Daily Marauder

ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA

Amazon.com reported profits climbed 9%, to $225 million, on revenues that increased 18%, to $6.7 billion, in the fourth quarter. The online-shopping giant has been able to buck the economy’s downward trend by aggressively opening new product categories and offering steep discounts and free shipping. ClipSyndicate/Bloomberg (1/29) , The Wall Street Journal (1/30) , Financial Times (1/29)

Joost is having some real success with its iPhone/iPod touch app. The company announced that the free player has been downloaded more than 1 million times from Apple’s App Store less than two months after its release. The global Web video service recently expanded with 11 new content partners, providing access to thousands of hours of anime, comedy, drama, movies, music, documentaries, sci-fi, and sports via Wi-Fi connections. (Cynopsis 1/30)

Looking to update your mp3 music collection to make it DRM-free? Apple updated the iTunes store to allow more flexibility in its “update my library” feature. Now you can choose entire albums to update, or choose which songs from each album you’d like to convert to DRM-free versions. Each update still costs 30 cents/song. (Cynopsis 1/30)

Hulu is offering over 30 historical and informational videos in honor of February’s Black History Month. The videos touch on a number of different topics, including Brown vs. the Board of Education, the Freedom Riders, Harriet Tubman and the Tuskegee Airmen to name a few.  Click the logo below to check it out. Hulu will also present each Super Bowl commercial moments after it has Hulu has aired on live broadcast. Check it out at www.hulu.com/superbowl.

Travelzoo, a publicly traded travel site launched in 1998, has annouced that it purchased the domain “Fly.com” for $1.8 million. According to Travelzoo’s announcement, Fly.com will be the home of “a new information web site to be launched in Feburary”. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/30/travelzoo-buys-flycom-for-a-lofty-18-million 1/30)

The “Generations Online in 2009″ report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project overturns some commonly held assumptions about teen behavior, finding that 78% of 12- to 17-year-olds game online, while only 67% participate in social-networking sites. Mediaweek (1/29)

The number of amateur creators contributing to the user generated content phenomenon reached 83 million in the U.S. last year, according to eMarketer. That number will continue to increase over the next five years as internet users become more eager to contribute to the conversation, surpassing 108 million creators or 50% of the internet audience by 2012. Yet the enthusiasm for the UGC genre, which led to Google’s purchase of YouTube for a cool $1.65 billion, has waned as economic models to monetize the content have failed to materialize. (Cynopsis 1/30)