[科技前沿]如何成立一個新公司？

來源：The New York Times 編輯：Vicki

在詹姆斯邦德的電影中，Ursula Andress和Halle Berry在大海中游泳，並穿着比基尼向岸邊走去。每個人都可以這樣麼？不是這麼簡單的，她們戴着防水的染眉毛油，這些細微之處語言無法表達。很多情況下，跟一部電影學習不是一件壞事，這個理念也使谷歌和YOu Tube聯合打造了Howcast網站，並投入到了一個繁忙的快速發展的網站羣體中。

How to Start a Company (and Kiss Like Angelina)

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IN their star turns in James Bond movies, Ursula Andress and Halle Berry perfected the art of emerging from an ocean swim and walking onto the beach in a dripping-wet bikini.

For everyone else? Not so easy. But there are some tricks for aspiring(有志氣的，有抱負的) Bond girls, and they involve, among other things, waterproof mascara（防水的染眉毛油）, Vaseline（凡士林） and double-sided tape. There are some finer points, too, to pull off such a feat, and words can’t quite convey their subtleties（細微處）.

Sometimes — and this is a difficult sentence for a newspaper to print — it’s easier to learn from a video.

That notion led a handful of Google and YouTube veterans（老兵） to start , and jump into the bustling and fast-growing crowd of Web sites offering how-to content.

Given the competition, from sites like Howdini and even YouTube, Howcast Media is betting that its particular blend of information and entertainment, presented in short and snappy（時髦的） video, will draw plenty of traffic and, most important, deliver a profit.

Certainly the demand is there. People like to watch videos, and, in a bad economy, the ranks of do-it-yourselfers and would-be MacGyvers are swelling.

Already, Howcast has 100,000 videos in its library, some that it has produced itself and many more from others like Playboy, Popular Science, Home Depot and the Ford modeling agency that share in the ad revenue.

The site offers instruction on a range of topics, from everyday issues — fixing a leaky faucet（維修一個漏水的水龍頭）, creating a living will — to the more obscure, like how to survive a bear attack or how to have sex in a car. (Nothing on Howcast is particularly graphic（形象的，生動的）. Plenty of other sites, of course, already offer that sort of stuff.)

Given the ease of posting on sites like YouTube, where 20 hours of video are uploaded each minute, it takes more than a bunch of short clips to succeed. Part of the trick to winning on the Web is having a distinct personality.

Some industry executives give Howcast credit for finding a way to stand out.

“They understand that video is an incredible medium to share and instruct,” says David Eun, a Google executive who oversees strategic partnerships. “But they also realize that they can use video to provide instruction in an environment that is entertaining, not dry.”

One of the biggest challenges for a site like Howcast, though, is the same one that has vexed（使焦慮） old-school media giants and survivors of the dot-com boom: How can content creators turn a profit on the Web?

Howcast’s solution is to partner with advertisers and create instructional videos for their specific products or services.

Blurring the lines between editorial and advertising is a tricky endeavor, of course. Companies that try to be too stealthy（悄悄的，鬼鬼祟祟的） or clever risk seeing their brand roasted on Facebook, Twitter and beyond.

“Users are sensitive to brands trying to muscle into what appears to be an organic social media environment,” says Nick Thomas, an analyst at Forrester Research. “Yes, I want to learn how to cook something, but do I necessarily want to be taught by someone who makes the ingredients?”

Howcast’s team of young executives argue that they can tap-dance along that fine line by making sure that any branding effort is in a supporting role, rather than a starring one, in its instructional videos.

They are even forging（鍛鍊，僞造） relationships with the State Department as it looks for ways to use social networks and other media to communicate directly with people around the world. Among the videos they’ve produced for it are “How to Protest Without Violence” and “How to Launch a Human Rights Blog.”

Howcast executives are also quickly signing deals with the likes of Google, Facebook and Hulu to spread their videos across the Internet.

“Being a media company today means you can’t exist inside a walled garden, just driving traffic to your own site,” says Jason Liebman, 33, Howcast’s chief executive. “You have to produce the content, distribute it all over the Web, develop the technology — all of which is hard to do. But you need to do everything in order to be successful today.”

SITTING in a stifling office loft in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, with a couple of air-conditioners chugging away in vain, Jeffrey Kaufman runs through the topics that are particularly popular on search engines these days. The list includes werewolves. And manboobs.

Mr. Kaufman is the head of programming at Howcast, and is supposed to have his fingertips on the nation’s pulse through proprietary data-mining tools and information gathered from search engines.

Mr. Kaufman chalks up（記錄） the werewolf （狼人）craze to the coming movie “New Moon,” the second installment of the popular “Twilight” vampire（吸血鬼） series, based on the books by Stephenie Meyer.

Why manboobs? Everyone in the small room shrugs.

Then they have to figure out a how-to video spin on the topics (How to make a werewolf costume? How to get rid of manboobs?). The final consideration is whether the subject will attract advertisers or, better yet, a corporation would pay to have its product or service appear in the video.

The how-to category is big and growing, but extremely fragmented（片段的）. And while Howcast, whose Web site is just 17 months old, is watching its traffic soar, it lags far behind eHow and (owned by The New York Times Company), according to Hitwise, a research firm.

Keke View：由谷歌公司的前僱員創建的howcast,自從誕生以後，流量穩步上升，六個月後，被美國時代雜誌評爲2008度最佳網站50強，位列第11。隨後提供iphone應用程序允許下載內容，使它一躍成爲美國繼黃頁後的最受歡迎的生活服務類網站。網站提供的就是生活服務功能：教用戶如何做怎麼做。