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July 11, 2008

In This Update:
• FCC Chairman to Recommend Sanctions Against Comcast for Traffic Throttling
• Guardian Media Group Buys paidContent for $30 Million
• Turner to Sell Ads on Some Yahoo Sports Sites
• Citizen Journalism Site NowPublic Acquires Truemors
• New York Magazine Buys Restaurants Menu Site Menupages
• AT&T and AOL Block Child Porn Newsgroups
• Yahoo to Offer Ad-Supported Free Game Downloads
• Report: User-Gen to Only Ever Account for 4% of Video Revenue
• Sony to Put Virtual Ads in PlayStation 3 Games
• Wikipedia Hosts Human Gene Repository
• YouTube Adding Geosearch
• Survey: Listening To Music via TV and PC Rises
• Chinese Video Site 56.com Returns After Month-Long Outage
• Real Estate Site Trulia Raises $15 Million Fourth Round
• Video-Enabled Web Marketplace Shopflick Raises $7 Million Series A
Sponsored by:
McCarter & English, LLP
The law firm of new media. Major offices in New York, Boston, Newark, Stamford, and other cities. Advising new media companies from start-up to exit. Venture capital, IP protections and disputes, employment matters, outsourcing, joint ventures, acquisitions, to name just a few.

FCC Chairman to Recommend Sanctions Against Comcast for Traffic Throttling
YAHOO
The head of the Federal Communications Commission said Thursday he will recommend that the nation’s largest cable company be punished for violating agency principles that guarantee customers open access to the Internet.
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Guardian Media Group Buys paidContent for $30 Million
ALLTHINGSDIGITAL
Britain’s Guardian Media Group is set to announce this morning that it will buy the company that runs the high-profile digital media news site paidContent for a price “north of $30 million.” That price, though, includes an earn-out, sources said, which will depend on future performance of the company. The paidContent site is owned by ContentNext and was founded by Publisher and Editor Rafat Ali in 2002.
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Turner to Sell Ads on Some Yahoo Sports Sites
REUTERS
Time Warner Inc’s Turner Broadcasting System Inc unit will sell advertisements on Yahoo Inc’s NBA, golf and NASCAR pages in a multiyear deal, the companies said on Thursday. The arrangement is unusual for Yahoo. Beyond selling ads on its own network of websites, the company has typically provided third-party partners with its online advertising sales team’s expertise and technology rather than the other way around.
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Citizen Journalism Site NowPublic Acquires Truemors
DIGITAL MEDIA WIRE
NowPublic, an online “citizen journalism” network, announced on Thursday that it has acquired Truemors, venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki’s site “dedicated to the free-flow of the news rumor mill.” Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Truemors solicits user-generated newsworthy rumors across topics ranging from entertainment and gaming to sports, news and health, and pays its contributors per post that is accepted.
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New York Magazine Buys Restaurants Menu Site Menupages
PAIDCONTENT
Menupages, the New York City based online restaurant menu guides site, is being bought out by New York Magazine, we have learned. This is the first such online buy for NYM, which is owned by Wasserstein & Co., the PE firm founded by Bruce Wasserstein. Menupages, which was founded in 2002, now offers restaurant and take-out menus for eight major U.S. cities
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AT&T and AOL Block Child Porn Newsgroups
DSL REPORTS
In June, Verizon, Time Warner Cable and Sprint announced they’d struck a deal with the New York Attorney General, agreeing to block access to newsgroups that contain child porn, as well as quickly delete any child porn from their servers. AOL and AT&T today announced they too would be purging servers of such content and blocking access to newsgroups. AT&T spokesman Marty Richter said the company would disable all those with addresses starting with “alt.binary.”
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Yahoo to Offer Ad-Supported Free Game Downloads
REUTERS
Yahoo Inc said on Thursday it would offer its users hundreds of popular casual online games as free downloads backed by revenue from advertising integrated into the games. More than 400 ad-supported games from top casual games publishers like Anarchy Big Fish Games and Sugar Games will be available to users before year-end, Yahoo said. The company is working with technology providers Double Fusion and NeoEdge to sell and integrate video ads into the Yahoo! Games catalog.
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Report: User-Gen to Only Ever Account for 4% of Video Revenue
NEWTEEVEE
User-generated video will account for 42 percent of streams this year, but only 4 percent of online video revenue, according to an upcoming study from The Diffusion Group. Conversely, professional online video will account for 58 percent of streams and 96 percent of revenue. Those trends are expected to hold for the next five years.
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Sony to Put Virtual Ads in PlayStation 3 Games
PHYSORG
Sony announced Friday that it will start offering virtual advertising space in PlayStation 3 games as part of efforts to stem losses from the console. Players may see the ads in spaces such as billboards and wall surfaces within the games, it said. Sony has teamed up with in-game advertisement firms Double Fusion and IGA Worldwide for the new service, which will be available mainly in Japan, North America and Europe.
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Wikipedia Hosts Human Gene Repository
ITNEWS
U.S. scientists are developing a “Gene Wiki” with the aim of fostering a flexible, organic archive of human genetic information. The project exists within Wikipedia, and is expected to speed up the process of deciphering genome sequences. To speed up the development of the ‘Gene Wiki’, the researchers developed a computer program that downloads information from existing databases, formats it, and posts the information as a ‘stub’ article on Wikipedia.
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YouTube Adding Geosearch
NEWTEEVEE
YouTube will soon add geosearch – giving viewers the ability to find videos tagged to a certain location – disclosed product manager Brian Glick at a developer talk at YouTube’s San Bruno, Calif., campus on Thursday. Glick said the feature was currently “in limited experimentation,” and would be launched “really soon.”
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Survey: Listening To Music via TV and PC Rises
HYPERBOT
A new survey by Parks Associates says 2/3rds of US and Canadian broadband households regularly use the PC to play music at home and a surprising 1/3 say they use their TV to listen to music. MP3 players ranked equal to TVs.
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Chinese Video Site 56.com Returns After Month-Long Outage
PACIFIC EPOCH
Guangzhou-based online video site 56.com reopened on July 11 after more than a month of “system updates”. During the uncertain period, company employees and unnamed insiders alike said the site had been closed due to questionable content. 56.com went offline on June 3, but when asked what updates took so long and what, if any, new content has been added to the site, the company only says, “no comment”.
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Real Estate Site Trulia Raises $15 Million Fourth Round
PAIDCONTENT
Trulia, a popular real estate search site, has raised a $15 million fourth round led by Deep Fork Capital LLC, along with past backers Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners and Fayez Sarofim & Co. The company has now raised a total of $33 million. The company, which claims to be the biggest online real estate company, recently rolled out its own ad network, centered around real estate
Source>

Video-Enabled Web Marketplace Shopflick Raises $7 Million Series A
DIGITAL MEDIA WIRE
Shopflick, the developer of an online video-shopping marketplace, announced on Thursday that it has raised $7 million in its first round of funding, from Panorama Capital and Venrock. Los Angeles-based Shopflick’s platform enables sellers to set up custom branded shops and use video to tell the stories behind their products. The company is led by former executives from News Corp., Fox Interactive and eBay.
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