In This Update:
• Senate Approves Bill to Delay Digital TV
• Glam Media Snaps up AdaptiveAds
• The Hottest Telecom Startups in Japan
• Report: Online Retail Could Reach $156 Billion in 2009
• Scrapblog Raises $4 Million from Disney & Others
• The Economy According To Mint
• In Davos, Talk of Linking Clean Tech and Economy
• Industry Moves: Former MTV Exec Christina Norman Joins Oprah-Discovery As CEO
• Appirio Helps Companies Reach Your Facebook Friends
• BuySellAds Announces New Features and 2009 Plan
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Senate Approves Bill to Delay Digital TV
REUTERS
The U.S. Senate unanimously passed another bill on Thursday to delay the national transition to digital television. Efforts to move the transition date to June 12 from February 17 are fueled by worries an estimated 20 million mostly poor, elderly and rural households are not technically ready for the congressionally mandated switch. President Barack Obama supports a delay in the switch. Earlier this week, the Senate passed another bill delaying the DTV transition, but the measure failed in the House of Representatives. The bill is essentially the same that previously passed the Senate, but with a few minor modifications from the House. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, and Texas Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison worked out the compromise bill.
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Glam Media Snaps up AdaptiveAds
ADOTAS
Glam Media has acquired AdaptiveAds, a venture-backed display ad targeting and optimization company based in San Francisco and Mumbai, India. The price wasn’t disclosed. AdaptiveAds brings creative audience targeting, adaptive ad optimization and brand engagement tracking to Glam Media’s brand ads platform and enables both agency direct and self-service media buying solutions. Through the acquisition, Glam Media is opening an office in Mumbai and establishing an engineering presence in Pune, India. In December 2008, Glam Media reached more than 100 million unique visitors globally for the first time as reported by comScore Media Metrix.
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The Hottest Telecom Startups in Japan
READ WRITE WEB
Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology held its annual event for telecom related startups this week and several interesting companies gave presentations. Masaru IKEDA covered the event for the popular English language blog Asiajin and two of the companies caught our eye in particular. Japan has long been a place where telephony and communications innovation can be found. Much of it is culturally specific but we think the work of companies Peace Mind Corp. and Brand Dialog could translate in interesting ways around the world.
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Report: Online Retail Could Reach $156 Billion in 2009
SF GATE
Online retail sales will likely keep climbing in 2009, even in the recession. According to projections from Forrester Research, U.S. online retail sales are expected to rise 11 percent to $156 billion this year, excluding revenue from travel. However, that will mark a slowdown in the overall growth rate, which was 13 percent in 2008, when online retail sales totaled $141 billion, Forrester says. Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru said the majority of the 2009 growth in online spending will come at the expense of physical stores. She expects more consumer dollars to be spent online because it’s easier for people to comparison shop and to find what they’re looking for. Online sales are expected to make up 7 percent of overall retail revenue in 2009, compared with 6 percent in 2008.
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Scrapblog Raises $4 Million from Disney & Others
ALARM CLOCK
Blogging tool Scrapblog has raised a $4M funding round led by Disney’s Steamboat Ventures and Longworth Venture Partners. The round brings Scrapblog’s total funding to $7.5M. Scrapblog is a free, Web-based service that allows users to create multimedia scrapbooks. You can mix-in their photos, videos audio and bunch creative elements in a drag-and-drop environment. The startup hails from Ft. Lauderdale and is led by Carlos Garcia who apparently weathered a storm with scrapblog, most notably it wet dark for a while. Now they claim 2M users since their relaunch in March 2007.
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The Economy According To Mint
TECHCRUNCH
At the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland this week, it’s a somber environment. Nearly every session – at least every session that’s full – is about the global economic crisis. While there is much rhetoric and shifting of blame, there is little mention of hard data beyond stock market declines and the price of bailouts. As an engineer, and founder of a company where one of our core values is “quantify everything”, lack of numbers bothers me. How bad are things really? Answers like “really bad” or “worst since the Great Depression” just don’t do it for me. What does it mean in dollars and cents? Fortunately, Mint.com is in a unique position to answer this question – quantitatively. Since the crisis first hit in September, our user registration rate has more than quadrupled, giving us 900,000 sample points on the economy. That’s close to 1% of US households. All told, Mint.com tracks more than $50B in assets & liabilities.
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In Davos, Talk of Linking Clean Tech and Economy
CNET
The World Economic Forum calculates that $515 billion in yearly investment is required between now and 2030 to transition the world to cleaner sources of energy production. At its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, the World Economic Forum released a report on Thursday urging policy makers to make clean-technology incentives and investments part of government stimulus plans to revive flagging economies. Economists who authored the report said alternative-energy technologies have the potential to address two pressing global problems–energy security and climate change–while generating good financial returns. “It is essential that this stimulus also build our capacity to solve the longer-term climate crisis. Well-meaning but short-sighted economic stimulus programs could lock us into a predominately fossil fuel-based world economy for decades,” according to the report.
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Industry Moves: Former MTV Exec Christina Norman Joins Oprah-Discovery As CEO
PAID CONTENT
After more than a year of searching, the Harpo-Discovery Communications JV finally has a new CEO: Christina Norman, the 17-year MTV Network vet who left Viacom last February. Norman will head OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network, a cable net slated to replace widely distributed Discovery Health early next year. Norman’s first interview a year ago was a flop, according to Fortune.com. Her former boss Tom Freston, ex-CEO of Viacom, was a Winfrey choice for CEO, but he resisted, instead, as Fortune explains, working behind the scenes to recommend other possible CEOs, including his own successor at MTV Networks, Judy McGrath.
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Appirio Helps Companies Reach Your Facebook Friends
VENTURE BEAT
Appirio, a startup that works to connect the various internet “clouds,” plans to make Facebook more business-y with a new referral management system that will help companies recruit workers, and market and sell products on the social networking site. The referral engine is basically the business side of Appirio’s user application Refer2myFriends (previously called MyFriends@Work), which allows people to plug their contacts from Salesforce.com’s customer relationship management (CRM) software into Facebook. Now businesses can tap into those connections as well, and can build their own customized extensions.
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BuySellAds Announces New Features and 2009 Plan
CENTER NETWORKS
Online advertising marketplace BuySellAds has announced a variety of new features and enhancements to their service. They have also posted some details on their plan for 2009.
They have updated the site architecture and design. I like the split between advertisers and publishers in the new design. The search has been revamped which they believe is the biggest update in the overall list of revisions. Here I like the sliders which help narrow down the search without making it overly complicated. They have reduced the amount for wire transfers and are keeping the no minimum for a cashout via Paypal. I like that they take care of the Paypal fees – I’d say about half of the companies I deal with take care of the fees and I think it’s the way to go.
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