Jon Miles, 09-30-2009
The transformation is complete. After several months of internal adjustment and review, News Corp announced today that Fox Interactive Media’s management reorganization is complete.
Charged with the task of playing the “lead role in shaping digital strategy across News Corporation” and “ensuring a consistent, long term vision of both product innovation and revenue generation across the entire company,” the group will be renamed News Corp. Digital Media (“NDM”).
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Seth Gilbert,
Twitter is not the only company drawing massive investor speculation. Gaming startup OnLive announced Tuesday (9/29) that investors including Warner Brothers, Autodesk and AT&T Media Holdings had all jumped in to fund a substantial Series C financing.
Details weren’t disclosed but CEO Steve Perlman said on the company’s blog that the round was the company’s largest to date. It was "much larger than our previous rounds and gives us a serious jolt of rocket fuel as our beta progresses," he wrote.
Some speculation in the market is that the valuation may have been in excess of $500m. (via Venture Beat) No telling if that’s accurate.
OnLive is looking to deliver a “cloud computing” competitor to the traditional game console environment. More than seven years in the making, the company is currently beta testing its offering and looking to build out server farms necessary for their eventual commercial launch.
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Seth Gilbert, 09-29-2009
Web enabled TV’s are becoming more common and eventually, they or some comparable TV to Internet bridge technology, will be the norm. In the interim, though, consumers don’t seem to have any hesitation when it comes to satisfying their video cravings through today’s distribution platforms.
On September 28th, comScore Video Metrix released its measurements (release) detailing August viewing habits.
For the month, 161m US internet users watched online video. Up from 158m viewers in July, the draw set the current (and sure to be broken) record for the all time high.
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Seth Gilbert, 09-28-2009
When you talk about the magnitude of a business, there’s scale and then there’s SCALE. Apple unequivocally reached the second plateau with its App Store Monday.
In a short press release, the company announced customers have downloaded more than 2 billion applications since the store’s debut. That’s a jump of 500 million downloads since July, or an even billion since April.
Steve Jobs has to be happy in Cupertino.
To add some color and put 2 billion downloads in context, we’ve hit the spreadsheets. Crunching the numbers:
• Average Downloads Per Day – The App Store has delivered approximately 4.5m downloads per day since its debut in July 2008. Since mid July of this year, when Apple triumphantly announced it had delivered 1.5 billion downloads, the rate’s jumped to somewhere near 6.5m per day. (Ed. Note: averages are approximate due to inexact information about the days on which Apple crossed each download milestone. See table).
• Available Titles – Back in March, the App store had about 30k applications to offer. Since July, the number of available titles has jumped from 65,000 to 85,000 and the number of developers has advanced from 100,000 to 125,000.
• Free or Paid – According to an App Store product survey maintained by 148Apps, the App Store had 83,618 titles available for download in the U.S. on September 28th (just under Apple’s report of 85k titles). Of these 83.6k downloads, approximately 23%, or 19,514 titles were free.
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Seth Gilbert, 09-8-2009
Mickey is looking for some new ideas and the talent to develop them. He’s not scared to pay to get either.
Just about a week after shelling out $4b to buy Marvel Entertainment, Disney’s dug into its acquisition coffers again, this time to snag little known game developer Wideload Games.
In a press release, the companies announced the deal Tuesday morning.
In contrast to the Marvel purchase, the Wideload buy seems almost singularly about the people. Wideload won’t be bringing a cache of known brands or readily saleable products to the Disney family. There won’t be any super heroes or arch villains to pepper story arcs or cross the media boundaries of Disney’s empire. Since being founded in 2003, Wideload has developed only a handful of games.
The real characters Wideload will bring to Disney are its staff, particularly, its founder, game industry veteran, Alex Seropian.
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