In This Update:
• Gannett Pays Tribune $135 Million to Acquire Majority Stake In CareerBuilder
• Nokia to Debut Mobile Lifestreaming App
• Apple to Launch Interactive Album Application
• Liberty Media to Spin Off Entertainment Segment
• HarperCollins Launching Its Own Book Social Net Authonomy
• Report: Facebook Making $34.5M in Virtual Item Sales
• MAPme Widget Tries to Best Google Maps
• Screenlife Being Sold to Paramount
• Songza Rocks the College Scene
• Virtual Computer Raises $6 Million
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.Gannett Pays Tribune $135 Million to Acquire Majority Stake In CareerBuilder
PAIDCONTENT
Gannett has acquired an additional 10 percent stake in CareerBuilder from Tribune for $135 million. That gives Gannett a 50.8 percent controlling interest in the online jobs site. Tribune, which has been trying to find ways to turn around its financial and debt woes, now owns 30.8 percent of CareerBuilder. The shared ownership doesn’t affect the other partners in CareerBuilder, which includes The McClatchy Company, which continues to own 14.4 percent; and Microsoft Corp.continues to own 4 percent.
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Nokia to Debut Mobile Lifestreaming App
READ WRITE WEB
The Nokia app, called LifeviNe, will be available sometime in the next few weeks in Nokia’s Beta Labs. With LifeviNe, everything you do can be recorded and uploaded to the web. Based on the SportsTracker app, LifeviNe will geotag every image, video, and even your music (there are no details on the music aspect yet). The media will then be pushed to the web when you sync your phone, a process which can be done manually or automatically, depending on your preference. For security purposes, you may not want it to upload automatically since the geotagged images, videos, etc. will pinpoint your exact location on the map, but that’s a personal choice you’ll have to make.
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Apple to Launch Interactive Album Application
HYPERBOT
Apple appears to be trying to bring album packaging into the digital age with a new iPhone and iPod touch application that the company will test with the latest Snow Patrol release next month. “It will be an interactive element; a digital booklet that will take you into the videos and content,” Polydor product manager Liz Goodwin told Music Week. “For fans it will be a real must-have, and the fact that they are the first band to do this gives us an additional angle for exposure.”
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Liberty Media to Spin Off Entertainment Segment
DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
Liberty Media Corp. will spin off its Liberty Entertainment business into a separate entity that will hold $2 billion in debt incurred in the company’s April investment in DirecTV Group Inc., freeing the parent company to focus on other objectives. Liberty Entertainment, one of three publicly traded parts of Liberty Media, owns 50% of DirecTV and all of the cable-network Starz Entertainment, among other companies.
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HarperCollins Launching Its Own Book Social Net Authonomy
PAIDCONTENT
HarperCollins is launching its books social networking site called Authonomy with the intent of using it to discover new and unpublished authors, and hoping the community will vet these manuscripts and ideas. The site is launching in UK for now, after three months of private testing.
While HarperCollins is not promising book deals, it has committed to read the 10 top-rated submissions to Authonomy every month and hopes other publishers will also join the site.
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Report: Facebook Making $34.5M in Virtual Item Sales
DIGITAL MEDIA WIRE
Online social network is deriving about 10% of its revenue from the sales of virtual items that members can give as gifts to one another, according to an estimate calculated by Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Jeremy Liew on the firm’s blog. The company is thought to be selling between $28.5 million and $43.5 million in virtual gifts annually, or an average of $34.5 million — while total Facebook revenue is estimated at between $300 million and $350 million for 2008.
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MAPme Widget Tries to Best Google Maps
TECHCRUNCH
MAPme announced today that it has released a Google Maps widget that will let users perform tasks that they are already capable of performing with the run-of-the-mill Google Maps application, but will let them embed the flash app as a widget anywhere they can edit HTML, which should make frustrated Google Maps users happy. According to the company, the MAPme widget is a pure flash object that lets you add your own images or YouTube videos to your map’s hotspots. And in case you need them, the widget lets you populate the map with a series of markers. To add a social flavor, the MAPme widget lets users create and contribute hotspots that may be of interest to others.
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Screenlife Being Sold to Paramount
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
Screenlife, maker of the popular DVD trivia game “Scene It?”, is being acquired by Viacom’s Paramount unit in a deal for less than $100 million, according to a source familiar with the terms.
Co-founded in 2002 by Craig Kinzer and Dave Long, Screenlife has sold more than 15 million units of its DVD games. Screenlife raised $7 million in angel financing in 2003, bringing total funding in the company to $10 million. That same year the company inked a major distribution and marketing deal with Mattel, which propelled “Scene It?” into large retail outlets such as Target and Toys “R” Us.
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Songza Rocks the College Scene
NEW YORK TIMES
It’s back-to-school time again, which means that millions of college students are embarking on the annual hunt for the best free music sites on the Web. This year one online music site is all the rage: Songza.com. The site calls itself a “music search engine and Internet jukebox.” The site makes 28 million songs instantly playable, and employs some creative sleight-of-hand to do it. Enter in a song or band title and the site scours the voluminous collection of music videos on YouTube, and then streams the audio of a song – while hiding the video in the unseen margin of the Web browser.
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Virtual Computer Raises $6 Million
PRIVATE EQUITY HUB
Old Road Computing (a.k.a. Virtual Computer), a Westford, Mass.-based virtualization technology startup, has raised $6 million in Series A funding from Highland Capital Partners and Flybridge Capital Partners.
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