In This Update:
• Limelight Networks Signs Content Delivery Deal with Microsoft
• Report: USA to Pass 100% Mobile Penetration Level by 2013
• Warner Music Funds Music Social Network Developer uPlayME
• Seagate to Offer Solid State Drives in 2008
• Mobile Video Search Firm Veveo Gets $14 Million Second Round
• New York Times Launches Personalization Portal
• Vadver Plots a Video Recommendation Service
• Apple to Usher in Era of Mac OS X-Based iPods
• VideoEgg Claims Google is Copying Its Ad Format
• Facebook Family Tree Developer iFamily Gets Funding
Limelight Networks Signs Content Delivery Deal with Microsoft
DIGITALMEDIAWIRE
Limelight Networks is partnering with Microsoft to help improve the performance, scalability and reliability of internet delivery of media content for the software giant. Under the agreement, Microsoft and Limelight will cross-license certain technologies, consider joint development projects in the future, and cooperate on extending and improving their respective technology infrastructures. Microsoft and Limelight have also extended a multi-year agreement under which Limelight Networks will continue to provide global media streaming and content delivery services to Microsoft. In Jun, Limelight Networks raised an estimated USD240m with its IPO on Nasdaq. It provides digital content delivery services for more than 850 of the world’s top media companies, including Brightcove, DreamWorks, Facebook, MSNBC.com and MySpace.
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Report: USA to Pass 100% Mobile Penetration Level by 2013
CELLULAR-NEWS
There will be more mobile handsets in use in the US than people by 2013, with the number of mobile subscriptions growing 3% a year over the next few years, according to research firm SNL Kagan. The research firm estimates that 84% of the US population will have mobiles by the end of 2007. It also predicts that the average revenue per user will increase 1.5% every year for the next 10 years, taking into account inflation, to USD61.09. Despite falling prices for basic phones, the growth in demand for data use, mobile video and web, will drive up revenues. Data revenues over the next 10 years will grow at an annual compound interest rate of 14%, according to SNL Kagan. In addition, some of the services, the research firm claims, could be subsidized through mobile advertising.
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Warner Music Funds Music Social Network Developer uPlayME
VENTUREBEAT
uPlayMe, the latest in a ever growing pile of companies offering a desktop application to let you connect with people through shared tastes in music, said it has raised a “multi-million” round of funding. The New York company uses a recommendation engine, looking at the music you’ve played and letting you contact other users who have recently played the same music. It also works for videos, including those watched on YouTube, and other digital content, such as movies and TV shows. The investment comes from Warner Music Group, a major music label, Village Ventures, and other investors. Here’s the announcement. The specific amount was undisclosed.
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Seagate to Offer Solid State Drives in 2008
SLASHDOT
Seagate Technology LLC plans to add solid-state drives based on flash memory chips to its lineup of storage products sometime in 2008, the company said Thursday. Seagate will introduce the drives across a range of products including desktop and notebook PCs, offering various storage capacities, said Woody Monroy, a Seagate spokesman. Monroy confirmed comments made by the company in published reports earlier in the day. SSDs, as solid-state drives are also known, use flash memory instead of magnetic disks to store information. Flash is a type of non-volatile memory, which means the chips retain stored information when power is off. Other memory types, such as DRAM, lose data when the power goes off.
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Mobile Video Search Firm Veveo Gets $14 Million Second Round
MOCONEWS
Veveo, a mobile video search firm based out of Andover, MA, has received $14 million in its second round of funding, and getting ready to launch it service after couple of years of hatching the service. The round was led by Norwest Venture Partners, Matrix and North Bridge Venture Partners…the three also invested in the first round of $14 million. This makes it a total of $28 million for a company which hasn’t yet launched its service.
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New York Times Launches Personalization Portal
SEARCH ENGINE JOURNAL
Finally, after more than a year of being in beta stage, NY Times opens the doors of its start page personalization portal, My Times to the public. My Times is a web portal that lets NYT readers organize not only NYT articles but articles from all over the internet. My Times is like your other social news aggregator sites with all the features of a web 2.0 portal such as widgets, bookmarking facilities, rss feeds and portal-wide searching facility. The difference though is the NY Times look and feel since My Times is still a subset of the main NY Times main web site.
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Vadver Plots a Video Recommendation Service
NEWTEEVEE
Vadver, a pre-launch video startup is building a video-discovery service that sounds somewhat similar to Mesmo.tv and Divvio, with the idea of using social connections to recommend online videos. Vadver, which has four employees and was founded in January of this year, has raised $1.7 million in Series A funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson. The company is starting out by building a consumer-facing Web page – a Facebook app and TiVo app and all the rest are, of course, in the pipeline as well. The company also plans on developing an alternative browser that’s optimized for video, a sort of “set-top box for the Web.” To that end, Vadver is hoping it might be able to persuade content producers to create 30-second sample video clips, a la digital music, so users can more easily scroll through their options before making a decision about investing their time (or even money).
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Apple to Usher in Era of Mac OS X-Based iPods
APPLEINSIDER
Apple Inc. will use a media event next month to unveil a new breed of iPod digital music players that have been injected with the company’s Mac OS X operating system. The move will culminate a multi-year effort on the part of the Cupertino-based electronics giant to form a new platform of digital devices around the common core of its legendary operating system software and expertise in industrial design. Three of Apple’s four business segments — the Mac, iPhone and Apple TV — already rely on derivatives of the Mac OS. In surgically replacing the iPod’s Pixo-influenced OS with a modern-day variant of its homebred software, the company will have effectively scaled the Mac OS across its entire product matrix. Internally, Apple is much further along, according to sources, who say the company will again tap an embedded version of the Mac OS to form the foundation of yet another business segment and digital device family in 2008. In the meantime, however, the company’s efforts will reportedly focus on maturing its already established product families.
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VideoEgg Claims Google is Copying Its Ad Format
MARKETCLUSTER
VideoEgg claims that Google’s new in-video ad format in which it overlays ads along the bottom of videos is a replica of the system already used on VideoEgg’s site. According to VideoEgg’s chief marketing officer, Troy Young, YouTube’s new overlay advertising strategy is a copy of the model he says VideoEgg introduced more than 12 months ago. Young says the company has also applied for a patent over the advertising format that covers invitation video-based ads that include overlay and pausing as well as bringing up the video. Google says its new format involves semi-transparent animated overlays briefly playing over the bottom 20% of the YouTube video player, around 15 seconds into a viewed clip. Users can click on the overlay to see the full ad, which will launch in the video player, suspending the original clip while the video ad plays. If it is not clicked on, the overlay will disappear after a short period. Alternatively, a user can manually close it and continue to watch the original clip. The format was tested with around 200 content partners and YouTube advertisers, including Warner Music and 20th Century Fox and Google claims it performed well above traditional advertising such as banner ads.
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Facebook Family Tree Developer iFamily Gets Funding
ALARM:CLOCK
Facebook genealogy application developer iFamily is receiving an undisclosed amount of Series A funding. No deal terms were disclosed. The investment was provided by CountryRoad Capital and will be used to expand research and development into new Facebook applications. iFamily’s flagship application is Family Tree, a Facebook application that allows users to create their own family tree by adding in relatives’ details and photos. The tree will link directly to the profile of family members who are Facebook users and the entire tree can be displayed in a user’s profile and shared with other community members. iFamily says its application has been downloaded over 20,000 times since its Jun launch and around 62,000 family trees have been created.
Tags: Apple, Brightcove, EMI, Facebook, Fox, Google, iPhone, IPO, Limelight Networks, Mac, Mesmo, Microsoft, MSN, MSNBC, MySpace, NBC, NY Times, Seagate, Series A, Video, VideoEgg, Warner Music, YouTube