OpenAds, a free and Open Source ad network with more than 30 thousand installs, has announced a forthcoming hosted version of its service and another round of venture financing. RWW's Sean Ammirati discussed OpenAds and the desirability of a hosted version in a May post here titled Google's Potential Vulnerability - An Open Ad Network
I admit an unhealthy addiction to Scrabble. I have been playing almost daily for many years. I think my girlfriend and I own 5 or 6 different versions of the game between the two of us. That's why I was so excited last year when brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla launched Scrabulous on the Facebook platform (they actually created the game in 2006, but it didn't really take off until it was introduced to the Facebook audience). Being rather familiar with the various incarnations of Scrabble online, I am confident in my opinion that Scrabulous is by far the best.
But in the back of my mind I knew it wouldn't last. The name is too close to Hasbro's trademark. The rules, tile distribution, the game board -- all the things that make it superior in every way to Yahoo!'s Literati -- all infringe on Hasbro's copyrights. And so, this past week has not been a very good one in Scrabulous land.
Sun Microsystems announced today that had entered into an agreement to acquire open source database company MySQL AB for $1 billion in cash and assumed stock options. MySQL is used by many of the web's largest companies, including YouTube, Facebook, and Wikipedia, and makes up the "M" in LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP), one of the most popular open source web development stacks utilized by web sites today.
Everyone loves to get stuff for free. We line up to get a free drink, we sign up for free checking accounts,
and we're happy to get a free gift with the purchase of our next car. We love free stuff, even though we all know
and understand that free is an illusion. After that free drink, we pay for the next three. The bank is making money by investing what we put in that checking account. The car dealer can afford to give away a small gift because the profit on the car
is large. But none of this seems to bother us - free things still have a certain allure. But is the concept of free taking us down a dangerous road?
Besides being the day that Macworld crashed Twitter, today was also Wikipedia's seventh birthday. In the 7 years since Wikipedia was publicly launched on January 15, 2001, the online encyclopedia has put up some impressive numbers. The flagship English language version now has 2,174,371 articles (as I write this), is the 9th most popular site on the Internet (according to Alexa), and has spawned 6 side projects (Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikisource, and Wikiversity).
Wikipedia's projects span over 250 languages, with 9.4 million articles, 1.5 million images, and 10.3 million registered users (75,000 of whom are active contributors). All in the public domain.
Even with the home mortgage meltdown in the US theatening to pull the econonmy into a recession, analysts feel confident that the online ad market will remain healthy. "We believe the secular growth of the Internet will enable Internet fundamentals to outperform," wrote Piper Jaffray senior research analysts Aaron Kessler and Gene Munster in a report last Monday. "Whereas Internet advertising budgets were the first to be cut during the market crash in 2000, we believe the proven high ROI of online advertising today will make online advertising resilient even with a recession in the United States."
But whether the Internet remains recession-proof or not, the mortgage crisis will affect the world of web advertising in very real ways.
Probably the most anticipated announcement that Apple CEO Steve Jobs made at the annual Macworld expo this morning was that of the MacBook Air: a 13.3", LED backlit notebook computer that pushes the concept of "thin" to its boundaries. But the one that Jobs spent the most time on, and seemed the most excited about, was the announcement of the iTunes Movie Rentals store in conjunction with the revamp of his maybe-no-longer-a-hobby-project Apple TV.
Although the name is clearly meant to recall that of ubiquitous video portal YouTube, YouTorrent upon first reading sounded more like an accusation than anything else: You Torrent. Although some of us hesitate to admit it, we do torrent.
Yes I know there are many legitimate reasons for doing so, but that's not always the reason for hitting up sites like The Pirate Bay.
New numbers are out from Nielsen today on marketshare among the big online video sites. Despite an expected December downturn in total numbers, there were some unexpected changes in the market last month.
The highlights? YouTube viewership grew 9% according to Nielsen, Metacafe grew 27% and Yahoo! Video viewership fell by an amazing 60%.
We've been writing a lot about data portability here lately, and specifically the DataPortability.org Work Group. High level members of Google and Facebook staff joined the group a week ago yesterday, key people from LinkedIn, SixApart, Flickr and Twitter joined two days after that, the new Mozilla CEO told us last night that his organization is looking closely and will likely join the group.
That's all well and good but when does the rubber hit the road? Where's the beef and what are we waiting for?
