In This Update:
• HP Strikes Deal to Buy EDS for $12.6 Billion
• Clear Channel Sale Appears to Be Close
• NBCU Set To Release Health-Related Online Video Net
• Sprint Affiliate Sues to Block Clearwire Deal
• Hollywood Actors and Studios Clash Over Internet Clips
• HBO Shows May Sell on iTunes, for $1.99+
• ABC to Introduce New Ad Measurement Tool
• Yahoo Opens Location Database to Developers
• Microsoft Debuts Stargazing App Worldwide Telescope
• Isobar Acquires SEM Shop rmsarcar.com, iProspect Expands into Germany
• Vending Machine Can Determine Age Using Facial Recognition
• MIT Students Show Power of Open Cell Phone Systems
• ESPN Buys Cable TV, Digital Rights to US Open Tennis for $140 Million
• Social Gaming Network Raises $15 Million Series A
• Multiplayer Gaming Card Firm Bigfoot Networks Gets $8.75 Million Second Round
• Sprout Raises $5 Million for Flash Widget Creation
• Online Community Experience Project Raises $3 million
• Web Video Viewing Up 64% in March, Led by YouTube

HP Strikes Deal to Buy EDS for $12.6 Billion
REUTERS
Hewlett-Packard Co will buy Electronic Data Systems Corp for $25.00 per share, the two companies said on Tuesday, or about $12.6 billion to better compete against IBM. The companies said the deal had an enterprise value, which includes debt, of $13.9 billion. The announcement was widely expected after a source briefed on the matter said on Monday that HP was in advanced talks with EDS with the plan of announcing a deal by close of Tuesday. The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2008, the companies said. Their collective services businesses had annual revenues of more than $38 billion and 210,000 employees, doing business in more than 80 countries, they said.
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Clear Channel Sale Appears to Be Close
NEW YORK TIMES
After a year of bickering and courtroom battles, Clear Channel Communications finally may be sold. The two private equity firms seeking to buy Clear Channel, the nation’s largest radio broadcaster, were close to settling with the banks financing the deal on Monday, the company said. A revised deal would finally close one of the last remaining leveraged buyouts from the private equity boom, which collapsed last year as the credit market tightened.Under the terms being discussed Monday night, the buyout would be reduced in price to $36 a share, from $39.20, people briefed on the negotiations said. The newly private Clear Channel might also pay higher interest rates to the banks, cutting into the profit that Bain Capital and THL Partners would earn. A settlement along those terms would leave both the buyout firms and the six banks able to claim victory of sorts.
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NBCU Set To Release Health-Related Online Video Net
PAIDCONTENT
NBC Universal has finally made its foray into online wellness with the release of its Digital Health Network, which is mainly focused on the distribution of original video. The health video channel was planned for several months-we were expecting an announcement as early as March. The network will be up and running in June. The network will be initially made up of three consumer-focused sites: Healthline Networks, which claims about 18 million users; RightHealth, which says it attracts a monthly audience of 6 million; and iVillage’s YourTotalHealth, which has about 3 million uniques per month. When the network is launched, the sites will have access to health-related video produced by NBC News, NBC Local Media, and Healthology.com.
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Sprint Affiliate Sues to Block Clearwire Deal
AP
An affiliate of Sprint Nextel Corp., iPCS Inc., said Monday it is seeking to block Sprint from forming a wireless broadband company with Clearwire Corp. An affiliate of Sprint Nextel Corp., iPCS Inc., said Monday it is seeking to block Sprint from forming a wireless broadband company with Clearwire Corp. Sprint and Clearwire Corp. announced last week they plan to combine their wireless broadband units to create a $14.55 billion communications company, to be called Clearwire, that will continue developing a mobile network based on WiMax technology.
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Hollywood Actors and Studios Clash Over Internet Clips
REUTERS
Getting Hollywood actors paid for their smallest performances — video clips on the Internet — is shaping up as one their biggest sticking points in stalemated contract negotiations with major studios. Whether actors must give consent for snippets of their film and TV work to be displayed online, and how much they should earn for them, was the No. 1 disputed issue cited by the Screen Actors Guild after labor talks broke down last Tuesday. Studios want to freely distribute YouTube-style clips of old TV shows and movies without seeking actors’ permission and pay them a flat fee rather than bargain on a price with each performer individually. The actors’ union staunchly opposes that move.
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HBO Shows May Sell on iTunes, for $1.99+
NEW YORK TIMES
After years of insisting on standard pricing for digital downloads, Apple is apparently ready to acknowledge that not all television shows are created equal. The company intends to put some episodes of HBO shows up for sale on the iTunes Store at a price higher than the $1.99 that it now charges for all current television episodes. The deal may lead other media companies to push to change their digital download prices. HBO, the leading premium cable channel, may announce the deal as early as Tuesday, according to a person briefed on the negotiations who would not be identified because the deal has not been formally announced. According to this person, full seasons of “Sex and the City,” “The Sopranos” and other HBO series will be gradually added to the iTunes service.
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ABC to Introduce New Ad Measurement Tool
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Under pressure to prove the effectiveness of TV advertising, ABC will announce today a new measurement tool for marketers that offers various details about the viewership of particular shows beyond just ratings. ABC’s new “Advertising Value Index” allows advertisers to choose from more than 15 criteria, including factors such as income level, education, employment status, how long viewers tune in to commercials or how engaged they are with the program. The idea is that advertisers choose the criteria they are interested in, giving extra weight to factors they deem most important.
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Yahoo Opens Location Database to Developers
READ/WRITE WEB
Yahoo! today released a developer preview of its Yahoo! Internet Location Platform, a collection of in-depth geo-location based APIs. We expect to see location be more smartly used in many applications around the web thanks to this platform. The gist of what’s being enabled is this: applications can provide the name of one location and then the Yahoo! APIs will report neighboring and “parent” locations. Yahoo! explains the breadth and depth of location data it now offers thusly: “The [Platform] contains about six million places. Coverage varies from country-to-country but globally includes several hundred thousand unique administrative areas with half a million variant names; several thousand historical administrative areas; over two million unique settlements and suburbs, and two-and-a-half million unique postcode points covering about 150 countries, plus a significant number of points of interest, Colloquial Regions, Area Codes, Time Zones, and Islands.”
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Microsoft Debuts Stargazing App Worldwide Telescope
ELECTRONISTA
Microsoft today kicked off the public beta of WorldWide Telescope, a downloadable app built for browsing the viewable universe. The software uses an Internet database to provide high-detail images of nebulas and other astronomical objects without requiring a large download; a unique approach stitches together images to create a seemingly unified view that uses terabytes’ worth of data. The system is also unique in providing the views from specific telescopes, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, and allowing users to switch between viewing X-rays and observable light. Views are also available from the Opportunity and Spirit Mars rovers, Microsoft adds.
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Isobar Acquires SEM Shop rmsarcar.com, iProspect Expands into Germany
MEDIAPOST
Aegis Group’s Isobar unit, already the largest digital marketing services organization in the world, this morning announced an expansion of its iProspect search marketing agency into Germany via the acquisition of rmsarcar.com, a four-year-old search marketing shop.
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Vending Machine Can Determine Age Using Facial Recognition
NEW SCIENTIST TECH
Cigarette vending machines in Japan will soon be able to judge their user’s age from their appearance. The technology has been developed as an effort to have the machines comply with new laws that, from July, require them to check the age of buyers. Customers must look into a digital camera attached to the machine. The system will compare facial characteristics, such as wrinkles around the eyes, bone structure and skin sags against a benchmark dataset of more than 100,000 people. The legal age for smoking in Japan is 20 and the country has about 570,000 tobacco vending machines. “With face recognition, so long as you have got some change and you are an adult, you can buy cigarettes like before. The problem of minors borrowing (identification) cards to purchase cigarettes could be avoided as well,” Hajime Yamamoto, a spokesman for Fujitaka Co, which developed the technology says.
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MIT Students Show Power of Open Cell Phone Systems
PHYSORG
What do you want your cell phone to be able to do? Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Hal Abelson put that question to about 20 computer science students this semester when he gave them one assignment: Design a software program for cell phones that use Google Inc.’s upcoming Android mobile operating system. In the process, they revealed the power of an open system like Android to shake up the mobile phone industry, where wireless companies are being pressured to loosen the control they have maintained over what devices do. If the brainstorms of these MIT students are an indication, phones will soon challenge the Internet as a source of innovation. For these students at least, cell phones should be all about location, location, location. Most of the projects produced by the seven teams of students involved programs that let phones track people’s physical place – or that of their friends – to help them do things and meet up. The class had about three months to build software for an Android phone. The idea had to have a solid business case, a probable way of making money.
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ESPN Buys Cable TV, Digital Rights to US Open Tennis for $140 Million
DIGITAL MEDIA WIRE
The United States Tennis Association (USTA) announced on Monday a new deal with ESPN for the cable TV broadcast and digital rights to the US Open grand slam tennis tournament, ending its 25-year deal with USA Network. The six-year pact, which begins in 2009 and was worth nearly $140, according to the Wall Street Journal, will see ESPN offer 200 hours of US Open coverage. ESPN will also offer live feeds on the ESPN360 broadband service, comprehensive coverage on ESPN.com, and various content on ESPN Mobile.
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Social Gaming Network Raises $15 Million Series A
WEBWARE
The Social Gaming Network, parent company to social-networking applications that do exactly what the name implies they would, has reason to celebrate. The company has netted $15 million in Series A funding from Greylock Partners, the Founders Fund, Columbia Partners, and Novak Biddle Venture Partners. A release said that the Social Gaming Network’s new funding will be used to “allocate even greater resources to research and development of its gaming platform, and produce more tools for social game developers who want to create a richer gaming experience for on the social networks and the social web.” But it was also hinted that the cash will help the company “(add) more depth to its platform and diversity to its portfolio of games.” Considering the Social Gaming Network has made acquisitions in the past, snapping up Facebook applications like Free Gifts, there will probably be more on the way.
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Multiplayer Gaming Card Firm Bigfoot Networks Gets $8.75 Million Second Round
AUSTIN BUSINESS JOURNAL
Bigfoot Networks, a provider of technology that decreases lag time for networked online gaming, has raised an $8.75 million second round of funding, led by North Bridge Venture Partners and Palomar Ventures. Venio Capital Partners also participated. Founded in 2005, Austin-based Bigfoot sells network interface cards that online gamers can use to improve the speed of multiplayer games on their computers. The company, which previously raised $4 million in 2006, said it will use the new funds to expand its sales efforts and engineering staff.
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Sprout Raises $5 Million for Flash Widget Creation
TECHCRUNCH
Sprout is a browser-based tool for creating interactive widgets in Flash that debuted in February. The Honolulu and San Francisco-based startup has collected $5 million in venture funding to fuel its operations. Polaris Venture Partners led the round, with previous investors Global Venture Capital and Mitch Kapor participating. Mike Hirshland of Polaris will join Sprout’s board of directors. Sprout is notable for the power it gives non-techies to design impressive pieces of distributable content, which can be used primarily for viral marketing campaigns. These pieces, called “sprouts”, are like mini-websites in that they can contain pages with elements you’d find on regular webpages: text, links, graphics, video, audio, and even interactive components like polls and maps.
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Online Community Experience Project Raises $3 million
VENTUREBEAT
Experience Project has quietly drawn a big community of people who share life experiences with each other anonymously. Since it started a little more than a year ago, users have created a million distinct experiences on intimate subjects such as “I live in a sexless marriage.” The company has raised $3 million in a first round of funding to expand the anonymous social experience site. The company has six employees and is based in San Francisco. Berjikly says that he will hire more engineers to improve the site. The site is not yet profitable. D.E. Shaw Group led the round. Other investors include Maples Investments and Baseline Ventures.
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Web Video Viewing Up 64% in March, Led by YouTube
MULTICHANNEL NEWS
Internet users in the U.S. watched 11.5 billion online videos in March, a 64% gain from one year earlier, led by Google’s YouTube with more than 4.3 billion views in the month, according to research firm comScore. The videos viewed in the month, up 13% from February, came from almost 139 million users, or 73.7% of the total U.S. Internet audience, comScore estimates. The average online video viewer watched 235 minutes of video, up 14% from an average 206 minutes in February. The average online video clips duration was 2.8 minutes, compared with 2.7 minutes in February. ComScore’s Video Metrix measures both streaming and progressive-download video.
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