Seth Gilbert, 07-13-2007
Every year, the celebrities and power brokers of big business converge on Sun Valley, Idaho for the pinnacle of exclusive schmooze and booze deal making conferences. Investment banker Herb Allen’s five day event is legendary. This year, it began officially on Wednesday, under the scenic skies of the mountain resort town.
Guests with the privilege of attending include such heavyweights of media and technology as Rupert Murdoch (News Corp), Robert Iger of Disney, Jerry Yang and Terry Semel from Yahoo, Warren Buffet, Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates and others. Also on the guest list are the folks from a number of high profile, high-buzz startups including representatives from IPTV player Joost, from news aggregator Digg, from Facebook, even newly funded Ning.
Between golf, meetings and private events, among the crowd, ideas are circulated by the pine trees or the pools. In the boardroom or lounges, strategies and business cards are exchanged. Partnerships are contemplated.
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Seth Gilbert,
What a difference two months makes.
Two months ago, Palo Alto based social media network Imeem was being sued by Warner Music Group for copyright infringement. Now two months later, all is forgotten. The suit has been dismissed. The two are partners.
Warner Music and Imeem announced Thursday they would offer the entire Warner music and video catalog for free ad-supported streaming through imeem. Imeem, which has about 16m active users, is focused on letting its subscribers share playlists and discover content.
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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,
Tivo and Amazon cut out the need to use a PC from their video download service earlier this week. Tivo equipped users can now buy downloadable movies straight from their remote controls if their DVR is hooked up to a broadband Internet connection. Microsoft similarly cut out the PC for movie downloads when it enabled a PC-free movie rental service through its Xbox gaming platform and website Xbox Live about a year ago.
At the video gaming industry’s leading trade show in Santa Monica, Microsoft and Disney announced a deal to expand the titles available on Microsoft’s service.
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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,
What’s wrong with this picture: it’s summertime, a humid, sunny Saturday afternoon. Father and son, Mother, daughter, the family, they all pack themselves in the car to fight traffic and parking headaches to go to that venerable of institutions – a professional baseball game. There, the Red Sox are beating the Yankees at Fenway, the fans singing Sweet Caroline. Seats vibrate from the collective noise. The Jumbotron scoreboard announces a birthday. The scent of roasted peanuts fills the air. The crowd does a giant wave. A fly ball goes just foul. Vendors chuck hot dogs and crackerjacks. Cheering kids have their gloves at the ready to catch a foul ball. And you, you’ve brought a video game console?
Video game console? Huh? I don’t remember that in the lyrics to "Take Me Out to the Ballgame." It’s sure not part of the father-son baseball outings I remember.
What it is, however, is a story about the kind of inventive product repurposing that professional product marketers dream about and just such a thing is going on.
Up in Washington, in Mariner country at Safeco field, Nintendo of America is running an experiment with its best selling portable console, the DS Lite. Click to Read More
