Pirouz Nilforoush

Co-Founder & President @ inPowered AI. Previously founded NetShelter (aquired by Ziff Davis).

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Today we launched inPowered 2.0 - check out my interview with Robert Scoble!

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Ziff Davis acquires NetShelter from inPowered!

Today we announced the acquisition of NetShelter by Ziff Davis. It was covered on TechCrunch, AdWeek, and Media Post. It's been an amazing ride since 2006 when Peyman and I started the company. What started out as just a dream of helping independent tech bloggers do what they love doing became the largest technology media company in the world reaching over 150 million people world wide. We helped amazing bloggers like Arnold Kim (an M.D.) quit their day job in pursuit of their dreams. We helped transform the media landscape from a few media conglomerates covering the world of technology to hundres of independent bloggers giving us their diverse perspective on different events. We helped bring varying points of views to consumers of news and information - and that is good for people and something I am most proud of. Today I want to thank everyone that came along the ride with us. From our very first bloggers, investors, and marketers to every employee that believed in our mission and gave it their all to help us get to this point - I thank you for believing in us and for your dedication in helping us get here.

As we end this chapter in our journey we look forward to a new one. I believe the democratized media landscape that we helped create with NetShelter has created a fundamental problem for people as they are trying to become informed on different subject matters. With millions of people now creating information about varying topics never have we been faced with a greater challenge in trying to figure out who we should pay attention to because they possess knowledge and expertise and who we should tune out. This is a problem that we are most passionate about solving at inPowered. I am more excited than ever to be working with a group of amazingly talented people that are passionate about solving this problem. Together we can move mountains and I can't wait to share what's next with all of you!

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30 under 30

I'm honored for being named a marketing mag 30 under 30 - you can read the full article here http://tinyurl.com/bn5lst4

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It was really fun sharing my experience with a group of young entrepreneurs at Startup Weekend Toronto http://toronto.startupweekend.org/

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Big Trends from Mobile World Congress!

I spent this past week in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress - the world's largest conference for the mobile industry. Overall people shared a ton of excitement with respect to the state of the mobile industry as a whole and I wanted to share the big trends that I was able to unfold during my time in Barcelona:

We are moving towards a networked society - where instead of all people being connected all things will be connected - built on mobility, broadband, and cloud (apps) we will start seeing connectivity in industries such as auto and health. Operators believe that this will fuel growth in the number of mobile connections in the coming years making 100 billion mobile connections a reality in the next 10-20 years - imaging SIM cards in almost every thing!

4G will start seeing real adoption in 2011 - Major carriers in the US including Verizon and AT&T have either already begun launching LTE networks in major cities or have planned launches by mid year 2011. Why it matters? LTE will provide us with consistent 8-10mbps mobile broadband speeds which will open up a whole new world of opportunities with apps that can be developed to take advantage of the increased speeds.

NFC payments are gaining momentum - with McDonalds placing contactless readers in over 1200 stores in the UK we might be seeing a tipping point for NFC. In Japan 60% of mobile users use NFC and we're bound to see similar numbers here in the US in the coming years. Mobile operators want to be the enablers and consumers find it attractive to get rid of pockets full of cards.

Mobile app ad revenues will see accelerated growth - Sir Martin Sorrell from WPP mentioned that research they have seen predicts mobile ad revenues by end of 2013 will account for 1/3 of all mobile app revenues and we are just starting to scratch the surface with total app revenues as adoption of smart phones continue into the mainstream.

Mobile broadband adoption will have a significant impact on the society - with over five billion mobile subscriptions worldwide we are moving towards 80% of the worlds population being connected. What's more exciting is that over one billion people will have mobile broadband access by the end of this year and that is significant given the fact that every 1000 new mobile broadband connections generate 80 new jobs and every 10% increase in mobile connections grow GDP by 1%!

If you had a chance to attend this conference please let me know of your thoughts in the comments.

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I really enjoyed reading this article and as a media entrepreneur who has been "on the grind" for over 10 years I could relate in many ways. Building great companies has never been an overnight thing and in many ways "the grind" is not a web 2.0 phenomenon; however, in this "post bubble" era you have to believe in your vision and work at it for years before you realize (or don't realize) your dream. If you don't live, breathe, and LOVE what you're doing day in and out then you might as well sell short while you can because its a long wild ride with many ups and downs and bumps and bruises along the way...but it's all part of the journey!

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Nice day for a run along the Embarcadero!

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Welcome to my blog!

Hello world! I am proud to say that I have finally setup my own personal blog and scratched off a big one from my ever growing "to do" list. My name is Pirouz Nilforoush, the Co-Founder and President of NetShelter Technology Media and here's my story...

My Story

My passion for creating community websites and blogs goes back to over 10 years ago when I started my first website out of my parent's basement in Toronto, Canada. I was a teenager spending most of my free time experimenting with different things online and it just so happened that my favorite TV show at the time was Comedy Central's hit show South Park! As a fan of the show it became increasingly frustrating for me when time and time again I found myself not being able to keep up with Comedy Central's schedule for new episodes. That's when me and a couple of my friends, whom I had gotten to know through my interactions online got together and launched a website dedicated to making all episodes of the show available to users worldwide and SPDownloads.com was born! Over the next year or so the site grew very quickly and was reaching well over 4 million unique visitors on a monthly basis. A site that I had built to solve for a specific problem was now reaching millions of users online and as a result it started gaining the attention of other media portals and destination websites.

At the time I was having a very tough time monetizing this large audience that SPDownloads was attracting -- you have to remember that this was back in 1999 where online advertising as an industry was very much in its infancy stage and smaller publishers had very few options to monetize their content. I was struggling every single month just to pay off the high web hosting costs of my website - it was not cheap to run a site that made large video files available for users across the globe to download for free! Fortunately this was also a time where large corporations were extremely excited about the potential of online advertising and were experimenting with this new advertising medium by spending millions of dollars with top online media outlets. One of these companies was UGO.com which was way ahead of the curve with the destination website model of aggregating original content and at the time had more advertisers knocking on their door than they could handle. Not being able to fulfill the demand they were seeing from advertisers on their own website representatives from UGO approached me with the idea of placing advertisements on SPDownloads.com and sharing the advertising revenues with me. Given the fact that I had no other way of monetizing the site at the time and was barely able to keep up with the ever growing web hosting costs I could not be happier with this offer and was able to build a steady revenue source to support SPDownloads through this partnership over the course of the next few months. In my interactions with other independent publishers I was hearing from them over and over again that they too were struggling to monetize their content and even the largest independent publishers didn’t know how they could get any attention from advertisers that would be of interest to reach their audiences. This led me to come up with the idea to create an entity that would bring together the web’s most credible independent publishers and give them access to the same level of resources and tools that large media companies had become accustomed to. I approached my brother Peyman with the idea and in December of 1999 NetShelter was born.

Over the course of the next few years we made many mistakes, accomplished more than we could have ever imagined and in the process gained a lot of experience as first time entrepreneurs. In December of 2008 we raised over 11 million dollars and closed our first round of capital from our good friends at Rho Canada, JLA Ventures, and GrowthWorks Capital. Since then we have established our headquarters in San Francisco and have grown to become the largest technology media company in the world reaching over 120 million users worldwide!

I now spend most of my time in between San Francisco and Toronto and am excited more than ever for our next stage of growth!