In This Update:
• PixelFish Acquires Eyespot
• European Business Social Network XING Acquires Socialmedian for $7.5 Million
• Document Sharing Site Scribd Raises $9 Million Second Round
• Music Industry to Abandon Mass Suits
• Report: Overall U.S. Music Demand Down 2% in Q3
• Scientific Journal to Authors: Publish in Wikipedia or Perish
• Study: Kids Going From Ads to Web
• Redstone Gets Reprieve To Restructure $800 Million In Debt
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PixelFish Acquires Eyespot
NEW TEEVEE
Video production company PixelFish announced today that it has acquired recently-shut down online video editing/white-label video company Eyespot. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Founded and angel-funded in 2006, the Torrance, Calif.-based PixelFish has 15 employees and is similar to TurnHere, offering to create low-cost video promotions for small and medium-sized businesses that can be distributed to outlets like Yellowbook. PixelFish VP of Sales and Marketing Stephen Condon told us in a phone interview that assets like Eyespot’s Mixer tool will allow clients to edit video on their own, doing things like swapping out voiceovers. The acquisition also gives PixelFish access to video publishing and transcoding tools, as well as a number of provisional patents for online video technologies.
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European Business Social Network XING Acquires Socialmedian for $7.5 Million
TECHCRUNCH
Hamburg, Germany based XING , a global professional social network that’s strong in Europe, has acquired New York based socialmedian for approximately $7.5 million in total, a mix of $4 million in cash up front and an earn-out valued at between $700,000 to $3.5 million (€0.5 million-€2.5 million) payable over three years. Socialmedian’s founding CEO Jason Goldberg is relocating to Germany and will be joining XING as Vice President Applications Platform, and the entire socialmedian team will be integrated into the company. Socialmedian is basically a personalized news filter that integrates well with social networking platforms. It aggregates news articles from around the web, blogosphere and social services like Digg, Delicious, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Google Reader, FriendFeed, etc. which are then filtered by topic.
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Document Sharing Site Scribd Raises $9 Million Second Round
PAIDCONTENT
Scribd, the document uploading and sharing service which doesn’t yet seems to have found a way to get any major revenues, has found some more money: it has received $9 million in second round funding led by Charles River Ventures, along with money from previous investors Redpoint Ventures and Kinsey Hills Group. Scribd says it is among the largest it its category (which has sites like Docstoc) and has 50 million readers each month and more than 50K new documents uploaded daily. It has been trying to license its platform to other publishes, one way it plans to develop revenue; also, the obligatory Google Adsense revenues.
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Music Industry to Abandon Mass Suit
WALL STREET JOURNAL
After years of suing thousands of people for allegedly stealing music via the Internet, the recording industry is set to drop its legal assault as it searches for more effective ways to combat online music piracy.The decision represents an abrupt shift of strategy for the industry, which has opened legal proceedings against about 35,000 people since 2003. Critics say the legal offensive ultimately did little to stem the tide of illegally downloaded music. And it created a public-relations disaster for the industry, whose lawsuits targeted, among others, several single mothers, a dead person and a 13-year-old girl.
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Report: Overall U.S. Music Demand Down 2% in Q3
DIGITAL MUSIC WIRE
Demand for music among U.S. Internet users fell 2% in the third quarter of 2008, a figure that includes CDs, purchased downloads, songs downloaded via file-sharing networks, and borrowing CDs to rip to computers, according to a report from market research firm NPD Group. The proportion of consumers purchasing a CD fell from 25% in the third quarter of 2007 to 22% this year, and NPD estimated that the volume of CDs purchased overall declined 19% compared to last year. By contrast, the number of digital downloads purchased, and number of buyers both saw an increase. Fifteen percent of Internet users, up 2% from last year, purchased tracks from online music stores, and legal music download volumes were up 29%.
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Scientific Journal to Authors: Publish in Wikipedia or Perish
READ WRITE WEB
Every day, hundreds of articles appear in academic journals and very little of this information is available to the public. Now, RNA Biology has decided to ask every author who submits an article to a newly created section of the journal about families of RNA molecules to also submit a Wikipedia page that summarizes the work. As Nature reports, this is the first time an academic journal has forced its authors to disseminate information this way. The initiative is a collaboration between the journal and the RNA family database (Rfam) consortium led by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. Every new Wikipedia page will go through the same peer review process as the original article, though afterward, of course, the pages are open for editing just like every other page in the Wikipedia.
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Study: Kids Going From Ads to Web
VENTURE BEAT
Kids who go online to learn about a product have often been prompted to do so by advertising they encountered elsewhere. A report released this week by Mediamark Research & Intelligence says 46 percent of the 6- to 11-year-olds it polled for its 2008 American Kids Study have “visited a Web site that they saw or heard about in a commercial or advertisement.” Analyzing survey data collected in April through August, the report says the population of kids who’ve followed this path is about evenly split between boys and girls. But incidence of such behavior skews significantly toward the older end of the 6-11 age spectrum.
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Redstone Gets Reprieve To Restructure $800 Million In Debt
PAIDCONTENT
No financial Armageddon today for Sumner Redstone, who gets an indefinite reprieve on either paying-not gonna happen-or restructuring some $800 million in debt coming due for National Amusements. The total debt is about $1.6 billion. Redstone owns 80 percent of the company, which owns movie theaters and controls Viacom and CBS. (Redstone is chairman of both media company boards.) The reason for the extension: National Amusements is gaining time to finesse a plan that’s already been presented to creditors, it’s current on payments and the deadline was more of a target than anything. One reason the plan isn’t completely ready: the NY Times says Redstone’s daughter Shari opposes it.
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