In This Update:
• Quadrangle Group Buys Greenfield Online for $426 Million
• Online Gamer Playtech Raises $218.5 Million, Plans Acquisitions
• Glam Media Buys UK Online Ad Rep Firm Monetise
• NBCU Takes Majority Stake in Sports Site WCSN
• Yahoo Stretches Mobile Reach To 600 Million
• EA Extends Bid for Take-Two, is Rejected Again
• Technorati Launches Blog Ad Network, Technorati Media
• Microsoft to Open European Search Tech Center
• Brightcove Rebuilds Video Service
• Google: We Don’t Know How to Make Money from YouTube
• Researchers Develop Ultra Low-Cost Plastic Memory
• Motorola Launches Movie Store for Cellphones
• Cisco Warns Video Could Swamp the Internet
• Report: 9 Million Mobile Users Shop via Cell Phone
• Solarflare Raises $26 Million for Networking Chips
• Answers Corp. Raising Up To $13 Million from VC Firm Redpoint Ventures
• Funambol Raises $12.5 Million Series B for Mobile Synching
Quadrangle Group Buys Greenfield Online for $426 Million
THE DEAL
The Quadrangle Group has signed a deal to buy Internet surveying firm Greenfield Online for $426 million in cash. Terms call for Quadrangle to pay $15.50 per share for Greenfield, a 17 percent premium over the target’s $13.28 Friday close. The price is also about 26 percent over the company’s average closing price for the past 30 days. The buyout includes a so-called go-shop clause that allows Greenfield Online to seek other suitors until Aug. 4. Wilton, Conn.-based Greenfield collects consumer opinions about products and services for marketing firms and corporations. In the 12 months ended March 31, the company recorded Ebitda of $31.95 million on sales of $132.5 million.
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Online Gamer Playtech Raises $218.5 Million, Plans Acquisitions
THOMSON via FORBES
Online gaming software company Playtech is set to explore acquisition opportunities after successfully raising GBP112m (USD218.5m) in share placing. The group placed 21.62 shares, representing 9.9% of its market value, at 520 pence per share. Playtech says it intends to use the proceeds to acquire affiliate marketing companies or fund existing deals, although the group did not specify any particular acquisition deals. Last year, the group acquired Virtue Fusion, an online bingo software provider, and also entered a licensing agreement with gambling site PartyGaming.
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Glam Media Buys UK Online Ad Rep Firm Monetise
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Glam Media is set to announce the acquisition of digital-marketing firm Monetise, as part of plans to increase its global reach. According to the newspaper, Glam hopes to use the deal to develop ad operations in China, India, Japan, Germany, France and the UK. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but UK-based Monetise is expected to bring in between $25 million and $45 million of ad revenue next year. Glam Media is a privately held company that operates a network of websites and blogs aimed specifically at women, with features on fashion, cosmetics and entertainment. Some 42 million unique US visitors used the company’s flagship site Glam.com in May alone, estimates comScore. Monetise’s 17 employees will form Glam’s UK team.
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NBCU Takes Majority Stake in Sports Site WCSN
MULTICHANNEL
NBC Universal is polevaulting into the cable sports network arena, acquiring a majority interest in the Olympic-sports-tinged cable and broadband service World Championship Sports Network. NBCU officials say it will seek to aggressively increase the five-year old WCSN’s 2 million subscriber base over the next year under its new brand, Universal Sports Network. The service, which will be co-owned by NBC Sports and private equity fund InterMedia Partners, could potentially be packaged as part of an overall extension of NBC’s Olympics deal with operators. Those contracts expire after the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing. As part of the deal expected to be announced this week, NBCU will become a “significant shareholder” in WCSN – which offers more than 2,000 hours of annual original event programming and 200 live events in such sports as track and field, equestrian, gymnastics, ice hockey and skating – and will jointly control WCSN with the company’s majority shareholder InterMedia Partners, although financial details were not revealed.
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Yahoo Stretches Mobile Reach To 600 Million
REUTERS
Internet media firm Yahoo Inc said on Tuesday that its mobile search service will be offered by six more telecom companies in Asia. It now has 60 such partnerships worldwide, including with Mahanagar Telephon Nigam (MTNL) in India, Hong CSL Limited, Smart Communications and Digital Mobile Phlis (Sun Cellular) in the Philippines and Vibo Telecom in Taiwan. “We are now able to reach 600 million subscribers,” David Ko, Asia managing director and vice president of Yahoo’s mobile division, told reporters at a media briefing.
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EA Extends Bid for Take-Two, is Rejected Again
REUTERS
Video game publisher Electronic Arts Inc on Tuesday again extended its $2 billion takeover offer for smaller rival Take-Two Interactive Software Inc but Take-Two again rejected the bid as too low. EA, publisher of blockbuster games such as “Madden” and “Need For Speed,” said it extended the $25.74-a-share offer to July 18 from June 16. Take-Two, publisher of “Grand Theft Auto,” said its board continues to recommend that shareholders not tender their shares to EA, which launched its bid in February. About 6.14 million shares of Take-Two have been tendered in the offer, which Take-Two said represents just 7.9 percent of the total.
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Technorati Launches Blog Ad Network, Technorati Media
TECHCRUNCH
Blog-focused advertising networks are all the rage right now, with both Federated Media and Glam pulling down big valuation financing rounds in the last few months based on very early growth metrics. Other startups, like Six Apart, have launched their own blog advertising networks as well. Technorati now joins them with the launch of Technorati Media , their own blog advertising network. The company has been testing the new sales product with a number of partners, including BlogTalkRadio, BlogCritics, BlogCatalog, BlogTV, Technabob, GPSMagazine, GeekAlerts and NerdApproved. CEO Richard Jalichandra says these blogs reach a combined audience of approximately 17 million unique monthly visitors.
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Microsoft to Open European Search Tech Center
REUTERS
Microsoft Corp said on Tuesday it planned to open a search technology center (STC) in Europe as part of its plan to accelerate investments in Live Search. The location of the STC has not yet been determined, the company said, with several cities being considered. The STC will be opened in Microsoft’s 2009 fiscal year, starting July 1 this year. Microsoft has sought to increase its presence in online search in a bid to gain ground on market leader Google Inc and Yahoo Inc to create an online advertising powerhouse.
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Brightcove Rebuilds Video Service
TECHCRUNCH
Brightcove, the Cambridge-based video hosting company, is releasing a completely rebuilt version of its service into private beta. The new publishing model centers around Brightcove’s first server-side API, which allows publishers to deeply integrate video meta data into their display pages. Publishers can choose to highlight related videos in ways that make the most sense for their content. They can also display descriptions, and choose URLs, that optimize SEO. As far as monetization is concerned, in-page advertisements can be synchronized with in-video ads to make for more effective impressions.
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Google: We Don’t Know How to Make Money from YouTube
TIMESONLINE
Google has said that it is still unsure how to make money from YouTube, the enormously popular video-sharing website it owns, but hopes to be able to do so soon. Eric Schmidt, the search giant’s chief executive, said it “seemed obvious” that Google should be able to generate “significant amounts of money” from YouTube, on which hundreds of millions of videos are watched every day, but that as yet it hadn’t figured out how to go about it. He also rejected suggestions that Google dominated the web, saying that it was outperformed by Yahoo, the internet portal, in some areas, and added that in any case the company’s goal was not “to monetize everything”. In an interview with The New Yorker writer Ken Auletta, Mr Schmidt was cautious about how profitable YouTube might be, but said he believed the site could lead to “the creation of a whole new industry.” He said his optimism was based on two facts: “We know people are watching it” and “We have the luxury of time to invest.”
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Researchers Develop Ultra Low-Cost Plastic Memory
NANOWERK
Researchers at the Zernike Institute of Advanced Materials at the University of Groningen have developed a technology for a plastic ferro-electric diode which they believe will achieve a breakthrough in the development of ultra low-cost plastic memory material. Their findings will be published in the July edition of Nature Materials, a publication of the leading scientific journal Nature. The newly developed technology is similar to that used in Flash memory chips. In both cases, the memory retains data without being connected to a power source. Flash memory chips are used in memory sticks, MP3 players, cellular phones and in the memory cards of digital cameras.
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Motorola Launches Movie Store for Cellphones
LAST100
Motorola has launched a full-length movie store for its mobile phones. The service is available first in the UK-only, but will eventually extend to France, Italy, Germany and Spain. The catalog is currently restricted to forty titles from one studio – Paramount Digital Entertainment – including “The Italian Job”, “Star Trek” and “Team America: World Police”, priced at between £5.99 and £8.99 per movie. Movies can’t be downloaded ‘over-the-air’ directly to handsets but instead the service requires “side-loading” whereby content is downloaded to a PC first and then transfered onto a mobile phone. Motorola says this is so that customers avoid potentially expensive data charges but it also means that the service can bypass carriers who may offer a competing service
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Cisco Warns Video Could Swamp the Internet
INFORMATION WEEK
Cisco has just issued a report that backs up claims by many Internet service providers that video viewing over the Web is gobbling up huge quantities of network capacity and the problem is only going to get worse. The Cisco Visual Networking Index predicts that IP traffic will nearly double every two years to 2012. Released Monday, the 2007-2012 forecast projects that IP traffic will grow at a combined annual rate of 46%. The growth is creating a new vocabulary of IP metrics of exabytes and zettabytes. One exabyte equals 1 billion GB, or 250 million DVDs. A zettabyte equals 1 trillion GB, or 1,000 exabytes or 250 billion DVDs. “The broad and increasing adoption of visual networking is having a significant impact on IP traffic growth for both consumer and business services markets worldwide,” said Suraj Shetty, Cisco’s VP of service provider marketing, in a statement. “Until just a few years ago, ‘exabyte’ was an unheard-of term. However, because of the massive growth we’re seeing, by 2012 we will have to reorient our vocabulary once again, as the metric that we need then will be the zettabyte.”
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Report: 9 Million Mobile Users Shop via Cell Phone
WEBPRONEWS
Making purchases using mobile devices such as cell phones is increasing in the U.S. with 9 million mobile subscribers saying they have used their mobile to pay for goods or services and nearly half (49%) saying they plan to try mobile commerce in the future according to a new report from Nielsen. Men were found to be more likely then women to use their mobile phone for commerce with 4.9 million men doing so and 4.3 million women making a purchase using their mobile phone. The most likely age group to make a purchase using cell phones were those between the ages of 25 to 34. Three million adults in the 25 to 34 age category, or 5.4 percent, have made a purchase, compared to 3.6 percent of all mobile subscribers. Out of the 40 million users of the mobile web in April, 5 million visited mobile shopping and auction sites, an increase of 73 percent from April 2007, when 2.9 mobile users did the same. eBay was the most popular shopping site on the mobile Web, with 3.4 million unique visitors in April.
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Solarflare Raises $26 Million for Networking Chips
VENTUREBEAT
Solarflare Communications has raised $26 million in venture capital for its high-speed networking chip business as part of an effort to create more energy-efficient data centers. The Irvine, Calif.-based company is creating 10GBASE-T chips, which can transfer data at 10 gigabits a second over the Ethernet protocol. Such chips are used in servers and switches inside data centers to boost the transfer of data from one piece of hardware to another with the lowest power consumption. The company is in a good spot because it is the first to capitalize on a generational shift in networking, as network speeds move from 1-gigabit-per-second to 10-gigabits, said Russell Stern, chief executive of Solarflare. The round includes previous investors such as Oak Investment Partners, Foundation Capital, Accel Partners and Amadeus Capital Partners. The round slightly exceeds the amount raised by rival chip company Aquantia, which raised $25 million in March.
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Answers Corp. Raising Up To $13 Million from VC Firm Redpoint Ventures
PAIDCONTENT
Answers Corp. (NSDQ: ANSW), parent of reference site Answers.com, is raising up to $13 million from VC firm Redpoint Ventures. The company has already sold $6 million worth of convertible preferred stock, convertible into 1,333,333 shares at $4.50 (shares closed yesterday $3.92). Redpoint then has the right to purchase another $7 million worth of convertible preferred of series B convertible preferred stock, convertible into 1,272,727 shares of common stock at $5.50. Each investment comes with additional warrants, basically giving up Redpoint an upside sweetener. As of last quarter, Answers had about 7.85 million shares outstanding, for a total market cap of $30.8 million.
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Funambol Raises $12.5 Million Series B for Mobile Synching
TECHCRUNCH
By taking an open-source approach to mobile mail and contact syncing, Funambol is cracking the problem of creating applications across 850 different mobile handsets. The company raised $12.5million in a series B financing led by Nexit Ventures. Castile Ventures and existing investors Walden International and H.I.G ventures also participated. Funambol previously raised $5 million in a series A in August, 2005, and then a previously undisclosed follow-on of $5.5 million in December, 2006. The company is based in Redwood City, California, with most of its employees and development engineers located south of Milan, Italy. It is behind one of the largest mobile open-source projects. Its syncing engine has been downloaded more than two million times by developers.
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Tags: Accel Partners, Answers Corp., AOL, Blockbuster, Brand, Brightcove, Cambridge, China, Cisco, ComScore, EBay, EMI, Financing, Forbes, Funambol, Glam Media, Google, Greenfield Online, IGA, Informa, ISP, Memory, Microsoft, Monetise, Motorola, NBC, NBCU, Oak Investment Partners, Orb, Paramount, Playtech, Quadrangle Group, Redpoint Ventures, SEC, Series A, Solarflare, Technorati, U.S., VC, Venture Capital, Video, WCSN, Yahoo, YouTube