Blog News Watch

I woke up at 7 AM this morning - a little on the late side for me but it’s Saturday, I’m allowed. I thought for a moment about going back to sleep for a little catnap but in the end, my mother’s work ethic took over and I picked up the laptop and opened the email.

And there, in my inbox, is an email from a particular internet business “guru” (who shall remain nameless) who’s been hyping to me for the last week or so - almost daily - this upcoming report of his which will be so “shocking,” he promises me, it will revolutionize the way I do business. And now, Guru tells me it’s here. Ready to be read. Even though he wanted to make it better - to hold on to it and refine it - he was convinced by all these people smarter than he is to release it now - it’s that revolutionary!

Great. Can’t wait.

I spend the next hour wading through 65 pages which can be boiled down into the following:

• 29 pages of a variation on the theme of “I can’t believe I’m telling you this, you NEED this, and this is SO SHOCKING” - but not telling me what “THIS” is??
• 11 pages of recounting to me the “shocking” revelations that: we’re using the Internet as a distraction, people’s attention spans are dropping, all this new technology isn’t reducing our work week the way we hoped, and we’re dealing with too many interruptions. (This is news? To whom, exactly, besides obviously our Guru?)
• One three-page segment was a little intriguing - if still overhyped and over-long: his argument that interruptions are making us dumber. Didn’t need three pages to tell me this, but still - it’s something. Worth an hour of my time? No.
• And his radical tips for this amazing breakthrough success? Are you ready? I’m going to give it to you! Hold on now - it’s really radical!!!
  

Technorati Tags: marketing reports, internet business gurus

The gossips of Wal-Mart debut in movie download war was around for few weeks now. Finally ending all gossips and speculation Wal-Mart is launching its long-awaited online movie download store.

A so called “beta” version of the online video store, set to debut this Tuesday, will sell digital versions of about 3,000 films and television episodes from all the major studios and some TV networks, including Fox Broadcasting. Unlike some traditional offerings, Wal-Mart will not rent films online instead it will sell the content with limited copyright. The films can be played on a PC or transferred to Microsoft Windows Media-compatible portable digital players. The movies will not play on Apple computers or the popular iPod. According to Wall-Mart later this year movies bought from the Wal-Mart store also can be burned onto a DVD, which won’t be available in this beta release.

Wal-mart is using its buying power to beat the prices charged by other download services in many cases, offering films from $12.88 to $19.88 and individual TV episodes for $1.96 surprisingly 4 cents less than Apple Inc.’s iTunes store. This will play a major impact in online movie download industry.

But Wal-Mart abandoned its efforts to build an online DVD rental service in 2005 to compete with the well-established Netflix Inc. Can they manage to survive this time? Cause there are other companies like-Amazon Inc. launched its “Unbox” video rental and download store, Movielink, which is owned by five studios, and CinemaNow etc. doing well and they won’t just pass the ground to Wall-Mart without fight. I am much more concern about the price Wal-Mart is offering, that is less than the wholesale price of of physical DVDs and it will be very highly unlikely studios will continue to deal at that price. So ultimately today or tomorrow Wal-Mart will change the pricing or something else to adjust and will stand in the same row with other online movie retailers.

Wal-Mart, Online Movie, Retailers

Interesting news, Meebo the Ajax-based online IM service that combined all the big IM services as well as served in almost all major languages got funded US$9 million. This will be the second round in a row led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Sequoia Capital. Meebo’s first round funding from Sequoia in late 2005 was about $3.5 million based on a $9 million pre-money valuation. According to Meebo, they will use the funds to expand from its 10-person staff and is already hiring. Next month, also call for an API that will support partners who want to push meebo to users.

Well meebo gaining popularety no doubt about it. 1 million registered members with 1.2-plus million daily log-ins, 75 million messages exchanged a day, average sessions of 75 minutes. These are certainly impressive stats, which is luring those investors. Would you surprised if Meebo will be in take over bid in near future? well i know i won’t. Google, Yahoo, Aol anyone might be seriously observing Meebo for their next acquisition.

Source: Paidcontent

Well just yesterday we were talking about Venice Project Joost, a internet TV startup that created awesome buzz across the net, specially in web 2.0 arena. Today’s news is Brightcove raises $59.9M in Private Financing for Internet TV Company. Looks like this year might be the year of Internet TV, as we saw last year was blog networks.

Brightcove announced today the final round of $59.5M strategic funding round. The coolest part is there are number of big shot companies like-The New York Times Company, AOL and Morgan Stanley was among the investors. Jeremy Allaire, Brightcove founder and CEO said-

This investment in Brightcove will enable us to grow our business at a critical juncture in the adoption of Internet TV,…….With the new funds we will be expanding internationally, deepening our service offering to give media partners better tools to distribute and monetize video online, and empowering consumers to interact with that content in exciting new ways.

This a nominal amount of funding considering they array of there partnership, British Sky Broadcasting (Sky), Discovery Communications Inc., Dow Jones & Company, Inc., MTV Networks, The New York Times Company, Reuters, Sony BMG, Time Life, Warner Music Group, and Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive. So as you can see most of the high roler is there partners. So i won’t be surprised if we see some ore funding in near future.

eBay (the company itself) has been going under lots of fascinating developments and earning boosts recently. Now they just extend their coverage into events biz. According to news from the guys at eBay today, they are buying online ticket scalper StubHub. Guess how much they are paying for it? US$310 million.

This is definitely good deal for both concerned, especially for the StubHub and its investors which include former football(NFL, not Soccer)quarterback Steve Young and BEA Systems co-founder Edward Scott. This will be eBay’s third major purchase in the last few years, following on from PayPal and Shopping.com. StubHub is the largest tickets-only reseller of concert, sports, and event tickets, selling more than $400 million worth of inventory during 2006. During its six years in business StubHub has brokered the sale of over 5 million tickets. eBay moves a lot of event tickets through its site, but as they dont actually own the tickets they keep themselves above any ticket scalping laws.

StubHub attracted 2.1 million unique visitors and generated 22.3 million page views in August, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. On the other hand eBay’s ticket section saw 309,000 unique visitors and 875,000 page views. So as can see StubHub was a definit competitor of eBay ticket section, at a cost of US$310 million getting rid of a major threat is definitely good for eBay.

eBay, StubHub, Acquire

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Since Xmas i was tracking rumor that Leading Photo Sharing Technology,BubbleShare would be acquired by MySpace owner NewsCorp. Wwell guess what? BuubleShare did got acquired, just not by newscorp by Kaboose. Kaboose Inc., the largest independent family focused online media company in North America, today announced yesterday it has acquired Toronto-based BubbleLabs Inc.(Owner of BubbleShare) and its website.

Under the terms of the transaction, Kaboose will acquire all of the outstanding shares of BubbleLabs, Inc. for a purchase price of US$2.25 million. In addition, BubbleLabs shareholders may receive an additional US$750,000 based on an earn-out arrangement. So what hapen to the team created masterpice like BubbleShare? well BubbleLabs’ four founding employees, including CEO Albert Lai, will be joining the Kaboose team. This will be another star in Kaboos rank. Kaboose owns some of the world’s leading online properties targeting families, including BabyZone.com, Kaboose.com, TwoPeasInABucket.com, BirthdayInABox.com, Funschool.com and Zeeks.com. In a statement after this acquire announcement, BubbleLabs CEO Albert Lai said–

Kaboose’s family audience is a perfect fit for the BubbleShare photo sharing solution. Our entire team is looking forward to joining Kaboose to help bring better tools and services to its incredible reach of mothers and families.

Source: Newswire.ca

A while ago I was just going to check my account status with AdBrite, as i run AdBrite ads in one of my site but fortunately came across with this “Adbrite In Video Beta“. It’s been a while AdBrite was showing Beta product list on their home page, but until yesterday the list was just two-Banners & Mobile, now In video added.

“In Video” is the new video player that AdBrite are about to launch (in beta) for bloggers and webmasters who want to use video on their sites and monetize it. Currently they are signing up advertiser’s but begun rolling it out to certain publishers and will release it to the public soon(No specific date specified). There are some cool features that will impress you–

• Fully customizable video player, easy-to-use, and 100% free.
• Brand your videos with your own custom logo “watermark”.
• “Split-screen” ads engage users without interrupting viewing experience.Actually the ads will showed up when you hover your mouse on the top edge of the player.
• Sharing features promote your site when your videos get “viral”.
• Earn money from your videos, even when they’re embedded into other peoples’ Web sites.

It is quite interesting method of monetizing video. A service definitely watch out for, if you have a video site.

Though the domain Fonebiz.co.uk was registered way back 14-June-2005, but the blog has been started full scale just from September(there are few posts on October,2006 though), 2006. So needless to say the blog is very very new, but surprisingly it manages to pull 60,000 unique visitors and US$1,000+ adsense revenue per month. Did I have to say what is Fonebiz.co.uk blog about?

The blog has 80,000 plus back links and 1,400 indexed back links in Google, probably that’s the reason it’s already have PR3 (Google Page Rank 3). The blog has cool 275,000 page views per month and as well as additional referral sell earnings from Citkita, Kontera etc. aside from adsense.

The blog is designed over WordPress and Has a 900,000 page ringtone database, so far with 400 + Blog Posts.

Current running bid for this blog, which listed at Sitepoint is US$8,500 and Buy it now price was listed US$25,000.

Though the blog’s design isn’t a fancy one, but the bottom-line is it has already managed to pull some serious cash with less then 4 months of period. As well as the unique visitors, page rank, page views and backlinks are very impressive and high considering the age of blog. The Seller has provided screenshots of traffic details and earning reports to validate his claim.

Fonebiz, Sitepoint, Mobile Blog For sale

It’s more then two years since Podcasts attained prominence in 2004.Amateurs and advertisers everyone braced the downloadable audio programs as the next step in the evolution of broadcasting. But one segment never tried to to get along with it, i.e. Music industries. Probable cause-fear of piracy and the need to be paid — the major record labels and music publishers that control the rights to about 75% of the commercially released music in the U.S. have refused to make deals that would allow songs to be used in podcasts. But now after years of rivalry the music industry is finally taking its first steps toward embracing podcasting.

This deadlock broken when San Francisco-based Rock River Communications Inc. has struck some of the first deals to license major-label content for podcasts. This company, which specializes in making the mix CDs sold at the check-out counters of retailers, is now creating a series of promotional podcasts on behalf of different corporate clients including DaimlerChrysler AG and Ford Motor Co. In this deal Chrysler and Ford pay Sony BMG music an undisclosed flat fees for the right to distribute the podcasts for a year, regardless of how many or how few copies are downloaded. More interesting turn is BMG will also allow users to keep the programs on their personal computers or MP3 players. Each podcasts includes 30-second ads from the car maker.The programs are available from Chrysler’s home page and from the podcasting section of Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes Music Store. Ford’s version is not yet available, probably later this month it will be prominently available at Ford’s site.

This is a very small steps towards licensed podcasts of music, since there are still a lot of problem remained unresolved. But nonetheless this might be the kickoff everyone has been waiting for.

Source: USA Today

Ford, Chrysler, Sony BMG, Podcasts, Rock River Communications

Ok honestly saying, I didn’t saw it coming. Come on we are not talking about just anybody, we are talking about Jimmy Wales, who founded great thing like Wikipedia. Wikipedia the online encyclopedia has article on almost any topic under the sun (or you can think of). Now according to Times Online UK’s published article he is set to launch an Internet search engine with amazon.com that he hopes will become a rival to Google and Yahoo!.

The project has been dubbed Wikiasari and transitional(beta) release will be sometime in  May-June, 2007. Wikiasari using same backbone that used by Wikipedia internal search. Wikipedia secured multi million-dollar funding from amazon.com earlier this year(2006), so it wouldn’t be their first handshake. Question is what Amazon will get out from this? Amazon already have two search engines (Alexa, A9), if Jimmy’s Wikiasari somewhat beat Google (which i doubt) then Amazon’s those search engines will be automatically busted. On the other hand Amazon can implement Wikiasari technology in their search engine, if it become successful.

According to Jimmy Google’s computer based algorithms are less effective/no match with human editorial judgment. Ok i agree with this one, but how he intend to put editorial glance to millions of sites across the net and also Human are prone to mistake? He gave a indication that, the “wikipedians” might be in use for these editorials. But considering the job at hand it will take a long time to flag each and every site on the net.

So i guess Wikiasari won’t  be complete when it will launch on 2007. It will be rather be a directory rather then a search engine (in my opinion).

Source: Times Online UK

Wikipedia, Wikiasari, Jimmy Wales