In This Update:
•Ad Server OpenX Raises $10 Million Third Round
•Nokia’s Ovi Store is Now Live
•Russian Firm Offers to Invest in Facebook
•Japan Sets up $3 Billion Cash Lifeline for Small Firms
•Lehman Units Argue Bankruptcy
•QR Codes Connect Print to the Web
•June 1st New Yorker Cover Drawn Entirely on the iPhone
•Yahoo Placemaker: Extract Location Data from Any Text
•Vodafone and Others Plan Location-Based Mobile Ads
•Guidepoint Acquires Vista Research
•Microsoft Spending $100 Million to Call out Google’s Fatal Flaw
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Ad Server OpenX Raises $10 Million Third Round
PAID CONTENT
OpenX Technologies, the open-source ad server that rebranded from OpenAds last year, has closed a $10 million third round, bringing its total investment to more than $30.8 million. DAG Ventures, a new investor, led the round. It was joined by previous backers Accel Partners, Index Ventures, Mangrove Capital, First Round Capital and News Corp digital media head Jon Miller, who also serves as chairman of OpenX’s board. Aside from its rebranding, OpenX has made a number of changes since raising its $15.5 million second round in December 2007. In April 2008, it chose Yahoo’s former global ad marketplaces SVP Tim Cadogan as CEO. It also moved its offices from London, where OpenX was founded, to Pasadena, Calif.
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Nokia’s Ovi Store is Now Live
NEOWIN
After the success of Apple’s App Store, it seems other companies have noticed the benefits that such an offering can have on business. Other companies such as Palm, Google and Nokia have their own offerings, the latter releasing theirs fully just today. The Ovi Store initially went live first in Australia, Ireland and Singepore, but Engadget is reporting that every area which supports access to the store can now get just that; the Ovi Store has launched with 20,000 “items”, which is an impressive figure compared to some others. It isn’t clear whether those items are applications or otherwise, but expect that to be clarified very soon, now that access is available. Nokia’s executive vice president, Tero Ojanperä, has said, “Ovi Store is open for business and we’ve stocked the shelves with both local and global content for a broad range of Nokia devices. Ovi Store makes shopping for content and applications easy and fun for feature phone and smartphone owners alike.”
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Russian Firm Offers to Invest in Facebook
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian Internet-investment group, has offered to invest $200 million in Facebook Inc. at a $10 billion valuation for the company’s preferred stock, according to people familiar with the matter. It is unclear whether Facebook has responded to or decided to accept the offer, which comes as the social-networking company has been talking to a range of venture-capital and private-equity firms about raising more money to help fuel its growth.
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Japan Sets up $3 Billion Cash Lifeline for Small Firms
REUTERS
Japan threw another lifeline to small firms in need of cash dollars by promising to channel funds from a government-affiliated bank even as credit market conditions show signs of improvement.
Finance Minister Kaoru Yosano said on Tuesday that the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) would provide around $3 billion in loans to small Japanese firms operating overseas to help them raise cash in the U.S. currency. “I expect funding needs of around $3 billion from small firms,” Yosano told a news conference. Although strains in financial markets have been easing in the past few months, Japanese policy makers remain concerned about funding conditions of many companies.
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Lehman Units Argue Bankruptcy
WALL STREET JOURNAL
America’s largest bankruptcy is causing an international standoff between Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s U.S. and U.K. operations. Administrators for Lehman’s U.S. estate plan to ask a federal judge Tuesday to approve an international framework for coordinating bankruptcy proceedings among subsidiaries spread across the globe. But administrators representing Lehman’s main European arm in the U.K. are balking at the agreement, saying they are governed by local rules and the interests of their own creditors. The stalemate is significant because Lehman’s U.K. estate held about a third of the firm’s roughly $630 billion in assets before it filed for bankruptcy.
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QR Codes Connect Print to the Web
MEDIA SHIFT
Point your phone at a printed page. Take a picture. Get taken to a website. That’s the power of QR codes, codes embedded in print that can link cell phones to specific websites. They’ve been doing this for years in Japan, and now they are starting to do it in Europe. Sooner or later it will get to the States.From the user’s point of view, this is very cool. But the important issue for newspapers and journalists is that every click gives feedback on what is interesting to whom and when. In the post-Google advertising environment, QR codes could finally help solve the dilemma that has long plagued advertisers, the “50%-of-advertising-doesn’t work, but-I-don’t-know-which-half” problem.
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June 1st New Yorker Cover Drawn Entirely on the iPhone
GIZMODO
Artist Jorge Colombo took about an hour to fingerpaint an intricate Times Square scene on his iPhone using Brushes, a $4.99 iPhone drawing app. Now, it’s the June 1st cover for The New Yorker. I’m guessing the editors of the magazine saw some kind of weighty symbolism in such a stunt, but landing a New Yorker cover is the kind of honor that would define an entire career for many illustrators. That’s not to say this kind of thing isn’t impressive-it really, really is-but I can’t help imagining some dusty, 93-year-old editor at the top floor of the Conde Nast building seeing his first iPhone in the hands of an intern, losing his monocle over this amazing new tech-nol-o-gee, and impulsively ordering something, anything to do with this MAGICKAL DEE-VICE to be put on the cover, now.
Yahoo Placemaker: Extract Location Data from Any Text
READ WRTE WEB
At Where 2.0, Yahoo announced a new product in its already impressive lineup of geo technologies: Placemaker. Placemaker is a new open API from Yahoo that helps developers to make their applications and data sets location-aware. Developers can feed Placemaker any kind of structured and unstructured data, including feeds and web pages, and the app will analyze the text and extract location data from it. This, could, for example, allow news organizations to easily tag their content with location data and create hyper-local products based on this data. We talked to Tyler Bell, the product lead for the Yahoo Geo Technology Group, yesterday, and in the interview, he stressed that Placemaker, which will be open and freely available today, should be considered a ‘geo-enrichment tool.’ Placemaker can take virtually any type of written content and will try to extract geographic information from this.
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Vodafone and Others Plan Location-Based Mobile Ads
CLICK Z
Vodafone is planning to trial a range of location-based ad products in Europe later this year. Meanwhile, Alcatel-Lucent and Placecast have announced the availability of their own location-based ad platform, and are currently touting it to network operators and agencies. Starting in June, Vodafone will test products including a navigation-based application on which advertisers can embed information about local outlets or promotions. A location-aware search facility dubbed “Power Search” is also in the works; that will allow advertisers to pay to top the list of local businesses related to a given search term.
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Guidepoint Acquires Vista Research
PE HUB
Guidepoint Global, LLC, a leading primary research firm, today announced the acquisition of Vista Research, Inc. from Standard & Poor’s, a division of The McGraw-Hill Companies. Guidepoint provides one of the world’s largest networks of industry experts to investors and business decision makers. The strategic combination of over 130,000 global experts creates one of the largest industry networks in the world, strengthening Guidepoint’s leadership in the expert network field and building on its healthcare expertise with Vista’s depth and breadth in Technology, Media, Telecommunications, Energy, Industrials, Retail, Financial Services, and Leisure and Gaming sectors.
Microsoft Spending $100 Million to Call out Google’s Fatal Flaw
VENTURE BEAT
AdAge reports that Microsoft has budgeted up to $100 million to advertise Bing, its yet-unlaunched search engine, on TV, on radio, online and in print. The Bing campaign is so big that ad agency JWT has hired additional creative staff, according to AdAge. Getting customers to switch from Google will be tough. Internal Google tests found that most users favored results branded with the Google logo, even when Google swapped logos with another search engine to serve supposedly inferior results under its own brand. What’s Bing like? The site isn’t live yet. No one seems able to nail down the difference between Bing and Google in one simple sentence. AdAge says: People who’ve seen the Microsoft product suggest it’s useful and has some nifty filtering tools, even though it’s not a markedly different-looking interface, at least for text search.
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Tags: Accel Partners, Apple, Boston, DAG, Google, Microsoft, Venture Capital, Vista, Yahoo