In This Update:
• Yahoo and Google in Non-Exclusive Search Ad Deal
• Senate Antitrust Subcommittee Plans to Investigate Google-Yahoo Deal
• NYSE to Sell Market Data to Websites
• Macrovision Acquires Assets from ThoughtWorthy for TV Search and Metadata
• Operators Release Tru2Way Agreement Details
• EMI Licenses BBC Archives; Two-Way Deal
• Thomson Reuters Selling Business Info Service Dialog to Proquest
• Verizon Offers Details of Usenet Deletion: alt.* Groups, Others Gone
• Google to Develop ISP Throttling Detector
• Wii Fit Finding Its Way into Rehab
• MySpace to Get New Face and New Functionality
• Out-of-home Advertising Slowed in First Quarter
• Firefox 3 Won’t Have ‘Private Browsing’
• Facebook No Longer the Second Largest Social Network
• Advertising Network AdChina Raises $10 Million First Round
• Qumu Raises $8.6 Million for Enterprise Video Efforts
• Social Network Dating Startup Zoosk Raises $4.1 Million Second Round
Yahoo and Google in Non-Exclusive Search Ad Deal
REUTERS
Microsoft’s plan to establish a strong footing in online advertising suffered a big blow on Thursday as merger talks with Yahoo finally, formally failed and Yahoo said it would let Google sell search ads on its site. Separate statements from Microsoft and Yahoo signaled a real rift between the two after their agonizing on-again, off-again talks, and Yahoo shares fell 10 percent as final hopes of a full or partial acquisition faded. Microsoft shares rose more than 4 percent as investors showed relief that the company would not be paying too high a price for a deal they considered risky — even though its biggest rivals on the Web aimed to work together. Yahoo said it had agreed to let Google put search ads on its site in what it called an $800 million annual revenue opportunity that would boost cash flow by $250 million to $450 million in the first 12 months. “Google has made an enormous gain strategically. This move might well have shut Microsoft out of the online space altogether,” said Sanford Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay. Google and Yahoo, No. 1 and No. 2 in search, will pit ads against each other in auctions for the ad that pays the most.
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Senate Antitrust Subcommittee Plans to Investigate Google-Yahoo Deal
PAIDCONTENT
U.S. Senator Herb Kohl (D-WI), chairman of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, came out with a statement yesterday evening on the Yahoo-Google deal: “We will closely examine the joint venture between Google and Yahoo announced today. This collaboration between two technology giants and direct competitors for Internet advertising and search services raises important competition concerns. The consequences for advertisers and consumers could be far-reaching and warrant careful review, and we plan to investigate the competitive and privacy implications of this deal further in the Antitrust Subcommittee.”
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NYSE to Sell Market Data to Websites
REUTERS
The New York Stock Exchange, a unit of NYSE Euronext, has asked the U.S. Securities Exchanges Commission for permission to start selling real-time market data to media and Internet organizations starting in July, seeking to join Nasdaq OMX and BATS Trading, which recently announced similar projects. NYSE plans to launch the new product, called NYSE Realtime Reference Prices, on July 1 for a four-month pilot, contingent on SEC approval of the trial project. NYSE will charge a flat fee of $100,000 per month for data derived from NYSE trades of NYSE-listed stocks. It hasn’t announced a fee schedule for trades on NYSE-listed stocks on other exchanges. Exchanges need regulatory approval to sell market data to websites, and in January 2007, Nasdaq OMX and NYSE submitted separate requests to the SEC for the right to do so. The use of pilot projects allows the exchanges to go ahead while they wait for definitive approval.
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Macrovision Acquires Assets from ThoughtWorthy for TV Search and Metadata
PAIDCONTENT
Macrovisio says it has acquired technology and the website of ThoughtWorthy Media, a vertical, TV-related search engine. The agreement was entered into back in January by Gemstar (though unannounced until now), now part of Macrovision. The ThoughtWorthy site allowed users to search for content found on TV, like music, and then purchase it. This functionality will now be part of TVGuide.com, an asset the company is keeping despite the planned disposal of the physical magazine. Besides the consumer-facing aspect to it, it also builds out Macrovision’s metadata capabilities, which includes the previously acquired All Music Guide.
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Operators Release Tru2Way Agreement Details
MULTICHANNEL
Comcast this week submitted a copy of the industry’s binding licensing agreement for the tru2way interactive TV specification in a filing with the Federal Communications Commission, revealing that consumer-electronics manufacturers are allowed to displace an MSO’s own navigation screens but only under specific circumstances. The eight-page “memorandum of understanding” contract, first signed by Sony Electronics in a breakthrough deal with cable last month and soon followed by five other licensees, outlines specific commitments the operators must meet in deploying and supporting tru2way. The agreement limits the way third-party CE devices may use on-screen real-estate, which had been one of the bones of contention in the years-long standoff between the Consumer Electronics Association and the cable industry on opening access to two-way services. Tru2way-based products-like HDTV sets or digital video recorders-may display the CE manufacturer’s navigation controls only if a user has initiated an action to access those controls, and appears the same way regardless of channel and is “transitory.” Licensees are also prohibited from displaying on-screen ads.
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EMI Licenses BBC Archives; Two-Way Deal
DIGITAL MUSIC NEWS
The BBC has now licensed its priceless archives to EMI Music, part of a two-way deal emerging Wednesday. The catalog cross-licensing gives EMI access to its artists across the vast collection of BBC television and radio programming. In turn, the BBC now has the keys to the formidable EMI Music vault, a collection that includes David Bowie, Pink Floyd, Frank Sinatra, Coldplay, and the Rolling Stones. The Beatles are reportedly covered by a separate arrangement.
The deal simply allows for the creation of broader entertainment productions, without the added licensing hassle. In a typical pre-deal scenario, EMI would control a set of recordings for an artist, but not the live performance footage. The BBC would face a similar dilemma, holding the cards on the reverse set of rights. The five-year agreement allows EMI to make use of the BBC content across various formats, including DVDs, CDs, and downloads.
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Thomson Reuters Selling Business Info Service Dialog to Proquest
PAIDCONTENT
Dialog, one of the oldest electronic/online informations businesses, is being disposed of by the newly merged Thomson Reuters. It is being sold to ProQuest. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition of Dialog would allow ProQuest to expand more in the corporate library and professional research markets. Proquest itself was sold to Cambridge Info Group in 2006. Dialog would continue to a distribution channel for Thomson Reuters content after the transaction.
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Verizon Offers Details of Usenet Deletion: alt.* Groups, Others Gone
CNET
Verizon Communications confirmed on Thursday that it will stop offering its customers access to tens of thousands of Usenet discussion areas, including the alt.* groups that have been a free-flowing area for discussions for over two decades. Eric Rabe, a Verizon spokesman, said only a subset of discussion groups, or newsgroups, would be offered to customers in the future. No law requires Verizon to do this. Instead, the company (and, to varying extents, Time Warner Cable and Sprint) agreed to restrictions on Usenet in response to political strong-arming by New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat. Usenet is a pre-Web technology that, for most of its history, relied on companies, Internet service providers, and universities to operate servers that would exchange messages posted by their users. Each server operator can choose what newsgroups they wish to offer. Today, some companies like Supernews, Giganews, and Usenet.com offer newsgroup access for a fee.
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Google to Develop ISP Throttling Detector
THE REGISTER
Google has been very vocal on its stance for net neutrality. Now, Richard Whitt–Senior Policy Director for Google–announces that Google will take an even more active role in the debate by arming consumers with the tools to determine first-hand if their broadband connections are being monkeyed with by their ISPs: “We’re trying to develop tools, software tools…that allow people to detect what’s happening with their broadband connections, so they can let [ISPs] know that they’re not happy with what they’re getting — that they think certain services are being tampered with,” Google senior policy director Richard Whitt said this morning during a panel discussion at Santa Clara University. If the country doesn’t have neutral networks, Whitt contends, innovation stagnates among application developers. And he believes that individual consumers – as well as Washington policy makers – should join the fight for such neutrality.
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Wii Fit Finding Its Way into Rehab
REUTERS
Injured athletes may find themselves playing Nintendo’s Wii Fit as part of their rehabilitation. This and other fitness-oriented video games have “great potential” for core strengthening and rehabilitation and may boost compliance with rehabilitation exercises, Sue Stanley-Green, a professor of athletic training at Florida Southern College in Lakeland, told Reuters Health. “We are looking to incorporate Wii Fit into the athletic training room as far as rehabilitation, for example, on post-operative knees and ankles,” she noted in a telephone interview. Fitness video games that have the user perform lower-body balance and weight-shifting activities could help patients with weight-bearing rehabilitation after an injury or surgery.
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MySpace to Get New Face and New Functionality
MEDIAPOST
Jeff Berman, MySpace’s recently appointed president of sales and marketing, is expected to announce plans today for a complete global redesign beginning next Wednesday, June 18 when the social network relaunches its home page. “This is more than a facelift,” according to a MySpace spokesman. “We’re changing the way people interact with the site and with brands.” For the event, a major advertiser has signed on to take over the MySpace homepage on the first day of the new redesign, which users apparently won’t see fully until June 19. MySpace began its redesign project six months ago with the intention of creating more intuitive navigation, improving usability, and giving users easier access to MySpace’s core community features such as music and video.
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Out-of-home Advertising Slowed in First Quarter
MEDIAWEEK
Out-of-home advertising slowed in first quarter, rising only 3 percent to $1.6 billion, according to figures released Thursday (June 12) by the Outdoor Advertising Association of America. The gain is the lowest growth rate since the late 90s when the business began its seemingly unstoppable upward climb. Insurance and real estate, falling from the medium’s second largest category to the third, slashed spending in first quarter by 11.5 percent to $161.8 million. Other categories cutting ad spending included media and advertising (-0.5 percent), communications (-1.8 percent) and auto dealers and services (-4.1 percent). Offsetting the declines public transportation, hotels and resorts increased spending by 6 percent, restaurants by 5.9 percent, retail by 5.7 percent and automotive, auto accessories and equipment by 1.6 percent.
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Firefox 3 Won’t Have ‘Private Browsing’
CNET
At least one security feature won’t make it into the final release of Firefox 3 on June 17, Mozilla confirmed again Thursday. The feature, Private Browsing, would have disabled all caching, cookie downloads, history records, and form data used during the current session. In essence, you could surf the Web and leave no fingerprints. “It basically said to the browser: I would like what I’m about to do to not be logged anywhere,” said Johnathan Nightingale, Mozilla’s security user interface designer. He described the private browsing process as this: you hit a button and everything past that point isn’t logged. Then, at some point in the future, you hit the button again and it’s as though what you just did never happened.
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Facebook No Longer the Second Largest Social Network
TECHCRUNCH
It was sort of inevitable given Facebook’s monster growth over the last few years, but April 2008 was the milestone: Facebook officially caught up to MySpace in terms of unique monthly worldwide visitors, according to data released by Comscore. Both services are attracting around 115 million people to their respective sites each month. Most of Facebook’s user growth, however, has been in international markets – MySpace is still dominates Facebook in the U.S. market, with 72 million monthly uniques. Facebook has 36 million monthly uniques, up from 23 million a year ago. Facebook added 75 million monthly uniques over the last twelve month, but just 13 million of those visitors are located in the U.S. MySpace added 5 million U.S. uniques during that period – at this rate it will take 4+ years for Facebook to catch up to MySpace in the U.S. market.
Advertising Network AdChina Raises $10 Million First Round
PAIDCONTENT
Shanghai-based ad net AdChina has secured a $10 million first round funding led by Mayfield China. The year-old company also has received unspecified angel funding from Jack Xu, a VP at Cisco and eBay’s former VP of engineering. Chinese ad firms of all sizes are gearing up for the Beijing Summer Olympics, which is expected to generate roughly $1.5 billion in ad revenue.
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Qumu Raises $8.6 Million for Enterprise Video Efforts
VENTUREBEAT
Enterprise video company Qumu has raised a $8.6 million third found of funding. As Qumu says on its site “video plays an increasingly strategic role in the way enterprises communicate internally and externally.” Qumu customers include AT&T, Abbott Labs, Capital One, Citigroup, Dell and eBay. The company was formerly know as Media Publisher but that was probably a bit too generic for a large enterprise video company, so they decided to rename the company Qumu, which is the “Firepower within” in Native American mythology. The round was participated in by a few individuals as well as the Storm Ventures and Advanced Technology Ventures.
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Social Network Dating Startup Zoosk Raises $4.1 Million Second Round
ALARM:CLOCK
San Francisco-based dating site Zoosk has raised $4.1M led by Canaan Partners with ATA Ventures. The company has developed a simple dating interface for people to get to know each other on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, etc. The company says it improves the online dating experience by helping people “meet and connect through the context of their online social communities.” An aspect of the service is that it can connect users on different social networking sites.
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