In This Update:
• Obama Picks Genachowski To Head FCC
• Co-Founders, Top Executives Resign From Sling Media
• Court Upholds ‘Amazon Tax’, Sales Tax Coming To E-Commerce?
• Delicious Founder Joshua Schachter Joins Google
• Online Ad Provider Go Internet Media Raises $10 Million First Round
• Google Launches Quick Search Box for Macs
• Quattro Wireless Puts Mobile Ad Inventory in Microsoft’s Atlas
• Social Networking: Will Facebook Overtake MySpace In The U.S. in 2009?
• ActionAllStars.com Signs Up 100K Users for Sports Site
• NewsGator Raises $10 Million in Sixth Round
• Astro Gaming Raises $3.5 Million for Gaming Accessories Business
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Obama Picks Genachowski To Head FCC
PAIDCONTENT
Genachowski has significant media and start-up experience: the Harvard Law classmate of Obama worked for Barry Diller as a senior IAC executive before founding LaunchBox Digital. He’s a cofounder and managing director of Rock Creek Ventures. His resume also includes stints as a law clerk for two U.S. Supreme Court justices. Observers had him on the short list for the new chief technology officer post Obama plans, but Genachowski’s experience as chief counsel to Clinton era FCC Chairman Reed Hundt seems to have tilted the choice in that direction.
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Co-Founders, Top Executives Resign From Sling Media
DIGITAL MEDIA WIRE
Sling Media, the developer of media “place-shifting” technology acquired a year ago by EchoStar for a reported $380 million, on Monday saw the departure of its two co-founders and a good portion of its top management, PaidContent reports. Company co-founders and brothers Blake and Jason Krikorian — Sling’s CEO and SVP of business development, respectively — along with president Jason Hirschhorn; chief creative officer Ben White; and VP of sales Greg Wilkes have all resigned from Sling. Hirschhorn told PaidContent that the executives agreed to stay on for a year following the EchoStar acquisition and take the company through another Consumer Electronics Show, but, “Now it’s time for the entrepreneurs to move on.”
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Court Upholds ‘Amazon Tax’, Sales Tax Coming To E-Commerce?
SILICON ALLEY INSIDER
Bad news for Amazon, and all of e-commerce: The New York Supreme Court has upheld the validity of the “Amazon tax.” You may remember this one — back in April, the New York state legislature passed a bill requiring etailers like Amazon to collect state sales tax, despite a 1992 US Supreme Court ruling that only companies with a physical presence in the state are required to collect taxes. Naturally, Amazon (together with Overstock.com) sued, but a judge shot down the complaint.
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Delicious Founder Joshua Schachter Joins Google
TECH CRUNCH
We’ve confirmed that Joshua Schachter , the founder of Delicious and a Yahoo exec until June 2008, joins a number of ex-Yahoo’ers at cross-town rival Google. In a phone call Schachter says he hasn’t been assigned to a specific project yet and declined even to state who he’s working for at the Internet giant, but he did confirm that today was his first day on the job at Google.
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Online Ad Provider Go Internet Media Raises $10 Million First Round
PAIDCONTENT
Ad network and online marketing company Go Internet Media has secured a $10 million first round of financing from U.K.-based PE Firm Kennet Partners. Internet Media runs lead-generation portals (like Free Education Guide) in the secondary ed space, as well as a cost-per-action (CPA) ad network. The Santa Clara, CA-based firm will use the funds to help grow its sales team; and since it doesn’t operate a pure-play, CPM-based ad network, Internet Media may be sheltered from the plummeting display ad rates that have been forecast for this year.
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Google Launches Quick Search Box for Macs
WEB PRO NEWS
Google has released a Quick Search Box tool for Macs that it hopes will make searching easier outside of the browser. Google says the open-source quick search box for Macs is still in the experimental stage. “This Mac version is much more experimental than its iPhone sibling, Google Mobile App, and through it you will be able to see many of the areas we are exploring: contextual search, actions, and extensibility. It is by no means feature-complete, but is a very good indication of things to come.”
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Quattro Wireless Puts Mobile Ad Inventory in Microsoft’s Atlas
CLICKZ
Mobile ad network Quattro Wireless is making its ad inventory available through Microsoft’s Atlas Media Console, a dashboard used by ad agencies and advertisers for media buying and planning. The buy-side solution is designed to make it easier to integrate mobile display ad campaigns with other digital ad formats. A hurdle to the growth of mobile ad spending has been the silos separating media platforms. Traditional forms of online media such as display, video, e-mail, and search are bought through DoubleClick’s DART or Microsoft’s Atlas. Yet mobile is still bought separately through a mobile ad network. That’s slowly starting to change, due to developments such as the agreement between Quattro Wireless and Microsoft
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Social Networking: Will Facebook Overtake MySpace In The U.S. in 2009?
TECHCRUNCH
Year end Comscore numbers for the U.S. audience are out. The first thing we checked? How the major social networks are doing. Facebook, which became the largest worldwide social network in mid 2008, is still playing catch up to MySpace in the U.S. They have 54.5 million monthly unique visitors, says Comscore, compared to nearly 76 million for MySpace. But Facebook’s growth rate in the U.S. averaged 3.8% per month over the last twelve months. MySpace’s U.S. growth rate is 0.8% per month. That’s nothing to be ashamed of, but unless things change a lot, Facebook will overtake MySpace to become the largest social network in the U.S. in…2010.
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ActionAllStars.com Signs Up 100K Users for Sports Site
SOCALTECH
Marina Del Rey-based Six Degree Games is off to a rapid start with its new Action AllStars virtual world, the firm tells socalTECH, with more than 100,000 registered user in the first two weeks of public availability. The site–which counts both the National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball Advanced Media as partners–offers an online site focused on interacting with friends, playing games, and chatting with other sports fans. Minard Hamilton, the firm’s CEO and co-founder, told us that that the most popular part of the site has been the firm’s areas for NBA games.
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NewsGator Raises $10 Million in Sixth Round
PULSE 2.0
Last week Facebook posted a video describing how to publish feed stories with Facebook Connect. Today one of our readers, Amin Issa, posted an interesting observation from the video: the addition of the word “Like” which was hyperlinked. This appears to be a duplicate of FriendFeed’s popular “like” feature. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to see the feature in action but my guess is that this was the site’s beta version. It’s interesting to see Facebook duplicating some of the features provided by FriendFeed as they strive to continue working toward becoming the largest site for sharing information.
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Astro Gaming Raises $3.5 Million for Gaming Accessories Business
VENTURE BEAT
Astro Gaming said it has raised $3.5 million in a second round of funding for its gaming headset and accessories business. The San Francisco company spun out of Astro Studios, an industrial design company that helped design the Xbox 360, in August, 2006. It raised $2 million from Seraphim Investments and designed an audio headset for professional gamers. Astro Gaming’s A40 headset had multiple functions for pro gamers and it was adopted by most of the teams in the Major League Gaming tournament circuit.
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