[科技前沿]如何成立一个新公司？

如何成立一个新公司？

来源：The New York Times 编辑：Vicki

在詹姆斯邦德的电影中，Ursula Andress和Halle Berry在大海中游泳，并穿着比基尼向岸边走去。每个人都可以这样么？不是这么简单的，她们戴着防水的染眉毛油，这些细微之处语言无法表达。很多情况下，跟一部电影学习不是一件坏事，这个理念也使谷歌和YOu Tube联合打造了Howcast网站，并投入到了一个繁忙的快速发展的网站群体中。

How to Start a Company (and Kiss Like Angelina)

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(有志气的，有抱负的) 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（细微处）.

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 Howcast.com, 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（时髦的） 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（维修一个漏水的水龙头）, 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，生动的）. 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（使焦虑） 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（锻炼，伪造） 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（记录） 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 About.com (owned by The New York Times Company), according to Hitwise, a research firm.

Keke View：由谷歌公司的前雇员创建的howcast,自从诞生以后，流量稳步上升，六个月后，被美国时代杂志评为2008度最佳网站50强，位列第11。随后提供iphone应用程序允许下载内容，使它一跃成为美国继黄页后的最受欢迎的生活服务类网站。网站提供的就是生活服务功能：教用户如何做怎么做。