Seth Gilbert, 07-12-2007
Adap.tv, a company offering in-stream contextual ad services for online video, announced the closing of a $10m Series A financing. Redpoint Ventures and Gemini Israel Funds provided the capital.
Adap.tv’s technology includes proprietary (and patent pending) algorithms for analyzing video content. Based on that analysis, the company’s software then serves, in real-time, relatively discreet text ads relevant to the users viewing behavior. It’s a similar concept to the ads on web pages served by Google’s Adsense or Yahoo’s Publisher Network. Adap.tv plans to earn revenue through a combination of pay per performance and revenue sharing.
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Seth Gilbert,
Despite a crowded market, many investors including Angels and professional Venture Capitalists are still trying to catch the wave on Internet video. The focus of most seems to be on niche plays, perhaps to diversify portfolios and hedge against future failures.
Three such deals, all with entertainment professionals onboard, and all added to the Metue Company Watchlist’s, have been announced recently.
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Seth Gilbert, 07-11-2007
To date, Elevation Partners has been relatively slow in the deployment of their $1.9b private equity fund. That may be changing. Today, Elevation announced its second deal in as many months.
The media convergence focused private equity firm whose cofounders include Silicon Valley icon Roger McNamee and global icon, U2 singer Bono, announced an agreement to buy the SDI Media Group from fellow private equity firm Warburg Pincus (which acquired SDI in 2004)
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Seth Gilbert, 07-10-2007
The gaming industry is valued at $37.5b by some measurements and growing. The Asian Pacific market is expected to be nearly $19b by 2011. 81% of American youth play video games at least a month. Despite such staggering numbers, if you read the words of Electronic Arts CEO, all is not rosy. Games are becoming too complex, too involved and alienating the mass-market. Their producers are also failing to innovate. So said John Riccitiello in Yesterdays Wallstreet Journal where he was quoted commenting that the industry is "making games that are harder and harder to play" and that "for the most part, the industry has been rinse and repeat." And he’s right.
Statistics show the competition for leisure time and entertainment is incredibly fierce and even with convergence in hardware (which now include DVD players and Internet connections) helping expand the gaming marketplace in some ways, the same competition is requiring game publishers and developers to tread carefully; mistakes are costly. A missed opportunity to get a game to market (e.g. a gamble on the wrong platform) or a weak showing from a game with expensive development costs could be a heavy drag on revenues for months.
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Seth Gilbert, 07-3-2007
After a month of rumors, it was officially confirmed Monday that Google is acquiring consumer telephony/internet integration company Grand Central Communications. Official terms have not been disclosed but widespread speculation is that the price was surprisingly high; above $50m. That’s hard to believe, improbable seeming but not impossible. Reports are the two year old company had raised approximately $4m in venture funding from investors including Micro Ventures.
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Seth Gilbert, 06-29-2007
Palm reported Q4 earnings after the close of market Thursday. The numbers easily beat Wall Street analyst consensus expectations but overall were poor year over year; and especially dim in comparison to very positive results from competitor Research in Motion.
For the quarter ending June 1, Palm earned $15.4m (15c/share) on revenue of $401.3 compared to $27.2m (25c/share) for the same period last year. Excluding one-time charges Palm said it would have earned $17.8m (17c/share) this quarter. Analyst consensus estimates (Thompson) were for earnings of $14.43m (15c/share).
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Seth Gilbert, 06-26-2007
Last January comScore reported 70% of the total U.S. Internet audience watched at least one Internet video stream that month. It’s been reported that there are more than 12 million hours of video programming currently hosted online. YouTube has been reported to have more than 5.1m hours of content. With such an enormous, and rapidly increasing, pool of content one of the bigger challenges is how to effectively index and search the data. Without organization, it is too easy as the old saying goes “to be swimming in information but thirsting for knowledge.”
A host of video search companies are lining up to try and address the problem. The approaches vary. Some are focusing on text-to speech technology, others are looking elsewhere. It’s a new market, but one with such potential, that advertisers, eager for contextual delivery, are salivating over the potential.
One of the primary cataloging and search standard used so far has been keywords and meta-tags. They are user controlled. To work someone has to manually identify the content and title it appropriately. Social networking sites allow a wide range of people to share that responsibility (by adding unique “tags” as identifiers) but the trouble with user defined search is that it’s only effective when users use the same vocabulary. If I say tom-ay-to and you say to –mah-to we could get different results. Click to Read More
