ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA
Yahoo may still recommend a hostile takeover from Microsoft after admitting it had already spent $14 million in advisor fees to fight the approach. Unveiling a 9% rise in Q1 revenues, co-founder Jerry Yang says he remains “open to any and all alternatives, including a sale to Microsoft.” (Iwantmedia 4/23, http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article3799757.ece 4/23)
In what appears to be an exclusive, TBS.com began streaming full episodes of Sony Pictures Television’s Seinfeld, rotating 4 episodes at a time. Don’t bother if you’re on a Mac, though - all of TBS’s content streams using Microsoft DRM. (Cynopsis 4/23)
Photobucket joined Flickr in developing its own public API, allowing applications to be built enabling users to create and edit their photo albums from third party sites. Intercasting Corp. is one of the first out of the gate with an ANTHEMT-based app allowing mobile phone users to share and upload photos for transfer to the site. (Cynopsis 4/23)
EBay is filing a lawsuit against Craigslist, claiming that its interest in the smaller site has been “unfairly diluted.” While the two companies are mum on the suit’s details, a post on the Craigslist blog suggests that eBay may be seeking a hostile takeover of the online classifieds site. (Iwantmedia 4/23, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/22/BUKE10A0NV.DTL 4/23, http://blog.craigslist.org/2008/04/tainted-love 4/22)
White label social networking creator Ning, co-founded by Marc Andreessen, raised an additional $60 million in 4th round funding led by Allen & Co. (Cynopsis 4/23)
Also, Ning is on the cover of Fast Company this month. Check it out here.
A “decent-sized” cyber attack against CNN.com early this week was enough to slow it for some visitors, according to network security analysts. Angered by Western coverage of unrest in Tibet by CNN, Chinese organizers had hoped to knock the Web site offline. (Iwantmedia 4/23, http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/144973/cnn_site_hit_by_china_attack.html 4/22)
Look for characters such as Pee Wee Herman and Pat to come to a platform near you. Sony Pictures Television signed a deal with the famed LA-based improv troupe The Groundlings to create 50 original digital shorts over the next year, reports Variety, mining both past and newly created characters for one offs and series. The first few 3-5 minutes skits are due out this week on mobile and online via Sony’s Crackle.com and other outlets. (Cynopsis 4/23)
Up against competition from TMZ.com and Perez Hilton, Comcast’s E! Online completed a major overhaul - cutting way down on the clutter and adopting the now familiar one-post-at-a-time blog format. (Cynopsis 4/23)
Uptime monitoring service Pingdom has put together
a list of thousands of .com domain names owned by Google, based on an analysis of the root zone file. They then verified the most interesting ones with WHOIS information. Does GoogleWarnerbros.com represent a future partnership, or a failed tryout? (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/23/want-gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooglecom-too-late 4/23)
A lawsuit filed against Google alleges that the search giant defrauds its AdWords customers by charging them for ads they don’t want. Google doesn’t make it clear that to avoid running AdSense ads, one must enter a zero in the input box, claims plaintiff David Almeida. (Iwantmedia 4/23, http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/google/showArticle.jhtml;?articleID=207401388 4/22)
FCC Chairman Kevin Martin on Tuesday made some of his strongest comments to date against Comcast’s Internet-management policies, telling members of the Senate Commerce Committee that the company and other broadband providers should be evaluated “with heightened scrutiny.” But the NCTA’s Kyle McSlarrow, testifying at the same hearing, told lawmakers that cable companies could police themselves and that they controlled their online networks “to ensure all of their customers have the best possible Internet experience.” (The Washington Post 4/23, Reuters 4/22)
Kevin Martin from the FCC
Sony has agreed to acquire Gracenote for about $260M. Gracenote provides a range of music-related solutions including MusicID, which detects which song is currently being played by an application and loads track information for the user (such as artist and album names). MusicID leverages a database of over 6M CDs and 80M tracks. Its technology has been in development since 1995 (previously under the name CDDB). (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/22/sony-buys-gracenote-for-260m 4/22)
Top 10 Brands by Video Streams for March 2008 (U.S., Home and Work)
Video Brand Total Streams (000) Unique Viewers (000)
YouTube 3,646,076 69,604
Fox Interactive Media 332,708 19,801
Yahoo! 265,912 22,532
Nickelodeon Kids and Family 187,646 6,256
MSN/Windows Live 170,850 10,521
ESPN 114,631 6,103
Disney Online 90,130 7,671
Turner Entertainment New Media 89,795 6,348
CNN Digital Network 82,525 5,515
Google 74,826 14,095
Source: Nielsen Online, VideoCensus
