In This Update:
• Warner Pulls Music From YouTube
• Scribd Scores New President and $9 Million Investment
• “Twitter of Korea” Acquired by “Google of Korea” for $2 Million
• Long Tail Sells Little Music, Research Claims
• Austin Ventures and Casella Buy Fin Info Provider Asset International
• Mozilla’s Relationship with Google Is Getting Complicated
• Another $100 Million for Palm from Bono & Elevation Partners
• Oracle Fancying an ‘Unbreakable Salesforce.com’?
• Google Reader Quietly Launches a “What’s Hot” Area
• $1 Billion Acquisitions Still Exist — In China (SINA)
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Warner Pulls Music From YouTube
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Warner Music Group Corp. said it began removing its songs and videos from Google Inc.’s YouTube videosharing site this weekend, after the two sides failed to renegotiate a licensing deal.
For now, the decision doesn’t appear likely to escalate into a broader battle between YouTube and the music industry, as people close to the other major labels said they didn’t anticipate taking down their content in the immediate future. Still, the dispute reflects frustration within media companies over how little ad revenue is generated by their deals with YouTube. Warner, like two of the three other major-label groups, Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group and Sony Corp.’s Sony BMG Music Entertainment, licensed its recording and music-publishing catalogs to YouTube shortly before the site’s acquisition by Google in 2006.
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Scribd Scores New President and $9 Million Investment
ADOTAS
Social document-sharing service Sribd has reeled in $9 million in Series B funding led by Charles River Ventures; Redpoint Ventures and Kinsey Hills Group participated. Scribd has also scored a new president – George Consagra, previously chief operating officer of AOL’s social networking site Bebo. Consagra will be responsible for Scribd’s business development, sales, finance and marketing. Charles River’s Bill Tai will join Scribd’s board. Scribd currently has roughly 50 million users a month and reports that 50,000 documents are uploaded daily.
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Twitter of Korea” Acquired by “Google of Korea” for $2 Million
READ WRITE WEB
Web 2.0 Asia is reporting that Me2Day – a Korean microblogging service likened to Twitter – has been acquired by Naver – the most popular search portal in Korea – for 2.2 billion Korean Wan, which equates to roughly $2 million US. Founded in February 2007, Me2Day was bootstrapped and angel funded. It had not yet taken on larger venture capital rounds. No estimate was provided for the amount of money invested in the development of the service to date.
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Long Tail Sells Little Music, Research Claims
PAIDCONTENT
Turns out the “long tail” may not be as long as some people thought. Though Chris Anderson’s theory holds that unlimited online retail availability means perpetual sales for archive and niche media content, UK music royalty collector MCPS-PRS says only 173,000 albums were bought through 2007 from a total of 1.23 million available; that means only 14 percent ever got a sale.
This is a small update (via Times Online) to a study the organisation’s economist Will Page presented in November, which found, in the singles market, only about three million of 13 million available were bought, and 80 percent of sales came from 52,000 tracks.
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Austin Ventures and Casella Buy Fin Info Provider Asset International
PAIDCONTENT
Austin Ventures, the PE firm, has acquired B2B online/print financial information provider Asset International, a Stamford, CT, which focuses on pension funds, asset managers, and other financial institutions. AV has also invested an undisclosed amount of capital into the company. Jim Casella, the former CEO of Reed Business U.S., who was working with Austin as an entrepreneur in residence of sorts, has taken over at the CEO of the decade old company. Asset International has brands such as Plamsponsor magazine aimed at investment professionals, Daily NewsDash and AdvisorDash newsletters, among others.
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Mozilla’s Relationship with Google Is Getting Complicated
PULSE2
The vast majority of Mozilla’s revenue comes from Google. In 2007, Mozilla pulled in around $60 million thanks to Google. That $60 million translates to about 88% of Mozilla’s revenue. The default homepage on Firefox is Google. When a user searches Google using the default Mozilla homepage, Google pays Mozilla a share of the ad dollar made on each click. With the Launch of Chrome, Google may start distancing itself from Mozilla. Chrome is a direct competitor to Firefox. Therefore, it’s in Google’s best interest to gain as much market share as possible. Last week. Google Chrome came out of beta. It was also made the default browser in the Google Pack.
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Another $100 Million for Palm from Bono & Elevation Partners
GIGAOM
It must be Christmas, as the guys at Elevation Partners are feeling generous enough to invest another $100 million into beleaguered smartphone maker Palm, which has been slip-sliding away for a very long time. Elevation Partners, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based private equity firm headed by Roger McNamee, previously invested $325 million in Palm (for about 25 percent of the company) and brought in new management – many of them former Apple executives – to save what was once an iconic brand and chief instigator of the smartphone revolution.
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Oracle Fancying an ‘Unbreakable Salesforce.com’?
CNET
The last company on which Oracle focus this much was Red Hat, as the software maker (re)announced Unbreakable Linux as a way to undercut Red Hat’s dominant Linux distribution. ZDNet Editor in Chief Larry Dignan suggests that the Salesforce talk may simply be a prelude to Oracle buying the online customer relations management specialist. Rumors are going around, and it wouldn’t be a surprise: Oracle considered buying Red Hat before too. Indeed, the best way to get acquired (or, at worst, undermined) by Oracle seems to be by beating it in the market. Oracle’s corporate culture seems to appreciate vendors that can beat it at its own game. Oracle’s latest fixation on Salesforce might suggest that its efforts to clobber the software-as-a-service leader with its own SaaS offering haven’t worked, at least not as well as planned.
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Google Reader Quietly Launches a “What’s Hot” Area
VENTUREBEAT
The Official Google Reader Blog has added a new “What’s Hot” sidebar item that “shows some algorithmically generated stuff that is interesting across the web,” a post on the blog notes. And this isn’t just a sidebar item, it has its own shared page just like every Google Reader who shares items has. This means that yes, you can subscribe to it and see some of “what’s hot” across the web. It’s not entirely clear how Google is generating this hot list other than that vague description that it is “algorithmically generated.” It’s possible that it’s not using Google Reader data at all. In fact, from the look of the URL for the page, it would seem to be a single Google Reader account that has labeled certain items as “cool.”
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$1 Billion Acquisitions Still Exist — In China (SINA)
SILICON ALLEY INSIDER
Chinese portal Sina.com (SINA) will acquire advertising company Focus Media (FMCN) for $1 billion in stock. The assets include Focus Media’s online adveritisng company Allyes, as well as its LCD display network, poster frame network and anin-store network. The deal is remarkable because only a year ago, speculation had Focus Media acquiring Sina in a stock-swap, not the other way around. Last week, we squashed a rumor that Google would buy Focus Media. The same report named Microsoft as an interested suitor. So maybe somebody was trying to drive up Focus Media’s price.
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