In This Update: 
• Google Gets Its Patent for Floating Data Center
• Yahoo! Personals could be Bartz’s next cut
• Earnings: WaPo Cuts Net Loss In Half; Online Revs Down 8 Percent
• Viacom Profit Falls 34%, Hurt by Ad Sales
• Automattic Rolls Out A WordPress For Social Networks
• ISPs and Copyright Holders Fail to Reach Piracy Agreement
• .TV domain name will dissapear as Tuvalu is sinking
• In Depth: GameStop Controls 21 Percent Of U.S. Game Market
• REPORT: Online Ad Spending To Follow Video and Social Networking
• Venture Capitalists Not So Convinced $100 Million Mobile App Companies Exist
• Avalon Ventures’ Kevin Kinsella Sees a Way Through the Recession
• DigitalGlobe Files for $250M IPO
• New FASB Rule Aims to Clarify ‘Net Income’

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Google Gets Its Patent for Floating Data Center
TREEHUGGER
Back in September we marveled at the patent Google decided to pursue plans for a data center that would float out on the ocean, powered and cooled by the waves. Well, the company was just awarded the patent. The intention is to have a data center floating 3 to 7 miles offshore, in about 50 to 70 meters of water, where it could use the ocean’s movement to harvest wave-generated power to run the servers, and sea water to cool them. Essentially, it would likely be a ship upon which modular data centers (shipping container style) are placed and hooked up to sea water-based cooling and electrical systems, and then the ship would be sent to the area in which it is needed. It’d need to come in to harbor during a storm, but other than that it’d be it’s own little island of information.
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Yahoo! Personals could be Bartz’s next cut
THEDEAL
Carol Bartz wasn’t kidding when she said she planned to aggressively trim underperforming assets from Yahoo! Inc. and simplify its corporate structure, as it appears another piece of the Internet company is on the cutting block. This time it’s Yahoo! Personals, the company’s online dating business. During an earnings call Wednesday afternoon, IAC/InteractiveCorp CEO Barry Diller said that his company is in talks with Yahoo! to acquire the unit, which is a rival to IAC’s Match.com property.
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Earnings: WaPo Cuts Net Loss In Half; Online Revs Down 8 Percent
PAIDCONTENT
The Washington Post Company narrowed its net loss in Q1 to $19.5 million ($2.04 loss per share) for its first quarter ended March 29, 2009, compared to net income of $39.3 million ($4.08 per share), but that was about as positive as its results got. The net loss included a $24.6 million charge related to early retirement program expense at Newsweek. Revenue slipped 1 percent to $1.05 billion, which isn’t too bad considering the double digit drops of many of its competitors. Still, cable TV and education masked the steep declines at the newspapers and magazines. For example, online ad revenues were down 8 percent to $22 million in the publishing division.
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Viacom Profit Falls 34%, Hurt by Ad Sales
NEW YORK TIMES
The media conglomerate Viacom said Thursday its first-quarter profit fell 34 percent, hurt by falling advertising and entertainment revenue. But its chief executive, Philippe P. Dauman, pointed to signs of an advertising turnaround, a critical factor for the company’s cable properties. The company, controlled bySumner M. Redstone, also owns the Paramount movie studio and cable networks including MTV and Comedy Central. “Over the past few weeks we have seen the advertising market stabilize,” he said in a conference call. Viacom said it earned $177 million, or 29 cents a share, down from $270 million, or 42 cents a share, last year. That topped the average Wall Street forecast of 26 cents a share, according to a Thomson Reuters survey.
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Automattic Rolls Out A WordPress For Social Networks
PAIDCONTENT
Automattic, the parent of blog platform WordPress, unveiled BuddyPress Thursday, a platform built on top of WordPress designed to let its users build social networks around their sites. The framework includes private-messaging features, profile setups and activity streams, all of which can be customized. Automattic, which has raised at least $30 million in venture funding, has been steadily adding to its properties. It bought the blo.gs pinging and blog trackback service from Yahoo earlier this month. And in October it purchased the PollDaddy, which it has since embedded into the WordPress editor.
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ISPs and Copyright Holders Fail to Reach Piracy Agreement
TORRENTFREAK
Copyright holders in Spain want ISPs to help offset the cost of piracy by imposing a surcharge on customers’ accounts. They also want ISPs to disconnect copyright infringers from the Internet. After many months in government mandated talks, no agreement has been reached. After many months of negotiations, government mandated talks between copyright holders and ISPs to find a mutually acceptable solution to the illicit file-sharing “problem”, have ended with no agreement. The copyright holders, the Coalition of Creators represented by the General Society of Authors and Publishers (SGAE), wanted the ISPs to charge their customers extra to cover alleged losses from their activities on P2P networks. Eduardo Bautista, SGAE’s president, recently said that it is the ISPs “civic duty” to cooperate. Unsurprisingly, he also wants repeat infringers to be disconnected from the web.
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.TV domain name will dissapear as Tuvalu is sinking
NEOWIN
GoDaddy is telling its clients not to buy .TV domains because the small island country is slowly sinking; Tuvalu is the small island country that is responsible for the .TV web address. The problem is that the island nation is slowly sinking and that one day the country will be abandoned and according to ICANN so should all of the address related to that specific country code.
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In Depth: GameStop Controls 21 Percent Of U.S. Game Market
GAMASUTRA
GameStop now runs over 6200 stores in 17 countries around the globe. In North America, it covers the United States and Canada. In Europe, the firm has most of its stores in France, Italy, and Germany. In Oceania, it has stores in Australia and New Zealand.In this, the final part of our overview of GameStop’s business, we’ll look at how the company’s revenues across territories have changed with time. Moreover, we’ll focus on the United States and estimate what percentage of the market the company controls by comparing with public data from the NPD Group. Finally, we’ll look at the density of stores in the United States, particularly with respect to population.
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REPORT: Online Ad Spending To Follow Video and Social Networking
MEDIAPOST
According to a new report on the Global Online Media Landscape by The Nielsen Company Online, engagement by Internet users is deepening, in part a result of a shift toward video content and social networking as popular online subcategories.
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Venture Capitalists Not So Convinced $100 Million Mobile App Companies Exist
MOCONEWS
We’ve all read the stories: a small developer hits it big with an iPhone app, raking in as much as $800,000 in five months as iShoot’s creator Ethan Nicholas did. These anecdotes don’t seem to be going away, the latest to crop up is the news that the small Australian developer Firemint sold over 700,000 copies of its $0.99 iPhone app “Flight Control” since its March debut, netting the company some $693,000. But what VC’s want to know is if there is a $100 million mobile application company out there, or just lots of “hobbyists”, as the nytimes.com asks.
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Avalon Ventures’ Kevin Kinsella Sees a Way Through the Recession
XCONOMY
San Diego’s Avalon Ventures is among a handful of homegrown VC firms that remains an active investor in early stage companies in the region, even though overall venture funding is anemic right now. But Avalon founder Kevin Kinsella sees a healthy resurgence of venture activities-and even some IPOs on the horizon. “The situation is what it is,” Kinsella tells me, “but we continue to see opportunities in venture capital.” The situation for the first three months of 2009 in the San Diego region was shockingly low, with the local office of PricewaterhouseCoopers counting just $87.4 million in 15 venture deals-a level unseen in this area since the first quarter of 1997.
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DigitalGlobe Files for $250M IPO
ALARMCLOCK
The guys who are best known for powering Google Maps are set to pay-back investors. DigitalGlobe’s other customers are US and foreign defense and intelligence agencies as well as and oil and gas exploration companies. DigitalGlobe gathers images daily through its two satellites and maintains them in its library. It plans to launch a third satellite in the autumn, which it expects to nearly double its image collection capabilities.
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New FASB Rule Aims to Clarify ‘Net Income’
WALL STREET JOURNAL
U.S. accounting-standard setters threw some observers of corporate profits a curveball this earnings season by fiddling with what companies mean by “net income.” The decision to replace the time-honored bottom line — the most basic measurement of corporate performance — with formulations like “net income attributable to the company” has changed the familiar look of earnings statements at a time when corporate profits are being closely scrutinized for signs of the economy’s health.
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Event: New York State Bar Association: BLS Technology & Venture Law Committee
May 7, 2009, The Penn Club of New York. Sponsored by MasurLaw (http://www.masurlaw.com).
Progress Partners is speaking at this NYSBA event.

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