Daily Marauder

ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA

Microsoft has been talking to some major media players this week including Time Warner and News Corp. as it prepares to take another pass at Yahoo, reports the Wall Street Journal. This time Microsoft would be bidding only for its search business and partners would buy the rest, effectively breaking up Yahoo into pieces. Yahoo has also circled back to Time Warner regarding a potential merger with AOL. (Cynopsis 7/3)

The Justice Department’s antitrust division has begun issuing subpoenas as it probes further into whether a planned Google-Yahoo partnership in search advertising is anticompetitive. (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/google-yahoo-partnership-justice-is-looking-closer/index.html?ref=technology 7/2)

The ongoing Google/YouTube-Viacom litigation has now officially spilled over to users with a court order requiring Google to turn over massive amounts of user data to Viacom. If the data is actually released, the consequences could be far more serious than the 2006 AOL Search debacle. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/03/judge-protects-youtubes-source-code-throws-users-to-the-wolves 7/3)

A document in the settled Facebook ConnectU litigation reveals that Facebook’s common shares are worth a quarter of the value of the stock Microsoft purchased when it invested in the social network. (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/03/what-is-facebook-worth-part-37/index.html?ref=technology 7/3)

The warning came as part of Apple’s transition from .Mac to the new MobileMe online service, which was announced at last month’s Worldwide Developers Conference. (http://www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_852573C4006938800025747A00801C71.html?ref=technology 7/2)

Ten-year-old open source initiative Mozilla officially broke its own download record, according to the Guinness World Records, registering 8,002,530 downloads of Firefox 3 on June 18. Congrats! That’s a lot of bits. Since that time over 28 million users have downloaded the browser. (Cynopsis 7/3)

Hitwise performed an analysis of top search terms that drove traffic to both Barack Obama and John McCain’s websites and found some common denominators including Health Care, Global Warming, Education and Immigration. Traffic to Barackobama.com received 79% of U.S. online visits in a custom category of both candidate websites. But traffic to John McCain’s site has been rising in recent weeks. McCain’s traffic increased 42% in June 2008 compared to May 2008 and 24% compared to June 2007. (Cynopsis 7/3)

Market Share of U.S. Visits among Custom Category of Presidential Candidate Websites
Rank     Name               Domain                    June-08         May-08          Apr-08
1      Barack Obama barackobama.com         79.25%          85.38%          84.07%
2      John McCain     johnmccain.com          20.75%          14.62%          15.93%
Source: Custom report from Hitwise