Seth Gilbert, 09-22-2008
Efforts by the major music labels to find new revenue sources that will replace eroding CD sales often have the feeling of things being thrown at the wall to see what sticks. Today, the Big 4 (Sony BMG, Universal, Vivendi and Warner Music Group) threw a flash memory card with a little help from a hardware maker.
SanDisk, the world’s leading supplier of flash memory cards announced the new initiative to sell the tiny memory chips preloaded with full albums of MP3 music. Plug the card into your MP3 capable phone, or portable player and it’s ready to go. It’s near instantly accessible tunes in the palm of your hand.
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Seth Gilbert, 09-18-2008
On September 5th reports circulated the IPTV startup Joost was preparing to abandon their application-based delivery mechanism in favor a new, more accessible browser based solution. The new launch was promised shortly. Today, it arrived.
At the Joost website, the company began serving a browser based solution to stream its collected library of licensed video content. The launch was characterized as “soft” meaning the company is not promoting it and is using it as a live beta test to work out bugs.
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Seth Gilbert, 09-17-2008
From the venture wires, two startups closed new financings this week: Austin, Texas based game company, Challenge Games, and Bethesda, Maryland based online book publishing community WEbook.
Challenge Games
Based in Austin, Challenge Games was founded in 2006 with the aim of building short-form (playable in short term increments) multiplayer games. To date, the company has launched two free browser based games: Duels (released Aug. 07) and Baseball Boss (released July ’08).
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Seth Gilbert, 09-16-2008
Are video games the MTV of a new generation? Are DVD’s really on the road to becoming obsolete? Are smartphones being accepted as fast as the hype suggests? New research from NPD Group and the Pew Foundation sheds a little light on each of these questions. This edition of the Metue “By the Numbers Report” recaps some of their findings
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Seth Gilbert, 09-15-2008
It would probably be entirely reasonable if all the financial news published on Monday focused solely on the banking world: the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the sale of Merrill Lynch, the ongoing saga of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Books will be written about these events. Analysts and academics will probe the “why’s” and “where’s” of what happened and try to lay out a map of how to avoid repetition. Policy makers may even push legislation to prevent recurrence (as was the case with Sarbanes-Oxley following the scandals at Enron, Tyco, Adelphia, Worldcom and others).
Compared to these big headlines, the rest of Monday’s business news was small to the point of seeming irrelevance, still there was plenty going on of merit within other markets. As one analyst’s comments suggested, the collapse of Lehman Brothers doesn’t stop Microsoft from selling software or consumers from shopping at Wal-mart. Life, and business, will adjust and move forward.
One piece of interesting news in the media, entertainment and technology sector was an announcement by retail giant, Best Buy, that they were purchasing digital music service Napster (press release). Comparatively tiny, in scale and scope, the news could be more significant that it might otherwise appear.
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Seth Gilbert, 09-14-2008
The takeover attempt was highly public. From early February to late August, for more than six months, it grabbed headlines. The private courtship that followed lasted less than a month.
On Sunday, Electronic Arts came out of a self imposed quiet period to announce their private discussions with Take Two were concluded. At this time, EA said, the companies have decided not to pursue any merger.
Just two weeks ago, there was the slight prospect of otherwise. Click to Read More
Seth Gilbert, 09-12-2008
The video game industry has been on fire. For twenty seven months, a streak almost unfathomable in electronics retail, the U.S. marketplace returned double digit year over year percentage growth (via NPD). Every month had yielded a more than 10% gross sales improvement, every month until now. The August NPD retail report came out this week and it showed a surprise slowdown. In August, the industry grew only 9% year over year in the U.S. Many are questioning what happened and if it’s cause for concern.
Gaming is one of those entertainment industries that is often called “Recession Resistant.” In tougher times, the theory goes, people need their escapism and fun more than ever. Even as they watch their spending, they’ll pay for a movie ticket, or a DVD, or a new game to suspend reality. But most anyone who has ever owned a water resistant watch will tell you, water resistance isn’t the same as waterproof. If you take that watch down deep enough underwater, it will let the water in. Recession Resistant is the same thing. It’s a reasonable safety zone but not a guarantee.
That fact has some analysts asking: did the gaming industry finally spring a leak?
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