site says its “election cycles” are on a monthly basis, and the current cash prize right now is $1,000.

Here’s a screengrab from what looks to be the page of co-founder Nick Hanauer, who really does not need another $1,000 (I presume he’s not eligible to collect). Other top names at King of the Web include former Expedia CEO Rich Barton and Hanauer’s former aQuantive colleagues Maggie Finch and Scott Howe.

I’m reminded right away of Funny or Die, the comedy-video ranking site started by Will Ferrell and friends (although that has professional comedy content). There’s also a bit of pop-culture DNA recalling the meme factory over at Cheezburger Network, and even the ratings feature on plain old YouTube videos.

But it’s not just about comedy. The leader when I checked in was “Pwn Star,” who is actually campaigning on a platform of making female characters in video games better—less sexpot cliché, more butt-kicking awesome. Her page gives good and bad examples of what she’s talking about. The previous “king” was someone who posted a ton of puzzles to their page.

Other people are making it more of a straight-up popularity contest by posting videos of themselves doing funny things. That includes someone’s dog chasing a radio-controlled truck. The site is putting an emphasis on video as a means of getting your face and candidacy out there.

So let’s count the Internet trends being weaved together here: The social graph, gamification, and user-generated content. I’m not sure where to file the cash prizes part, but that’s really timeless.

As for the business model, we’ll have to see about that later. The people running the site are heavy Facebook and Twitter users, and I would guess this really will rely on lots of integration with those portals.

But you have to like the candor of the top guys: Barton told TechFlash last year that “It’s one of those ideas that’s totally binary. It will be huge or it will be nothing.”

As a side note, it’s interesting to see such a big elections angle from a guy like Hanauer. He lost big-time on his last foray in elections, when he vocally came out in support of Initiative 1098, which sought to establish a Washington state income tax on the rich.

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While we are remembering Ken, I couldn’t help sending this picture of a poster that appeared in my office one Monday morning about 30 years ago that illustrated Ken’s sense of humor that most people never saw (see photo at bottom of this post).

This is something we shared, along with the concern about wanting to have beautiful computers and cabling. Unfortunately, I don’t have the text on the back of the poster that listed 20 reasons for the messy cables—e.g., “engineering said ‘marketing made me do it,’” and “we don’t ever want a customer to say that our cables are too short.”

Ken loved to work on the cabling and power supply problems for the DEC computers, a problem he and most every other company has never solved. He delivered a lot of the crisply burned out power supplies that customers sent him to my office.

Cabling has only gotten worse.

However, as a Ford board member, he claimed that he was able to get them to have a beautiful engine compartment and cabling (after he became a board member).

There are other things to recall as well. There’s the story of him wanting to redesign the famous, large, Yellow Ethernet cable just as we were to announce it!

I tend to remember all the humor and moments of irony that we shared while building computers at DEC.

Personally, I believe one of his longest living legacies will be the founding of The Computer (History) Museum(s) that started in Maynard, moved to Marlboro, then Boston for 15 years, and has lived in Silicon Valley for the last 15 years.

.

[Editor's note: The author spent 23 years at Digital Equipment Corporation as Vice President of Research and Development, where he was responsible for Digital's products.]

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They have done it. Finally. Biologists at the National University of Singapore have isolated the Management gene. Now DNA technology will forever change how we think about business—and who runs it. That same rigor that was used to sequence the genome can now tell us who is going to be a good/great manager from the hoi polloi.

It’s about time. Think of the possibilities. Think of the implications for high-tech firms, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists.

Our graduate schools of business can get out of that messy, inaccurate, and flawed job of screening applications by assessing their future competence based on their shrill applications. Applicants will no longer have to lie about all the Lessons Learned in their 15 minutes of business experience. They can save their creativity for their future IRS filings. “Don’t bother renting a suit and a tie, and keep wearing those Birkenstocks and tee shirts, but just ship us a snippet of your hair,” Stanford University will say in the future.

On the other hand, will we even NEED graduate schools of business—why even train what is already there? Did Kobe Bryant need college? Kevin Garnett?

How do businessmen achieve immortality today? Either they fund finding a cure for disease, run for high office, or buy an NFL team. But there is a better way than donating tons of money! With the ability to isolate the Management gene, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates will have a superior option—they can just clone that part of themselves. And no more sucking up to other Billionaires and trying convince the superrich to give away half their fortunes. (“Memo to Bill and Warren: Pound Sand! We don’t do Guilt”—signed, The Forbes 398). Look, if you two guys don’t realize we see through this blatant push to win a Nobel Peace Prize, you are sadly mistaken. Oh no, there is a better way to live forever. The ultimate designer gene: BuffetDNA. If you think the sperm from a Kentucky Derby winner is valuable…

But push it even further. If the DNA for management is valuable, how about the DNA for Mismanagement? If there is a gene for management, there must be one for mismanagement/fraud—right? Now Bernie Madoff and Bernie Ebbers can pay back all that money—by licensing their DNA to the recruiting arms of Citibank, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs. Applicants can be rejected without having them ever enter the labor force. (“Prisoners Ebbers, 158-382, and Madoff, 147-362, please report with your plastic cups to the infirmary.”)

The evolutionary psychologists have driven management science out of the ice age—the old saw about culture and socialization being the primary determinants of behavioral differences is dead, dead, dead. Now it is obvious: Biology rules! The difference between individuals and their ability to succeed in business is biological.

OK then, what are the next steps? Will 23andMe become 23foraFee? Wait, there seems … Next Page »

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Ever since AOL (NYSE: AOL) acquired San Francisco-based TechCrunch for an undisclosed amount, many in the technology community have been speculating on how long it will take founder Michael Arrington to toss in his towel and leave the Internet giant. At least that’s the question on the minds of the folks over at Redmond, WA-based startup lab Conceivian, who today rolled out a new website that allows people to bet on when Arrington will call it quits.

WhenWillMichaelQuit.com is purely for fun, according to Conceivian chief startup officer Marcelo Calbucci.

“Big companies have their issues. Too many meetings, too many emails, too many rules and too easy to kill innovation are just a few of them. Michael Arrington has his quirks. He doesn’t like to shake people’s hand, he hates meeting, he works on odd hours, etc.” Calbucci wrote on the site’s blog. “We think Arrington + AOL is just crazy. Yes, it happened, but we think the odd marriage won’t be long. We are pretty sure it will not last more than the three years and one day for Michael to get all his earn out, but it’s likely to be much earlier.”

Besides aiming for a few laughs, Calbucci says the “mini startup” is out to prove that crowd sourcing can be used to predict the future. Conceivian was serious enough about the venture to issue an “official” press release, and the group says it expects to gather millions of votes. Everyone who guesses the correct date—any day between now and four years from the acquisition—will be entered into a drawing for a free iPad.

In addition to guessing the quit date for Michael, who has been on the AOL payroll for just 10 days, visitors to the site can also have a little more fun completing the sentence “Michael Arrington at AOL is like…” and vote their favorite answers to the top of the list.

Conceivian, founded in 2010, is on a mission to create 100 game-changing innovations in the next 10 years, though the group admits WhenWillMichaelQuit.com is not one of them. “We expect to use the same technology to predict when Léo Apotheker, the new CEO for HP, will be fired by the board,” Calbucci joked in the release.

“The primary goal is to have fun with this site. We think we could actually create some generic version of the website on the future for people to create their own ‘When will X happen,’ but for now it’s just an idea. No grand plan,” he told Xconomy.

The betting has nothing to do with the merits of either AOL or TechCrunch, according to Calbucci, but rather the dynamics of moving entrepreneurs from a position running the show, to a new job that means taking orders from above.

“It’s pretty hard to have free-spirited entrepreneurs being “locked” into the large company “jail,” Calbucci wrote on his blog. “I’m pretty sure—scratch that, I’m 100 percent sure—Michael Arrington will not stay the full three years for his earn-out,” which is rumored to be $15 million, or $5 million for each year of his contract.

Read more about Calbucci’s inspiration for the site on his personal blog, and cast your vote here.

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[Updated with comments from Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman, 6:35 pm] I Can Has Cheezburger‘s Ben Huh extended an offer to purchase Condé Nast’s online user-generated news aggregation site Reddit.com last week, amidst an online debate over politically controversial advertising, according to VentureBeat.

In a post on the Seattle-based humor network’s pop culture site, The Daily What, Huh offered to buy Reddit after Condé Nast, following in the steps of Facebook, refused to run promotional ads for California’s Proposition 19, which would legalize marijuana for personal use for those 21 and older. The decision resulted in backlash from Reddit users and administrators, who disagreed with Condé Nast’s decision to turn away advertising dollars. The Reddit admins even released a statement calling for the community to petition the decision.  Condé Nast responded that, “As a corporation, Condé Nast does not want to benefit financially from this particular issue.”

Huh took the opportunity to jump into the fray, proposing to take the issue and the rest of Reddit off of Condé Nast’s hands. In his post on The Daily What, Huh wrote, “I believe that Reddit is one of the best communities I have seen on the Internet. I also believe that Reddit would benefit from more resources and less corporate interference. We can offer all of the above. And we’d love to buy Reddit and all those pesky troublesome users that we love so much.”

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian responded on his blog that he would be “very surprised if Reddit were sold.” However, given Huh’s success with the Cheezburger network, he added, perhaps humorously, that he and the Reddit team might benefit from meeting over cheeseburgers to further discuss the offer.

Huh purchased the original I Can Has Cheezburger site from two entrepreneurs in Hawaii in 2007, and has since built up the humor network to encompass over 50 sites, including its best-known staple, LOLcats. Cheezburger has been steadily growing ever since, and now has nearly 50 employees, including the company’s first full-time CFO, who was hired in June.

Last month Huh’s network entered into a content partnership with Seattle-based global media organization Getty Images, giving readers the ability to doodle and caption Getty photos and repost them on the network’s ROFL Razzi and Pundit Kitchen sites. A similar deal between Cheezburger and the Associated Press fell through earlier this month, after the wire service said the partnership could potentially jeopardize its “journalistic integrity.” Cheezburger is currently in talks with Corbis Images, and Huh says the humor network will continue to seek out content partnerships with other media organizations. Read more on Huh’s public offer to purchase Reddit at VentureBeat.

[Updated, 6:35 pm] I caught up with Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman, who shared his thoughts on the both the advertisement debate, and Huh’s offer. He says Condé Nast’s decision to not run … Next Page »

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If you like to spend your spare time crawling the Internet for pictures of cute animals with silly captions or stories of others’ “fails” (i.e. moments of sheer misfortune caught on camera), odds are you’ve stumbled upon I Can Has Cheezburger. It’s grown into a network of 51 sites that have become the viral ‘it spot’ for online humor. The Seattle-based company has been growing fast—both in page views and employees—since it was founded just three years ago. I met up with Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh earlier this week to chat about the future of the online comedy network and all the new talent the company has been recruiting, including just-hired chief financial officer Pearl Chan.

Chan officially joined the team Wednesday after 18 months working as Cheezburger’s part-time CFO. She brings with her more than 20 years of experience with early stage Seattle tech startups, including Picnik, the hit photo editing service  recently acquired by Google. I had the opportunity to chat with Chan on Tuesday about how being a part-time CFO helped her get the job, the company’s secret to monetization, what makes the Cheezburger community so darn special, and how the company is going about becoming “anyone and everyone’s humor network.” Here are some of the highlights from our conversation:

Xconomy: In my interview with Ben, he mentioned that you’ve been working with Cheezburger on a part-time basis for some time now. How did you first get involved with the company, and what was it about Cheezburger that made you want to come on board full-time?

Pearl Chan: The investors at Cheezburger-they are the who’s who as far as angel investors in Seattle…Cheezburger is funded by angel investors as opposed to a traditional venture capital firm. And there were a number of the angel investors that I already knew because I’ve worked with them in other capacities throughout my years in working in Seattle. And when Cheezburger got to a certain size, they needed some more strategic financial help. They [the angel investors] looked around and said, ‘well, who do we know that we could recommend?’ And that’s how my name came up.

At the time I got involved with the company—about a year and a half ago—the company was still fairly early stage. I mean, there were a lot of things that were still yet to be proven, but it was starting to get a lot of buzz and a lot of traction. And it is usually about that time that it’s good to take a look at getting some financial expertise, because prior to that there really wasn’t any internal financial expertise. We had some bookkeeping that was done internally, but not by a certified public accountant or anything.

And I was actually at that time working as a consultant, so I was a part-time CFO. And it’s interesting because there’s quite a need for that in Seattle. We have a very high amount of technology companies. Especially when they’re starting too, instead of funding themselves they take in external money—any kind of external money—from investors. And when you do that it’s important to show your investors and give them comfort that you’re taking good care of their money and doing all the right things with making decisions on how the money is being spent and how it’s being accounted for and that sort of thing. However, most of the companies at that size, they don’t have enough work for a full-time person because they haven’t been able to get big enough to do that. They still need that strategic level of expertise, so a part-time CFO was really ideal. And that’s how I got involved.

The first thing that I did [when she joined Cheezburger part-time] was kind of laid a lot of foundation groundwork on basic block-and-tackle financial stuff. But we had immediately—because the company got so much traction so quickly—we immediately went into some financial strategy-type … Next Page »

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Ben Huh is a very busy man. He’s only 32, yet he’s already spent much of the last few years soaking up the media spotlight due to the almost instant success of his network of humor blogs famous for its eccentric and misspelled name, I Can Has Cheezburger. In the three years since Huh purchased the main Cheezburger site, also known as LOLcats, from two entrepreneurs in Hawaii and built it into a treasure  trove of funny pictures of cute animals with the site’s signature misspelled captions plastered over them, the company has grown to become the largest humor network in the world with 340 million page views per month.

Cheezburger, formerly known as Pet Holdings, has been consistently topping the Seattle 2.0 startup index for the last year (and it’s still no. 1), has won a national webby award, and has been one of the few Seattle-area startups to continue hiring, even through the recession. The network now has over 50 sites, each dedicated to a particular niche of comedy. It would take a few paragraphs to list them all, but some of the more famed in the bunch include FAIL Blog, Babies Making Faces, There I Fixed It, Engrish Funny and Totally Looks Like.

Greg spoke with Huh about the startup’s strategy, rapid expansion and sudden fame in the online world back in October, when Cheezburger had 26 sites, 21 employees and had just exceeded 1 billion cumulative page views. Now, just eight months later, Huh has built a small empire with 51 sites, and 45 employees spread across the world (including one in Poland). According to Huh, Cheezburger has no plans of slowing down.

The company, as it grows, has sought to bring in more seasoned managers to help Huh manage this opportunity. The latest addition to the team is Pearl Chan, who has signed on as Cheezburger’s new chief financial officer among a slew of other titles, including treasurer, controller, director of finance, strategic business analyst, and tax manager.

I swung by Cheezburger’s Lower Queen Anne headquarters yesterday to chat with Huh about the company-turned-Internet phenomenon’s fast start, milestones in its relatively young startup life, where it’s going, what position it will be hiring for next, and the new user-involved “creation of culture” that Huh says makes the company unique. The office had all the trademarks of a startup. The reception area consisted of a small coffee table with a few of Cheezburger’s books strewn across it, and simple wooden chairs, no receptionist. The main room was an open space filled with rows of folding tables lined with computers and editors sifting through the over 19,000 user submissions Cheezburger brings in on a daily basis. Here are the highlights of the conversation, edited for length and clarity as always.

Xconomy: You graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in journalism. Were you planning on being a journalist?

Ben Huh: I was actually, but this was back in—1999 was when I graduated. That was like the heyday of newspaper valuation, so newspapers were going crazy. They were hiring. They were investing in dotcom stuff. They were merging and buying each other. It was pretty exciting. My role was actually on the presentation side/the design side and not so much the reporting. I did go to journalism school to be a reporter, and we didn’t have a visual program, but that’s what I ended up doing actually.

X: So you moved to Seattle in 2005, and in 2007 Andy Liu (also the board member) from BuddyTV helped you buy the original I Can Has Cheezburger site (officially launched in September 2007). How did you come across the site and what made you realize that you wanted to buy it up and eventually launch this massive humor network?

BH: My wife Emily, who also works here—she’s the editor—we started a pet blog because we had a dog—we have a dog—and we’d just moved here and we didn’t really know … Next Page »

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Anyone else out there remember the famous 1981 ad by Apple in the Wall Street Journal, welcoming competitor IBM into the personal computer age? The ad was Apple’s stake in the ground, saying it had invented the first PC system—and predicting massive growth and competition in the burgeoning industry. The rest, as they say, is history.

It’s also the future. Today, Seattle-based Melodeo, maker of the cloud-based music service nuTsie, spoofed the classic ad with one of its own. In a company blog post, Dave Dederer, Melodeo’s vice president of business development (and resident rock star from The Presidents of the United States of America), congratulates Apple on the “imminent launch of [its] first music streaming service.”

That’s a reference to the tech giant’s recent acquisition of Palo Alto-based Lala, a competitor to Melodeo, and its entrance into the world of cloud-based music. Melodeo, you see, saw this as a big opportunity back in 2006 or so. (I’m killing the humor by explaining it, so just check out the post.)

“When we invented the first iTunes music placeshifting service three years ago, we estimated that over 400,000,000 people worldwide could justify the purchase of one, if only they understood its benefits,” Dederer writes. “Next year alone, we project that well over 50,000,000 will come to that understanding. Over the next decade, the growth of cloud-based music streaming will continue in logarithmic leaps.”

It’s always cool (and important) to remember the technology wars that have come before. Now let the new competition—which will include this prominent Seattle startup—begin.

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Catching up on a bunch of tech startup news from around the blogosphere this week, most of it not very serious, but notable nonetheless…

—Brier Dudley at the Seattle Times took a considered look at the local video game industry and its outlook heading into 2010. Three things caught my eye: the comparison of the gaming sector to biotech in terms of how risky it is to develop a new product; the prospect of some big game studio acquisitions; and the general malaise of the gaming industry as compared to recent years.

—Seattle-based Cheezburger Network’s FAIL Blog released its top 10 most memorable “fail moments” of the year, as well as top 10 “fail people,” as voted on by some 100,000 readers. Kanye West (see photo above), the balloon boy hoaxsters, and the airport-overshooting Northwest Airlines pilots were honored to make the cut, I’m sure. Somewhat refreshingly, Tiger Woods didn’t show up (probably too recent).

—Speaking of Tiger, Seattle-based BuddyTV has a little advice for the troubled golf star. I’m already regretting posting this, so let’s move on.

—Seattle photo-editing software startup Picnik notes that Google’s Zeitgeist list of its fastest-rising search terms for 2009 included “picnic” at #2 in the food and drink category. While other items on the list, like “acai berry” and “peanut butter recall,” were probably tied to media events, Picnik speculates that people were in fact searching for a certain online photo editor that spells its name differently. After all, if you type “picnic” into Google, the top result is actually Picnik.

—Seattle 2.0 posted its monthly ranking of local tech startups’ estimated Web traffic. New companies who made the cut in November were BigDoor Media, Optify, EagleView Technologies, WebServius, and Buzzeromatic. Startup index honcho Marcelo Calbucci notes that sizeable gains were made by Jambool, Delve Networks, Jackson Fish Market, and BigStartups.

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It took about a year and a half before I could even begin to understand the I Can Has Cheezburger (or “LOLcats”) phenomenon online. The mundane yet bizarre cat pictures. The misspelled captions. The curious Internet-slang grammar. They were kind of funny, but mostly they were weird—and, at times, even a little annoying.

Yet millions of people flocked to these Web pages, submitting their own photos and captions and commenting on others. The Cheezburger Network, as the company behind it is now called (formerly Pet Holdings), has become a runaway success—an Internet sensation that has spawned a total of 26 humor sites, including FAIL Blog, GraphJam, Engrish Funny, and Emails From Crazy People. The original Cheezburger site hit 1 billion page views (10 billion cat images) earlier this month. And during the first half of 2009, the company raked in seven figures’ worth of revenue from advertising, licensing fees, and sales of merchandise, according to Time magazine.

So what’s its big secret? Why has the Cheezburger Network succeeded where so many other humor sites and blogs continue to toil in obscurity? It took me a while to realize it’s not about luck, or marketing, or the power of certain kinds of humor. There’s some good timing involved, sure, but mostly it’s about the drive and mentality of the company’s leader, Ben Huh.

Huh is often portrayed in the media as a jokester. Photos in articles show him wearing a funny hat or mask, surrounded by stuffed animals, or posing with a cheeseburger. That image is pretty far from the reality, as I understand from reading more about Huh and interviewing him recently. In a Q&A with Advertising Age earlier this week, for instance, Huh emphasized, “I am a business person.” And he shed some very interesting light on his approach to business: “We’ve gotten into situations where we’ve tried to acquire a blog for large sums of money, and they turned us down, and we’ve gone on to compete and we’ve won,” he said. “My final offer is, ‘If you do not do this, we will start a competitive blog, and we will not stop until we win.’”

Clearly, Huh has the killer instinct. He is deeply competitive, but not in an over-the-top way. He could turn out to be the Michael Jordan of consumer Internet startups, though we probably shouldn’t put him in the Hall of Fame just yet. Still, as a promising entrepreneur in his early 30s with a pretty big success already under his belt, his story—and his company’s strategy—is worth a closer look.

Huh first arrived in the Northwest in 2005 to work for Intava, an interactive media startup in Bellevue, WA. Before that, he had graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in journalism during the dot-com bubble. “They were handing out bonuses to college grads because we’d used the Internet once,” he jokes. Huh worked for a number of startups in the Chicago area, including his own Web analytics firm. “I made all the mistakes they say you’ll make,” he says. “I raised too little money, and spent all my time fundraising and not making a product for the market.”

By the time he landed in Seattle, Huh had made it a priority to always work for a company’s CEO, or at least have a dotted-line connection to them, in any job he took. “That was going to teach me more about running a company,” he says. “This is for my career, not for [any particular] job.” Huh had also learned from his previous startups to have a “huge focus on staying profitable.”

In 2007, he came across the I Can Has Cheezburger site, which had been started by a … Next Page »

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Seattle-based Cheezburger Network (formerly called Pet Holdings) announced today it has served 1 billion page views, or 10 billion images, since its first user-generated humor site, I Can Has Cheezburger, was launched in January 2007. The company also said it has hired Todd Sawicki as chief revenue officer. Sawicki is a senior sales and marketing veteran of several online startups and media companies including Lookery, and is on the advisory boards of Seattle-based Wetpaint and BuddyTV.

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Seattle-based Pet Holdings, owners of I Can Has Cheezburger and other humor websites, has formed a partnership with Dogster, a San Francisco-based social networking site, whereby Dogster will sell ads for Pet Holdings’ animal-related sites. The news was reported by TechCrunch, which also notes that the Cheezburger network will hit one billion page views this week. Financial details weren’t given, but TechFlash reports it’s the first deal Pet Holdings has done with a premium ad network in a very specific niche. The deal makes sense, as Dogster will benefit from Pet Holdings’ greater traffic, and Pet Holdings will benefit from Dogster’s ad monetization expertise.

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After a scorching week of 90-degree temperatures, what could be better than kicking back with a nice cold one, catching up with friends and colleagues—and seeing five of Seattle’s top rock bands with tech affiliations duke it out for prizes and the adulation of the crowd?

It’s all happening this Thursday evening at Xconomy’s Battle of the Tech Bands, at WTIA’s summer celebration down at the Pyramid Alehouse in Seattle. The Battle will take place from 6-9 pm. Get your tickets online here, by Tuesday 5 pm, as they are going fast…

The bands (listen to their songs here) will be competing for two prizes—Audience Favorite (voted on by the crowd via SMS), which wins one year of band promotional services from Nimbit, and Most Innovative Band (voted on by our judges), which wins free studio time from The Hive Recording Studio. Both winners will also receive free press releases to promote their shows, tours, and albums with traditional and online media outlets, courtesy of Marketwire.

We’ll also be giving out raffle prizes throughout the evening, including a Seattle harbor cruise for four from Argosy Cruises, museum passes and a gift certificate from the Experience Music Project, Guitar Hero III courtesy of Guitar Center, and Seattle Mariners gift packs (see the event site for a complete list). All raffle ticket proceeds are going to our charitable partners, Technology Access Foundation and Jack Straw Productions. Thanks to all for their generous donations.

And last, but not least, check out Paul Allen and Bill Gates in cartoon-land, as they prepare to compete in the Battle. I’m actually starting to believe they might be there, although I don’t know about the costume (that puts it over the top). It’s the latest installment of Protingent Man by David J. Locher, courtesy of Donn Harvey at Protingent Staffing:

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We are in the final stages of selecting the five finalist bands who will perform on July 30 at the Xconomy Battle of the Tech Bands, to be featured at the Washington Technology Industry Association’s Summer Celebration at the Pyramid Alehouse across from Safeco Field in Seattle.

We will announce the finalists very soon, but suffice to say that our esteemed judges were suitably impressed by the quality and diversity of the bands who entered. It is going to be a really rocking show, with a great mix of musical styles and companies represented.

The WTIA has also secured two Seattle-based charitable partners for the event, who will receive the proceeds from all raffle tickets sold. They are Technology Access Foundation, a nonprofit that prepares children of color for academic and professional success through a rigorous K-12 curriculum (Luke profiled TAF here), and Jack Straw Productions, a multidisciplinary arts center that fosters communication of art and ideas to diverse audiences through audio media and artist residency programs. To register for the event, click here.

In the meantime, here’s a quick behind-the-scenes look at Bill Gates and Paul Allen’s exploits in cartoon-land, as they prepared to send in their band demo to the contest. It’s the latest installment of Protingent Man, courtesy of Donn Harvey and David J. Locher:

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Alas, the deadline has come and gone. Finis. At the stroke of midnight on Friday night, the doors officially closed on any new band submissions for Xconomy’s Battle of the Tech Bands. The big event is happening on July 30, at the WTIA Annual Summer Celebration at the Pyramid Alehouse in Seattle.

You can beg, you can plead, but even if you are Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix resurrected to form a startup that’s reinventing the Web or curing cancer, we still won’t accept your submission… OK, well, maybe we would in that case.

Now it’s off to the judges for deliberations. Good luck to all of the entrants. We’ve got a great mix of bands from small startups and big companies, and a nice range of musical styles, and we’re looking forward to making some tough decisions. We’ll keep you posted on our progress in whittling the list down to the five finalists who will perform on July 30.

Meantime, in cartoon land, Bill Gates and Paul Allen have been on the ball. Having both been laid off from their temp jobs, they’ve had the time to record a killer demo for the Battle. Yes, it’s the newest installment of the “Protingent Man” comic, courtesy of David J. Locher and Donn Harvey (see the previous installment here and the full strip here):

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Here at Xconomy, preparations are in full swing for our Battle of the Tech Bands, which is happening at the WTIA Summer Celebration on Thursday, July 30, at the Pyramid Alehouse in Seattle. If you or anyone you know plays in a band with at least one member from a Northwest tech, life sciences, or tech investing firm, please submit your band’s stuff to techbands@xconomy.com (full details and event info here).

The deadline for submissions is coming up fast—next week, June 12—so don’t delay. We’ve already got a bunch of worthy competitors, but a few more bands from the tech powerhouses (Microsoft? Amazon? Real?), as well as the gaming cluster, certainly wouldn’t hurt. We know you’re out there.

We’ve lined up a team of stellar judges, and are working on a few more, as well as some great music-related prizes. Stay tuned for details on those.

Meanwhile, in cartoon land, Bill Gates and Paul Allen have some extra time on their hands to devote to getting their musical act together in time to participate in the Battle. It’s the latest installment of the Protingent Man comic, courtesy of David J. Locher and Donn Harvey (see the last installment here and the full strip here):

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Are you ready to rock? We’ve already received quite a few submissions from Seattle-area musicians in the tech and life sciences community who want to compete in the Xconomy Battle of the Tech Bands. The big competition is happening at the WTIA Summer Celebration at the Pyramid Ale House on July 30. (Event details and band application info is here; the deadline for applicants is June 12.)

But we also got a submission we didn’t expect. It looks like tech luminaries Bill Gates and Paul Allen, a known music buff, are planning to enter the competition—at least in one alternate reality. Donn Harvey, the president of Bellevue, WA-based Protingent Staffing (and bass guitarist with Hettel Street Blues), sent us a rather unusual e-mail. It seems his company has a comic-strip superhero who works with Gates and Allen.

I’ll let the cartoons, drawn by David J. Locher, tell the rest of the story (see below):

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(To be continued…)

OK, so it’s a little self-promotional (for both of us), but we laughed out loud when we received it. Besides, it’s all in the spirit of fun and a great cause, right? We’ll be announcing the judges and prizes for the Battle soon. In the meantime, please help us spread the word, and e-mail us at techbands@xconomy.com if your band would like to enter.

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