In This Update:
• Sony in Pact on TVs That Don’t Need Set-Top Boxes
• NBCU Deal Values New Delhi TV at $567.9 Million
• Online Ad Firm FaceTime Buys DR Provider CMS
• Google Reveals Google App Engine Pricing Plans
• VMware Buys B-hive for Performance Scans
• Next Microsoft Operating System Has Touch Controls
• Pixsy Partners with MMORPG.com on Online Gaming Video Search Engine
• TiVo to Offer Disney Movies for Download
• Yahoo Partners with 4Info for SMS Ads
• Nation Not Fully Prepped for DTV Shift, Says Nielsen
• Market for Securing Mobile Devices Yet to Take Off
• Long-Range Wi-Fi Challenges WiMax
• Online Realtors Win Rights to Housing Database
• Report: Online Video Viewers to Top One Billion In 2013
• Visible World, a Targeted Cable Advertiser, Raises $25 Million Round
• Mobile Browser Skyfire Gets $13 Million in Series B Funding
• Web Widget Maker RockYou Raises $1 Million

Sony in Pact on TVs That Don’t Need Set-Top Boxes
REUTERS
Sony Corp has signed an agreement with the top U.S. cable companies that leads the way for televisions that can receive digital signals without need for a television set-top box, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association said on Tuesday. Other consumer electronics companies besides Sony also have been invited to formally join the memorandum of understanding Sony negotiated with Comcast, Time Warner Cable Inc, Cox Communications, Charter Communications Inc, Cablevision Systems Corp and Bright House Networks, the cable organization said. The agreement establishes the fundamentals for a retail market for the digital cable-ready televisions and addresses how they will be sold with services like video-on-demand, digital video recording and interactive programming guides, according to the cable group which did not publish the entire agreement.
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NBCU Deal Values New Delhi TV at $567.9 Million
ECONOMIC TIMES
NBC Universal has paid $150m for a 26% stake in India’s New Delhi Television (NDTV), valuing the whole of NDTV at around USD567.9m. Details of the acquisition, closed in Jan, have just been disclosed by NBCU in a filing on the Bombay stock exchange. Under the deal, NBCU has an option to raise its stake to 50% in two years, with NDTV group holding the other half. The acquisition gives NBCU control of a stake in Hindi entertainment stations NDTV Lifestyle and NDTV Imagine, as well as media tech unit NDTV. However, the deal does not include access to NDTV’s news and business channels.
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Online Ad Firm FaceTime Buys DR Provider CMS
PAIDCONTENT
Online ad firm FaceTime Strategy has bought Concise Marketing Solutions, a direct marketer based in Dallas. Terms were not disclosed. CMS, which was founded in 1991, targets Fortune 100 companies for its online and e-mail marketing services. As part of the merger, CMS’ founder Scott Dinsmore will join Washington D.C.-based FaceTime as president of the direct response practice group. FaceTime also has offices in Dallas and plans to open offices in New York, Charlotte N.C., and Los Angeles.
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Google Reveals Google App Engine Pricing Plans
RETUERS
Google Inc said on Tuesday that Google App Engine would offer additional computing resources for developers this year and announced pricing for the service. Developers using Google App Engine, which lets outsiders build Web applications on the same infrastructure that runs Google’s own applications, will have a free quota of 500 Megabytes of storage and enough computing power and bandwidth for about 5 million pageviews per month. But for further usage Google said it would charge developers depending on how much storage and bandwidth they require beyond the free quota and that the pricing plans would be effective later this year after a preview period.
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VMware Buys B-hive for Performance Scans
GIGAOM
Virtualization firm VMware said today it would purchase Israeli startup B-hive Networks for an undisclosed amount. The B-hive team will form the base of VMware’s development center in Israel and will give VMware a better way to track the performance among virtualized machines. Typically, performance mapping and monitoring software measure how well servers talk to one another, but in virtualized environment, this is made more difficult. Instead one needs to measure how well information gets from one virtualized machine to another. B-hive’s Conductor software helps track how fast and well data flows in both virtualized and physical environments from the end user perspective, and has the ability to automatically adjust the server environment to deal with bottlenecks. B-hive raised $7 million in September 2006 from Index Ventures and Venrock Associates.

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Next Microsoft Operating System Has Touch Controls
REUTERS
Microsoft Corp plans to give users of the next version of its Windows operating system touch screen controls as one option for controlling the software, its top executives said on Tuesday. Chairman Bill Gates and Chief Executive Steve Ballmer showed off new Windows features based on software it calls “multi-touch” that will be part of Windows 7, the next version of Windows, which Ballmer said was due out in late 2009. The ability to use touch to give users fingertip control of their screens could help revolutionize how computer desktops and mobile phones are controlled and would be an alternative to existing mice, keyboard and pen-based user controls.
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Pixsy Partners with MMORPG.com on Online Gaming Video Search Engine
CENTERNETWORKS
White label multimedia search provider Pixsy will announce a partnership with MMORPG.com on Thursday. Under the terms of the agreement, MMORPG.com will utilize Pixsy’s advanced media searchplatform to power an online gaming video search engine targeted to MMORPG enthusiasts who are interesting in online role-playing. MMORPG stands for “Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games” and is currently a hot gaming market. This partnership between Pixy and MMORPG.com will give gaming fans access to gaming news and information that meets their specific needs.
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TiVo to Offer Disney Movies for Download
CNET
TiVo is gearing up to dish out Disney movie rentals, as the digital video recorder company expands its lineup of movies from major studios. Under an agreement with Disney-ABC and CinemaNow, TiVo subscribers can download the movies for 24-hour rental. TiVo expects to offer the Disney rentals later this year to its broadband-connected TiVo Series2 and Series3 subscribers. Price for the service was not disclosed. The Disney movies will add to TiVo’s more than 30,000 titles from Amazon Unbox, Music Choice, and other content providers.
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Yahoo Partners with 4Info for SMS Ads
WALL STREET JOURNAL
On Tuesday, Silicon Valley start-up 4INFO, one of the most-active players in text-message advertising, announced a new trial partnership with Yahoo. Under the arrangement, 4INFO provides the technology for Yahoo to publish its content, such as news updates, horoscopes, sports scores and weather forecasts, via text messages that also contain a small ad. Consumers sign up online to receive the alerts. Yahoo can sell the ads alone or as part of a broader online-mobile ad package, or, alternatively, 4INFO can sell the ads through its mobile-ad network. Ad executives report click-through rates with text-message ads of 1% to 10%, a significant jump from the figures for Web banner ads, which are typically only a fraction of that.
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Nation Not Fully Prepped for DTV Shift, Says Nielsen
MEDIAWEEK
Eight months away from the DTV transition, large segments of the population remain unprepared, according to Nielsen study on DTV preparedness. The study, released to clients Friday (May 23), updates a previous study and provides additional detail on the potential programming impact. According to the study, 9.4 percent of TV households are completely unprepared for the transition. Another 12.6 percent of households are partially unprepared and have at least one set that would not work after the transition date. That’s only slightly better than February, when 10 percent were not ready and another 13.1 percent had at least one digitally unworkable TV set. Between now and Feb. 17, 2009, consumers have several choices: purchase a new digital set, purchase a converter box for the old set, or subscribe to a subscription TV service.
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Market for Securing Mobile Devices Yet to Take Off
REUTERS
The market for software to protect mobile devices such as smartphones has yet to take off despite brisk sales of devices such as Research in Motion Ltd’s BlackBerry and Apple Inc’s iPhone. Symantec Corp Chief Operating Officer Enrique Salem estimates that it is currently worth a few hundred million dollars a year. “It is growing. But given the number of handsets, the number of smartphones, you would think it would be growing at a much higher rate,” Salem said. “I can’t give you an exact number but it is not as fast as you might think.” For now, security on mobile devices is seen as an extra feature on programs designed to fight malicious software on personal computers and laptops, said Mike Haro, senior analyst with Sophos, the largest privately held security software maker.
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Long-Range Wi-Fi Challenges WiMax
PC WORLD
A Dutch company and its British partner have re-launched a long-range Wi-Fi technology that’s claimed to do most of what WiMax promises, yet is here today and is a fraction of the cost. The technology, called InspiAir, was developed in Israel but despite a number of early contract wins, it has not seen widespread success. Now though, Dutch distributor KMC Systems has acquired the worldwide sales rights, renamed it Max-Fi, and is pitching it as a cost-effective alternative to WiMax. The claims made for the technology – which is now in its second generation – are hard to credit, acknowledged John Duffin, the business development director at VPNet, Max-Fi’s UK distributor. “It’s not bumping up the power – it’s standard 802.11 and it works with your existing laptops, yet even at 2km range you can get 1 or 2Mbit/s,” he said. Each Max-Fi AirEZ 4000 rugged access point has four 802.11a/b/g radios and can support up to 300 users, he added.
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Online Realtors Win Rights to Housing Database
TECHCRUNCH
The National Association of Realtors has settled its antitrust case with the Department of Justice, and has given online realtors full access to the industry-standard Multiple Listing Service (MLS) Databases. The MLS is a comprehensive listing of homes that are available on the housing market, and until this point the NAR has restricted access to online brokers. These online brokers have been offering fees that are significantly lower than traditional realtor rates, and rather than adapt as an industry, the NAR choose to withhold the essential data. The Department of Justice took issue with this stance, and filed suit in September 2005. The deal is especially important for disruptive online-only companies like Redfin , which rely on being able to access current home listings.
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Report: Online Video Viewers to Top One Billion In 2013
WEBPRO NEWS
Online video’s popularity is going to skyrocket, and there’s no reason for anyone to miss out on the profits, according to a new report. ABI Research predicts that, in the year 2013, over one billion people will watch some sort of clip online. Various estimates put the world’s population at around seven billion in 2013, so if no nuclear wars take place and ABI’s forecasts are correct, at least 14 percent of all people will watch moving images on computer screens. Cesar Bachelet, a senior analyst at ABI, states, “A wide variety of actors aim to gain a share of this fast-growing market: not only content owners such as the BBC and NBC Universal, and Internet portals such as AOL and Yahoo!, but also a range of new entrants including user-generated content sites such as YouTube and Dailymotion, broadband video sites such as CinemaNow and Lovefilm, and Internet TV providers such as Apple and Zattoo.”
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Visible World, a Targeted Cable Advertiser, Raises $25 Million Round
VENTUREBEAT
Targeted advertising, based on geographic location, age, gender and other factors, is a pretty common concept by now. Visible World wants to bring it to cable television, with an added twist – editing of specific commercial spots to appeal more to individuals. Visible World has about 200 advertising partners and can reach 52 million homes. It was founded in 2007, and is based in New York, close to its Madison Avenue targets.. Adams Street Partners and AllianceBernstein led the round, and were joined by Comcast Interactive Capital, Dawntreader Ventures, Grey Ventures, Leucadia National, Marketing Services Risk Surety, Time Warner and Viacom. The company has raised about $75 million to date.
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Mobile Browser Skyfire Gets $13 Million in Series B Funding
MASHABLE
Skyfire Labs Inc has announced $13 million in funding in a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, and including previous investors Matrix Partners and Trinity Ventures. The funds will be used for further rollout of Skyfire, launch outside the US, and for development of versions for more mobile handsets. Skyfire is a mobile browser currently in private beta, and according to the folks from Skyfire Labs, it “offers users the complete PC browsing experience at blazing fast speeds, all on their mobile phones.”
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Web Widget Maker RockYou Raises $1 Million
DIGITAL MEDIA WIRE
RockYou, a developer of social applications and widgets that enable photo slideshows, glitter text, voicemail and other features, has raised $1 million in new financing from Doll Capital Management (DCM). RockYou was reportedly seeking up to $70 million at a $400 million valuation, but has temporarily settled for the $1 million infusion while it ponders whether to pursue a larger funding round or sell the company. Founded in 2006, San Mateo, Calif.-based RockYou claims over 35 million users, and serves over 180 million widget views per day. The company has to date raised a total of $13.5 million, including an $11 million round last year.
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