Daily Marauder

ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA

Walt Mossberg just finished interviewing Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker (my real time notes are here, see Peter Kafka’s notes as well).The two key topics of the interview were the failed Microsoft merger, and Yahoo’s core focus as a company. And while Yang never actually said the words quoted in the title above, his tone and body language screamed “We’re Done.” (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/28/jerry-yang-were-done 5/29)

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang

Facebook boy Mark Zuckerberg has no plans to sell the social-networking site, even if Microsoft offered $15 billion. “The goal of the company is to execute on the things we talked about before,” he says, “such as helping users share information more easily.” (Iwantmedia 5/29, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aRQ4j.Mq8Hcc 5/29)

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes says the media giant doesn’t want to “unload” its AOL online division — but he is open to a deal if it increases the value of the Internet property. “If someone gave [AOL] more scale, and more resources, of course we’d be open to that.” (http://www.smartmoney.com/breaking-news/ON/index.cfm?story=ON-20080528-000910-1914 5/28)

Jeff Bewkes, CEO of Time Warner

News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch predicts the U.S. economy will be dismal in the coming months. “People are suffering terribly,” he says. Newspapers are going to “deteriorate tremendously.” Also, Google is “the greatest company in America.” Barack Obama is “like a rock star.” (Iwantmedia 5/29, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aTVbDsf.hq6g 5/29)

News Corp. Chief Rupert Murdoch

The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists is reaching a tentative deal with Hollywood studios on a three-year contract. The deal establishes fees for content downloaded online and preserves actors’ rights on the use of their voices and images in online clips. (Iwantmedia 5/29, http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-aftra29-2008may29,0,5396803.story 5/29)

At the Google I/O conference today, VP Engineering Vic Gundotra stressed the supremacy of the browser among all internet-enabled platforms.So it should come as no surprise that the Google Earth team has announced on the same day that it has ported the Google Earth desktop client’s 3D mapping technology into the browser. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/28/google-earths-3d-goodness-comes-to-the-browser 5/29)

Amazon.com will seek to beef up its digital-media menu with the introduction in the next few weeks of a new streaming-video service, CEO Jeff Bezos said at a conference Wednesday. He declined to elaborate, but the company has launched such digital products and services as its Kindle book reader, a music store and a site to download movies, TV shows and videos. MSNBC/Reuters (5/29)

TiVo will offer its subscribers Disney films for download to broadband connected TiVo DVRs directly from subscribers’ TV sets. Subscribers will be able to rent the movies for a 24-hour period through a deal with Disney-ABC and digital entertainment provider CinemaNow. (Iwantmedia 5/29, http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080528/tivo_disney.html 5/29)

Google is supplying software technology that will let users of News Corp.’s MySpace more quickly search their e-mail. MySpace counted 110 million users earlier this year. More than 170 million messages are sent daily by members of the leading social-networking site. (Iwantmedia 5/29, http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSN2839657420080528 5/29)

Reed Hastings, the CEO of mail-order movie firm Netflix, says the company’s business model has only about five years of steam left in it. While others at the company sought to soften Hastings’ remarks after the fact, the CEO told attendees at an investor conference that streaming movies over the Internet could boost Netflix’s worldwide subscriber total to 20 million. CNET (5/28)

Blockbuster has unveiled a prototype kiosk that, some day, will allow users to have an ATM-like experience with digital movie downloads. The company, which is looking to move beyond its rental-chain roots, said it also was mulling systems that would allow customers to download films via set-top boxes and/or Internet Protocol TVs. TBO.com (Tampa, Fla.)/Associated Press (5/29)

Women’s ad network Glam Media thinks it’s worth more than $1.3 billion, reports Matt Marshall at VentureBeat. That’s how much an unnamed suitor is supposedly offering for Glam. But Marshall thinks that Glam will turn it down. The company has raised $115 million, most recently in an $85 million round. Glam runs ads on female-oriented Websites that it says reaches 64 million people a month. Today it just launched a video ad service called the Glam TV Platform that bundles rights-cleared video (from partners like E! Online, CelebTV, Sony BMG, Brightcove, YouTube, and others) with video ads that publishers can put on their sites. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/29/how-beautiful-is-glam 5/29)

(Below) Way harsh Ty. It seems Diller is trying to force relevant businesses into irrelevancy for his own purposes and this makes him out of touch with the new media universe. To call Google irrelevant is like calling a telephone useless

IAC/Interactive CEO Barry Diller on Google: “They are irrelevant to us. I think our [Ask.com] product is in most respects better.” On Facebook: The social network is “nothing more than the Princess phone 20 years ago” — a symbol of teenage communication coolness. (Iwantmedia 5/29, http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2008/05/28/d-iacinteractives-barry-diller-on-the-spinoff-plan-do-hollywood-kids-have-any-teeth 5/2)

Tom Cruise is launching a Web site: TomCruise.com. Few stars have seen themselves pilloried more on the Web than Cruise, who has watched numerous embarrassing moments ricochet around the Internet at warp speed. His new site appears to seek to “protect his brand.” (Iwantmedia 5/29, http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080529/ap_en_mo/on_the_net 5/29)

Web measurement firm comScore is going mobile. The company is buying M:Metrics for $44.3 million plus 50,000 options of comScore stock. M:Metrics measures mobile Web usage, and will give comScore the ability to track mobile visitors, pageviews, and ads clicked. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/28/comscore-buys-mmetrics-for-44-million-to-measure-the-mobile-web 5/29)

Companies that track users online behavior could see their Internet advertising growth slow because of consumer uneasiness with such practices, predicts the Stanford Group. Many Internet users would choose to opt out of online tracking if they were able, says the research firm. (http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/05/28/privacy-issues-could-slow-online-advertising-growth 5/29)

Distributing friend connections across the web has been quite a hot topic in the Web 2.0 community as of late. MySpace, Facebook, and Google have all come out with their own initiatives for sharing social graph data with any number of websites. And there appears to be a struggle over just who will ultimately control the aggregated data – if anyone. So it may or may not come as a surprise that Gigya, a startup known for distributing widgets across social networks, blogs and other social media platforms, is getting into the mix by launching a service into public beta called Gigya Socialize. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/28/gigya-socialize-goes-up-against-google-friend-connect 5/29)

Microsoft officials said Wednesday that the company’s Windows Vista Media Center does protect against copyright infringement on its pay-per-view and video-on-demand offerings, but does nothing to block over-the-air or QAM digital broadcasts. The company came under fire May 12, when Vista Media Center users were stopped while trying to record two NBC Universal shows, “American Gladiators” and “Medium.” CNET (5/28)