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After Digitas, Ad Agencies Look To Next Big—Or Even Small—Digital Acquisitions – With Publicis Groupe’s $1.3 billion offer to buy interactive shop Digitas old news by now, the ad industry is now focused on the next big independent digital agency purchase. For one thing, not satiated by the pending Digitas purchase, Publicis and its agencies (Leo Burnett, Saatchi & Saatchi and Fallon) are said to be looking for additional acquisitions opportunities in the digital space. Other ad holding companies, like Havas, are also looking to fit a creative interactive agency within their walls.

Downloaded Digital Sound Tracks Up Two Thirds – Nielsen SoundScan reports that through the first 49 weeks of 2006, sales of individually downloaded digital tracks are up more than 67% over the same period in 2005, accounting for more than 525 million digital downloads; already 173 million more than 2005’s annual total. 

YouTube Delays Anti-Piracy Software – YouTube is failing to complete the anti-piracy software it promised, the first line of defense against piracy on its Web site. The so-called “content identification system” is supposed to track down and prevent unauthorized copyrighted music and video from being uploaded to YouTube. It was supposed to be ready by the end of last year, but the company confirmed that it was not, and was unable to give a date as to when the technology would be in place.

Predictions: Mixed Year For Internet Bellwethers – John Battelle, one of the Web industry’s better prognosticators, gives his 2007 predictions. Among them: Yahoo, AOL or IAC will be scooped up by Microsoft this year, as the software giant realizes it can’t build its way into a better online media position. If it doesn’t buy AOL, Yahoo will, he says. Failing that, AOL will go public, but the IPO will receive a lukewarm review.

New Amazon Web Site Sells Shoes and Bags – The online retailer Amazon.com said Wednesday that it had started a shoe and handbag Web site called Endless.com to tap into the growing footwear and accessories market. The new Web site will carry more than 250 brands for women and men, including Donald J Pliner, Enzo Angiolini, Reebok and Columbia Sportswear. It will compete with online rivals like Zappos.com, Onlineshoes.com and Shoes.com, which all offer free standard shipping and returns. 

AOL Founder’s Next Startup: Revolution Health – AOL Co-founder Steve Case, who left Time Warner (AOL’s parent company) in 2005, has effectively launched his next startup – Revolution Health. Revolution Health is a health-related portal site and social network. Users are urged to ask questions and answer other users’ questions, rate their doctors, participate in online discussions and otherwise contribute content.

Amazon.com’s Investment In Wikia: $10 Million; Developing Wiki-Based Search Engine – We have mentioned this funding before, but the amount came out today through SEC filings, picked up by PEHub: Amazon was the sole investor in Wikia’s second round, and the amount is $10 million. Wikia is the for-profit community wiki company from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, who is chairman. Story:

Will Media Embrace Wikis? – For Web publishers, posting user feedback has become a requisite part of their business. Will wikis be the next step in the content they offer their audiences? Since wikis enable people to edit and contribute to published content, it raises the risk that the information provided could be inappropriate, irrelevant or just plain wrong. As the folks at Wikipedia will tell you, wikis need constant monitoring. This would certainly cost, but would the payoff in ad revenue make it worth the expense for media companies? Absolutely, because wiki content costs nothing to produce. The problem media execs will have is ceding even more control of their content to consumers. 

The Year of the Music Industry – As the predictions for 2007 pour in, Billboard says this should be the year the music industry figures out how to profit from user-generated content. In 2006, record labels like Universal Music Group struck deals with YouTube and Google Video, enabling video users to freely use their copyrighted material in exchange for a cut of the publishers’ ad revenue. As opposed to suing all and sundry–a policy that will ultimately prove both fruitless and futile–these progressive deals represent an important part of the recording industry’s future. 

Online Video Is Effective Publicity – Company got a bad rep? Take a page from the book of Monsanto Co., a producer of engineered crops. The company sent camera crews to the Philippines, Australia and other countries where their genetically modified goods are produced to film testimonial from local farmers. These videos were then placed on the company’s Web site. Companies like Monsanto are often the target of protests by environmentalists, but the use of video helped show how genetically modified crops have actually made the lives of the local farmer better. 

Jimmy Wales’ Google-Killer – Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales believes his next wiki project could become powerful enough to take on Google. Wales’ vision of a totally transparent social search engine could prove to be the ultimate extension of Google’s original vision: Organize the world’s content, and make it searchable. Google ranks its results based on how many links a given page receives–a system that’s prone to trickery and hacking.

2007: Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without – A list of TechCrunch’s favorite Web 2.0 companies with descriptions. 

Mozilla Does Microformats: Firefox 3 as Information Broker – Just before Christmas, Mozilla designer Alex Faaborg published some introductory posts on his blog about where Mozilla is headed with microformats. Quick background: Mozilla is of course the developer of the popular open source browser Firefox; and microformats are (in Alex’s words) “adding semantics to markup to take it from being machine readable to being machine understandable.”  

Updated Disney.com Offers Networking for Kids – CEO Bog Iger talked to the WSJ about the upcoming Disney.com relaunch, describing it as “the single most important companywide strategy Disney is currently implementing.” Added features to the site will include personalization, social networking and subscription services. 

AKQA Named Agency Of The Year – OMMA magazine today announces that digital shop AKQA has won the Agency of the Year award. AKQA took top honors for work on behalf of shop clients like Coke, Diageo’s Johnnie Walker brand, Visa, McDonald’s, and Microsoft. The independent shop is attracting a lot of attention these days, so much so that it’s now shopping itself around, with some reports saying it could draw as much as $150 million. Digitas–which Publicis Groupe just agreed to purchase for $1.3 billion–won the Silver. 

Music Industry Changes Its Tune on Podcasting – After two years of hesitancy, the music industry is finally taking its first steps toward embracing podcasting. When podcasts attained prominence in 2004, amateurs and advertisers alike heralded the downloadable audio programs as the next step in the evolution of broadcasting. But they have failed to make headway in one key area: music programming. 

Wired’s Top 10 Acquisition Candidates – Wired has come out with a list of 10 top acquisitions candidates in this space for 2007: Among them some usual suspects and some not: Facebook, Digg, TechMeme, Zillow, Technorati, Wordpress, 37Signals, Feedburner and Riya.  

Facing threats, Jobster targets profitability in 2007 – Jobster, the job search engine that has raised $48 million in venture financing over the past two years, is undergoing an analysis of the business that could involve layoffs or other changes in the first part of 2007. Jobster employs about 145 people — making it one of the biggest newly created Internet companies in Seattle. A source tells the P-I that Jobster recently instituted a hiring freeze, a sign that the company may have grown too big too fast. 

Holiday E-Commerce Sales Surpass $23B – Online holiday spending in 2006 increased 26% over last year to $23.11 billion for the nearly two-month period ending Dec. 26, according to data released Thursday by comScore Networks. A late surge of Internet shopping in the week before Christmas–a 38% jump over the year-earlier period–helped push the total to new levels. 

Hitwise: Google Blog Search Overtakes Technorati – Google Blog Search garnered a bigger market share of visits than longtime market leader Technorati for the week ending Dec. 23, according to new data by research firm Hitwise. The upsurge appears to be the result of Google recently changing its home page to showcase the blog search function more prominently, according to Hitwise research analyst, LeeAnn Prescott. 

New Technology Offer Better Ad Targeting for Small Business Owners – At this point, small-to-mid-sized businesses selling local products or services ought to advertise online. Why? SMB’s usually make less money and have lower ad budgets, which makes TV a waste. But search-engine marketing isn’t enough, which means small-business owners need to dig a little deeper to get their messages in front of targeted audiences. 

Consumers Prefer to Steal Movies and Other Content – Surprise, surprise: a recent study from NPD Group, a research firm covering the music industry, claims that movie downloads using peer-to-peer software and servers is outpacing purchases made from legitimate download services, such as CinemaNow or Apple’s iTunes. The study, compiled from NPD’s VideoWatch tracking software, finds that just 2% of online households purchase movies from movie download services, whereas 8% utilize illegal P2P services. 

Jupitermedia Buys JustTechJobs.com – Jupitermedia has for once bought outside of the online images industry that it has focused on for the last year or so: it has bought out JustTechJobs.com (JTJ), an online tech job site based in Boulder, Colorado. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. JTJ has created separate sites dedicated to specific sub-sectors within tech. Some history here: In 2000, Jupiter, then known as Internet.com, did not buy Dice.com, now one of the biggest tech jobs sites, but bought oher content sites part of the parent EarthWeb. Last year Dice.com was sold to General Atlantic and Quadrangle for $200 million.

PayPerPost Acquires Performancing.com – PayPerPost, the leading marketplace for advertisers to reach bloggers, videographers, photographers, podcasters and social networks, today announced it has signed a Letter of Intent to acquire select assets of Performancing LLC, operator of Performancing.com, a popular Internet community site for professional bloggers.  

DoubleClick Sells Abacus To Epsilon For $435MM – Marketing services company Alliance Data Systems Corp. has agreed to purchase Abacus, which manages databases for catalog companies, from DoubleClick for $435 million. Seven years ago, DoubleClick bought the company for $1.7 billion.  

FCC Approves AT&T’s $85 Billion Acquisition of BellSouth; Includes Cingular – The Federal Communications Commission approved AT&T Inc.’s $85.8 billion takeover of BellSouth Corp. Friday, after the telecom giant offered a series of major concessions to consumer groups and regulators. The agency approved the deal, the largest ever in U.S. telecommunications history, by a unanimous 4-0 vote. The merger creates a behemoth that will have a market capitalization of over $220 billion — more than double that of nearest rival Verizon Communications Inc. — and will serve 67.5 million local phone customers in 22 states, as well as 11.5 million broadband users.

ForeSee: Amazon, Netflix Tops In Consumer Satisfaction – Online movie rental company Netflix and retailer Amazon had the highest levels of online consumer satisfaction this holiday season, according to a report slated for release today by research firm ForeSee Results. For the report, ForeSee measured consumer satisfaction indexes for the 40 highest-selling U.S. retailers on a 100-point scale. 

How Starwood is building the hotel of the future in Second Life – Starwood, creators of the upscale W Hotels brand, is using the virtual community Second Life to introduce its new brand, Aloft. The new hotel brand targets a hip thirtysomething crowd, offering wireless Internet service, chic areas for lounging and socializing, cool terminology (the pool is named “Splash” and the snack bar “Re:Fuel”), and loft-like architecture throughout. The chain wanted to get feedback and create buzz among its target audience before constructing a brick-and-mortar building. So Starwood began construction this fall on an “island” it purchased in Second Life, foreshadowing what it plans to do in 2008 in five North American locations.  

Yahoo 2007: Is Panama Enough? – Panama may not be enough to clean up Yahoo’s mess. In the face of a slumping year on the stock market, deserting executives and a trouncing by Google in Web search and mergers and acquisitions, Yahoo needs a good 2007. The company has placed high hopes on Panama, its new ad monetization technology aimed at delivering better-targeted ads to its users in the hope that it will make Yahoo’s search and display ads more lucrative. 

Possibility Of A Yahoo-AOL Merger in 2007; Google-AOL Change of Control Clause – So bets Merrill Lynch analyst Jessica Reif Cohen, in a note titled “Is 2007 the year AOL and Yahoo are in play?” last week. She said that AOL and Yahoo could be open to a tie-up in 2007, spurred by AOL’s falling market share in Internet search and Yahoo’s lag behind Google. “We believe there are several trends that could push either AOL or Yahoo towards a major transaction, with each other or with another competitor…Although not without its problems, we believe that an AOL-Yahoo combination is one of the more logical combinations in this arena.”

WSJ looks at Microsoft’s ‘behavior targeting’ advertising efforts – The company is making a global push to sell ads geared towards the interests and demographics of individual users of its Hotmail service, msn.com site and other sites. The push is based around the information provided when a user signs up for Hotmail and then the searches they perform, and the results they click on, when using MSFT’s Live Search. The company hopes to grab a bigger piece of the online advertising market by using the information from the 263M worldwide users of Hotmail. The system was launched in the U.S. in September and MSFT plans to roll it out worldwide. The company says it has about 100 advertisers signed up so far.

Monster.com Replaces CareerBuilder At St. Pete Times – Continuing its drive to align with traditional newspapers, career site Monster will replace CareerBuilder as the online recruitment service for the St. Petersburg Times next month. Monster and the 300,000 daily-circulation Times will launch a co-branded job site that will include career-related advice, a resume builder and salary information in addition to national and local job listings. 

Jewelry, Video Games Propel Online Retail Past $21B – E-commerce spending surged in the week before Christmas, according to comScore Networks. For the three days from Dec. 18 through Dec. 20, non-travel retail spending online climbed to $1.55 billion, marking a 35% increase from last year. Story: http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=53003&Nid=26095&p=387769 Report: Wikipedia Founder Readies New Search Engine – Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales plans to launch a new search engine, according to a recent report in the Times of London. The newspaper reported that the project, dubbed Wikiasari, could launch as early as the first quarter of 2007. 

YouTube Adds Features – Video-sharing site YouTube is now offering users the ability to instantly record videos by using Flash software and Web cams, as part of a site upgrade. The site also is offering a new user interface that cuts the number of tabs at the top of the screen down to four–videos, categories, channels and community. 

comScore: Google Passes Yahoo in Global Traffic – Google has displaced Yahoo as the world’s second most-visited Web site–although not by much–according to November figures comScore Networks. Google’s sites brought in 475.7 million visitors, compared to Yahoo’s 475.3 million. Both trail global leader Microsoft, which attracted a whopping 501.7 million visitors.

Web Ad Prices Keep Rising – The cost of buying ads on the Internet is going up, and it’s going to continue. The Web has proven to be the cheapest, most effective means of reaching a targeted audience. As such, more advertisers are shifting dollars to the Web, which places the supply of quality Web sites and ad networks at more of a premium.