Articles of the Day
Google’s Armstrong: We’re Not Launching An Ad Agency - Ad agencies have nothing to fear from the newly launched Google Creative Lab, according to Tim Armstrong, Google’s President, Advertising and Commerce, North America. “We are not launching an ad agency. It would be mathematically impossible for us to get into that business, and we have no interest in doing it.”
Financial Category Holds Steady At Google - The current crisis in the subprime mortgage and lending industries is not causing any cutback in financial services spending on Google, the search giant’s industry sector head and a leading advertiser in the category said Thursday.
ABC Sees Wisdom In Syndication: First Deal Up With AOL - Proving itself syndication-friendly, ABC has agreed to distribute its programming through AOL Video. AOL is the first portal to carry the Disney unit’s primetime fare, but likely not the last in light of ABC’s recent vow to branch out beyond its own site.
Nielsen: Ad Spend In First Half Of 2007 Tumbles - The latest Nielsen Company report confirms what other research companies have revealed–advertising spending is in a weakened state. The big research company says for the first half of 2007, ad spending slipped 0.5% versus the same time period for 2006. Not surprisingly, the Internet led the way–again–as the most improved category, up 23.6% versus a year ago. Also on the upswing is outdoor media.
Intel: WiMax Goes Live In ‘08 - WiMax is coming, seriously, this time. Chip maker Intel, whose invested hundreds of millions into the technology, is so sure that WiMax will go live in 2008 it’s pumping its next-generation semiconductor technology with a new Wi-Fi/WiMax module called Echo Peak. What does any of that mean? On a larger scale, notebooks powered by the technology, called Montevina, will process information faster and be low-power, but they’ll also support the new mobile WiMax standard being developed by Sprint Nextel and Clearwire that you’ve heard about for nearly five years. According to a recent Intel announcement, 150 million people will have WiMax access by 2008, 750 million by 2010 and 1.3 billion by 2012.
The Google Monopoly - “Don’t be Evil.” You knew that motto would come back to haunt any company with enormous growth aspirations like Google. Evil–or something approaching it–is exactly what Microsoft and AT&T worry about in Google’s bid to acquire the display advertising giant DoubleClick. The prospect of marrying cookies to search data is just a little too scary, they say–mostly for Google’s competitors, which would be at the Web giant’s mercy when it comes to establishing online advertising rates.
Email As Foundation For Social Networking - Earlier this week Yahoo completed the $350 million purchase of Zimbra, a provider of Web-based email (among other things), Firefox maker Mozilla spun off its free, cross-platform email client Thunderbird, and Xobni, a company that pledges to “take back” the inbox (”Xobni” is inbox spelled backwards), made its “impressive” launch.
SK Telecom To Invest $110M In Online Businesses in US; Includes Cyworld USA; Invests $270M in Helio - SK Telecom (NYSE: SKM), the Korean telecom giant, made a bunch of investment related announcement today, and among them, it will invest up to an additional $270 million to support their struggling wireless JV Helio, effectively pulling other JV partner Earthlink (NSDQ: ELNK) out of committing any further cash. We’ve covered that in detail on MocoNews here. The more relevant part here it is also earmarked $110 million to invest in online businesses in U.S., though it didn’t give a lot of detail…the brief SEC filing from SKT today says this: “Investment in the Internet business in the U.S., which may include the social network service”.
E-Mail: Not an Open-and-Shut Case - The use of e-mail as a marketing tool has become ubiquitous and widespread almost a dozen years after it was first introduced. Its future should be bright. eMarketer estimates that e-mail advertising spending will grow from $338 million in 2006 to $616 million in 2011 — a six-year increase of 82%. Comparatively, total Internet ad spending will grow twice as fast during the same period. So why is the e-mail ad growth rate lagging?
Senate Gets Into GoogleClick Review - It’s not just the FTC and privacy advocates like EPIC and USPIRG anymore. Google’s proposed acquisition of DoubleClick will be subject to a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee review next week, according to a WSJ Washington Wire blog post. It seems that Google’s new in-house political lobbying team couldn’t have come at a better time.
Yahoo! buys news aggregator BuzzTracker - Yahoo! is buying Participate Media, the two-year old startup which developed BuzzTracker, for an undisclosed amount that could be around USD5m according to unnamed sources. BuzzTracker is a website that uses a mix of human editing and technology - the BuzzTracker software - to aggregate news from over 90,000 licensed sources, including blogs, reviews and multimedia sources, before grouping them by topics, popularity or date, while mapping the stories geographically.
Hearst Buys Realage.com, Bolsters Cross-Platform Ad Sales - Hearst has added Realage.com to its growing stable of digital properties. Health care sites with a vertical search component are a good way to deliver targeted advertising, as they allow advertisers to bid on key search terms and subject headings. For magazine publishers, the acquisition of health-related sites provides opportunities for cross-platform ad sales.
Yahoo To Buy Email Provider Zimbra - Yahoo on Monday announced an agreement to acquire e-mail software provider Zimbra for about $350 million. The acquisition is intended to help Yahoo expand its presence in universities, businesses and through ISPs by helping organizations host e-mail on or off premises with their own domain. Zimbra’s offerings include rich, AJAX-based e-mail, calendar, and contact management features that can be used both on and offline.
Comcast Buying Entertainment Community Site BuddyTV - Seattle-based BuddyTV, a TV community site, is being acquired by Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA), paidContent.org has learned from sources. BuddyTV took a loan of $250K from the Charles River Ventures’ Quick Start Seed Funding program back in May, before taking a $2.8 million investment from Gemstar-TV Guide this summer.
InfoSpace Sells Online Directory Business To Idearc For $225 Million - Not necessarily a sale of its mobile unit, yet, as has been reported before, but InfoSpace (NSDQ: INSP) has sold off its online directory business, including Switchboard.com, to yellow-pages publisher Idearc (NYSE:IAR) for $225 million in cash. After the close of the deal, expected end of this year, InfoSpace will return the net proceeds from the sale to shareholders as a special dividend. At closing, InfoSpace’s cash position is expected to be in excess of $400 million. Switchboard.com site was acquired by InfoSpace in 2004 for approximately $103 million, and formed the majority of the revenues for its online directory business…For the first half of 2007, this business had revenues of $17.2 million. The business employs approximately 50 people.
ProfileBuilder Acquires Social Networking Photo Site ZingFu.com - Online identity management service ProfileBuilder has announced the acquisition of ZingFu.com, a site for manipulating photographs (see site for examples) for use on social networking sites. For its part, ProfileBuilder offers tools to create one online identity card that can be displayed across the web on sites like MySpace and Facebook.
