On Monday, shortly after Terry Semel stepped down as CEO of Yahoo! CNBC Wall Street correspondent David Faber floated a rumor that News Corp. might be interested in offloading MySpace for a sizeable stake in Yahoo! -- about 25%, he said. This morning, News Corp. seemed to confirm the deal via an article in one of its own newspapers, the Times of London that News Corp. was indeed talking to Yahoo! about such a deal, though for a 30% stake. That would put the value of MySpace at around $10-12 billion.
Most pundits agree that this would appear to be a great deal for News Corp. (who would get a quick 2 year return on their investment in the 2000% range) and a bad deal for Yahoo!. Wired said the deal would be "desperate" on the part of Yahoo!, TechCrunch said the move would be "monumentally stupid" for the portal company. I'm inclined to agree, for the reasons that have already been discussed ad nauseum across the web. The big winner, however, regardless of whether the deal materializes beyond the rumor stage, is Facebook.
Dmitry Shapiro CEO of Veoh invited me to a
GoToMeeting webinar today to unveil a serious challenger in the Web TV market. VeohTV
Beta, subtly billed as a "Joost Killer", is actually an amazing development in
online video viewing. The impetus for the Veoh TV service is characterized by a Veoh
slogan Dmitry related during the webinar: “Video Lives All Over the Web.”
This simple truth is demonstrated in the new VeohTV service’s approach to
aggregating and utilizing all types of video. VeohTV allows users access to virtually any
video with unparalleled functionality, quality and control from a very advanced viewing
interface.
One of the new features on AltSearchEngines, the R/WW Network blog edited by Charles Knight, is The Great Debates. Every Tuesday night at 8pm EST / 5pm PST, ASE hosts a discussion between various alternative search engines. Their first debate was on Continuous Search and featured Swamii, Searchbots, and Allth.at. The second debate was on Meta Search and included CrossEngine, GoshMe, and Srchr.
Plenty happening in the digital lifestyle space this week. R/WW Network blog last100 reports on the following 3 stories:
BitTorrent releases SDK for set-top-boxes and other devices: BitTorrent, the company behind the popular peer-to-peer file sharing technology, has announced the availability of its Software Development Kit (SDK) for consumer electronics devices. Perhaps the most enticing part is the chance for licensee’s products to become officially BitTorrent certified.
Less than 12 hours after we posted our review of the Web Office Suite space, Google has seemingly put the last piece of the jigsaw in place for their suite. Today Google announced it has acquired the assets of Zenter, "a company that provides software for creating online slide presentations." This technology will be added to Tonic Systems, a technology for presentation creation and document conversion. Tonic Systems was acquired in April by Google. Nick Gonzalez says that "Zenter was focusing on the front end of the application, as well as community/sharing features", so it will be a nice complement to Tonic.
It's no secret that Google has influence. Being the most heavily used search engine, they in a very real sense control the distribution of information to much of the world. But Google has increasingly been peddling its influence in American politics (which, as the rest of the world is well aware, can have far reaching global consequences). And Google isn't just influencing elections with their pocket book (though they did give $288,000 to candidates in the last US election cycle in 2006), they are becoming an increasingly more important player in the 2008 American election for president.
Yesterday, Google officially unveiled its newest blog: Google Public Policy. The blog, which carries the tagline "Google's views on government, policy and politics," is different than any other Google blog in that it has nothing to with their technology. The blog will instead be an outlet for Google's views "on issues like net neutrality, censorship, innovation regulation, immigration, R&D, national security, and trade" ("just to name a few"). Google's public policy team, who author the blog, say that they hope to foster a "dialogue" with Google users about political issues in order to "do a better job of fighting for our common interests." But a new blog is just a small piece of Google's strategy for influencing government policy.
This morning Zoho will release their latest Web Office app, Meeting, as a public beta. It's a good opportunity to consider what progress each of the main Web Office vendors is making towards a full Web Office Suite. For this post, we'll consider Google Apps, Microsoft Office Live, Zoho, ThinkFree, and Zimbra. There are others of course, but these are (I hope you'll agree) the main players.
Also, later in this post we compare Zoho's Web Office apps with Google Apps. These two companies have the most apps so far, so it's a good indicator of progress in the space (remembering that Microsoft is yet to release a truly compelling Web Office Suite - and no, Office Live in its current incarnation doesn't count).
Spain/US-based MyStrands announced today that it's raised $25 Million "to lead the social recommendation industry". MyStrands is a music discovery and social networking site that covers the PC, mobile and physical worlds. We wrote about MyStrands' technology in January, at which point it had announced a re-vamp. MyStrands is based on "behavior-based recommendation technologies" and their services allow people to organize and discover digital music and other media, through Internet connected devices (computers, mobile devices, etc). The mobile side of MyStrands was significantly strengthened in January, with new support for Symbian and Windows Mobile devices, along with a new mobile Web portal to help users network and discover music. There were also a couple of new Flash-built services - music charts and radio - plus a tie-in with Napster. MyStrands has iTunes integration too, making it a very flexible web-based music recommendations app.
The company explained in their blog post where they're headed to next:
Yahoo! announced today that Terry Semel, who has been the company's CEO since May of 2001, will step down. Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang will replace him. Semel will become non-executive Chairman of the company and an adviser to the board, who also named Susan Decker, former EVP of the Advertiser and Publisher Group, as the company's president. Looks like Valleywag will have to update their chart of Yahoo! executive turnover.
In a press release, Semel said the board and he had long discussed the need for "a smooth succession in Yahoo!'s senior leadership," and that more recently it was clear that he was not the right person to lead Yahoo! through its current reorganization. "This is the time for new executive leadership, with different skills and strengths, to step in and drive the company to realize its full potential -- it is the right thing to do, and the right time is now," he said.
So you've shot your masterpiece, but it's a little rough around the edges. If you have any hope of winning that Oscar, you're going to need to do a little editing. But renting out an editing bay means thousands of dollars and figuring out what all the shortcut keys on the Avid keyboard do. But wait, you're in luck! Friday evening, YouTube launched their new video editing tool: YouTube Remixer, in partnership with Adobe. Avid it's not, but perhaps it's just what you need to turn your raw vacation footage into Spielberg or Coppola.
Unfortunately, YouTube's Remixer debuted to some rather tepid reviews, in part because it is more or less the same software Adobe rolled out with Photobucket in March. But wait, you're in luck again! There are a bunch of other online video editing tools, and we'll take a brief look at some of them below (though again, don't expect Avid).
