Zivity: Silicon Valley Elite Dabble in Adult Content

Porn is big business, and the industry has been quick to adapt by copying successful features of new consumer Internet sites. But one thing we haven’t seen until now: respected Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors taking a direct interest in funding or running these sites.

The potential payoff from a successful adult site is clearly too high for Silicon Valley to continue to ignore the space, though. And San Francisco-based Zivity is going to be the first experiment out the door. The founders say Zivity isn’t porn, but that certainly depends on how you define the term. The primary content of the site is naked female models.

The company’s founders include Scott Banister, a co-founder of the recently acquired IronPort, as well as other technology veterans. CEO Jeffrey Wescott led security software architecture and scalability at IronPort, and co-founder Cyan Banister was also an IronPort exec. They’ve raised $1 million in funding, although they aren’t yet disclosing any investors other than Banister. Rumor has it that a number of former paypal execs may have invested.

Like Suicide Girls, Zivity is a social network surrounding pictures of attractive women. Users can log in and join the network and view non-nude photos for free. If they want have the clothes taken off, it costs $10 per month.

Paying users get 5 votes per month to give away to models that they like. And every vote from a user is money in the pocket of the model and photographer - they get 80 cents per vote received. The default split is 60 cents to the model and 20 cents to the photographer, but that can be negotiated by models and photographers who’ve achieved a certain level of status in the system. This is where Zivity differs substantially from Suicide Girls, which pays its models a flat fee for their content.

The company is keeping the look and feel of the site under wraps for now, but did send me the screen shot I’ve included here. They also confirmed this is a Flash interface for viewing the photos, although the site itself is built on Rails.

Zivity is raising a second, larger round of financing now, and will launch later this year. Beta accounts are slowing being given out now.

Previous Adult/Porn coverage on TechCrunch - see PornoTube, Eroshare, Heatseak (porn browser), Socialporn and others.

Technorati Loses A “Great Leader.” PodTech Also Loses CEO

We’ve all known that blog search engine Technorati and videocasting site PodTech weren’t doing particularly well: that both companies were conducting CEO searches. But today the bloodletting became real.

PodTech CEO John Furrier is out. James McCormick, the COO, steps up to the CEO position. The company also announced that 1938 Media is no longer partnering with them, which is a real loss.

Technorati is a bit more complicated. Dave Sifry, the founder, is no longer CEO. And surprisingly, he is no longer an employee with the Company at all. And no one is replacing him yet.

Sifry said previously that he’d stay with the company: “I expect to resume a more active role in product development.” Today the message was the opposite: “I would go ahead and transition to the board exclusively.”

Teresa Malo, CFO, Dorion Carroll Vice President of Engineering and Derek Gordon, Vice President of Marketing, now jointly run the company.

Sifry’s last blog post as CEO of the company was representative of his entire tenure - vague and cold. Layoffs also occurred today but Sifry didn’t mention them until the end. The blog post sort of went like this:

me….me…me…and oh yeah we layed off eight people.

Sifry also refers to himself as a “great leader” in the fourth paragraph of his post.

How about a different approach? Perhaps a blog post lamenting the layoffs and the disruption in people’s lives would have been in order. And then an ending saying that he takes responsibility for the problems which led to this and will be stepping down, too.

To be fair to Dave, some people who’ve worked with him say he cares a lot about the wellbeing of his employees, and will go above and beyond the norm for them when needed. That side of him doesn’t come out very well in his blog posts. But writing an “I’m leaving” post is certainly difficult to do. I’m not saying I think the post was entirely appropriate, but I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt to some extent.

Update: David Dalka thinks Technorati’s Google SEO tactics may have accelerated Sifry’s departure. And it does look like the Technorati traffic party has ended - Technorati no longer shows up in the search results for the terms I mentioned in that post.