Despite a hectic past two months fighting off a proxy battle with investor Carl Icahn, Yahoo is rumored to be sending out buyout feelers for social-networks company Demand Media.
Yahoo's Hilary Schneider, who was recently promoted to oversee the company's U.S. go-to market operations, traveled to Demand Media's Santa Monica, Calif., offices a couple weeks ago to gauge Demand's interest in a $1.5 billion to $2 billion buyout, TechCrunch reports, citing unnamed sources.
But Demand Media didn't bite, TechCrunch notes, adding that company founder Richard Rosenblatt is said to be seeking a price in the $3 billion range.
A post in All Things Digital casts a different perspective on that meeting.
In an interview with All Things Digital, the Demand Media founder said: "There is a lot of potential here, and I want to build a big company for the long-term."
All Things Digital also cites Yahoo sources as saying there has been "no offer floated" to acquire Demand Media.
But both reports note that a hook-up between the companies wouldn't be a bad idea.
Says TechCrunch:
It just so happens that what Demand Media is good at--generating lots of advertising impressions and creating niche social networks for media sites, may be a perfect fit for at least some of what ails Yahoo.
But should Yahoo want to make a play for the company and force a deal, Demand Media doesn't have the same pressures as Yahoo, which is in its own fix with Icahn. Demand Media isn't publicly traded, at least yet...
Google's Orkut social network isn't just big in Brazil. It's also popular in India, especially among software developers, according to a new survey.
Despite Facebook's efforts to promote that social network as the platform of choice for third-party application developers, Orkut is used by twice as many software programmers in India than either Facebook or MySpace, according to an Evans Data survey of more than 300 developers in India. Software programmers in that country are heavy users of social networks in general.
Seventy-three percent of those surveyed said they had used Orkut, compared with 35 percent for Facebook and 32 percent for MySpace.
"Capturing mindshare with developers in fast-growing emerging development markets like India and Brazil gives them (Google) a strategic advantage going forward in further cultivating this very important community," Evans Data Chief Executive John Andrews said in a statement.
Google has released new domains specific to India and Brazil as a result of the popularity in those countries.
The independent survey was conducted in late May and early June.
Satellite TV provider Dish Network said Tuesday that AT&T will end its agreement to bundle its TV service with AT&T's broadband and phone service at the end of the year.
AT&T and Dish have had a joint marketing deal since July 2003, which allows AT&T to package the Dish TV service with AT&T's phone and Internet packages. But AT&T has decided not to renew the agreement, and as required by the contract between the two companies, AT&T is giving Dish six months notice that the deal will expire December 31, 2008.
The move is likely a way for AT&T to negotiate a better deal with either Dish or its competitor DirecTV. In April, AT&T expanded its partnership with Dish in the old BellSouth territory. (AT&T bought BellSouth in 2006.) And it stopped marketing a similar package with DirecTV.
At the time, it looked as if AT&T had dropped DirecTV for Dish. But AT&T has always maintained that it's discussing partnerships with both companies. And now it looks like the company is free to pit one company against the other to get the best possible price.
AT&T said in a statement that it will continue to discuss options with Dish even though it has terminated the current agreement.
Video is a key part of AT&T's strategy. The company has spent millions of dollars over the past few years to upgrade its network with fiber so that it can deliver TV over its IP network. The new U-Verse service is up and running in parts of AT&T's network. But the company isn't able to deploy U-Verse everywhere, so it has been relying on deals with satellite TV providers to deliver a so-called triple-play bundle that includes TV, phone, and broadband services in a single package.
CBS announced Monday it completed its $1.8 billion acquisition of CNET Networks, publisher of many Web sites including CNET News.com, setting the stage for expanding its CBS Interactive division into five categories.
Under the acquisition, CBS Interactive will include such categories as technology, entertainment, sports, news, and business. The division will be headed up by Quincy Smith, former CBS Interactive president, who will now serve as its CEO. Neil Ashe, former CNET Networks CEO, will become president of the business unit.
CBS Interactive's technology category will include CNET.com, CNET Reviews, Download.com, and others. The entertainment category will include TV.com, GameSpot.com, Chow.com, CBS.com, TheInsider.com, Last.fm, and the CBS Audience Network, while the sports category will include CBSSports.com, CBSCollegeSports.com, and NCAA.com.
CBS Interactive will also incorporate the news category, serving as home to CNET News.com, for technology news, and CBSNews.com, which features global news and current events. The business division will operate BNET.com, as the anchor to its business-related content, as well as ZDNet and TechRepublic, which serve readers who use tend to use technology for large corporations.
Red Hat has been talking about open sourcing its Network for well over a year. Today, it finally did it.
However, code by itself is only moderately interesting. What we need now is a thriving community around "Project Spacewalk," as Red Hat calls the Network project.
Why? Well, because in some ways the commercial open-source community increasingly fragments as it matures financially. What is the first thing that MySQL and JBoss did to add value to their support subscriptions? Build networks. What, presumably, will be the first things that other open-source companies do? Build networks.
What is the result? A swamp of incompatible service-delivery networks.
Now consider the power for Red Hat if its Spacewalk actually served as a gathering point - an integration point - for the commercial open-source community? Powerful.
... Read more
Three former Nortel Networks executives are being criminally charged in Canada for misstating the company's financial results in 2002 and 2003.
Nortel's former CEO Frank Dunn along with former CFO Douglas Beatty, and former controller Michael Gollogly have been charged with fraud, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The executives were fired in 2004 as part of a massive accounting scandal at the company. As a result of the scandal, Nortel, which makes and sells equipment to phone companies, was forced to restate earnings as far back as 2001. In 2005, the company admitted it had overstated revenue by $3.4 billion.
The three men plus another former executive had previously been charged in a civil fraud suit by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the U.S. The SEC suit accuses the former execs of manipulating the company's earnings from 2000 to 2004, when its stock started declining as a result of the telecom bust. Nortel is also suing Dunn, Beatty, and Gollogly for bonuses the men were paid in 2003.
Nortel said in a statement that it's been cooperating with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Nortel itself has not been charged nor has it been the target of the investigation.
Behind the MediaSmart Connect's fold-down front panel is a USB port and a slot for an optional removable hard drive.
(Credit: HP)Hewlett-Packard's line of MediaSmart TVs includes the built-in ability to stream digital media from your home network and the Internet straight to their screens. But for the vast majority of us who don't own an HP TV, the company will soon have a second option: the MediaSmart Connect. The little black box connects to your home network (via its built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi or wired Ethernet) and streams a wide variety of digital audio, photo, and video files--including content from compatible Internet services (including Live365, Vongo, CinemaNow, and MovieLink).
The MediaSmart Connect should be able to pull digital files from any UPnP and DLNA compliant storage devices on your home network--beyond standard Windows PCs, that includes network attached storage devices such as HP's own MediaSmart Server and Media Vault. It can also double as a Windows Media Center Extender when interfacing with Media Center-enabled versions of Windows Vista--allowing the streaming of live or recorded TV at HD resolutions. The MediaSmart Connect doesn't have any on-board storage, but users can use the box to pull compatible media straight from an HP Pocket Media Drive (found on the company's PC desktops) or a standard USB flash drive.
The MediaSmart Connect will be available later this summer for $349, and is now available for preorder. (If it looks familiar, it's because HP has been teasing us with it since January's Consumer Electronics Show.) It'll include a learning remote that can control up to four other devices, an HDMI cable, and a $20 CinemaNow coupon. To drum up publicity for the product's launch, HP is offering a trade-in program where 100 people can exchange their old digital media adapter for the MediaSmart Connect. The company is also teaming with Microsoft to offer a series of four online "webinars" to demonstrate the product's features over the next few weeks. Feel free to check them out, but don't be surprised if you're just getting an infomercial for the product in question.
We'll be doing a detailed hands-on review of the MediaSmart Connect once we get a final production sample in July. (Also on deck: the similar Linksys DMA2200.) Until then, the floor is open: do you have any interest in the MediaSmart Connect, or in Windows Media Center Extenders in general? Is the whole idea of streaming media in the home just a niche market that will never go mainstream? Or would you prefer to go with an Xbox 360, which handles nearly all of the same media streaming functions, and adds game playback to boot?
Someone posts a fake profile of you on MySpace casting aspersion on your character. You may be justifiably angry, but unless you are willing to specify the defamations and provide proof they are untrue, don't expect to be able to unmask the profile author.
On Friday, Cicero, Ill., Town President Larry Dominick dropped his request for a court to force MySpace to identify the creator of several spoof profiles in his name that he claimed were defamatory. His petition filed last month (PDF) did not provided details about the profiles and exactly what was defamatory. The pages were removed after Dominick complained.
The profiles had photos and "questionable comments about his sexuality and ethics," according to the Chicago Tribune.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a friend of the court brief last week arguing that fulfilling the request would violate the author's First Amendment right to remain anonymous unless Dominick could demonstrate a viable legal claim. The EFF also argued that the federal Stored Communications Act, which prohibits government entities--including Dominick acting in his official capacity as Cicero town president--from obtaining identifying customer information through the ordinary civil discovery process.
EFF Senior Staff Attorney Matt Zimmerman says the organization doesn't oppose all claims of Internet defamation, only those that fail to provide details about the alleged defamation and proof that the statements aren't true, as well as those that don't provide notification to the person whose identity is being sought.
"It's far too easy for someone to go into court and simply ask a third party like MySpace or Facebook to turn this information over if there is no attempt to notify the person whose rights would be affected," he told CNET News.com.
The concern is that without First Amendment safeguards for anonymity people will use the courts merely to find the identity of people whose opinion or actions they disagree with and use that information to chill criticism.
Most of the time, the cases arise from postings made on blogs. But social network pages are increasingly being used for anonymous self expression.
For instance, a judge in Indiana ordered Facebook to name the person who created a fake profile for a high school dean last month.
Tom McInerney, the Web video-sharing pioneer who left the sector 18 months ago, is making a comeback.
Guba co-founder Tom McInerney
(Credit: Greg Sandoval/CNET News.com)This time, however, the co-founder of video site Guba is an investor. He's one of the backers of Shopflick, a company trying to become the Web equivalent of the Home Shopping Network. The site enables apparel merchants to showcase the clothing they offer by uploading video clips. Many sellers use the opportunity to channel their inner Francis Ford Coppola.
For example, the style mavens at designer Ric Rac shot a scene of two women wearing nearly identical versions of the company's $145 Kangaroo Dress meeting on the street. The audience hears the trash talking going on in each woman's head.
McInerney, who spoke at the OnHollywood conference on Wednesday, said Shopflick's founders got the idea for the site by meeting a woman who had made jewelry and had appeared on the cable show the Home Shopping Network.
The three-minute appearance brought the woman more sales than in the prior seven years, according to McInerney. Shopflick's executives want to bring that same magic to the Web.
Helping merchants sell clothes online is a practical use for Web video, McInerney said. He added that enabling people to share homemade videos online may not be as practical--unless, of course, you're YouTube.
McInerney stepped down as Guba's CEO in December 2006. By then YouTube had already amassed a huge audience and lead in video sharing. Three months earlier, Google had acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion.
"I think we can all acknowledge that YouTube has won the big prize," McInerney said then. "The billion-dollar opportunity has kind of passed."
Before that, Guba was among the first video-sharing companies to sign licensing deals with Hollywood studios. McInerney said that Guba was too small to compete against some of the bigger players that entered not long after, such as Amazon.com and Apple. Guba no longer offers feature films for download.
"We pretty much lined up every studio," McInerney said. "Later, we couldn't justify paying the guarantees that all the studios asked for...frankly, movie downloads on the Web haven't really taken off."
McInerney predicted that consumers will one day soon watch movies downloaded from the Web and that a handful of distributors will prevail over the sector. But he doesn't plan to give it another try.
"I like being an investor," he said. "You can still be involved by just writing a check, but you don't have to work 22 hours a day."
Facebook understands what makes its service tick: lots of users and developers.
On July 23, the social-networking powerhouse will hold its second annual F8 platform conference in San Francisco. The company claims 400,000 developers in more than 160 countries and 24,000 Facebook applications in its directory.
Facebook also recently reached a milestone, according to ComScore, catching up with MySpace on the unique-user metric.
Both social networks attract about 115 million members on a monthly basis. However, most of Facebook's growth has come from outside the United States, which could be more difficult to monetize than U.S. users. MySpace has 72 million unique monthly users in the States, twice the number of Facebook.
See also: "The battle for Facebook" (Rolling Stone)
