In This Update:
• Amazon Unveils Kindle 2.0
• MLB.TV Adds HD Viewing
• The Updated Fate of Broadband in the Stimulus Bill
• Obama Appoints John Doerr to Economic Advisory Board
• Facebook Opens Up: Lets Developers Access Status Updates, Notes, Links, and Videos
• Recession Strikes Razorfish on West Coast
• Enquisite Gets $8 Million Second Round for Search Marketing Tech
• Contextual Content Aggregation Firm OneSpot Gets $4.2 Million Funding
• Web Analytics Firm 7 Billion People Gets $3 Million Funding

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Amazon Unveils Kindle 2.0
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Amazon.com Inc. is announcing a new version of its Kindle e-book reader on Monday. And, in a sign that the electronic book is gaining clout in the publishing world, Amazon is also expected to say it has acquired a new work by best-selling novelist Stephen King that will be available exclusively, at least for a time, on Kindle. Many publishers have long feared that Amazon would persuade a major author to write for its Kindle on an exclusive basis. Although retailers such as Barnes & Noble Inc. have long published their own books, they have struggled to find distribution outside their own stores. But Amazon has already proven that it can sell as many Kindles as it can manufacture. Indeed, Amazon is working to overcome the supply problems that have plagued the device.
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MLB.TV Adds HD Viewing
GIGAOM
Rolling out in time for spring training, the new MLB.TV video player features DVR capabilities that let you pause and rewind live games, live game chat and if you have a fast enough connection, you can now watch games in HD. The New York Times reports that half a million people shelled out $120 to subscribe to the MLB.TV service last year. In these tough economic times, the league is looking to keep those impressive subscriber numbers up by lowering the price to $110 for the season (or $80 for a version with fewer features). The MLB’s video player will use the Swarmcast CDN to help determine a user’s connectivity and deliver the best quality feed available ranging from 400k to 3mbps, which the company says, provides 720p quality. The league is also using Flash for its video after kicking Microsoft’s Silverlight to the curb last year.
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The Updated Fate of Broadband in the Stimulus Bill
GIGAOM
Legislation changes faster than the weather in Texas, so the tweaks to the broadband sections in President Barack Obama’s stimulus bill are nothing unusual. But as the debates get down to the wire (a stimulus package should be finalized be the end of this week), it’s time to revisit the legislation’s effect on broadband providers. The latest efforts appear to be taking the dollar amount for broadband grants in the Senate bill from $9 billion to $7 billion and increasing the tax credits for broadband deployments, as well as limiting their use to rural areas. Wireless also got a boost in the tax credits with faster wireless broadband speeds of 6 Mbps down becoming eligible for a 40 percent credit, while speeds of only 3 Mbps down could receive a 30 percent break.
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Obama Appoints John Doerr to Economic Advisory Board
VENTURE BEAT
President Barack Obama just named two Silicon Valley bigwigs to his new Economic Recovery Advisory Board – famed venture capitalist John Doerr of Keiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Charles Phillips, president of business software maker Oracle Corp. There’s an impressive range of names on the board, which will be led by Paul Volcker, who chaired the Federal Reserve under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, and will include GE chief executive Jeffrey Immelt, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumpka, and Harvard Economics Prof. Martin Feldstein.
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Facebook Opens Up: Lets Developers Access Status Updates, Notes, Links, and Videos
READ WRITE WEB
Facebook announced a major update to its API tonight that will allow developers to read and post status updates, links, and notes to Facebook. In addtion, Facebook now also allows third-party developers to create applications that can upload videos directly to a user’s account. The service already had an API for uploading and viewing photos.The company also announced that its users now share over 24 million links every month, and that more than 15 million of its users update their status every day. As Nick O’Neill on the AllFacebook blog points out, this move can be seen as a direct attack against Twitter. The early success of Twitter, after all, was mostly based upon the availability of an API that allowed for the creation of a thriving ecosystem that went far beyond what Twitter’s developers had originally envisioned.
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Recession Strikes Razorfish on West Coast
CLICKZ
The recession has struck Razorfish’s West coast staff, following layoffs by the Microsoft-owned digital agency in its New York office. Citing the “challenging economic climate,” the agency blamed the cuts on financial and technology clients reducing their ad budgets. According to the firm, 70 employees working in its Los Angeles, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle offices were given pink slips last week. The laid-off staff accounts for 4 percent of U.S. employees.
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Enquisite Gets $8 Million Second Round for Search Marketing Tech
PAIDCONTENT
If the financial crisis had not come last fall, IAC would be in a bad way right now. In its earnings report this week, the search and online media firm, whose properties include Ask.com, blamed a combination of factors, both external and “self-inflicted,” for a steep decline in its fourth quarter ad revenue. One of those factors was Google’s decision to stop serving AdSense for Search ads to some Ask partner sites, decimating its network revenue. Another was the search engine’s internal search quality efforts, which reduced ad impressions. “We got less queries because we were making the product more efficient,” said CEO and Chairman Barry Diller.
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Contextual Content Aggregation Firm OneSpot Gets $4.2 Million Funding
PAIDCONTENT
OneSpot, an Austin, Texas-based online contextual content aggregation firm, has received $4.2 million in funding in its first round, led by Silver Creek Ventures, it said. The company, founded in 2006, previously raised about $1 million in its angel funding, including from Mike Maples (former EVP at Microsoft) and Pat Horner (co-founder and former COO of Perot Systems), both of whom participated in this round as well. OneSpot’s white-label service allows publishers to show automatic related links from third-party sources next to their stories or pages (using widgets), much like, say, Techmeme does automatic content aggregation on tech/internet topics. Customers include WSJ.com, MarketWatch and SFGate.com.
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Web Analytics Firm 7 Billion People Gets $3 Million Funding
PAIDCONTENT
Search marketing and analytics software firm Enquisite has closed an $8 million second round of funding. New investors Castile Ventures and Formative Ventures led the round; previous backers The Entrepreneurs’ Fund III and Retro Ventures also participated. The S.F.-based company has raised $11.2 million since its inception in 2006, and will use the new funds for product development, sales and marketing. Search marketers can use Enquisite’s technology for keyword research and to measure the ROI of their campaigns; the software tracks stats including when and where the ads appear, and the number of clicks they generate.
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